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First Round
p/first-round-2
We're called First Round for a reason.
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Maddie Hall
First Search — The world's best startup advice, curated and searchable.
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First Search is the largest database of curated, high-quality advice for building startups ever created. We've vetted, tagged and organized 10,000+ articles about every facet of company-building.

Replies
Geoffrey Weg
Congrats guys (@maddie_hall1 @camille_ricketts)! I feel obligated to share Startup{ery (http://startupery.com). It's a similar product I launched a few years ago that organizes hundreds of hand-picked articles by 370+ topics. I've always loved this concept and am psyched to see the awesome First Round team launch First Search. It's great to see that you've organized 10,000+ articles! Impressive. Looking forward to using it!
Bram Kanstein (@bramk)
When I launched Startup Stash I added one category with 10 articles I thought every aspiring entrepreneur should read. I think I have a sketch somewhere for a "Content Stash" since (next to tools of course), content gives you inspiration and guidance as you're building a product or company. I never took the time to build it and love that First Round took it upon themselves to provide this, very very cool!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@bramk Thanks so much Bram. It was truly a team effort. If it didn't start with a napkin sketch or in a garage, is it really a software product?! ;) Startup Stash is an incredible tool by the way, we are big fans!
Chauncey TK Hamilton

I've been using First Search for about a month and find myself returning again and again to help the founders we work with find the information they need. I've also found myself bookmarking a ton of articles to read for later - essentially a more targeted Pocket for my own personal career development.

Pros:

I love that I finally have a go to place to search for the best advice across the web to help the companies we work with.

Cons:

I am biased, but nothing at this time. Excited to keep playing around with the product.

Maddie Hall
Maker
Thanks Chauncey! Glad to hear it. We look forward to growing the database and making the search experience even more personalized in the future.
Hereripene Baker
:) NIIICE...comment I mean...I will bookmark this sight because of your korero - comment xx thank you very much
Rob L'Heureux

Seems awesome so far. I could see it having some structure based on the nature of the advice offered i.e. who's perspective is offered (designer, developer, VC, etc.) or where there are wholly different schools of thought. This looks super useful as-is though.

Pros:

Easy way to surface great articles

Cons:

I wasn't sure where to click to read more at first

Laura Del Beccaro
Maker
Great idea! We've thought about adding the ability to segment the advice in more ways - by company stage, for example. Perspective of the author is also a really good one.
Jeremy Olson
Nice! Already on my bookmark bar.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@jerols That's exactly what we want to hear. You're the best!
Charley Ma
This is awesome! Love all of first round's content and excited to see what else has been curated
Ben Tossell
Always blown away by what First Round provide to the startup ecosystem. this is pretty epic too!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@bentossell Thanks, Ben. We're excited to help the startup community find extremely high-quality, curated advice about all aspects of building companies in this new way! #NoMoreUnnecessaryListicles :)
Stuart Campbell
@bentossell @maddie_hall1 You didn't think "thought leaders" on Quora were cutting it? ;) Very well done. Much appreciated by founders and founders-to-be!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@bentossell @rhizaboveit All types of content have a home on the internet, but we prefer the tactical quality stuff that's actionable for busy operators :)
Stuart Campbell
@maddie_hall1 Love it! I'm actually cobbling a "how-to" toolkit for remote/non-tech aspiring founders and would love to add this. Best of luck!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@rhizaboveit Throw it into this suggestions survey when you are done and we can add to the db. I'm assuming it's actionable, quality advice if it's based on your own career :) https://firstround.typeform.com/...
cn
This seems awesome! Nice work!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@netcyrax Thanks mike!
Mike Belsito
First Round's content has always been top-notch -- as a startup exec and product person, I've always found it to be a place for thoughtful content. With First Search, it just makes it even easier for me to dive in. Kudos to the team!
Max Pelzner
I've always enjoyed reading First Round Review stories! Congrats on the product launch 🚀
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@whoismaxpelzner Thank you, thank you!
Aziz Morsly
love the new platform, congrats to the @firstround team!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@firstround @azizmorsly Thanks so much! Every day, we'll serve up new advice relevant to what's going on in the industry, emerging tactics, and best practices. This is just the beginning. We'd love your feedback along the way (https://firstround.typeform.com/...).
Alessio Fanelli
Looks great! Any plans to integrate this with First Round Talent in order to connect startups/entrepreneurs with mentors/potential employees? I.e. I'm searching info about metrics and data, at the bottom of the articles I have a form where I can put in a request for a data science.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@fanahova That's a great question! This really is just the beginning — consider it version 1.0, so we'll be building a lot more functionality in. Thanks so much for the idea, we'll put it on the list!
Itamar Rogel
Awesome resource! The people at First Round Review have been putting out some of the best practical startup and business content out there for years now, great to see them doing this to make the content even more approachable.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@itamarro Thanks so much! We so appreciate that!
Whitnie Low

I'm on the First Round team -- curious what features folks feel are missing or want to see!

Pros:

Focus on tactical advice, solely for startups, can't search like this anywhere else on the web!

Cons:

We're early... there are many more features, filters, and subjects that I'm sure we're missing!

Keyul
articles from first round are very informative. Thank you for creating this resource.
Jonathan James
@kdeggelman , Nice - lots of articles - it's a great knowledge base to reference - what is the key difference as compared to Gartner/Forrestor/SAPHybrid though? If I want articles I want what's contained within them to propel me forward - ultimately allowing me to assess and move forward making a knowledge-lead decision - Gartner and others are behind pay-walls because they offer value to the assessment period that every company stays within - I think you need value beyond the search-and-find of an article - sometimes we read and we don't fully comprehend what's meant - if you added annotations to articles - then I could ask within annotation and draw a deeper conclusion from the replies about the processes/tools/methods used by the authors- this then helping me understand exactly how to implement the processes/methodologies I'm reading about - otherwise - the articles I find and read don't always deliver the value I need. Also - if any 2 articles share the exact same tags but differ in their content - why do they differ? Knowledge itself is conflicting - annotating articles would help things become even more clear to the reader from article to article -- and to keep spammers out just put access to article annotations behind a pay-wall - and authors could get notified when their articles are annotated - anyone could answer inquiries - but the author would need to approve the answers - I would pay for such features
Kevin Deggelman
Maker
@mrdignitty , thanks for sharing your thoughts! The idea of adding annotations is very compelling. I like the idea of adding an explanation of why chose to include the article and maybe a quick summary of the key takeaways. Stay tuned for more community focused features!
Atit Danak

There is much for ecosystem enablers/investors to learn from First Round. This another great approach to solving a known issue.

Pros:

Smooth. Good content.

Cons:

No Twitter sign-in. It is a great tool for tech world with so many people being active there. Would reconsider including it for sign-up/in.

Abhishek Jain
Pretty cool tool..
Maddie Hall
Maker
@abhij89 Thanks! Glad you're finding it helpful.
Hrefna Helgadóttir (Habbi)

blown away – "internet sans garbage!" (you can use that tagline if you want)

top marks, have already shared this with my product manger friends

love that this exists, and find this so important in our era of bizarre media reporting

Pros:

high quality relevant content only, clean look, no annoying popups

Cons:

since you're asking, nitpicky comment: find this half-opening articles a little annoying, quickly get around it by opening links in new tab

Ryan Hoover
Slick. How are you categorizing each article, @maddie_hall1?
Maddie Hall
Maker
@rrhoover from our 4 years of building the review, we felt we had a strong understanding of what topics operators wanted to see and what makes articles extremely tactical. We used these trends to categorize content and create categories for First Search.
Laura Del Beccaro
Maker
@maddie_hall1 @rrhoover to tag each article individually, we had a team of editors build an amazing set of training data that we used to build a few different machine learning classifiers. We've actually reviewed all tags manually as well, to ensure we're curating the best stuff!
Klajdi Turlla
@maddie_hall1 @rrhoover @ldelbeccaro Congrats on this great product. Great to hear that actual humans curated this trove of information. From my experience in researching and curating information, a good level of human curation is a must. What appears on the first page result of Google it's very often not the best article or the one with the most actionable insights. Great job :-)
Ivan X
Brilliant collections @FirstRound! Finally someone reuniting all the good stuff (which we all do 1by1) ➟ Would you be considering to give users the ability to curate articles on their own? Either for their own use solely or even for it to be visible publicly? ➟ Or if this is not you track, than: make a public curation process (maybe even different list-logics, for different use-cases) I understand that redundancies may be a problem down the line if you open it up too much. We have seen this in many tools before, creating too many unused lists. But too large lists can also be an obstacle. What do you think of all this, @maddie_hall1? ➟ I am btw doing a tool-list curation with journey design logic for different use-cases of business building. Anyone interested welcome to join my trello on this.
Maddie Hall
Maker
@be_creatv do you have a copy of our product roadmap?! :P Both are features we're hoping to add in the future and, even more so after launching, we've realized there's a lot of great content that we don't have in FirstSearch yet. We still want to maintain a high-quality product and not have people add self-promoting articles, but I think we can productize that by giving users the ability to submit content and allowing our team to review articles before they go live in the product. I'd love to see what you're working on if you'd like to add me to your Trello.