Friends vs Strangers: Whose Feedback Is More Valuable? With Derek Osgood of Ignition

Episode Summary:

In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Phil speaks with Derek Osgood, Founder and CEO of Ignition, a collaborative hub to help launch teams dynamically plan, execute, and measure GTM processes. Derek is also a Fellow at On Deck, and was previously the Director of Product Marketing at Rippling and the Product Manager at Playstation.

They delve into the fundraising process that Ignition went through, when to commit to an idea you have, the thought that goes into choosing to co-found a company, and why you should try to get feedback from customers outside of your network. They also explore just how many times you have to scrap and remake your product until it is absolutely perfect.

Guest at a Glance:

Name: Arsen Stepanyan 

About Derek: In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Phil speaks with Derek Osgood, Founder and CEO of Ignition, a collaborative hub to help launch teams dynamically plan, execute, and measure GTM processes. He is also a Fellow at On Deck, and was previously the Director of Product Marketing at Rippling and the Product Manager at Playstation.

A previous colleague described him as “the kind of manager who inspires you to come to work in the morning, and his creativity and energy flows to the rest of the team. He provided the vision and prioritization needed to do my best work, and the space and knowledge to learn and grow, and most importantly, I always felt empowered and supported by him.”

Derek on LinkedIn

Ignition on LinkedIn

Ignitions’s Website

Topics we cover:

• The multiple problems that Ignition solves
• The bigger you get, the harder it gets
• The fundraising process for Ignition
• How to know when to commit to an idea
• Deciding to co-found a company with someone
• Scrapping ideas until you get the right one
• The evolutionary process of building a SaaS product
• Find customers outside of your network
• Why you should focus on refinement before anything else

Key Takeaways:

Taking Matters into Your Own Hands 

Sometimes, after you’ve been using tools created by someone else and it still isn’t working, you may need to take matters into your own hands. Derek explains that, after having so many founders ask him what the best strategy when launching a product, and knowing that there was such bad or little information out there, he decided to prioritize the process and templates that he already made and built Ignition.

“I’ve launched hundreds of things. Every single time that I’ve had to build this process, I’ve had to hack it together with a bunch of tools that are not really built around the workflow that exists. It was never very efficient or effective, despite my best efforts to communicate.” 

Discovering Surprise Investors!

Before even landing on the idea for Ignition, Derek quit his job to pursue starting a company, which meant he was able to go full time but lacked the money to fund his company. But investors will come when you least expect it; when Derek first created Ignition, they only had a few customers, but they were so impressed with the hub that they offered to invest in it. It was only then that they were able to start the real fundraising process, and the rest is history!

“We built a prototype and went and put it in front of a few customers who we had never met. A couple of them were excited enough to say ‘we’ll definitely buy this’ and also a couple of them offered to invest because they were so excited about the vision. That turned into us going out and kicking off an actual fundraising process.”

How to Know When to Commit to the Idea

You have to know when to commit to your business ideas. There’s absolutely no point in marrying one before you’re one hundred percent sure it’s the right choice. But how do you know when it’s the right choice? Well, it’s all about trial, error, and validation among those you put the product in front of. Oftentimes, you’ll know when you’ve struck gold, but it’s important to remember to stay level-headed and not get caught up in the excitement. Try to look at your business from an objective point of view.

“We weren’t fully like, ‘lets go make anything and whatever sticks, sticks’. We were a little married to the idea, but we said we weren’t fully committing to this thing until we’ve fully validated it. This isn’t just personal pain, this is also pain that other people are feeling.”

The Value of a Stranger’s Voice

In order to get the best feedback for your work, always try to test out the product with people outside of your network - this is far more important than you might think. When we show our work to the people we know, people who we’ve already developed relationships with, they are more inclined to tell us they like our work in hopes it’ll make us happy. Whilst this is a very nice thing to do, we need criticism and pointers from an objective point of view in order to grow and develop.

Strangers are honest with us. Derek himself says that, if he showed his work to people in his network, they’d likely be ‘too gentle’ and want to protect his feelings too much.