In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast, Vijay sits down with Karthik Suresh—co-founder of Ignition and DoubleLoop.AI—to explore his unconventional journey from high-frequency trading to building one of the fastest-growing platforms in the AI agent space.
Karthik shares how early career lessons in finance shaped his product mindset, why user empathy became his north star, and how doubling down on positioning and messaging turned go-to-market into a product strategy.
You’ll hear how Ignition was born out of a gap in product marketing tools, why the team pivoted to DoubleO when GenAI exploded, and the exact steps they took to validate product-market fit—from leveraging community partnerships to gating product access behind payments.
Other topics covered:
- How to break into startups without prior experience
- The secret to founder-market fit and team dynamics
- Why most AI tools are vaporware (and how to tell the difference)
- Building brand trust through market education
- Why “pay if it works” is the next frontier in SaaS pricing
Whether you’re navigating an early-stage startup, experimenting with agents, or refining your GTM playbook, this episode delivers tactical insight with startup grit and product clarity.
Connect with Karthik Suresh on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiksureshlbs/
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/
Listen To The Episode:
From Wall Street to Workflow: Karthik Suresh’s GTM Pivot into the AI Agent Era
I always start the show with the signature question, would love to get your thoughts. I know you’re not the traditional CTO, you’ve got a product and a product management background, so I don’t consider you as a traditional CTO.
But having said that, we’d love to get a peek into your product side of the world and test. So with that, how would you define and you go-to-market?
Yeah. So go-to-market, obviously, go-to-market means so many different things for different people. In fact, a go-to-market from a marketing perspective seems very different from a go-to-market from a sales perspective.
You have the same title. You talk to the person, they’re like, oh, I’m a go-to-GTM guy, and then I’m a GTM, and then he’s like, oh, I’m doing marketing, I’m doing sales. But from my perspective, at the end of the day, it’s typically about making sure you have a very clear idea of who you’re targeting, who’s your end customer, what’s your value prop, what’s your distribution strategy, what’s your pricing and packaging.
But more importantly, the two most important things for me are what’s your messaging and what’s your positioning. So it’s like when you have your ideal target audience, how do you message the product in which they get it? Because as a PM or as an engineer, I’m more worried about talking about features, like, oh, that product does this, that product does that.
But from a go-to-market perspective, it’s more about communicating to the users in a way they understand why they should use a product to solve their problem. The messaging is very important. And then positioning.
Positioning is like, okay, of all the tools given out there, why should they use your tool? What’s your differentiation? So getting those two things are very key.
And then of course, the final thing is the channels. What channels are you going to use to get to the users? So to summarize, who’s your end-user?
What’s the value prop? What’s your messaging and positioning? And where do you, and where and how you find those end-users in a repeatable manner?
Yeah, no, very good. I mean, I love the way you simplified it, quote-unquote simplified it, right? It always starts with the end-user first and foremost.
And what are the problems that they are struggling with on a day-to-day basis? There’s a plethora of problems, but then you as the product person and from a go-to-market perspective, which specific set of problems are you looking to solve? And what does your product do?
And articulating that through your messaging and even for them to reorient, for the user and buyers to reorient and get a sense of, hey, why should they even consider you? That’s where the positioning comes into play.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the funny thing is like when you’re talking about it, it just occurred to me when I see a lot of these websites or ads, a lot of them are like, oh, this is how they’re all talking about how good the product is, how good the feature is.
Yeah.
But they never talk about the customer problem. Like I don’t care, you have this 20 features, right? So yeah, a hundred percent.
Yeah. I mean, that’s the biggest thing that I have, one of the biggest complaints from a go-to-market perspective where majority of the brands and the companies, they talk more about themselves versus the message of why someone should even care about looking at them in the first place or considering them. Right.
Exactly. That’s the biggest thing. Perfect.
I love this talk. Let’s get going. I know I’m excited about this conversation even more so now.
So with that, let’s step back, talk to us and listeners about your journey. I mean, all the way from maybe from your college days and walk us through your journey until what you do and who you’re serving today.
Sure. Yeah. So I was born and brought up in India.
I moved to the States to study at Carnegie Mellon. And my first job was in New York in algorithmic trading and high frequency trading space. So very different from what I do today.
But it was also like really transformational for me because those were some very shaky times after the financial crisis. And I was also a part of this company called Knight Capital Group, which had the highest trading loss ever. Like we lost like 400 million in 30 minutes or something like that.
And that was like getting that experience at such an early age made a big difference in the way I see the world. After being there for seven years in Wall Street, I felt like it’s more about taking money to make more money. There was no real impact, no tangible impact on the world.
So which is why I want to go into more building products. And I made the transition to tech. I did like an MBA in between just so that I can use that as a career switcher.
And then I transitioned from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. And when I got here, my first job was at a company called Kraft. I was the first employee.
And that’s where I was there till CESA. And that’s where I learned the art of the trade, we say that. So how do you find product market fit?
How do you pivot? And how do you go from zero to one? So I was there till CESA and it’s a CEC company, I think.
So I learned a lot. And then I was like, oh, I’m done with startups. I’m never going to work for a startup again.
And then joined Facebook. And then I was a PM at Facebook search and then PM at Facebook reality labs and had a lot of fun and very smart people. It’s a very different set of problems.
More of scale, which is product market fit. But then after a year or so, I was like, you know what? I want to go back to a startup or do something on my own.
So the itch never disappeared. So I met Derek, my co-founder through OnDeck. OnDeck is like a community of people looking to start companies.
So I joined OnDeck, I met Derek, and we were like, hey, let’s start Ignition, which is basically the first source of true platform for product marketing and product management. And it’s also kind of AI native. And we started Ignition in 2021.
That’s when we started. So it was a good run. We raised some seed round and we have some good customers, but the whole bet was product marketing as a function is going to expand in the coming years.
And there’s no tool serving product managers in a dedicated fashion. And so let’s do that. So that’s how Ignition was born.
But somewhere along the journey, what happened is Gen AI became a big thing. So that’s when the GPT 3.5. When GPT 3.5 hit, I still very vividly remember talking to Derek saying, hey, look, all the SaaS tools, we are in trouble.
Ignition is in trouble. But having said that, we were building AI for Ignition and we were like, okay, you know what? We got to pivot.
And that’s how 00AI was born. So we basically spun out 00 as a separate brand outside Ignition, which is now a horizontal platform to build AI agents for automating any business process. And then we’ve been building on it for the last X number of months.
And we went from zero to pretty quickly 304k in two, three months. And now we are continuing to grow that business. So that’s my journey so far.
Fantastic. Great journey. I mean, a lot of learnings.
In fact, you’ve already experienced so much in your quote unquote young career that many people aspired to. So congratulations to you on that. So let’s double click on a few things here.
I get Wall Street. I know, I understand why you left it. I mean, quick context.
So for me, I did my MBA from Cornell University. And of course, being in upstate New York, Cornell East Coast over there, which means I did bump into so many of the Wall Street job personality types. And I clearly could resonate to what you are sharing, which is, yeah, Wall Street is good.
I mean, from a money perspective, but is this what I want to do? And that’s the similar story for you, right? I mean, money, crazy hours, glitzy, glamor life, sure.
And bragging rights. But besides that, what is impact from an operational perspective? So that’s what led you to join, I believe it’s Kraft.
Is that right? Did I get that correct? Yeah.
So walk us, and especially the listeners, through your journey from the Wall Street finance oriented tech job to going as a product manager at Kraft.
So that’s quite a bit of a journey right there. So I think, so after my job in Wall Street, I tried interviewing for a bunch of firms here, and it was very hard to get any jobs or roles, to be honest. So I was trying to get a lead.
And some people do manage, but for me, I felt like, and also the roles I was getting was very junior or I had to restart from scratch. So I wasn’t really sure. And that’s when I’m like, okay, let me go to business school, even though I had a software engineering background and software engineering all my life.
And then I was like, okay, let’s go to business school, because it seems like that might be a better entry. And then the business school definitely helped me pivot my career from Wall Street into tech, which is weird because a lot of people from tech go to business school and go into finance. So I did the other way around.
After my computer science education, I worked for Wall Street. And after my business school, I worked for tech. It’s usually the other way around.
And then during my business school, I met a bunch of people and they all knew that, okay, I had this tech background, but I had no tech experience. So the only people who are willing to bet on me were obviously startups. So that’s why I found a startup, which is willing to take a bet on me.
And they were also very early. I was the first employee there. So I literally joined the founding team.
I just joined the founders. So I also took a bet on them. They took a bet on me.
So you got to take risks. I mean, it’s not very clear. Obviously, if you have five years or 10 years of product management PM experience, then you can go and say, hey, I want a PM role.
But if you have zero years of experience, you got to be very creative. You need to do a bunch of internships or projects or do free projects for founders and somehow brand yourself. And that’s exactly what I did.
And that enabled me to eventually get into, so I did a project for this company and they liked me. They hired me as a first employee. And then I started as on the business operations side of things, and then I moved to product.
So that’s my transition from Wall Street to being a PM.
Yeah. So even more intriguing is, I mean, I personally experienced it as well. I heard from so many of my peers and colleagues and friends in the industry, and especially being in Silicon Valley, you want to be in the startup.
I get that, but it’s extremely hard and it’s low probability for your first startup job to really click and take off, right? If in hindsight, I don’t know. First of all, at that point in time, did you have a formula of, okay, this is the right startup, right space, right trajectory, right market, and right founders?
Or is it like, okay, let’s go try and see what happens? What is the approach?
Yeah. So it really depends on your background, right? So I can talk about my personal experience.
If you already have some experience, you’re already here, then you should probably go and fish to make sure you like the founders, you like the market, and it’s growing fast. But for me, I had zero experience. I couldn’t choose.
For me, it was way for me to break into the industry. So I was willing, obviously the most important part for me was, I would not compromise was on the people, like the people are everything, like your manager and your team. So that’s one thing I was keen on.
But in terms of industry sector, I was very agnostic. I was just like, I just need a chance. I just need somebody to take a bet on me and I’m going to go all in and give my a hundred percent.
So that was, I was just looking for like a very broad, I just had a very broad net, but the only thing I was particular on was making sure that people are the good people who I can learn from, right. That was the main, but I know that like, and also in general, everyone should have the expectation that the startup stories are very glamorous. Like you see these founders make a ton of money and you were like, oh, I’m going to join this startup.
It’s going to be a rocket ship, but nine out of 10 times is going to fail. So you only hear the success stories. You don’t hear the failure stories, but that’s the norm.
You almost expect the startup to fail because that’s what happens. So you have to go with that mindset.
Yeah, totally. And then you mentioned something very important, which is the person, the manager or the team, the co-team that you’re going to work with. So sounds like that was your compass for, hey, I’m willing to take a bet and risk and join Craft.
That’s what I’m hearing.
Exactly. This is the founder, right? I mean, even now, actually that hasn’t changed.
Even when I started the company with Derek, I only started a company because I found somebody like Derek, somebody who I could get along with and somebody who I respected and admired. So people is everything, whether you’re in a PM job, when I was Wall Street, when I was founding companies, that’s one thing you should never compromise on.
Yeah. Yeah. I know we deviated a bit, but coming back to my earlier question, and by the way, I was the one who took you on a different path.
So let me shift this conversation back. So talk to us about your growth as a product manager at Craft.
Yeah. So then once I got into the PM role there, it was more about figuring out how do you keep user at the center of everything we do as a company? It’s again, that’s the commonality between GTM and product management.
At the end of the day, a lot of the times, if a founder has their own vision, right? I want to build this, I want to do this and so on. And then salespeople have their own kind of incentives because they just want to close the deal and get that commission.
Yeah. But you as a PM should be very steadfast and be the voice of the user in the company. It’s like, okay, I know you want this submission, but this is what users want.
I know if we build this one deal might close, but I don’t think we can serve repeatably a whole bunch of entire segment of users if I take the roadmap in that direction. So the number one role I had to learn is to use an empathy, being in the step of the user, interviewing and talking to users, figuring out where they fail and making sure to be an advocate for them in the company. It’s almost like you have an empty seat for the user and you are like the rep and then making sure to represent it.
So that’s the number one thing I had to learn. And it was not easy because initially the growth came from transitioning, being a feature factory manager, where I’m just adding this, okay, I’m going to add this feature, add this button, add this integration, add this, add that. And then like, hold on, there’s no common thread, none of this is attached to a specific user problem.
And then had to go through that whole process. And then they read a bunch of books, got mentored by some senior product folks to then focus everything based on the user. So that was like a big part of the journey.
Yeah. No, very good. And then you mentioned something which is the user becoming user centric and you just articulated how you transition into that.
It was like a natural, I mean, you start asking questions. Okay. Yeah.
These tasks have to be done at craft. You are doing it from an integration point of view or feature engineering or feature factory or something like that. And then you paused and asked a question, who is it really benefiting?
Who is benefiting from this? And how do I know that they’re really benefiting? So double clicking on that question.
So how did it go about finding the users, whom to talk to and how to have the conversation?
Yeah. So there’s obviously only, I can talk about on the Ignition side, which is like way more easier because it’s our own startup. So Ignition, our core persona was a product marketer.
And the first thing we did is we partnered with go-to-market alliance and product marketing alliance. So they have a PMA, they have a big community of PMMs. So the first step was like, it’s like first we define, okay, is PMMs the right audience to go after?
And answer is yes. Okay, great. Now, where do we find those PMMs?
Obviously, in our network, we have some friends we got on a call and talk to, but that’s not going to happen at scale. So then we’re like, okay, let’s go find communities. So then we found PMA, we partnered with them, we sponsored a few events, we had webinars, and that’s where we started and we got into the Slack.
And that’s when we started to get a steady stream of our ideal target persona and got on a call, identified what their issues are. And then even there, one of the biggest learnings there was even PMM is not a very well-defined role. So they’re, oh, it’s in some companies, it’s just glorified content marketing.
Whereas in some companies, it’s actual real PMM role where they have strategy, they’re setting the go-to-market strategy and have the budget. So there’s a lot of nuance we had to learn during that process. So, but the best way for us to go is see where they live and then go partner with that community or event or meetup or events, and then go find the initial set of users.
And that was with you and Derek at Ignition. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
But how did you gravitate towards product marketing? Why marketing?
Yeah. So I was a PM, Derek was a PMM. And I felt like PMs had a lot of tools like product board and Jira linear and all that, engineers have that.
But PMMs don’t have any tool. They just use monday.com or Asana. They just use very generic project management tools.
So Derek was like, no, there is a huge opportunity in this space to build something as a dedicated go-to tool for PMMs. And that’s how we started Ignition.
Got it. Very cool. So, and in between craft and Ignition, you took a detour to Meta.
So what is it like, and why do you jump into a large ship like Meta? And what was it like over there?
100%. Actually, I’m going to come back to that question. There’s one other point which occurred to me on your last question, how do you find the users?
I just want to let the audience know. So once we had this community of people, the second step we did to scale that is email marketing. So it’s basically, I mean, this is pre AI state.
So I don’t know how it is right now with AI based and I think email open rates have dropped quite considerably, but before the one other channel, which worked really well for us at scale was just sending cold emails and then setting up email dip campaigns and a five, six, five to seven follow-ups. And then, so that works. So anyway, so that was the obvious scale.
So our Ignition was initially was community driven, scale was email driven. So that’s how we source our users. Now, coming back to your next question.
So yeah, so I’ve craft, I did this for four years and I was tired and exhausted and I was kind of burnt out. And I was like, oh, startup was fun. I’m never going to do startup again.
This is not for me.
Yeah.
And I was like, I’m going to join a big farm and get paid well. And then, and that’s why I interviewed. And luckily I got an offer with Facebook and I decided to take it.
So that was the reason. It’s more me like taking a break and also like also trying also, I never worked for a big company. So I also want to experience it because I had no perspective of what it is to work for a large company.
So that’s how I ended up joining Facebook.
Got it. And then again, I would assume the same criteria, right? The right manager, the manager and you working together, that’s it applied.
Yeah. And also the, that applied, but since it was my first time joining a big company, I had no big company experience. I wasn’t, I didn’t really have a choice to make that I’m going to select this team as the other team.
So, but I had a veto though. I knew that if I didn’t like the manager, I would never, even if it’s Facebook or whatever companies, I’m not going to take it. Got it.
So that was more of a negative filter. It’s like, if this is not true, I’m not going to take it. Once it’s like, no, I only wanted to work for Instagram.
I only want to work for WhatsApp. It was not that it’s more like a negative filter. So, but luckily I got placed into a really good team, which was Facebook search.
And, and then yeah.
What does that product management experience like? I mean, what did that teach you over there?
Yeah, there that’s insane. Meta and I keep saying Facebook now it’s Meta because I was in Facebook days, but the fields there it’s because you can, you know, in startup, let’s say you ship a feature, you get, you have to wait such a long time to get any feedback in Meta. You have some even small AB tests, you have millions of users.
It’s just insane. I’ve never seen that kind of like, because they have obviously Facebook has a billion plus users. So a million is less than 1%.
Right. So it’s just like, you just have a small feature. You get instant feedback on something’s going wrong.
And then one thing which Meta did really well is analytics. They had the best analytics software where you could like measure like hundreds of metrics, starting with the overall session time of how much time you’re spending on the app to every, like how many times they click whatever feature and what is the journey like, what is the funnel? Like the whole thing could be measured, which was like crack for PMs, right?
Because those are the data you, it’s very hard for you to get as a startup.
Correct.
So I think I learned a ton of that as a product manager at Facebook. In fact, talking about that, it feels like that whole analytics team even spun out as a new startup called Statsig or something, which they took the analytics stack of Facebook and now they are prioritizing it and selling it from company to company.
Nice. Pretty cool. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, at that scale, it’s all about analytics and insights at various steps. And to your point, we keep talking about A-B test and as a early stage startup, yes, sure. I would love to do A-B test, but I don’t have that volume of users or can have a rapid pace, but at a company, at a large scale company like MetaR, Google or Amazon or Microsoft for that matter, it’s like you already have that set of users, you get feedback and you can instant A-B test testing.
Yeah.
And it’s in a SaaS startup, you don’t A-B test. It’s like an A-A test. Correct.
It’s just you’re just maybe convincing your CEO or somebody just to get a buy-in, but that step makes no sense because it’s not scientifically significant.
Yeah. Very cool. And then of course the startup and the founder in you, that age started growing again, bigger and bigger.
And that’s when you found Derek and talked about Ignition. Let’s talk about the pivot to double O, right? What led you and Derek and what is the hypothesis like and how did you validate and go into that direction?
Yeah. So now shifting topics here, I think Gen AI is such a big kind of a revolutionary shift in tech, which comes once in two decades, right? The last one was iOS.
If you remember when iOS came, everybody was building a mobile app and then everyone was talking about it. So the same thing is happening right now. So when there’s such a big inflection point in the history, all the previous mindset of building software completely changes.
You really have to reinvent yourself. What the software is going to look like post-Gen AI. And that’s where we started thinking about like, Hey, is this something we really want to work on?
And Ignition, do you think Ignition is even going to exist in a few years from now? And it’s less about Ignition, but generally the category of SaaS software, like software as a service, is that going to even exist? And we felt the answer was no.
There are going to be a few very dedicated, especially the ones which have source of truth, like for example, Rippling or Deal or stuff like that, they’re going to exist and thrive. But most of the other productivity tools, which Ignition was also was like, it doesn’t make sense for them to exist two years from now. So what are we doing here?
So we were like, okay, let’s build. So then we took a look, took a hard look at Ignition. We realized that we are building AI agents within Ignition, even before AI agents was a thing.
And we’re like, okay, that’s a big opportunity. So let’s bring that out as 00 and then create a horizontal platform for others to help build agents on top of us. Because we already have the know-how, we already built, we know how the infrastructure is.
So let’s just make it into a platform where you Vijay can come in and you can build a competitive Intel agentic workflow on 00, without having to worry about what an agent is. So that’s how 00 was found.
Understood. But again, how did you validate that? I mean, do you go, yes, you and Derek having that thought process is one thing, but you need an external sounding board.
Exactly. So in this case, typically you would run a process, right? Typically, let’s say I want to pivot from PMM to sales.
Then you go talk to your 10 friends and then maybe 50 people, see what their problem is, and then identify eventually the solution is going to work. But in this case, it was really obvious. In this case, it was almost like the market was pulling us because people were like, hey, I like the Ignition, but what is this voice of customer agent?
They’re like, what is this? I like this more. So it is so obvious that, and even when we launched, so then you launch a smoke screen, there’s no product, there’s nothing.
We just launched a website for 00. And then we had like hundreds and hundreds of signups on our website.
And they’re all coming from Ignition or even outside of Ignition customers or users?
No, outside of Ignition customers. So what we did was, so we had Ignition, which had 10 or 20,000 people visiting Ignition website a month. And we just added a banner saying, we are introducing 00 as a new product.
And people were not signing up for Ignition, but we are getting hundreds and hundreds. We’re getting like 10 to 20 signups on Ignition and hundreds of signups on 00.
Got it. I am actually right now on Ignition. I can see something big is coming, learn about it, get early access.
Yeah, exactly.
There you go. So that’s how we figured out, okay, we got to probably, there’s something here. Let’s spend more time.
Pretty cool. So you had volume, you had the search volume. I mean, you’re talking about scale, right?
Not just the initial hand built customer base. You had scale. Now, how do you test with that scale of traffic?
And so that was your validation. There you go.
Yeah. It’s basically like, so let’s say if you didn’t have Ignition, then what I would do, and this is more like for audience, I would run Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever it is. And then spend like some $500 or something like that.
And then drive a whole bunch of people to your website and see how many stick. And then see if you can get some of them on the call and then ask them why they actually signed up. And then that’s kind of how you validate.
But since we already had Ignition traffic organic, it was much easier for us to test the hypothesis.
Fair enough. So that’s good. So now we are in double O space and you already tested that.
So walk us through, I mean, you have like insane growth already, like a couple of months and what, 200, 300K in just a couple of months. So walk us through that. I mean, I’m also leading you to one of the key questions, which is a go-to-market success story.
And at a later point, go-to-market failure story. So this is clearly a success story. Walk us through the Ignition to double O success story.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, so the failure and success are not binary.
Usually like, you know, even at Kraft, they talk about, so Kraft right now is a supply chain risk management software. But I think when we started the company, it was more like we were selling company intelligence to hedge funds. And hedge funds was a great audience, but they would churn quickly.
Then we pivoted to sales. So that was a failure, kind of. And then we pivoted to sales people and sales work, but they weren’t willing to pay a lot of money.
So that was another failure. And then we pivoted to a supply chain and that’s where we found our first seven figure deal.
Sales people to supply chain, man, that’s entirely user-based and markets completely.
It’s the same product. So there’s two ways to pivot, right? Either the same product, you just change audience, or it’s the same audience, you test different products.
Correct.
So there at Kraft, the idea was like, it’s the same product, which is a company intelligence product, enrich a company, but you’re testing different audience and eventually. So I feel like at any startup, at least I’ve been part of, they’re always like some pivot. It’s very rare that it’s a first idea.
You just start and it just takes off. It almost never happens. You have to iterate and fail and then like, okay, get yourself back up and try and get your balance and fail.
And then finally until something works. So that was the story with Kraft.
And what does the timeline like for all this same product, but different use cases and space? What is the timeline for these experiences?
Three to six months, three to six months, because you’ve got to give it time because once you decide you want to do it, you need to change your website. You need to change your messaging. You need to recruit a new set of users, give them access to a product.
So it’s a six month cycle. So which is why you take money for two years, right? When you raise the seed round.
So the hope is in the two years, you can pivot and try, iterate as much as you can to hopefully eventually get that traction and you can raise a series A.
Correct. Yeah. Fair enough.
So we were talking about your point is completely valid. I mean, there’s no, it’s not binary, a success or a failure. And I intentionally put it out there and I get a spectrum of responses from the guests and more often than not, eventually a good chunk pivot to what exactly you said, right?
There’s no failure, failure. It’s more of a learning and a feedback to pivot to the next step. So going back to, I hear you on that completely go-to-market pivots, if you will, but coming to a go-to-market success story.
So expand on the double O success, the early success that you’re seeing.
Yeah. So the double O, I think the good thing about double O is we were building into a wave, right? So it’s almost like how Jeff Bezos was saying that, you just go on your surfboard and you just paddle and paddle and you just wait for the wave to come in.
And sometimes the wave never comes and you die or you find the wave, it just takes you to the shore. So in double O, the wave was already there. So you’re jumping right into the wave.
So you could see that market pool, people excited. We had no problems getting people to jump on a call or even put a credit card down. When people are willing to put their credit card down, that’s the biggest validation you’ll have.
So I think one of the things with double O, which I think again, it’s probably not normal for every business because for Ignition, it was not the case at all. For Ignition, it was a much harder sell and convincing people. On the double O side, the market was there.
The market pool was there. Market was literally pulling us. People were, even now we have such a long list.
We have more customers than we can sell right now. So I think the good thing about double O was picking a market where there’s already a huge demand and market pool and underserved products. So that’s how, kind of a success for double O.
Right. Yeah. Let’s just double click on that.
So I went to your Ignition site to get early access. I click on that and that landing page is still there by the way. It’s still live because you want to capture that organic traffic.
I’m sure. So it says, you don’t want to miss this. Our biggest launch yet is prepping for liftoff and then enter your email.
So what happens after that? So I go there, enter my email. Yeah.
Yeah. So once you’re going to enter the email, then we have our list. We have launches and we have our database.
We are tracking who is signing up and you obviously get an email, but basically we will reach out. If you are qualified, we will reach out to schedule a call with you.
Got it.
So I’m actually entering my email right now, but now you can go to the double O site directly because now you’re selling. So you can just sign up for the product right now.
Yeah. Fair enough.
This is more when double O was not a product. This was like nine months ago when we were just testing double O. Yeah.
Fair enough. And then, so I go there and then you mentioned something which really caught me attention and that’s the right way to do it, which is test and see if someone’s willing to pay money upfront and then build the product. So how did it go about doing that?
Yeah. So in this case, I think the first thing was like, so Ignition and double O are two different things here. So in Ignition, it was very clear what the problem is and who we are serving, which is PMM.
And we’re like, hey, we’re a go-to-market platform. We help you create go-to-market plans, competitive Intel and all that. But in double O, it’s a horizontal platform.
So the use cases are very broad. It could be like, hey, go through my calendar today and then see who I’m meeting, research that person and send an email to like, I’m doing contract management, review my contract to see if there’s any issues. So both are fine.
So which is like a different challenge for us from a positioning and messaging perspective. So on double O side of things, it’s more like we’re trying to figure out which of these use cases, there’s a real urgent need where they’re willing to put their credit card down. So early on, we had blocked access to double O.
In fact, we only gave access to double O if people were willing to pay for it. So we can use that as a filter to kind of filter out people who are not serious, to filter out people who are like, we’re like, okay, we’ll refund you. You need to pay us.
And if you don’t solve your problem in the first 30 days, we’ll refund you. So that’s the motion we took with double O. And so that really helps for all the people who signed up, for example, through Ignition.
We would get on a call and we’ll give them a demo of what double O is. We’ll maybe build them a workflow or agentic workflow for the current problem and then say, okay, now you want to use it. You got to pay for it.
Saurav Dixit Got it. So at the end of the demo call, towards the end of the call, you actually ask them to pay for it.
Exactly.
Saurav Dixit Got it. Understood. And then that’s a true testament.
First of all, you weed out the tire kickers versus the committed users. That’s one. And second is you’re validating demand, of course.
Saurav Dixit The only exception though is enterprise. Like, you know, let’s say it’s something Walmart comes in or some big company comes in. They obviously aren’t going to put down credit cards.
So for them, it’s more, it’s a very different day. It’s like, okay, if you’re serious bringing your whole team, let’s make sure you can get on a calendar. So that takes a different motion.
But for the most other self-serve, that one we talked about was the motion we used.
Saurav Dixit Understood. So you have, I mean, you have two different go-to-markets right now for double O. You have the individual users.
Maybe it’s a combination of solopreneurs or it can be others like small companies.
Saurav Dixit Small businesses.
Saurav Dixit Small businesses. And then you have the enterprises like a Walmart example. Fair enough.
And then you or Derek, and you and Derek will get on a call. It’s like a founder-led sales motion after that. Saurav Dixit Exactly.
For the enterprise, it’s founder-led sales. For the other, it’s mostly self-serve right now. Before we didn’t have self- serve, so we had to get on a call with everyone, which is painful.
But now we finally have self-serve right.
Saurav Dixit Got it. And then self-serve right now you’re offering like two weeks free trial.
Saurav Dixit Yeah, seven days free trial.
Saurav Dixit Sorry, is it seven days or 14 days? Saurav Dixit Seven days free trial right now. Saurav Dixit Okay, my bad.
Okay, so seven days free trial and then you ask them to pay. So that’s all good. Now, of course, your point, market demand is there.
Anywhere you jump either LinkedIn or any social media, you see a lot of agents and agentic workflows and a lot of startups coming up. So how are you looking to differentiate W versus the plethora of alternatives and competitors?
Saurav Dixit That’s a great, that’s a single, that’s a million dollar question because on one side, the market is huge and there’s infinite demand, it feels like. But on the other side, the competition is also insane. Because every mom and pop is building an AI agent startup right now.
So, and then obviously every YC startup, I think is like an agentic startup in this batch. So there’s like a ton of competition. But what adds fuel to the fire is the customers are not educated enough to make a decision on what startup is better than others because the whole agent concept is new.
So there’s a lot of market education we got to do. And I hope this podcast is also a way we can help with that. It’s like, one of the things I want to talk about is like, okay, how do you even differentiate?
You want to do customer support, there’s 50 AI customer support startups today. How do you figure out what one to use? I think where the differentiation happens is like how reliable it is, because it’s so easy to white code a new application today using cursor or bold or whatever you’re using and say, look, and it demos really well.
And then you’re like, hey, this is great demo. But the question is, you need to really check if they have real customers using it. But more importantly, are they expanding usage and not churning?
That’s I think the single biggest way to validate is like, okay, give me references, show me the customers who are not just using it, but also growing usage over time. That means your product is actually not vaporware, which I think 50% of the AI startups right now are vaporware. And then you need to ask for the references.
And then how accurate the answers are, especially if you’re in medical field, the accuracy has to be very high. So how accurate it is. So you have to do a pilot and make sure it’s accurate.
And then finally, there’s also the trust and enterprise and security issues, because a lot of people, they don’t want to share the data with LLM. How can you provide a really good firewall around your data? So you’re not leaking the data to the LLM models to get trained.
So there’s other issues there. So there’s a multi-step framework you need to use to evaluate an AI agentic startup, which neither the investors nor the customers have been educated to evaluate. So to coming back to your original question, unfortunately, there is no right answer.
We have to put in all the hard work to spend a lot of time on market education.
Fair enough. And how are you going about on market education? I hear you.
Clearly, there’s an education. I mean, let me backtrack. First of all, there’s a huge wave.
It’s almost, not almost, it is a formal factor, which is driving all this user base. Hey, there’s a big thing. I better test it out.
They’re all jumping into it head on. But then there’s also another element coming from, that’s from a user base. From a startup world, I can argue from startup world, it’s almost along that there’s a formal factor.
Hey, there’s a huge wave. I need to jump into it. But then there is a differentiator.
I mean, from a founder startup world and perspective, this is great. I mean, huge demand to your point that you mentioned a huge demand, a lot of traffic, people are buying. Now, how do I stand out?
This is where the whole brand to some extent, and a market education, it’s a complimentary thing. There’s a brand building that has to go on. And then there’s a market education aspect.
And then while doing this for you as founders, you’re trying to nail in into it. Maybe it’s a vertical or a horizontal, which use cases and then nail. So obviously, wrong approach.
It’s a hundred percent.
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Exactly the case. I mean, talking about brand, I feel like at the very early stage of the company, the founder’s brand is the company brand because the company has zero brand.
But eventually, how do you then build the double O itself as a brand? And that’s why we were very particular about picking a name which people like, and then associate double O with trust and reliability, and then have to grow that. And then on the other side, horizontal platform, you obviously cannot just focus on everyone.
So which are the one or two or three personas you’re going to pick to focus on and then to get to a certain revenue where you can then start expanding. So yeah, you’re spot on.
Yeah. Perfect. So what about the market education piece?
What is that pillar like for you and Derek?
Yeah. So the market education is, we do webinars every Thursday, for example, so if you go to the double O website, you’ll see a banner with a webinar. So a lot of people just sign up because we’re not trying to sell anything there.
We’re just going to explain, hey, what an agent is and how do you build workflows and all that, right? So we are doing that. And obviously, we are trying to get on all these groups.
We are trying to host events. If you see my LinkedIn profile, I’m basically a speaker in a lot of these agentic events aside. And so getting ourselves out in events and communities, doing webinars, so trying to really get the word out.
Again, we are very clear. This has nothing to do with double O. You don’t have to use double O, but educate yourself on what an agent is, how agents work and how to evaluate it.
Because once you do that, then you will come and use us. Correct. Yeah.
So, but the first thing is you’ve got to be AI literate. So how do you do that? And that’s what we are spending a lot of time on.
Understood. Yeah. So that is your go-to-market.
Yeah. Your double O’s go-to-market is exactly that. I mean, we talked about one angle, which is your user that PLG self-serve, and then the enterprise founded at sales for mid-market enterprise.
There’s also another element, which is the quote-unquote, there’s brand building. That is another key component. There’s content, which is your webinars and a lot of speaking and events.
So all those things eventually building into a cohesive go-to-market for you and for double O. So now I’m getting more to the execution piece, especially for the listeners out there who are founders themselves and who want to get better in their founder muscle, which is like, how are you and Derek thinking in terms of like the KPIs or leading indicators for double O, whether you’re going the right direction on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
Yeah. So for us, the number one thing is like increasing usage, right? Increasing usage and retention.
So what does increasing usage mean? So we also, the pricing model also, that’s another thing we forgot to talk about. The pricing model itself can be a big advantage to your go-to-market.
So right now we are usage-based pricing, meaning you only pay what you use, but eventually we want to move to an outcome-based pricing. So you only pay if you’re successful. So that’s an innovation we are still experimenting.
We’re not there yet. But coming back to KPIs, the two main KPIs we use is like, if a user onboard and start building workflows, he or she is like, are they building more and more workflows every week? Are they now like, is it more addictive?
Are they using it in a consistent basing? If you do a cohort chart, you want to see the cohort of all the people who joined this Monday, then you do that for every Monday, you see that code expanding over time. That’s one.
The second is retention, like purely like how many customers who signed up three months ago are still active today, 60 day, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day retention to see all the people who signed up, how many are active today, how many are active 60 days, how many are active 90 days. And obviously there’ll be churn and drop off because people’s expectations are wildly different. Sometimes people think AI is magic.
They’ll do anything for you and sometimes, and then they come back. So there’s definitely a churn there, but overall you want to see expanding usage and the retention.
Yeah, fair enough. And for me personally as well, I’m a solopreneur. And so I’ve been grappling with, hey, I need to automate a lot of my workflows because I want to spend more time on more meaningful, meaty tasks myself.
And going back to which, so I was lost. Honestly, I was lost with a lot of AI agent chatter. I don’t know, there’s N8N, there’s you guys, a bunch of others, but now because of you coming on the podcast, I’ll admit it, right?
I mean, there’s a affinity, a brand affinity building up. So I’m going to try Dublow and I’ll see which of the use cases I’ll use. So that’s what, I don’t know why I came up with this or why I went down this track, but to your point, again, going back to go-to-market, okay, now it’s coming back to me, go-to-market, right?
About brand building. So this is the element of that.
Yeah, a hundred percent. The other aspect we are trying to position ourselves, we talked about messaging a lot and positioning. The way we’re positioning ourselves is we’re the only platform we are truly no-code, meaning you can go from a prompt, you type a prompt in English saying, build me an agent to write a blog.
You type it in and Dublow will build an entire agent workflow for you. So it’s not like other platforms where you need to know what an agent is and you need to drag and drop stuff, you need to have an engineer to build it for you. It’s none of that.
It’s truly no-code. So that’s kind of how we are positioning.
Actually, you’re spot on. That is one of the things that I was grappling with subconsciously, even though I know that I need to build AI agents, but that is a friction subconsciously within me. Hey, there’s a Zapier-like, which is okay, you need to know and then do a drag, drop, connect and all that.
But what you’re saying and what I’m hearing is Dublow is different in the sense, in plain English, I just type my workflow and in the backend, the agent and agent workflow is created. Exactly, exactly. Got it.
Okay, perfect. So you’re positioning and messaging is resonating with me at least.
Yeah, that’s great.
One in this podcast. Yeah, for sure. Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
So I know we are coming up against time over here. We can go on and on in so many different directions. But yeah, I mean, you did mention like mentors, even back at Kraft and others.
So who are the top two or three? I know there are several, but maybe mention two or three mentors and sponsors who really played a big role in your career.
Yeah, so I would say the mentors, obviously there’s a set of influencers online and those are famous CPOs. People are like, you can’t go and say, hey, any mentor needs, it’s going to be hard. You need to find them in your network and obviously you need to give some back.
A lot of them are actually, I was very lucky to have really good managers. I had this manager, his name was Chandra and Meta and he was a previous VP of product at Zynga and a previous CPO at Headspace. So I had a lot of product strategy experience.
So I had to learn and he spent a lot of time training me and teaching me. And also he had to do it as a part of his job, but also I was lucky to work for him. So a lot of the mentors actually came from, I mean, it started with advisors.
So that’s where I know you have an advisor equity. So we had a couple of really good advisors. So we had both at Ignition and Neon, but anytime we have a question, we just jump on a question.
So we had my previous CTO at Kraft is an advisor. So anytime I have a technical question, I just jump on, call and talk to him. And then we had a sales, really good sales advisor, John, we just talked to him and anything about sales, we just talked to him.
So it’s really for you to find the right mentors in your own network, but also somehow incentivize them. On the big tech, it was my manager or some kind of that, or on the startup, it was like you reach out to people, get some advisor equity or get them to put some money in startup either way, and then use their expertise to really get as much mentorship as possible.
Yeah, fantastic. And then the last question for you is if you were to turn back clock, what advice would you give to your younger self from a go-to-market perspective or even broadly?
Yeah, I would say go a little bit broader, but it applies even for a go-to-market is don’t be scared of taking risks. Your quality of life later on, and even your happiness and contentment and purpose is so dependent on you having the courage to leave your comfort zone and take risks early on. Risk in terms of career, risk in terms of geography, risk in terms of everything, risk in terms of trying to jump into something new.
It’s the single biggest, most important thing in life. Life is short, time flies. So don’t hesitate to take the risk or some idea you’ve been trying to pursue for a long time.
Do it today. Fantastic.
I’ve got nothing else to add to that. So it’s been a wonderful conversation, Karthik, and good luck to you, Derek, and the DoubleO team going forward.
Thanks, Vijay. I really enjoyed this conversation.