How Ignition GTM, Inc CEO Derek Osgood grew Ignition GTM, Inc to $527.1K revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hey folk mike folks my guest it is derek osgood he's a former marketing executive 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 higher at rippln where he stood up the product marketing function helped scale the company to 20 million in arr as product marketing leader everywhere from startups to major brands like playstation derek has launched over 100 products and his products have generated over 1 billion revenue now he's building the platform he wished he had all along the way derek correa take us to the top yeah yeah let's do it i'm excited awesome first off this is like one of those things man we are launching products like crazy at founder path 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 click up mixed with like handwritten sketches from the last team retreat it's terrible like why hasn't something like this existed before dude i have no idea it's it's this cluster at every single company i mean i've been now 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 a really specified and like important process in any company and so teams end up having to do all 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 it's um i think that you know 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 um because of 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 yeah 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 uh it's it's a messy problem and you know it's tough to solve but um important so so before i dive deep into like the actual products i want to go deep here um 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 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 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 with their business model for you to actually have seats and for them to even be able to access the information that they need hence why you have a lot of meetings and stuff so so yeah we charge um you know at our base tier 29 per editor per month and then you know our kind of primary tier that most teams use it's a 99 per meter per month so um you know small teams end up looking somewhere in the like three to ten k range um you know on an acb basis so yep yep is that your sweet spot right now like before you really start to go up market or mid market we have teams of all sizes so we have you know big companies right now like square and smart rent using us um and then we also have you know a bunch of like small five to ten person teams using us we allow some peoplepreneurs using us as well for their own like personal launches so oh wow uh well okay so now i'm curious don't mention the name of the customer but what what what um your largest company how many editors do they have on one like for one brand 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 still kind of getting out of the implementation phase okay so 15 editors at 99 a month your biggest customer is sort of like 1500 a month today something like that really interesting oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path 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 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 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 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview man so this is great okay i want to come back to how you plan to expand like your net dollar retention obviously would 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 a second these small editing teams like you call them editors but what are their job titles on linkedin today yep so typically it's a product marketing manager or a product manager um the role of product marketing ends up being done by people with a couple of different titles so sometimes it's like a just generic marketing manager if you're talking about like cpg companies it ends up being a brand manager um so it's there's a variety of different like shapes and sizes of product marketing but functionally it is the product marketing function um and then you know sometimes the product manager ends up being the kind of primary collaborator collaborator with them um they do have you know there's smattering of like 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 um sometimes some design teams or editor seats so um it does vary a bit company company but primarily we go after you know the product marketing team is kind of our main entry point interesting and and how does this so if i was looking at this and saying how can i get this done without paying for have ignition i would use something that my like development team uses like linear right a project management tool because that's really what's going to 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 what are you building inside of your platform that we're not going to see inside of project management tools for developers already yeah so i mean one of the big downsides of doing that is just you are intermixing two totally com 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 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 know you can kind of replace linear or jira or whatever you're using on the dev side um 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...