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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.

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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/...
Maddie Hall
Maker
Since launching First Round Review (http://www.firstround.com/review) four years ago, we've learned a lot about what makes startup advice actually useful — and how hard the good stuff is to find. Most of the time when you Google how to do something, you get a glut of listicles, vague 'thought leadership,' and misinformation. We want to fix that. We're launching First Search to collect and centralize the best advice about all aspects of building tech companies. To do this, we've tapped our community of experts, like Dropbox VP Product Todd Jackson and Plangrid CEO Tracy Young, to send us their favorite articles — and we've combined that with software trained to suss out quality and credibility. All told, the site makes high-caliber content searchable across 260+ roles, disciplines and topics. Check it out today. Save and share the pieces you like. Explore curated lists built by the industry's best (https://search.firstround.com/lists). This is just the beginning. The more people who use the product, the better it'll get — and we'd love your feedback along the way. In the meantime, we want to know: Is this resource helpful? What articles/authors/blogs would you like to see added? Would you want to become a First Search curator? Leave us comment, stay tuned, and get searching! 💥 Edit & special offer: If you leave us some feedback (i.e. content you'd like to see included, improvements you'd like to see made) in the comments here, we'll make sure you see our next big January release of the product early! Some very cool stuff in the works.
Pulkit Agrawal
@maddie_hall1 really awesome Maddie -- have been very impressed by the breadth and depth of coverage; how long have you been working on this?
Maddie Hall
Maker
@_pulkitagrawal The product/engineering team has been working on it since last summer. Thanks to the leadership of @kdeggleman and incredible talent of @ldelbeccaro @tedowens and @brettberson we were able to iterate quickly and ship the product. It's truly been a team effort.
Mohammed Rafy
This thing is Gold. First Round Review is my go-to platform to read stuff. Everything is so detailed. Thanks for doing everything. :)
Maddie Hall
Maker
@rafyasarmatta think of this as the Tedx version of the Review :) Same high-quality content from a wide variety of industry experts and sources.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@rafyasarmatta Thanks so much for the kind words! Means a lot to us here.
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.
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/...).
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
Jenna Abdou
Huge congratulations and so much gratitude to the amazing First Round team on a game-changing contribution to the startup community!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@jenna_abdou thank you so much for all your help! I feel honored to get to work with such an incredible team.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@jenna_abdou Thank you, thank you. We 100% could not have done it without you.
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.
Hereripene Baker
thank you for your trusted path of thought... <3 ...appreciated by me...
Xanthe Kueppers
As someone who is often searching - having a curated website is a great resource.
Maddie Hall
Maker
@xanthekueppers Thanks! We are looking forward to growing our database and making the search experience even more personalized in the future.
Thomas Leitermann
Fantastic!! Now I don't have to search for the specific article I share, I can just say "google First Search, search there and anything you'll find is useful" :)) First Round Review is the best startup/innovation content on the WWW, hands down! - yet somehow you managed to make it even better. Congrats!
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@thomasleiterman Wow thank you so much for the kind words! That's the best feedback we could ask for.
David Smooke
This is cool! Always looking for new ways to help people find the 'right' next story. I like this design. Also, hey @camille_ricketts! I have some https://hackernoon.com/ stories that may fit into your library
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@davidsmooke Oooh cool, thank you! We're taking requests and suggestions all day, so this is great!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@davidsmooke @camille_ricketts Any of these Hacker Noon articles look familiar? https://search.firstround.com/pu...
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!
William Woodhead
This looks really great. I think this sort of curation is very valuable in a overwhelming sea of information. Very excited to get reading.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@willam_woodhead Thanks so much! Really glad you like it, and appreciate the comment! 🙏🏼
Jeremy Olson
Nice! Already on my bookmark bar.
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@jerols That's exactly what we want to hear. You're the best!
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!

Brennan Erbeznik
This is amazing. Great work @maddie_hall1 and team.
Maddie Hall
Maker
@brennanerbz Thanks! Channeled the design leadership of Snap and others in the colorful and (hopefully) delightful UI.
Brennan Erbeznik
@maddie_hall1 It's delightful. ;)
Abhishek Jain
Pretty cool tool..
Maddie Hall
Maker
@abhij89 Thanks! Glad you're finding it helpful.
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!
Max Pelzner
I've always enjoyed reading First Round Review stories! Congrats on the product launch 🚀
Camille Ricketts
Maker
@whoismaxpelzner Thank you, thank you!
Jim Knutt
Incredible, Great resource!!
Maddie Hall
Maker
@jimknutt Thanks Jim. I hope you find the articles on Executive Management and CEOs helpful!