How Ignition GTM Raised $5M and Priced at $99 Per Editor While Chasing Its First $1M in ARR (Interview with CEO Derek Osgood)

Introduction and the Go-to-Market Problem

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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

00:21products, 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?

Derek Osgood

00:28>> Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it, Nathan. Excited.

Nathan Latka

00:30Awesome.

00:31First 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

02:01So 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?

Pricing Model and Per-Editor Structure

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

02:57Yep. Is that your sweet spot right now? Like, before you really start to go up market or mid market?

Derek Osgood

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.

Customer Segments: From Solopreneurs to Square

Nathan Latka

03:17Well, 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

03:42Okay. 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

04:05the 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

04:29inside 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

04:51VC 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

Biggest Customer and Editor Counts

Nathan Latka

05:16only 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

05:41inside 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

06:05give 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

06:25a second. These small editing teams, like you call them editors, but what are their job titles on LinkedIn today?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

07:22Interesting. 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.

07:45What are you building inside of your platform that we're not gonna see inside of project management tools for developers already?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

10:06Got it. Okay. And put this, I guess, how many brands do you have using the platform today as customers?

Target Users: Product Marketers and PMs

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

10:28And 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

How Ignition Differs From Project Management Tools

Nathan Latka

11:00Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And put this on a timeline for us. When did you write the first line of code for Ignition?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

11:26And we're in 2021?

Derek Osgood

11:27>> Yes, 2021.

Nathan Latka

11:28And what was the seed how much was the seed round?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

11:47Got 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?

Derek Osgood

12:03>> Yep. Yep.

Nathan Latka

12:04Okay. 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%?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

13:14That's fair. That's fair. What's how many folks are on the team today? And of the team size, how many are engineers?

Platform Features: Research, Planning, and Post-Launch

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

13:41So 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?

Derek Osgood

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

Nathan Latka

13:55That'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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

14:58That's can you share the original agency you worked with when you started?

Derek Osgood

15:02>> Yeah. It's come it's an agency called Evrone. Evrone? Ev, Evrone.

Nathan Latka

15:07Like, e like, should like, if people listen right now, should they go Google them and use them too? Were they good?

Derek Osgood

15:11>> Yeah. They're great. We love them.

Nathan Latka

15:12Okay. E e v r o n I?

Derek Osgood

15:15>> R o n e.

Nathan Latka

15:18O 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

15:36all ignoring your salaries like you and your founder. What's the all in person fixed expense per month right now?

Derek Osgood

15:44>> So on a per person basis? No. Don't tell

Nathan Latka

15:46me peep individual salaries. I mean, total headcount expense monthly excluding founder salaries.

Derek Osgood

15:51>> Oh, total headcount expenses is about 150 k.

Nathan Latka

15:54Okay. 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.

Derek Osgood

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

Nathan Latka

16:37all 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.

Customer Count and AppSumo Breakdown

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

17:20Yep. 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

18:03Why 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?

Why Ignition Did the AppSumo Lifetime Deal

Derek Osgood

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

Nathan Latka

19:16But 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?

Derek Osgood

19:20>> We don't care. I mean, like, honestly,

Nathan Latka

19:22if 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

19:41care about that feedback no matter how engaging it was?

Defending AppSumo User Feedback Quality

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

20:26How how many are there? How many came from AppSumo?

Derek Osgood

20:29>> A couple 100.

Nathan Latka

20:31Okay. 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?

Derek Osgood

20:36>> Probably about that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:37Have 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

21:08There's a lot people who drop Sumo deals, they give the whole thing away for free.

21:11There's

21:11no 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

21:39Got 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.

Derek Osgood

21:52>> Something along those lines.

Nathan Latka

21:53Okay. 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?

Funding History and Team Size

Derek Osgood

22:09>> So there's they're invest so they're CEOs and investors of ours. So basically product market

Nathan Latka

22:14That counts as an economic relationship for sure.

Derek Osgood

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.

Distributed Team and Capital Efficiency

Nathan Latka

23:02Did they ask you to pay for that placement or did you get it for free since the founder invested?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

23:14What'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?

Derek Osgood

23:26>> Typically, they charge 50 k. We didn't pay that. Like, we paid a lot less than that.

Nathan Latka

23:30I 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.

Go-to-Market Strategy: Cold Outbound, Community, Content

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

24:45I mean, you think you can break a million dollar run rate by January or you guys are by December this year?

Revenue Target and First Revenue Month

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

24:59I see. Very cool. And obviously, no revenue exactly one year ago, right?

Derek Osgood

25:03>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had no revenue a couple of months ago.

Nathan Latka

25:06Yeah. Yeah. When was first revenue? What month?

Derek Osgood

25:09>> First revenue was July.

Nathan Latka

25:11June, 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?

Derek Osgood

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.

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Nathan Latka

25:53Let's wrap up here, Derek, with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

26:08Number two, is there a c is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

26:19What's the last revenue number they put out publicly?

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

26:31But you left then. You left right around there then?

Derek Osgood

26:34>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

26:35Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Number three, favorite online tool for building ignition?

Derek Osgood

26:39>> Favorite online tool, linear. Honestly, I love linear.

26:42>> Me too.

Nathan Latka

26:43Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Derek Osgood

26:46>> Four.

Nathan Latka

26:47That's not healthy.

Derek Osgood

26:48>> No. No. It's realistically, it's probably closer to six, but, you know, I think lately it's been four.

Nathan Latka

26:56Situ and when situation married, single, kids?

Derek Osgood

26:59>> Single.

Nathan Latka

27:00Okay. No kids?

Derek Osgood

27:01>> No kids. Single. Just moved to LA, you know, 2008. So

Nathan Latka

27:06And how how old are you, Derek?

Derek Osgood

27:08>> I am 35.

Nathan Latka

27:1035. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Derek Osgood

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.

Nathan Latka

27:23Guys 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

27:45Founder 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.

Derek Osgood

27:58>> Yeah. Thanks so much.

Nathan Latka

28:01One 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 expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

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29:11for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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