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What's up, DTC. Pod? Today we've got Derek osgood from ignition. So, Derek, I'll let you kick us off on you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what you're working on.

Yeah, great to check us. Yeah, so, I mean, my background, basically, I used to work as a brand manager early on in my career at PlayStation, launching big AAA games. Been kind of in and around ventureBack startups ever since. So bounced around a variety of companies in both kind of like tech MoLapse, a couple of DC. Brands, leading marketing teams, leading product teams, and then most recently, before starting ignition, ended up standing up the product marketing function at rippling as one of the early employees there. And these days, I'm working on building a platform for managing product launches. So we help d to C brands, we help SaaS companies, we help anybody who's launching products, features campaigns to more effectively bring those things from concept through to launch. So we're basically building a platform that rolls in all the research tooling that you need to understand your market.

Has planning tools baked in to help you structure a repeatable launch process and communicate that internally to all the people that need information. And then on the other end, help you to actually measure the success of that launch. So we're really kind of like bringing that whole process into a nicely packaged platform that anybody can come in and launch things with.

So, Derek, one of the reasons we're really excited to have you on the pod was because we love bringing different founders from different industries that have learnings or Products That Apply To DTC but May Not Be Exactly DTC. So we're really excited to kind of talk about what it takes to get to launches. Whether it's product launches, brand launches. It seems like in the D to C world, people are always launching new things, right? So on this episode, we're really excited to just kind of unpack what goes into launching products or initiatives as a team and what are kind of the best practices about being able to do that successfully. So why don't I kick this to you? Why don't you tell us a little bit just about what you've learned in the world of go to market in product launches. What are some of the lessons that you've learned and what would you say are kind of universal lessons and frameworks for anyone in any type of business you're building?

Yeah, it's funny. I think one of the things that always strikes me when I talk to folks about launching things is everybody thinks that launching things of their company is different. Right? And so whether you're a D to C brand or you're a SaaS company, you think that your process is some special snowflake. And the reality is this process looks pretty similar across SaaS companies, across T to C brands, across entertainment. It's all really boiled down to the same kind of fundamentals. And so really, you're just trying to identify what are we building? Why are we building it? Who is that thing most relevant to? What do we need to tell that group of people in order to get them to take the action that we want, which is typically, go buy our product. And then where do we need to have that message? Reach them. And what's the kind of rollout process that needs to happen in order for that to be most effective so that we can learn what we need to learn through the process and end up actually introducing it in the most impactful way at that point in time that we try and kind of drive that lightning strike on launch day.