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First Round Capital

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Leadership4 steps

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

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Marketing4 steps

Brand Personality via Five Dimensions

Spike in two of five personality dimensions, then write five 'we are X but not Y' attributes with built-in tension

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Concierge Manual Onboarding

Hand-onboard every early user one-to-one to manufacture superfans and dodge premature self-service engineering

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Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

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Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

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Sales3 steps

Dollar-Driven Discovery

Test the dollar potential of a hypothesis, not just whether customers 'like' the idea

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Sales5 steps

Enterprise Procurement Navigation

Do procurement's work for them, define exactly what you do, and split contracts so deals don't die on the vine

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Marketing4 steps

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

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Innovation5 steps

Game Design, Not Gamification (Build Toys, Then Games)

Make software fun by designing real toys that reward playful exploration — not by bolting on points and badges

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Marketing4 steps

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

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Strategy4 steps

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

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Strategy5 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong

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Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

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Marketing5 steps

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

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Marketing4 steps

Positioning Before Pricing (The Single-Attribute Position)

Own one clear position that is unique, available, and reinforces your product strategy — then let it dictate price

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

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Marketing4 steps

Product Positioning with the Bar Test

Define audience via concentric circles, distill into the classic four-part statement, then validate it out loud at a bar

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Sales3 steps

Qualification-First Diagnosis

There is no bottom-of-funnel problem — slow deals trace back to qualifying the wrong people, message, or problem

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

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Leadership4 steps

Single Decisive Reason (SDR)

For any important decision, isolate the one reason that alone justifies it — a pile of weak reasons is a red flag

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Strategy4 steps

Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening

Classify every build as deepening the product for current users or widening it to new ones — to diagnose 'why we feel slow'

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Marketing4 steps

Startup Launch PR Playbook

Fix your story, set realistic exclusive expectations, hang news on a bigger hook, and mine local press

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Sales5 steps

The 30-Prospect Manual Discovery Experiment

Before buying any sales tool, hand-pick 30 prospects, write each a real note, and let the response rate reveal your ICP parameters

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Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

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Marketing4 steps

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

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Strategy4 steps

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

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Sales4 steps

The Four-Component Cold Outreach Message

Open cold with relevancy + a counterintuitive hook + a problem (never the solution), kept short enough not to scroll

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Four Levels of Product-Market Fit

Sequence PMF as four levels, optimizing satisfaction, then demand, then efficiency in turn

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Strategy3 steps

The Four Ps of Pivoting

Persona, Problem, Promise, Product — the four levers to change when you're stuck

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Sales3 steps

The Friend-Zone Test

Sit customers down and force the truth: do you need me, or do you just like me?

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Marketing5 steps

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

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Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

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Strategy4 steps

The Product/Market Fit Engine

Turn PMF into a number you can raise: focus only on the 'somewhat disappointed' users whose reason for loving you matches the mass market's

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Strategy4 steps

The Purpose Statement (We Exist To)

Distill why you exist into one 10-year 'we exist to' sentence that makes people root for you

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Strategy4 steps

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones

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Sales4 steps

The Service-First Wedge

When the buyer has no process to buy your tech, sell a time-boxed service that gets you the logo, revenue, and the pen

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Marketing5 steps

The Startup Naming Process

Position first, brief the intent, brainstorm hundreds of bad names, then score survivors against seven criteria

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Productivity4 steps

The Switch Log

Log every task-switch in real time so your actual work trail — not your calendar — reveals where your time really goes

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Sales4 steps

Van Westendorp Premium Pricing (Price at the Third Question)

For a best-in-class position, price at the 'starting to feel expensive' point, not the 'bargain' point

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Sales5 steps

Vulnerability-Based Customer Discovery

Admit you're early and unfinished (even if you're not) to get raw feedback, then gate-check whether the problem is real

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Sales3 steps

Win-Rate-First Funnel Math

Stop obsessing over conversion rate — a high win rate means you need far less top-of-funnel throughput

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