Ignition GTM, Inc
Valuation · 2022
$18M
2024 Revenue
$527.1K(Est.)
Customers
500
Funding
$16M
Avg ACV
$1.1K
Team
21
Founded
2021
Ignition GTM, Inc Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)
Ignition GTM, Inc generated an estimated $527.1K in annual revenue in 2024. Source: GetLatka estimate
Ignition GTM, Inc. (haveignition.com) is a collaborative go-to-market platform designed to help product and marketing teams plan, execute, and measure product launches. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in a fully distributed structure, the company combines project management, strategic documentation, asset management, competitive intelligence, and post-launch measurement into a single end-to-end workflow tool built specifically for product marketing functions.
As of September 2022, Ignition had approximately 800 companies on the platform, including named customers Square and SmartRent, and had begun charging for the product only in July 2022. The company raised a total of roughly $5 million across a pre-seed round of $1.8 million closed in February 2021 and a seed round of $3.1 million closed in December 2021. With 21 team members and monthly headcount costs of approximately $150,000 excluding founder salaries, Derek Osgood stated that reaching a $1 million annual run rate by year-end 2022 was the target.
Osgood, who confirmed he is the CEO, previously served as an early hire at Rippling, where he built the product marketing function. He has launched more than 100 products across his career, with those products collectively generating over $1 billion in revenue. Product Marketing Alliance, one of the largest communities of product marketers, is both a strategic investor and a promotional partner.
Last updated
Ignition GTM, Inc Revenue
Ignition did not begin charging customers until July 2022. Osgood told Latka that first revenue came in July, meaning the company had no recurring revenue as recently as a few months before the September 2022 interview. Osgood declined to share specific revenue figures, stating, "I actually don't really wanna share revenue numbers at this point, but our revenue numbers are ticking up pretty decently."
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Ignition GTM, Inc Hit $527.1k revenue in October 2024 | Estimated |
| 2022 | Ignition GTM, Inc Hit $360k revenue in September 2022 | Not recorded |
| 2021 | Launched with $0 revenue |
Osgood confirmed that reaching approximately $1 million in annual run rate by the end of 2022 or early January 2023 was the stated goal. The host calculated a rough implied MRR of approximately $240,000 by multiplying 800 customers by an average of three editors at $99 per editor, but Osgood pushed back on that math, noting that a meaningful portion of the 800 companies came through an AppSumo lifetime-deal launch and do not contribute recurring revenue. A GetLatka estimate of forward revenue is not possible with precision given the declined disclosure, but Osgood's own stated target of $1 million ARR by year-end 2022 serves as the founder-cited ceiling for that period.
Ignition GTM, Inc Valuation, Funding Rounds
Ignition GTM, Inc reached a $18M valuation in 2022, set during its None round.
Ignition GTM, Inc has raised $16M in total funding across 4 rounds, most recently a $8M Seed round in 2023.
Founder / CEO
Derek Osgood
CEO
Derek Osgood is the CEO and co-founder of Ignition GTM, Inc., as confirmed by the KNOWN PEOPLE roster and the transcript. He was 35 years old at the time of the September 2022 interview. Before founding Ignition, Osgood was an early hire at Rippling, where he built the product marketing function. He told Latka that the last public revenue figure Rippling disclosed was approximately $20 million to $30 million in ARR, and that he departed around that time. That figure is a public figure Osgood cited about a former employer, not a company-confirmed Rippling disclosure.
Across his career as a product marketing leader at companies ranging from startups to major brands including PlayStation, Osgood stated he has launched more than 100 products, and that those products have collectively generated over $1 billion in revenue. He told Latka he started his career at PlayStation at age 20 and wishes he had started founding companies earlier. Osgood's co-founder, whose name was not disclosed in the interview, previously worked at Facebook and, according to Osgood, has said the Ignition engineering team is as good or better than teams he worked with there.
Net worth was not discussed in the interview. A GetLatka estimate is not possible without a stated ownership percentage or a disclosed valuation.
Q&A
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What's your age? | 38 |
Customers
As of September 2022, Ignition had approximately 800 companies on the platform. Osgood confirmed that named customers include Square and SmartRent. However, a meaningful portion of those 800 companies, roughly 200, came through an AppSumo lifetime-deal launch and hold lifetime access rather than recurring subscriptions. Osgood estimated that approximately half of the 800 total companies came through AppSumo, implying roughly 400 true recurring customers and 400 AppSumo lifetime-deal users at the time of the interview.
Ignition charges on a per-editor basis rather than per user seat. The base tier is $29 per editor per month, and the primary tier used by most teams is $99 per editor per month. The largest customer by editor count had 15 editors at the time of the interview, making that customer's monthly spend approximately $1,500. Average editors per company across the full customer base is 3 to 4. For larger-segment customers the average is 10 to 11 editors, and for smaller-segment customers it is 2 to 3 editors. Average contract value is approximately $3,000 annually, with small teams typically falling in the $3,000 to $10,000 ACV range.
AppSumo lifetime-deal users are converted to paid plans once they exceed a certain editor threshold. At the base AppSumo tier the limit is three editors, and at higher AppSumo tiers the limit is 10 editors. A customer research tool within the platform is also offered as a paid add-on, and Osgood noted that a meaningful portion of AppSumo users had converted to that paid add-on.
Ignition GTM, Inc serves 500 customers.
Ignition GTM, Inc Business Model
Ignition monetizes through a per-editor subscription model. The base tier is priced at $29 per editor per month and the primary tier is $99 per editor per month. A customer research tool is available as a paid add-on. The company does not charge for viewer or collaborator seats, only for editors who lead the launch process, which Osgood described as a deliberate structural choice to lower the barrier for cross-functional teams such as sales and support to access launch information without requiring paid seats.
Profitability was not discussed in the interview. Monthly headcount expense excluding founder salaries is approximately $150,000, implying an annualized headcount cost of roughly $1.8 million. With a stated goal of $1 million ARR by year-end 2022 and headcount costs alone running at $1.8 million annually, the company is operating at a loss funded by its $5 million in total raised capital. Burn rate beyond headcount and runway were not disclosed. Gross margin, churn, net revenue retention, LTV, CAC, and payback period were not discussed in the interview.
Ignition GTM, Inc Employees & Team Size
Ignition had 21 team members as of September 2022, all working in a fully distributed structure. Osgood told Latka that of the 21, the vast majority are engineers. At the time of the interview, Osgood and one recently hired marketer were the only two business-side employees, with the remainder being engineers plus a QA engineer and a designer. The host noted in his closing summary that approximately 17 of the 21 team members are engineers.
The team is geographically distributed across India, Eastern Europe, Poland, and Argentina. Osgood described the hiring approach as deliberately global, motivated by access to talent rather than cost savings alone. The agency Evrone was cited as the original development partner for the Eastern European portion of the team.
Ignition GTM, Inc employs approximately 21 people as of 2026. It serves 500 customers that rely on its solutions.
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Reached 21 employees (October 2024) | Not recorded |
| 2022 | Reached 21 employees (September 2022) | Estimated |
Frequently Asked Questions about Ignition GTM, Inc
What is Ignition GTM, Inc's revenue?
As of 2024, Ignition GTM, Inc generated an estimated $527.1K in annual revenue.
Who founded Ignition GTM, Inc?
Ignition GTM, Inc was founded by Derek Osgood.
Who is the CEO of Ignition GTM, Inc?
The CEO of Ignition GTM, Inc is Derek Osgood.
How much funding does Ignition GTM, Inc have?
Ignition GTM, Inc raised $16M across 4 rounds.
How many employees does Ignition GTM, Inc have?
As of 2024, Ignition GTM, Inc had 21 employees.
Where is Ignition GTM, Inc headquartered?
Ignition GTM, Inc is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.
Compare Ignition GTM, Inc to the industry
Ignition GTM, Inc operates across multiple industries. Browse revenue, funding, and growth data for Ignition GTM, Inc in each sector below.
Full Interview Transcripts
Founder spends $150k/mo on 21 FTE's to build tool that helps your product teams launchSep 6, 2022
[00:00] Hey, folk. My folks, my guest today is Derek Osgoode. He's a former marketing exec turned founder building Ignition, the collaborative go to market platform, helping product and marketing teams get new products to market faster and more effectively. Before this, he was an early hire at Rippling where he set up the product marketing function, helped scale a company to 20,000,000 in ARR. As product marketing leader everywhere from startups to major brands like PlayStation, Derek has launched over a 100 [00:21] products, and his products have generated over $1,000,000,000 in revenue. Now he's building the platform he wished he had all along the way. Derek, you ready to take us to the top? [00:28] >> Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it, Nathan. Excited. [00:30] Awesome. [00:31] First off, this is like one of those things, man. We are launching products like crazy at Founderpath. This problem is like a mix of, like, Google Docs, Apple Notes. Someone is sold on, like, Jira, so we sprinkle in some Jira and ClickUp mixed with, like, handwritten sketches from the last team retreat. It's terrible. Like, why hasn't something like this existed before? [00:50] >> I dude, I have no idea. It's it's this cluster at every single company. I mean, I've been I've seen this at dozens of companies that I've consulted for, that I've been at in house, and it's always just this dumpster fire of tools hodgepodge together. And the real thing is none of the tools actually do any of the work involved. So they're all like systems that are just built for documenting and tracking the work in what is [01:15] >> a really specified and important process in any company. And so teams end up having to do all of the actual research and competitive intel in a completely separate place that ends up completely siloing the information away from the teams that need it in order to execute the process. So I think that probably a big part of why it hasn't been built so far is just it kind of requires a product marketer to start it because of [01:42] >> the fact that it is such a product marketing specific function. And there's not a lot of product marketers who start companies, honestly. And I think like I haven't seen too many of them. So that sort of is my only hunch on why this hasn't existed. But it's it's a messy problem and, you know, it's it's tough to solve, but important. [02:01] So so before I dive deep into, like, the actual product because I wanna go deep here, How do you think about pricing on this thing? Right? What is your own go to market? What's the average customer pay per month to use this? [02:11] >> Yeah. Yeah. So we we charge on a per editor basis. So, you know, our whole structure is based around the people who are actually, like, leading the launch process. One of the big downsides to all those other tools that you were talking about there is that they charge for every single user seat. So a lot of the teams that need the information involved in the launch process, like, for example, sales and support, it doesn't make sense [02:31] >> with their business model for you to actually have seats and for them to even be able access the information that they need. Hence why you have a lot of meetings and stuff. Yeah, we charge at our base tier $29 per editor per month. And then at our kind of primary tier that most teams use, it's $99 per editor per month. You know, small teams end up looking somewhere in the, like, three to 10 k range, you [02:54] >> know, on an ACV basis. So Yep. [02:57] Yep. Is that your sweet spot right now? Like, before you really start to go up market or mid market? [03:01] >> We have teams of all sizes. So we have, you know, big companies right now like Square and SmartRent using us. And then we also have, you know, a bunch of, like, small five to 10 person teams using us. We have some solopreneurs using us as well for their own, like, personal launches. So Oh, wow. [03:17] Well, okay. So so now I'm curious. Don't mention the name of the customer, but what what what your largest company, how many editors do they have on one like, for one brand? [03:27] >> Yeah. Yeah. So the biggest editor account right now is actually it's only 15, but they plan on expanding that pretty significantly. I think they're planning on, like, doubling or tripling over the next couple of months. They're they're still kind of getting out of the implementation phase. [03:42] Okay. So 15 editors at $99 a month. Your biggest customer is sort of, like, $1,500 a month today, something like that. Yeah. Really interesting. Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into [04:05] the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations [04:29] inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a [04:51] VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you [05:16] only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now [05:41] inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to [06:05] give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. Man, so this is great. Okay. I wanna come back to how you plan to expand. Like, your net dollar retention obviously will be dependent on how many people you can classify as an editor, like, who's needed in the process. But let's go back to sort of, like, base case here for [06:25] a second. These small editing teams, like you call them editors, but what are their job titles on LinkedIn today? [06:31] >> Yep. So typically, it's a product marketing manager or a product manager. The the role of product marketing ends up being done by people with a couple of different titles. So sometimes it's like a generic marketing manager. If you're talking about CPG companies, it ends up being a brand manager. So there's a variety of different shapes and sizes of product marketing, but functionally it is the product marketing function. And then sometimes the product manager ends up being [06:58] >> the kind of primary collaborator with them. They do have There's a smattering of other marketing folks across the editor spectrum as well. So marketing ops teams are often involved and then oftentimes you have like a comms person, sometimes some design teams or editor seats. So it does vary a bit company to company, but primarily we go after the product marketing team as kind of our main entry point. [07:22] Interesting. And and how does this so if I was looking at this and saying, how could I get this done without paying for haveignition? I would use something that my, like, development team uses, like, linear. Right? A project management tool because that's really what's gonna drive if this thing gets released on time. And then I, like, sort of figure out a way to make the engineering Trello board or Kanban board work for all the marketing activities. [07:45] What are you building inside of your platform that we're not gonna see inside of project management tools for developers already? [07:51] >> Yeah. So, I mean, one of the big downsides of doing that is just you are intermixing two totally different lines of work that have completely different needs in terms of communication. So it's not just about project management when you're talking about launching stuff. And a lot of people think about their launches as the checklist. And so we do all the project management stuff and you can kind of replace linear or Jira or whatever you're using on [08:14] >> the dev side with our product when you're talking about marketing. But there's a lot of strategic documentation involved as well. So you also need the ability to actually document this stuff in written format in a way that's not buried within tasks. So we're taking the kind of project management, we're marrying that to documentation, We're then marrying that to asset management. So you can actually store all of the marketing assets that are created in the launch process, [08:40] >> manage approvals on those, and then push them into the tools that you need. But the real magic here is that we're actually taking all that stuff and that's just the baseline, like how do you document and plan the launch? And we're marrying that to tools that help with research upstream and then downstream communication of those plans. So upstream, we have competitive intelligence tools and customer research tools where we'll help you collect customer feedback into your roadmap, [09:08] >> identify. SurveyMonkey, Typeform, video recordings. Exactly. Exactly. And then we'll pipe that into the planning process itself. And then downstream, we help with communicating that stuff to all the teams internally that need it because those teams don't need one kind of master plan and they don't need to just see the list of tasks. What they need is specified bits and pieces of that planning information. So your sales team just needs to know what's the messaging, how [09:34] >> are we talking about this, what assets are available to us. So you can push just that content to them through email or Slack so they don't need to go like sift through a tool in order to find it. [09:45] >> And then on top of that, we're also helping with some post launch measurement and doing a couple other things that you just can't really get in a pure play project management tool. But ultimately, what you're getting is full end to end management all the way from customer research through to strategy, through to the post launch communication and measurement. [10:06] Got it. Okay. And put this, I guess, how many brands do you have using the platform today as customers? [10:12] >> Yep. So we've got about 800 companies on the platform right now, you know, again, ranging from small little companies to very large ones. And it's across a range of industries too. Some of them are SaaS companies, some of them are CPG product companies. So all all across the across the map. [10:28] And if you looked at like, if you took the number of brands you have on the platform and then divide it into that, right, the number of total seat number of editors in your case, what's the average team size, would you say? [10:40] >> Yeah, so the average team size, it's probably around three or four editors in a company, but that varies dramatically based on which segment you look at. So if you look at kind of our larger segments, it's closer to 10 to 11 folks. And then if you look at the smaller groups, it's two or three. [11:00] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And put this on a timeline for us. When did you write the first line of code for Ignition? [11:04] >> Yes, we wrote the first line of code in March 2021. So I met my co founder in December 2020. We kind of started thinking about it, kicking around the idea, doing some idea validation through January. And then we did some mock ups, closed some customers, closed a round of funding in February, and then started building in March. [11:26] And we're in 2021? [11:27] >> Yes, 2021. [11:28] And what was the seed how much was the seed round? [11:30] >> Yes, we raised a pre seed that was about $1,800,000 and then we raised another round of funding in December of last year. So total raise, we've raised about 5,000,000. And basically, that's when we launched our beta in January of this year. [11:47] Got it. So you sort of closed like January 1, basically another 3,100,000 on top of the 1.8 you already raised? Yep. What makes this so expense I mean, you're giving obviously, these are I mean, most pre seed rounds, you're selling 20% equity. Seed rounds, you're selling 15 to 20%. I assume you're probably right in the standard range. Right? [12:03] >> Yep. Yep. [12:04] Okay. So let's say you've been diluted on average 15% now twice. Like, why do you need this money to get going? Why couldn't you scrape by and bootstrap and keep 100%? [12:12] >> Yeah. So we likely could have for a while. I think, you know, part of it is my co founders needed to take a salary. Also, the other component here is we are building a pretty large surface area platform. So in order to solve this problem, you really have to solve all of the like 10,000 little paper cuts that are involved in it. And it's a pretty big bundled aggregate solution. It's very hard to build just like [12:37] >> one individual part of this because like, for example, if we built just the project management component of it, we would get sucked into building purely a project management tool for most of the life cycle of the company, because that's just where customer demand would end up pulling us. And we probably would have never had the time to devote to building some of the tools that help with automating a lot of the other work involved in the [13:00] >> process. So I think mostly it's the surface area of the product. We just had to build a lot of stuff in order to have it be meaningfully differentiated from what you're already kind of packing together in a documentation tool or a project management tool. [13:14] That's fair. That's fair. What's how many folks are on the team today? And of the team size, how many are engineers? [13:18] >> Yeah. So the team's about 21 people now, fully distributed. So, you know, we're pretty capital efficient in the team that we're building and almost all of them are engineers. So I'm the only actually, we just hired our first marketer. So we now have two business people, myself and him, and then our QA engineer and our designer, and then the rest are all engineers. [13:41] So So tell me about you mentioned remote and capital efficiency. Have you found is it the Eastern Block? Is it Argentina? Is it somewhere else? Where where do you love your developers to come from? [13:50] >> All of the above. So we have folks in India. We have folks in Eastern Block. We have folks in Argentina. Our designers [13:55] That's rare. Most times people find one area, they build around that. You've diverse you could argue diversified, right? But do you have a point person in each of those? How'd you find the first person, like say in India, for example? [14:06] >> Yes. We have a point person in each. So the first person in India, he came through AngelList, was just really he was actually hire. And so he came through AngelList when we were originally forming the company, we just loved him and we loved him. What about Poland? So Poland was I sifted through every single designer profile on Dribbble, and I found one that I loved and pinged him directly. Argentina, we ended up going for a recruiter, [14:33] >> so we knew that we wanted to build a team in a US overlapping time zone. So we wanted to build out a team there. So we found a recruiter there. Again, lucked out with a great point person. He ended up bringing one of his friends on as a referral. And then, you know, the Eastern Block was through an agency that we originally hired when we first started building, and we've just continued building out over there. [14:58] That's can you share the original agency you worked with when you started? [15:02] >> Yeah. It's come it's an agency called Evrone. Evrone? Ev, Evrone. [15:07] Like, e like, should like, if people listen right now, should they go Google them and use them too? Were they good? [15:11] >> Yeah. They're great. We love them. [15:12] Okay. E e v r o n I? [15:15] >> R o n e. [15:18] O n e. Evrone. Interesting. Very cool. I always love people, you know, they find these agencies talent all over the world. It's crazy. Like, my I don't know. You're probably not gonna able to answer this, but if you can, it'd be very valuable. 21 on the team based in The US, building a great product. I look at the UI. It looks fantastic. What is your with this distributed thing, and you talk about capital efficiency, what's your [15:36] all ignoring your salaries like you and your founder. What's the all in person fixed expense per month right now? [15:44] >> So on a per person basis? No. Don't tell [15:46] me peep individual salaries. I mean, total headcount expense monthly excluding founder salaries. [15:51] >> Oh, total headcount expenses is about 150 k. [15:54] Okay. Interesting. So okay. One fifty times 12 divided by 20 people. Okay. That's an average. That's not okay. So not cheap. You're still that's 90,000 on average per person. So it's not these are not cheap salaries, but you're maybe getting better talent because you're looking around the whole world. [16:09] >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, we did this not necessarily just to save money, but more so because we think that there's talent all over the planet. [16:19] >> And my co founder used to work at Facebook and he consistently says, our engineering team is as good or better than any of the engineering teams that I work with at Facebook. So I think we've gotten really lucky with some of our early hires and they've ended up continuing to flush out a really nice quality team [16:37] all over the world. Does it ever frustrate you when you have you ever tried to motivate someone at Evrone with a little equity kicker and like to get more of their time, but they just don't understand it or they don't care about it? You're like, oh, I can't use equity to motivate these folks. It's all cash. [16:50] >> It's funny. Yeah. I mean, like a couple of our folks, they have started to like kind of see the light on equity and they're like now excited by it. I think it's definitely like it's a totally different dynamic. You know, if you go try and hire in Silicon Valley, everybody is demanding maximum equity. You know, like everywhere else in the world, people you can I have to force it on people? I'm like, hey, look, you have [17:13] >> to take equity because I want you to have a slice of the pie here. And they're like, yeah, I don't care. I don't want it. Like, it's all gravy. [17:20] Yep. Yep. Now if we if we got the starter story there, we understand you got MVP going. We know your team size say, we take those 800 customers times an average of three editors a pop at $99 a head, that's a ARPU per per brand of about $300 a month times 800. Can we sort of back into your MRR that way? Would that be fair? You're doing about $240 grand a month right now? [17:40] >> It's probably not totally fair. So a lot of a big chunk of those 800 companies also came through an AppSumo launch that we did. So, you know, that that is lifetime deals and, you know, they're not recurring revenue. So and I actually don't really wanna share revenue numbers at this point, but our revenue numbers are ticking up pretty decently, but, you know, we're not we're not quite at that at that level yet. [18:03] Why why does a guy like you that understands product and user feedback so much do a lifetime deal? You know those people. They're not gonna expand. They're not gonna give her to monthly, so it doesn't help your cash flow. It doesn't help your valuation, really. Right? Because they because they because the lifetime deal destroys all the unit economics with Why waste your time with a lifetime deal? [18:19] >> So I I actually think that it is one of the most valuable things that we've done in the lifetime of the company. It was mostly for feedback. Like, basically, you know, we did our beta launch. The product was pretty broken when we did our beta launch and we purposefully shipped something that we knew we weren't going to be super happy with. And then we did a lot of work on it over the course of Q1, Q2, [18:41] >> and we decided, hey, we need to really stress test this before we go do any kind of like more concerted user acquisition and start scaling anything up. And so that was why we did the AppSumo deal and we got tons and tons of feedback and it was drastically more engaged feedback than I think we had been getting through the early part of the beta just because people had paid upfront. And regardless of whether or not it [19:04] >> was a lifetime deal or it was a recurring deal, we were getting much, much more valuable and very tactical pressure testing of the product. So Mhmm. Obviously, like [19:16] But go but if you then go build all the things they complain about, are they gonna pay you a bunch more and move to a monthly plan? [19:20] >> We don't care. I mean, like, honestly, [19:22] if they if they have the same why. That's why I ask. Right? You're getting feedback, but from the wrong peep in my opinion, if you go front to a JCPenney shopper who got the free jeans for $5, they brought in a $10 discount. You don't want feedback on how to build world class jeans from that person. They're gonna bitch and moan, take up customer support, and they're gonna guide you the wrong direction. So why do you [19:41] care about that feedback no matter how engaging it was? [19:43] >> Yeah. Because honestly, the problems that are that user versus the problems that are a larger company user, they're almost identical when you're talking about launching products. Like, I actually fundamentally disagree with the idea that they are the wrong user. They're just users that have a slightly smaller company that they're doing this in. But the feedback that they give us, it's identical to the feedback that we get from our larger customers. So it's not like we're getting [20:08] >> useless feedback here. It's just coming from a different source. And definitely there's support burden there, but I will never complain about having to spend a little bit more time on intercom because for me, more customer interaction is better and you know, there's not so many of them that they're gonna end up eating up all of this. [20:26] How how many are there? How many came from AppSumo? [20:29] >> A couple 100. [20:31] Okay. So so is it fair to say 50% of your total user base right now when you said 800 customers, a couple 100 from AppSumo? [20:36] >> Probably about that. Yeah. [20:37] Have you come up with a good way to convert them to monthly recurring? Like you spend all the time getting their feedback, you build great tools from them. Is there a paywall? Like have you done well there? [20:46] >> Yeah. Yeah. So basically like once they reach a certain user threshold, we require that they convert to a paid deal. Yeah. So once they've reached a certain threshold of editors and then there's also like one tool in our product, which is basically our customer research tools, which is a paid add on. And so a decent chunk of them have also converted to the paid add on for the research. [21:08] There's a lot people who drop Sumo deals, they give the whole thing away for free. [21:11] There's [21:11] no way to convert them. It's literally just like you just signed up for life because you sold a lifetime deal. Technically, you have to shut down in six months, well, no, you better refund everybody or six years even. It's a lifetime deal. But you've built a nice thing here. What is the editor limit? Is it two or three or four? What is it? [21:25] >> So at the base tier, it's three. And then if they bought one of the higher tiers, the maximum is 10. So once they there's a couple of agencies, for example, that they have 10 plus users that they're using right now that they're converting. [21:39] Got it. Got it. So when I asked you about how many customers you had earlier, really you've got 400 that are true recurring customers that are non App Sumo. Another 400 came from AppSumo of which you've converted some portion of those into monthly recurring. [21:52] >> Something along those lines. [21:53] Okay. Fair. Yeah. Very cool. Alright. Let's let me see if there's anything else that I missed here. I guess talk to me real quick about as we wrap up here about go to market. You've tied up and linked up very closely with a large community in the space. Walk me through how you did that. If there is a deal, is there economic relationship there? [22:09] >> So there's they're invest so they're CEOs and investors of ours. So basically product market [22:14] That counts as an economic relationship for sure. [22:17] >> Yeah. So he was one of the first checks in actually. Product marketing alliance, they're one of the biggest communities of product marketers out there. I've been pretty engaged in the community since before ever even thinking about starting Ignition. Like I did some speaking for them early on when they were first getting started. And I think, you know, generally we basically went to them first. They were one of the first people that we reached out to when [22:39] >> we said, hey, we're going to go raise some money because we believe very deeply in the benefit of community. And whether that's your own community or leveraging somebody else's, we wanted to be really tightly coupled with those guys, both for the imprimatur that their brand confers to us as experts in the space, but then also for promotional opportunities and partnerships. [23:02] Did they ask you to pay for that placement or did you get it for free since the founder invested? [23:07] >> So we've gotten some placement for free. We've also, you know, done some, like, small paid sponsorships, but we've gotten, you know, pretty good discounts on that stuff as well. [23:14] What's small like, see I I put my email in to get the the Dropbox docs sent, the State of Go-to-Market Report 2022. I see it says sponsored by Ignition. Are we talking, like, a five k sponsor or, like, 50 k sponsorship there? [23:26] >> Typically, they charge 50 k. We didn't pay that. Like, we paid a lot less than that. [23:30] I see. Okay. Cool. So that's a good relationship for you guys. Makes sense for let them in as a strategic investor. Anything else in terms of go to market that's worked really well for you? We're talking very meta here. Go to market platform for go to market thing. [23:40] >> Yeah, totally. I mean, we've done a lot of cold outbound, so we have mostly been using cold outbound outreach as our primary acquisition vehicle. A lot of our acquisitions come through word-of-mouth and just being active, I call it being a professional community member, just going and being active in product marketing alliance, responding to people's questions, going being active in other forums and whatnot where people are talking about go to market and trying to get insight into [24:07] >> this stuff. We've done a decent amount of podcasting as well. So, you know, we've since day one started to build out a pretty robust content program and podcasting program, both for SEO purposes and then also for a lot of thought leadership around this space because it's an area where there's a lot of content, but not a lot of it is very good content and very actionable. So we've done a decent amount of content as well, but [24:33] >> we've been pretty light on our actual marketing activity to date. We just kind of recently in the last month or two started kind of scaling up, trying to aggressively acquire folks. [24:45] I mean, you think you can break a million dollar run rate by January or you guys are by December this year? [24:50] >> That's the goal. I mean, I think we'll see if we end up getting there, but I think the target is definitely to get to a million or so by, you know, end of the year. [24:59] I see. Very cool. And obviously, no revenue exactly one year ago, right? [25:03] >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had no revenue a couple of months ago. [25:06] Yeah. Yeah. When was first revenue? What month? [25:09] >> First revenue was July. [25:11] June, July. Okay. Got it. Okay. August, September. Yeah. So you're literally like, I guess that's little confusing. Right? So if you have, like, hundreds of customers though paying $99, I mean, a bunch of those free users or something? [25:21] >> Some of them are free. Yeah. Mean, like, some not all of them are paid yet, but, yeah, we had a lot of them on the platform for free during the beta. We didn't start charging until actually July. And so that's when we started rolling people off of the free plan. We've been relatively light handed in trying to convert the free users that were in our beta to paid users because you want the product to be at [25:47] >> a point where they're excited about paying it before we start really pressuring them to do that. [25:52] >> Yeah. So All makes sense. [25:53] Let's wrap up here, Derek, with the famous five. Number one, favorite book. [25:57] >> Favorite book of all time is a fantasy book and it's called The Chronicle, Name of the Wind. But famous business book is Good to Great. [26:08] Number two, is there a c is there a CEO you're following or studying? [26:11] >> I mean, still definitely following Parker at at Rippling. You know, I think I've always I've always admired him and continue to do that. [26:19] What's the last revenue number they put out publicly? [26:23] >> I believe the last public revenue number that they put out was a while ago, and I think it was, something like 20 to 50 20 to 30,000,000. [26:31] But you left then. You left right around there then? [26:34] >> Yeah. Yeah. [26:35] Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Number three, favorite online tool for building ignition? [26:39] >> Favorite online tool, linear. Honestly, I love linear. [26:42] >> Me too. [26:43] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [26:46] >> Four. [26:47] That's not healthy. [26:48] >> No. No. It's realistically, it's probably closer to six, but, you know, I think lately it's been four. [26:56] Situ and when situation married, single, kids? [26:59] >> Single. [27:00] Okay. No kids? [27:01] >> No kids. Single. Just moved to LA, you know, 2008. So [27:06] And how how old are you, Derek? [27:08] >> I am 35. [27:10] 35. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [27:15] >> Be more aggressive. Like, go start know, when I was 20, was working at PlayStation, which was fun. Learned a lot, but, you know, I think I I wish that I'd started starting companies earlier. [27:23] Guys haveignition.com. They help your go to market teams plan go to market, launch new products, for example. They've got 500 to 800 folks who are actively using the platform. They've converted some portion of those into paid users. They've got eyes on breaking a million dollar run rate by the end of this year, maybe early January twenty twenty three. We'll see what happens. They've got 21 folks on their team right now spending all in headcount outside of [27:45] Founder salaries, about $150,000 per month. So healthy burn, they've raised 3.1 seed and another 1.8 pre seed, so plenty of cash to work with to drive that growth. 17 of the 21 are engineers, so have the engineering org. We'll see what happens next. Derek, thanks for taking us to the top. [27:58] >> Yeah. Thanks so much. [28:01] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their...
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