Welcome to DTC pod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter, join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok. And IG organic creative. Use the code dtcpod. Ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a d to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final loop is a real time accounting service built by d to C founders. For d to C founders, try final loop. Completely free, no credit card required. Just visit finalloop.com d to CPOD and get 14 days free and a two month PNL within 24 hours with all the ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. 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. So the fundamentals end up being pretty much the same across these companies. I think one of the biggest areas that becomes really clear once you go through a lot of launches and a lot of companies under index on this in the first couple of things that they're launching because they don't realize how much impact it has is kind of the internal marketing component of this. People end up thinking you spend all this mental energy trying to figure out, like, okay, what are we actually saying to our market? But the reality is, all the people within your company, there's so much orchestration involved in this process that they all need lots of information as much or more than your customers do in order to effectively go promote this thing. And companies just forget about that and they end up having no process. Information gets scattered. People just get totally lost. And the message ends up being really discombobulated when it actually hits customers, and that ends up driving really like failed launches and they end up flopping because the message isn't clear, because it's not reaching people in enough places, because it's not landing in a really focused way, and there's just no clear launch impact around it. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that has become really clear as I've talked to hundreds of people about the way that they're launching stuff, and been through hundreds of them myself.

So another question that I have around that, which is you bring up a lot of good points about how similar all sorts of launches are across all these different companies. But what always kind of jumps out at me is what qualifies as a launch, right? Clearly, for a D to C brand, if you've been planning it for a year and you know you're rolling out a brand new flagship product and you know that's a launch, then okay, you're going to be doing that. But what are the other things that people don't even realize are launches that they should be planning for and that they should be communicating, whether it's internally, externally, et cetera?

Yeah, it's a super good question. And honestly, so this is why when we're talking about the product that we've been building is we talk about it through the lens of go to market planning as opposed to product launch. Because launches are not just about product launches. And when people think about what a launch is, oftentimes they're just thinking about like, what is launch day, right? Like, what are we doing on the day of launch in order to make an announcement? But the launch process is a much bigger, longer, extensive process that includes all the planning that leads up to that launch, all the internal enablement and cross functional enablement that happens to prepare for it on launch day. The actual activity that's getting pushed live and then post launch, how you're supporting that launch? And customers that are coming in after the fact and measuring and iterating on it. So the process itself of what a launch is, is a lot more expansive than what people think when they think launch. But the, the reality is, everything that you're shipping as a company is a launch. It's not just the products that you're building. And so people oftentimes their head when they think about launch, that it goes to the big tier, one product launches, the big one thing that we're launching this year, or four things that we're launching each quarter. But the reality is, like, you are constantly launching if you're sat if you're a tech company, you're launching features all the time. If you're a D to C brand, you might be launching line extensions, and they're maybe not new products, but they may be variations of an existing product. And if you're a DC brand, you're also constantly launching campaigns and events and all these things that have a kind of point in time launch process to them. But they aren't necessarily launching a physical thing, they're usually launching an initiative. And so when we think about launching, it's really the context of going to market with a new thing, whether that's a new concept, a new message, a new market, or a new product.

And what's interesting is, in that same vein, as a BTC brand, you might be testing, launching completely different copy, different landing pages, different website. And so typically you will be dealing with third parties agencies who will say, here's our Trello or here's our process. And so it seems like this gives most companies don't have an internal operational process where this gives the brand ownership to say, here's how we do launches, we're going to use it, we're going to do it our way, which is something most BTC brands aren't used to. So how do you think about third parties and brands owning their launch process versus say, the standard is to adapt to whatever is the third party's launch process and then it fails, website launch fails. And then you look back and while we were running someone else's process, yeah, for sure.

I think one of the fundamentally most important things for any brand, and this is especially true of D to C brands, is obviously brand consistency, right? It's having a clear message, it's having a consistent set of assets and ways that you're actually communicating your message to customers. And so it's always shocking to me when companies don't have some kind of internal clear source of truth and clear process around this stuff because it is what drives all of your branding. The launch process is where most new assets are created for your company. It's the origination point of most new messages, it's the origination point of most new assets. And so if you don't have a clear kind of process and source of truth for both creating those things and then making them an existing repository that you can go back and reference and continue building on top of as opposed to just, like, reinventing the wheel. Every single time you do this, you're hamstring your ability to even build a brand in the first place. And so I think, as you were mentioning, lots of times, what happens is companies rely on their external agencies to drive the process oftentimes because they may not have the internal expertise for how to build this process and they may not really even know where to start. And that's fine for a little while. But if that doesn't actually turn into a codified process for you internally, that you can then copy and paste to every future launch that you have, regardless of whether you're working with that agency partner or whether you're working with a different agency partner or whether you're trying to bring it in house, then you're not actually building sustainable systems you're not building sustainable assets that you can then reuse as a company. And you're not actually building anything. All you're doing is just kind of like winging it with tactics over and over again. And I think the other challenge is you never learn the process if you're not building the process internally. You don't build the muscle because you're just outsourcing the process to somebody else. Using other agencies tools is fine, but you need to then find a way to turn that into something internal that you can then push into those agency partners in the future. And I think when you start talking to larger companies that have grown and been through this brash and experienced all the pain involved, if they do this, the way that you're describing where they're working mostly through whatever tools, and process the external partners are pushing like suggesting to them they discover that it just doesn't work and it's not scalable at all and they end up actually then requiring all kind of external partners that they're working with to plug into their existing internal process. So I think it's important to start thinking about that stuff from day one because you're going to have to go through that transition at some point. And if you don't build it from the start, then it becomes so much less scalable. You end up wasting so much time down the road rebuilding the process and your pace of learning is just drastically faster if you built it in house.

So my next question, Derek, is kind of what you alluded to in terms of the process and getting it right and knowing that, hey, this is the same thing over and over and over for all these different types of industries and types of launches. So my question is kind of like, what do you guys do? And when you were starting to build this company, what did you believe there was opportunity to productize on that was different than say, an Asana or a Trello, which is more of like a generic place for people to collaborate?

Yeah, it's a super good question. So I think the reality is everybody's head when they think about product launches goes straight to their checklist, right? It's like, okay, there's a big list of tasks that I need to get done in order to make this thing happen. But the reality is that's not the important thing in a launch, right? Your tasks are just the things that you're ticking boxes on. The important thing for you is the actual strategy. It's the documentation, it's the assets that are created and how you turn those into durable, multi use, multipurpose assets that can exist for the lifetime of your company. And so where we thought that there was a lot of opportunity is to take that checklist but marry it to the actual important stuff in launching, which is the strategic documentation, the asset management, and then layer in tools that actually help you do the work. Like realistically, this process, because it is a process that is somewhat standardized and it is a process that you need to be able to do repeatably and it requires kind of a fairly consistent set of inputs into it. We were like, hey, we can take that project, the project management component of it, and layer in some tools that actually help build so much more repeatability into this process and allow you to actually execute this stuff faster. So you can get to market faster, but also actually be able to do real planning that's insight driven as opposed to just scrambling to get your checklist done at the last second. And so basically our take was you need to have much more of a repository of knowledge and a place that everybody within the company, internal and external, like your agency partners. Your internal teams can go and understand exactly what the source of truth says about where the launch is status wise. What are the important pieces? What's the strategy around it? Why are we doing what we're doing? What's the context that's driving that strategy? And then what are the assets available to me in order to go help take my card of the launch process and execute it? And so I think it was mostly just building that source of truth and trying to layer in a lot more automation into it to help people actually do the work.

Yeah, so you're just essentially verticalizing the sana for this specific use case of a product launch. And so from a product standpoint, what are the nuts and bolts of these features that you mentioned that verticalizes that make it a lot easier for companies to be able to always be launching and iterate faster?

Yes, I could spend an hour talking about is the product has a lot of surface area, so we do a lot of things. But I think if you really break it down, it kind of falls into a couple of buckets. So on the research side of things, before you even start launch planning, we basically have automated competitive intelligence tools where you can drop in a competitor's URL and we will populate a ton of data about that competitor and track it on a continuous basis. So you can see recent news about them, you can see SEO data, you can see review scores and get insights analysis on those reviews, see what they're good and bad at based on a real customer insight. You will see snapshots of their website and how that messaging evolves over time. So you can basically just get an instant pulse on exactly what's going on with your competitors so you can start to really position against them. On the customer research front, we do the same thing. We basically have baked in best practice based research tools where you can easily conduct customer surveys on pricing and packaging, positioning what channels those customers hang out on, so you can really quickly spin up the research that's needed in order to understand who you're actually marketing to and where's best to reach them. And then we bury that into planning tools. And so the planning tools are basically a combination of like we have full blown project management, so all the modern bells and whistles that you would expect from project management tools, we support. We have full blown strategic documentation tooling that helps to actually document that strategy with frameworks baked into it to help guide you in building better strategy. And we even have some AI tools that will help generate some of that strategy alongside you. And then we have asset management where you can actually build that repository of all of the critical brand assets that are being built in that launch process, which then become a really filterable long term library of all of the important content in your company that you can then repurpose down the road for future launches you could build on, start to identify what's important in your brand. And all of that's layered in. We have a repeatable process that's baked into it. So we have workflows that are basically cascading suggestions. So as you start building those plans based on what channels you want to launch through or announce through, we'll then suggest assets that need to be created in that plan and we'll suggest what tasks need to be created in that plan. So your kind of bill of materials gets created as you're building out your plan with you. So you basically build a whole launch process in 10 seconds. It's very quick.

That's really cool. And I come from the content space and asset management is something to not be underestimated in terms of how much friction it can add to a process if it's not a smooth experience. And so earlier you mentioned as well the process of looking back after you did the launch. Right. So how does this help a team go back and analyze what worked, what didn't work, what went wrong. I don't know if that layer is yet productized or it's just going back and having the data points to know where things went right or wrong.

Yeah, so it's totally productized. This is the nice thing. So I think one of the reasons that teams are really bad at looking back at their past launches is oftentimes because of that fragmentation, right? Like they're housing all this stuff and budget docs and projects in Asana. They get archived and people forget where they live, they forget what they were titled because it's all infinitely flexible and there's no information hierarchy to it. So people just even forget that those past launches existed and where to go back to find them if they want to go reference what worked, what didn't work. The other thing is that teams don't have a good process for conducting actual retrospectives. So we actually have baked into the product when you complete a launch, we'll prompt you to, hey, do you want to conduct a retrospective with your team? And we will spin up a retro survey. It's very simple, straightforward, like four question, we ask you an NPS question, then a couple of learning questions, and then we'll codify all that for you in a score on the internal kind of effectiveness of that launch. And we'll give you all those qualitative insights with key takeaways summarized for you on what went well, what didn't go well. So then you can just easily apply those learnings. So the next time you're launching a product in that product line, or the next time you're launching a product to that persona, you can just go back and filter by all your launches, see the launches that you shipped recently to that persona and what went well, what didn't go well, what did you learn? What are the things you need to apply to the next one? So it's really easy to go back and reference all that stuff.

What I love about that is that it is a repository that you can share with future partners, agencies. Here's the repository for every launch we've done, and even onboarding new team members, especially in the marketing roles where startups just don't have the bandwidth to have every single launch perfectly documented in their notion page for new team members. So I love that.

If you do have it perfectly documented in Notion, the new team member doesn't know how you have structured your notion doc, right? So you could have a perfect document, but nobody knows how to find that because it's all infinitely flexible and there's no real structure information hierarchy to it.

It's oftentimes owned by one person in the company and then if that person is no longer in the company, who is going to adopt that and keep those documents updated?

Totally 100%.

I believe you worked at Rippling, right? Software has faster product iteration, faster launching cycles.

So you learned the hard way.

What was it that you learned through especially Rippling, which is a company that moves incredibly fast. So what were some of the learnings of manually doing this versus now building your own product? And where are you guys in the cycle in terms of the long term vision and where you envision this to fully be?

Yeah, I think so. In terms of just the problems at play when launching stuff, the pace that we launched things at Rippling was insane. We were also a very small team supporting all that. We were a three person product marketing team when I left, which we were supporting twelve plus product lines and the pace of each of those product lines, shipping things was insane. We were launching new things on almost a daily basis. And so I think the biggest learning was just the importance of actually systematizing this stuff and building automation. So one of the things that I built early on when I was there was just a regular email to the company that was basically summarizing all the things that were launching with lists of assets that were important to each of those launches, brief summaries of them, so everybody knew exactly what was getting built, when, when it was shipping, and what things they needed to know in order to talk about those things and like what assets were available to them. And that went out to sales, to success. And it was everybody along the people across the company's favorite email that they got all month. And it was the thing that motivated everybody and also got everybody to feel like they had new things to talk about when they wanted to go talk to customers. Our marketing team was able to send better newsletters to customers. Our sales team was able to have new things to go ping prospects about. So just that outward communication and the need to pulse information outwards across all of your companies like internal partners, external partners, et cetera, everybody needs that info and they're not going to know where to go seek it out. So you need to be pushing it to them constantly. I think that was probably one of the biggest learnings and then I think beyond that, just from actually I'm losing my train of thought here. I had one other point and I'm blanking on it.

No, just from there. If you want to jump ahead, go for it. But my question from there was from there the vision was born right from suffering that pain point and going through that problem. And I'm just curious what the dream, vision and goal is for Ignition and future product launches? What in the perfect world where software could be built perfectly? And especially with everything going on in AI. Right, what is the ideal perfect launch platform? What should the experience be like once Ignition vision is fully realized?

Yeah, for sure. We're already well along the way towards our kind of perfect vision. I think we've built a lot more product in two years than most startups our size ever could. So the product is really mature. But I think where we want the product to go long term is not only be the place where you can actually do all this planning and like right now kind of the house is there. All the framework and structure is in place and you can build this full repository for all the knowledge of your company. You can automate all of that internal communication around it where we want to start going and we're starting to do this already. We've shipped a bunch of things. Like this year we're leveraging a lot of the new AI tools that exist. We want to start helping to actually automatically create those plans with you and have them be really super personalized to your specific business and to your specific personas and to the objectives of your individual launches. So we're continuing to improve those workflows and AI recommendations in the product and generating plans. But I think that the really cool thing is because we become this incredibly powerful source of truth for your company on what all of your strategic information is around your launches and around the way that you're positioning and messaging and beer product and what your brand assets are. We can actually become a really powerful enablement tool internally where anybody can come in. So we're actually building this. We're shipping it later this month. We're building basically a contextualized version of Chat GBT that is just based on your data, where anyone can come in and they can ask a question. They can say, hey, how do I talk about the X product to Y persona? And what we will do is we will look across all of your positioning and all of your messaging and all the things that you've launched and all the documentation you have on that persona and all the documentation you have on competitors. And we'll say, based on all of that information, here's a messaging guide that explains how to talk about this. All the important talking points. Here's a list of assets that you can then use to promote that. And here's the three or four things that we launched in the last three months that are relevant to that persona. So then your support team, if they're getting questions about a product, they can come in and just immediately have a full messaging guide on how to talk about it. Anybody who wants to understand status of a launch across the company to come in and say, hey, what's going on with the launch? And we'll tell them all the status, who's blocking what tasks are on track, and not what assets have been created and approved. And it's super duper easy for anybody to come in and just understand exactly what's going on with any launch in the company at any given time. So our goal is to put all of this on rails, make it so that anybody, even if they have zero experience launching things, can come in and basically be an expert from day one and have that whole process mostly automated for them.

I love that.

Especially for we will hold what you.

Were saying about the contextualized no, I.

Was going to say you're the launch kind of thing, we're going to hold.

You to it at the end of the month. Sorry, Blake.

Go ahead.

No, what I was saying was I love that also from a product direction, what you were talking about, about contextual GBT, I think AI, everyone's talking about AI these days, whether you're in D to C and people are using it for generating their product catalog or product descriptions or everything. But even in terms of the workflow in generating marketing assets, in generating copy, there's so many different applications of it. I think what you said about contextualizing, a Chat GPT sort of instance. Is super important because from a product perspective, just going into chat GPT in the interface and stocking it with that knowledge would take you enough time and then coming up with the prompts that you would need to get the output that you're looking for is going to be a whole other beast. I guess my question is how far do you see that going? How are you guys building it? Is it something that's simple? Are you guys embedding all the content? How are you able to make it super accurate again? Because as people have more and more content and more and more launches, there's just so much content in there to pull out. So how do you make sure it's accurate and how do you contextualize it the right way to make sure people are getting what they need?

Yeah, so I mean it's definitely not an easy technical challenge and so there's a lot of work that's going on behind scenes to make it happen. But I think the reality is we have basically done a bunch of embedding work on our end and the reason this is possible in our product is actually because of the fact that we have some structure in place, right? So we already have kind of created the information hierarchy that's needed in order to make sure that that information is useful and we're not having to interpret whatever your kind of messy documentation is in the way that you've built this as a company. So we're able to apply that structure and then we're basically just giving you some template prompts. So the way that we're handling this is we're making some suggestions on common questions that are going to be asked, and we are doing a lot of iteration on our end, making sure that the prompts and making sure that the way that the model is trained, understand those questions and understand how far back in your data should they be looking. What types of information are most relevant? So there's a lot of signal training that we're doing on our end, but it's basically just a lot of iteration on that based off of the questions that we've already seen people asking and the questions that we're continuing to see people ask over time.

Yeah. And I think what you just said about how you've productized it, so everything split up, so it's not just a whole bunch of random data is super important, and people who are, like, working in AI and productizing different things maybe don't quite understand it. But there's a big difference between embedding something that actually has a structure to it and just saying, oh, just go randomly embed all this random text and see what it pulls out, because then it's just not going to be accurate. So I think the fact that you guys have already productized the layer of saying here's what goes where, and then are able to create on top of that is a really cool use case. The next thing I wanted to talk about was just kind of because you've seen so many launches, you understand how it works in the SaaS world for your own company and you've seen all different types of customers use it. I'd love to kind of just do a thought experiment and walk through a different type of, like I think one common thing we see on D to C Pod, right? It's a lot of people who are going through a brand launch, right? They decide they want to start a brand. They've put in a purchase order. They've set up their shopify store. They've put together some marketing assets. But I'd love to just through your lens, understand how you'd approach if you were creating a D to C brand or a consumer brand, like what you'd be thinking about running in your launch process to make sure you didn't miss anything.

Yeah, for sure. I won't go through all the logistical details because there's a ton of stuff like setting up your store and all that stuff, which is pretty well codified in some other spots. But I think the biggest area that I would start is, and this is probably true, like whether you're launching a D to C brand or whether you're launching any startup, any kind of net new company is try and build some degree of audience before you're actually ready to launch. And so I think that's like start delivering value to people you can launch as a sub brand. So have some separate brand that you start building an audience for yourself and around start humanizing yourself and making that audience familiar with you as a person and what you stand for and the values that you are trying to build into that brand. And so whether that's like delivering value through creating content or fostering a community of people in the audience that you want to eventually serve, go just start formulating an audience well before you ever start thinking about the launch itself. That helps to just build you a baseline that you can start activating and do a lot of pre launch marketing to and start to tee up. Hey, we're launching this thing in a month. Hey, we're launching this thing in two weeks. Start telling your network, here's some assets that you can share with that network. So leverage those kind of early fans as the biggest marketing channel that you have. I think when it comes to the actual planning process, don't skimp on the strategy. That's the single biggest piece of advice that I would give is, like, a lot of people, they start thinking, they're like, hey, I'm going to block this brand. I just need a website, and I just need a couple of assets, and I'm going to set up my storefront and start collecting payments. And I'll just go email a bunch of people and tell them that it's live. And the reality is if you don't have a really well differentiated and clear message and value prop to those people. It's going to land on deaf ears. And so you need to have done the research on your customers, understand what their real driving motivations are, why they really want to buy your product, who your competitors are, and how you're going to actually functionally tangibly deposition from them. So I think it's like when launching brands, it's important to build the actual emotive part of the brand and people buy emotions. And so that's really especially true of D to C. Like you want to tap into those emotive needs and make people feel like they're part of something that's exclusive and a group that's really tailored to them. But you also still at the earliest stages of building any brand or product. You still need to be pretty clear on what the tangible benefits are to those people. And so make sure that you have messaging that is tapping into real capabilities that it's unlocking for those people that are buying whatever you're selling. So don't skip on the strategy. Do all the hard positioning, work up front. Do build a messaging framework so that you then have at least something to go back and reference. You're going to iterate on this a lot over time, but at least have the baseline of how you initially think you're going to talk about this thing in place. And then when it comes to the actual execution and building out assets, there's some core pieces that you want. So think about obviously a website, obviously a storefront. Have a kind of nurture campaign built out so that those people that you initially attract in your first launch, they're going to have a good experience that carries them through a full buying experience over time and you're not just dropping them into a leaky bucket. Make sure that you have launch videos are great. Have some kind of like three or four. Like you don't have time at that early stage of a company or a brand to build tons of assets. So figure out what the two or three or four most impactful assets that you can create are that are really going to tell your story the best. Typically that's like a video, a website, like one or two emails, and a couple of social assets. And then make sure that that is distributed effectively. So like, all the people in your network, all the people in your company, all your agency partners, make sure everybody has those assets and they know exactly how to package them up into promotional activity and just go enable everybody around you to effectively launch that thing. Don't just rely on whatever you personally are doing to promote that. It really does take a village to launch things and you need to make sure that village all has the tools that they need in order to do it.

Yeah, I think the other thing that you've been mentioning throughout the show that's really stuck with me is just the importance of the internal communication of launching and not just the external. Right. It's not just a scenario where, okay, we've got one marketing person who knows what's going out and they're communicating to a couple of customers and we internally don't know what's going on. It starts really internally making sure the whole team knows what's going on and that will flow through to the customers and making sure everyone's aligned. Right. Whether it's in SaaS or D to see there's constantly things that I'm sure are being updated, right. Whether you're updating different SKUs, you're removing products from your site, you're adding products to your site, you're launching a new landing page, you're running a new set of ads. There's all these different things that are constantly going into action. I think that communication and making sure the team is on the same page just helps so much across the entire stack.

If you think about it, day zero, you have zero customers, you have zero fans, you have zero anybody. You might have three, four people on your team. You have three or four people that can all be super active in promoting that thing. You have a built in marketing channel and you need to make sure that all three or four of those people are really doing stuff. And it's not just like the one marketing person or the one founder that's going out and promoting because you're just leaving opportunity on the table. And that's true as you scale too, your most motivated people to support you are all of your existing team and your employees and your partners. And so making sure that they're effective at marketing the thing and they're excited about it, that excitement flows through to customers. So make sure that they have all the motivation and context that they need in order to tell the story.

Especially because there is high probability that launch is never going to go as planned. It can go either way. It could be a flop. And then you've seen companies on the other end of the spectrum that fail because they grew too fast or they weren't prepared for how successful that launch.

Was going to be. Yeah, totally. And it's okay for launches to fail too. That's the other thing is people put all this pressure on their first launch to be perfect, and most first launches fail and it's okay to relaunch your product or relaunch your brand multiple times. I think the story is like airbnb launched like four or five times before they actually started getting real traction. And that's true of a lot of successful companies. It's like, it's okay to launch many times as long as you have a fresh story and as long as you're talking to a new audience, just keep launching. Treat everything as a launch and you're going to have way more shots on goal and you're not going to put as much pressure on yourself to get every single launch absolutely perfectly right and you can continue iterating. And eventually one of those launches will be perfect and it will be the one that really starts taking off.

Derek, I love this. I love this framework, especially, and I'm so glad we got to have you on the show today, because I think one of the benefits of SaaS is, like you were saying, you're constantly shipping products, things are moving so fast, you're able to push out all this different sort of messaging, automated. And I feel like a lot of times what the D to C world gets really well is like you were saying, they get the emotive side, the communication, the branding, the marketing, et cetera. So I'm just pumped to be able to have you come on and drop all this knowledge about these different frameworks and systematizing it because it becomes such that framework of fast iteration, communication, all these different themes are so, so applicable. So just want to thank you for coming on the show. For our guests who are listening in, where can they connect with you? Where can they learn more about Ignition and follow along with you yourself?

Yeah, for sure. So best way to find me is I'm on LinkedIn. That's where I do most of my posting and sharing knowledge. Our website is have Ignition.com, and so our product is free to sign up for if you want to go check it out, go sign up. And if you ever want to reach us directly, there's a bunch of contact information on the website and we love to hear from folks.

Sweet. Thanks so much.

Thank you very much for having me.

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