David (00:00)
Let me just adjust myself here. You can see my... Look at that. I'm feeling a little bit thirsty here. Let me just get a drink from my bottle.

Sefunmi Osinaike (00:02)
Hey Amazing love it love it. Great,

Ilan (00:03)
Hahaha

Sefunmi Osinaike (00:10)
elan. Do you have one? Do you have

Ilan (00:11)
No, I don't have any Co.Lab swag ⁓

Sefunmi Osinaike (00:11)
one? my god. Okay. I'll send you i'll send you one after this door I'll send you one after this. Yeah. my god Love it. Love it. Love it. Like that was so that was such an unexpected surprise that made me so happy

David (00:17)
So refreshing.

Ilan (00:25)
Hey, welcome to Prompt and Circumstance. I'm Ilan

David (00:29)
And I'm David.

Ilan (00:30)
And today we're interviewing Sefunmi Osinaike

Sefunmi is a fixture among the product management scene in Toronto. He literally wrote the book, How to Product. He's also the co-founder of CoLab, a program which has trained hundreds of product managers as well as others trying to break into tech.

We're gonna interview about his recent pivot at CoLab, how he validates user willingness to pay in both B2C and B2B And we're gonna get his hot take on

why distribution is the moat for modern

Ilan (01:21)
So with that, we're here with Sefunmi Hey, how's it going?

Sefunmi Osinaike (01:25)
Good, how are you? Nice to see you again, Ilan. Nice see you again, David. It's always a pleasure.

Ilan (01:28)
Great to see

David (01:28)
Yeah.

Ilan (01:29)
you too. Yeah, it seems weird to ask this because in the Toronto tech community, I feel like you're known by everybody, but can you let the folks know who are listening, who you are?

Sefunmi Osinaike (01:37)
you

I'm pretty sure I doubt that. don't know if that many people know me. ⁓ But yeah, Toronto is city that I love and I respect a lot of people there.

Ilan (01:45)
Ha

Sefunmi Osinaike (01:53)
who have contributed to the community, especially even both of you. But nice to see everyone listening. My name is Sefunmi, I'm one of the co-founders of Co.Lab. So I describe Co.Lab as, I've described it in different ways. So, and I'm trying out like a new thing, because we've been pivoting for the past like year and a half. But previously we ran experiential cohort based learning for tech professionals and career switchers who are trying to break into tech. I describe it as kind of like a tech residency to give people the experience so that they can learn jobs

and they can gain the confidence and on the job skills. So that's what we did for the first part of like four years or like three and a half years. But more recently, we've actually since stopped training individuals. We now work with organizations who want to train communities or their employees or just like a group of individuals for an accelerator or incubator. So we've been doing that for the past year and a half. That's been very interesting.

And it's just more on the B2B side. We've kind of pivoted from B2C to B2B. And that's been interesting. has its own different set of challenges. ⁓ Yeah, happy to be here. Thank you both for inviting me.

David (02:57)
tell us maybe a little bit more about, about, can people expect now and, who, who is it who you'll be best working with?

Sefunmi Osinaike (03:04)
Yeah, so I think right now, it's just funny that we're going to be talking about AI because I'm a big believer in, I'm a bit of a late believer, I should have believed earlier,

I'm a big believer in AI really just changing the game for everyone. I've seen it do amazing things. And so ⁓ I want to help people improve their AI proficiency. So right now we are working on a brand new program.

to help people improve their AI proficiency, not just in the workplace, but to also help people start businesses. Because I think with AI, you can actually go a lot further when it comes to just like validation, when it comes to like distribution, when it comes to even building. ⁓ And so I think that that's kind of like the path that we're on. But instead of doing the hard work of convincing every individual and be like, hey, David, do you want to improve your AI proficiency? And you're like, ⁓ sure, maybe. Yeah, I can do it myself. ⁓

Ilan (03:53)
hehe

Sefunmi Osinaike (03:59)
organizations or communities or workforce development ⁓ agencies, or even the government actually, if we started some conversations with the Canadian government to be like, hey, people need to improve their AI proficiency and we can help with that. So that's kind like what that looks like. The big challenge on our part is like, you

I've always been a B2C guy, that adjustment has been quite challenging, even for me, and just learning like the long sales cycle, the constant relationship management. So I'm learning and growing every day as it relates to that. ⁓

Yeah, and it's probably going to look different in a year or two. But I think right now that's kind of like what we're focused on to help people improve their AI proficiency

Ilan (04:44)
want to dig into that more in just a second, but you you mentioned that you're late believer in AI. I'm curious, do you have a hot take about AI?

Sefunmi Osinaike (04:55)
Yeah, I feel like I don't know if this is a hot take.

but I've said this to people a lot recently, and I think I just want to just share it here because I think this is something that ⁓ I've spent a lot of time thinking about. So, and this relates to AI a lot. So, right in the past, if you think like 10 years ago, even just five years ago,

David (05:05)
Yeah, please.

Sefunmi Osinaike (05:14)
so there's this notion of product is a moat So if you build a great product, then you can actually get to market fast, product is great. And that's because the cost of building product is very high. need engineers, need to spend a lot of time and money and expertise, hire the best people. I'll say this is more more so 10 years ago, to be able to get ahead. So product was very difficult. Like you could spot a shitty product very quickly.

⁓ And distribution was relatively cheap, right? Right now, it didn't cost that much money to able to acquire users. Newsletters communities were still very new. Even social wasn't as expensive as it is today. But now,

Product isn't the hard thing anymore. Distribution is, right? Because the cost of products has gone low. before, when it used to take you six months to go to market, you can go to market in six weeks now, or even a month using AI to able to build a very good polished product. Now, distribution is very difficult, very challenging. I think those, the people that will win will be people with distribution. Because right now, obviously there's newsletter fatigue, ⁓

no one really knows the audience anymore. Organic takes a long time. And now even with like, know, ChatGPT optimization, like SEO is kind of like dead, now you're trying to optimize for,

David (06:36)
for AEO.

Sefunmi Osinaike (06:37)
I got this AI

modules. exactly. AEO. ⁓ Social is so expensive now. So I always tell founders, if you're building a product, I'm no longer phased by, when people are doing this product, I always tell them, what's your GTM? What's your distribution? Because I think that's the hard part. And I know the fact that product has now gone low, we've seen a wave of crazy saturation of like,

random terrible products, which means customers will now be picky and there's now this level of the bar is like super high for them.

David (07:11)
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the game is changing or it has changed already. about that? Yeah.

Ilan (07:12)
Absolutely.

Sefunmi Osinaike (07:15)
Give us change.

Ilan (07:15)
Yeah.

So circling back to what we were talking about earlier, so you made this pivot, you said about a year and a half ago and you're focused more on B2B now. And I think this gets into the main topic that we really wanted to dig into today with you, which is about testing for willingness to pay with your customers. And so you actually were telling us offline that

you discontinued one of the products that you'd come out in this new offering. And I'm wondering if you could tell us that story. Why did you discontinue that? And ⁓ what were your learnings there?

Sefunmi Osinaike (07:47)
Yeah.

Yeah, of course. I'm just to just give a little bit more context. So we're trying to create a validation service for founders or aspiring entrepreneurs or people who just wanted to build something. And the goal here was like, ⁓ well, our hypothesis was like, a lot of people don't start because the inertia is too much for them to start. it creates a lot of there's a lot of effort it takes for you to be able to start something. And you have all these questions of like, you don't want to invest a lot of time, money, energy.

for you to like not go anywhere. You want to like just waste that time. And so we figured that like, okay, how about we come in and help people validate and we do that in a very short amount of time. Let's say four weeks, two to four weeks. Like you have an idea, we spend a lot of time with you. We go out, we talk to your users on your behalf. We do user research, ⁓ competitive analysis, market research, all of that stuff. And then we kind of like arrive at this like go, no go, yes, no, do we move forward with this business? ⁓

And I was really excited about that because I thought it made sense to me. then because I was like, yeah, if people had if you could give people that bigger sense of conviction at the start, then maybe that could get them started. Right. Made sense. And then when it came time to kind of like test out willingness to pay ⁓ initially. So we had two camps and this is where I kind of tell the story in this path. We had the camp of people were like, ⁓

willing to pay, like, let's pay and let's get this started. And there's the other camper like, ⁓ I'm not willing to pay. And I think the camp that weren't willing to pay was very interesting because you had a lot of people say, no, validate the idea first. If it's viable, if I have a paying customer, then I'll pay. Like they want even more proof. And there are things both of those customers had in common, which was like,

I actually don't think they were the right customers for the product ⁓ or for the problem, ⁓ which is interesting because counter intuitively, there's like, want to get people who don't have the time. Our ideal customer profile was like people who had the expertise, but not the time. ⁓ But we found that a lot of those people ⁓

we were not going to help them succeed. Because even if we did all that work upfront for them, you're front loading a lot of the effort that requires them to even be successful, to even care about the problem that they're solving. You're almost doing the early stage work for them as a founder. And it then became a

of like, do I want to help that kind of customer?

Ilan (10:33)
Mm.

Sefunmi Osinaike (10:33)
right?

And is that customer going to be successful long term? Because I can collect money from that customer, help them. But later on, when things get really hard and you've of like offloaded that task to some agency, then are you willing to weather the storm? And a lot of the times when we looked at the people, the answer was we didn't think that if things got hard that they'll be able to like figure it out. I think that

that was like a problem for us. we eventually want people to be successful. Success for us isn't here we validated a business for someone. Success for us meant that they actually have a thriving business that's making money and they have a side project. And maybe one day they can do that full time. ⁓ So we just found that. And I think this is a very important lesson for me, which is not everyone who gives you money is your customer. And I try to also tell people that,

Ilan (11:25)
You

Sefunmi Osinaike (11:27)
The fact that someone pays you doesn't mean that they're your ideal customer because if they're not successful, even though you've collected their money, if you don't deliver any value to them, then that's not the kind of customer that you want.

Ilan (11:38)
was a fantastic answer, Sefunmi. There's a lot there. So I'm curious, you mentioned that you want to balance a customer's willingness to pay, which means that the problem is big enough for them to put their money where their mouth is, but also make sure that you're actually solving

the right problem for the right customer. So if you're in a place where you think you have the right problem for the right customer, what then is the right step to maybe get to that other side? Like, are they willing to put their money where their mouth is?

Sefunmi Osinaike (12:13)
Oh, got it. Yeah. So I think that's, that's the dream. of all, like right problem, right customer. There's a lot of good signals and it's not fluff. And I think even when we're validating, there was a lot of fluff. People say, Oh my God, I need this. I'm busy. And we actually went through different ICPs to try and figure out like who best needs this. Um, so I always try to deflect a lot of that. I mean, just casting mom tests. So I don't think we need to even go down that path.

I think it's just getting any form of commitment. It doesn't have to be a lot. if it's not monetary, then it should be like time. should be some sense of value, something that cost them something. ⁓ So money is the easiest thing. But I've also seen people like, again, think about the Udemy courses that people pay 20 bucks for and never go back to. ⁓

because they've a better version of themselves thought that they could actually finish that course and learn all the material. And in that case, it's like, are we gonna say that that is the wrong customer because they admitted they had the problem or the right customer. And then they bought, they purchased it, but they didn't use the product, right? And in that case, not.

no value has been created just yet. In one side of the business, there has been value because you've seen that Stripe notification, you're like, yeah, an enrolled student, but the person doesn't actually learn. And for anyone creating courses, the goal is for someone to actually learn the material that you're teaching. So I think being very clear about what commitment is the most important thing. And that differs the kinds of businesses, right? Because there are some businesses, like I say, like our business was you give us

time and you give us your money. Not just your money, but time and effort, which can be difficult because some customers had money, some customers didn't have time. Some people had time, some people didn't have money. ⁓ And then so that's when you need to understand based off of whatever product that you're giving, what is commitment? Like is it usage? Is it inviting someone? ⁓

Is it downloading something? Is it referring ⁓ people? So ⁓ I'll create, I'll try to understand what is that level of commitment. So then that way you can complete that arc of, okay, right problem, right customer. Now they need to give you something.

It could even be data, exactly. I think that's a perfect example. Are they going to connect something that's going to improve value for both of you, like where they experience an aha moment, or now they give you data that's then valuable for your own ⁓ company or your own product?

David (14:44)
That was great. Yeah. ⁓ you had mentioned, know, them putting something on the line as a means to test willingness to pay. And I think that's a, expansion of what some people might think about payment. and, like you said, this, this comes from the mom test where, ⁓ sure, you could pay with currency, but you could also pay with, like you said, and you mentioned referrals. So that would be a payment of,

reputation. So I think that's really good examples there.

Sefunmi Osinaike (15:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I remember one of my mentors was giving me this advice in the early days of Co.Lab because I was talking to him about customer acquisition and stuff like that. And we then

got into the conversation around scholarships and giving people scholarships. And he then asked me this. He was like, there a way you can measure if you bring in a scholarship student, like how many more students does that person bring or how many potentially paid students does that bring in? Because that can then give you an idea of like, is there any value?

So I think for us, know, as a young company, like you want people to pay, you want that because, you know, as a good startup company, revenue is important. But sometimes you have and we did experience that, like some amazing people who have met were unable to afford the program. have to give either steep discounts or even scholarships and

a sometimes more, I'll say 80 % of the time, it was a good investment in the fact of like, even if it didn't bring us anything monetary wise, we were able to see them succeed. They ended up being maybe one of the top teams in the cohorts and like sounding out praises on LinkedIn or just really changing their lives. And then the best case they go on to get a job. like, if you care about, and I believe that

Ilan (16:23)
Hmm.

Sefunmi Osinaike (16:34)
most product managers and most founders care about the good that they're putting into the world, even if there's no monetary attachment to that. And I think being able to see that, think is still very valuable. Then it goes back to like, know, closing that value chain and that arc, like right problem, right customer value. And even though like there was no currency exchange there, like, yeah, cool, we've closed that gap. And that's one more person that we've been able to help towards this mission that you created. So I and I think that could be a very powerful thing as well.

you

David (17:04)
What are some maybe specific things to do to test that sort of willingness to pay? ⁓ Whatever kinds of forms of payments that you found maybe worked well and some that didn't work so well in the past.

Sefunmi Osinaike (17:20)
I think you need to have that pull from the customer, right? Like if you found a customer who admits that they have a problem they're going to convince you and do whatever they can to To access your product because it solves a problem for them

All right, so I don't think you have to do much if you've communicated that value prop and that offer exceptionally well. ⁓ just think it just create that avenue for a conversation. And I think some of the best customers that I have, like they were already convinced before they even spoke to us whenever they did an interview to get into the program. I remember those one particular time our website was down. I had no idea, small team, ⁓ but I had this customer like email me several times

on LinkedIn, were like, hey, they want to apply for the program. want like, they've had good things. This is what they want to do. And I was very shocked because it's like the level, because yeah, the level of intentionality, because otherwise some, some of us have been like, oh yeah, let me just go find like if our

cohort or product management train was just like any other, then they would just have, you could just, if it's a commodity, then you can just get it somewhere else. But if it's not, if it's a deep problem, you know that this is where I'm going to get it to. You're going to do whatever you can. Another example, another story was

Ilan (18:31)
Mm-hmm.

Sefunmi Osinaike (18:38)
cohort that started and we always ran a cohort every five weeks and that was like the best case so it's times where it was like months or two months i've had a student wait two months to join the next cohort because like the program had already started they were two weeks late ⁓ and they begged and they did everything like they don't mind starting from scratch we're like i'm sorry we couldn't and they waited and they went through the cohort and they were successful so the fact that people were willing to wait that long showed that we had

Ilan (19:06)
if you're early on, you're testing out an idea, a new idea, ⁓ you need to determine that this idea, this hypothesis that you have actually is something that your potential customers So what are some ways maybe

that you tested out, for example, the B2B model for Colab. How did you right value for the customer that you could talk about to a customer for them to kind of pull you in?

Sefunmi Osinaike (19:34)
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I think for B2B is also very challenging. But I'll say a lot of conversation. I'll say it's conversation and credibility. think those would be the two things. So I think there was one particular partner that was just having a casual conversation. And they're like, hey, this is.

I'm trying to do this, I'm trying to do that. And it was just like an hour of them just telling us exactly what the problem was. And coincidentally, we had been working on something like that for a while. And then what I did, was like, hey, please do you have like five extra minutes? And then I shared my screen and then I showed them a note. This was like very, very rough, like a notion page of like, this is one of the things we've been thinking about is some of the topics. Like they had like.

12 things that they wanted to do. We covered like maybe eight.

of them. So like a little over halfway. And when I was going through this notion page, was like, again, repeating back some of the problems that they mentioned. And I think that was like the aha moment. And they were like, you know, this is great. Can we like learn more? Can you send us a proposal? And then I took in a lot of like the information and put together more stuff. Because you might not be there 100 % of the way, but when someone has a problem and you elude to the fact that you can solve their problem,

which case this case like I showed them I didn't just like talk about this which I think was just helpful and very serendipitous because with a lot of like B2Bs are like, you know, obviously slides, conversations, pitch decks, but this I kind of like went into the product, went to the offering and I was like, hey, we're doing this. This is an example of what we've done. This is example of, you know, what we built and this is example of other people build this, how we've used this in a different context. And then they know in our reputation that okay,

This is a credible organization. We've done this before, et et cetera. I think that helps. It goes back to, you I really love Alex Hormozi's 100 Million Offers. Great book. And I think it just like distills it down to the basics. I think offer before I even think product, because it's just a way of communicating what someone wants, even without the medium of how you're going to get it to them, whether it's like a product or there's a service, whether it's like an AI

or anything or a feature request. So I like to talk in that way. This is what we'll do, how we'll do it. This is what you get. And I think that helps communicate and bridge that gap properly for someone to then want to commit and be like, yes, I'm down to do a pilot. I'm down to do a deposit and stuff like

David (22:11)
That's another great call out. Hormozi even has been great for helping me strengthen the more business side ⁓ of thinking an offer to the market. Yeah.

Sefunmi Osinaike (22:22)
Yeah,

yeah, I think more PMs need to think more like that, honestly, because I read the book, I read the book for some like three years ago, and I've read it like every year since then. And I think it just gives me a different lens from like products

Because yeah, if you just strip it down, it's customers want this, customers have this problem, you want to solve this problem for the customer, right? And how can you do that? You can do that in a variety of ways. And it's just like the tools that you use. Yeah.

Ilan (22:51)
Getting to tools, ⁓ great segue, the Sefunmi I'm curious, center our podcast on AI tools and teaching people the tools that exist and how they can implement them in their practices. Are there any AI tools that you've used that have helped you to arrive at this willingness to pay and real

validation customer need.

Sefunmi Osinaike (23:19)
goes back to my original comments of like late believer in AI, because I'm still very much so using, I call it the big Gemini, Claude ChatGPT

Ilan (23:22)
haha

Sefunmi Osinaike (23:31)
And I think right now, and I know this sounds very mundane and simple, but all I test with right now is like Google docs and no show docs.

I don't go any further. I would say a landing page, but I don't even get to that point. feel like there's so far you can go without building a landing page. I would have said lovable because lovable has been interesting. I did build a prototype with Replit one time because we had to build a product for one particular partner that we're working

But in that case, I'll say like Replit when you have to like show and demo something and create some sense of value, we've used Replit. Yeah, we've used Replit a lot to be able to build stuff. But right now, I would just say like...

Ilan (24:04)
Hmm.

Sefunmi Osinaike (24:13)
creating one-pagers, creating blurbs, writing emails with trying to understand the offer, what people are saying. Like I would throw in like an entire transcript of a meeting that I've had with a customer into trying to understand the main parts of problems, put down my offer, make sure like it's hitting every single point. Like is there anything that I'm missing? And then I then use that to kind of like craft like a response. And then it's like when,

When customers tell you their problem and you tell them a solution that fits their problem, if they don't act, then they look like liars. Because then it makes it seem that like, it wasn't really a

I'll say a ChatGPT has just been amazing. Wonderful. Like I talked to a lot. do a lot of like dictation and the text to speech is like amazing. I think it's the best out of all three and just use that to just like pull out of my thoughts, pull out information and then break it down and work on one particular thing. I'm looking at for like an hour or two, wait till it's perfect before I just like tested out with

David (25:19)
Yeah, that's great. it certainly resonates with me, all those tools. ⁓ I'm glad you mentioned, voice I feel like I've, I've been one of the few people who have been saying this is the next level you gotta get on this. I know it feels weird, but you're so much faster with it. Yeah.

Ilan (25:30)
BEATING THE DRUM

Sefunmi Osinaike (25:36)
Yeah, it's much faster.

Yeah.

the other tool, I wouldn't say that I've used this to fullest potential, but I know how valuable this tool is. And I've referred friends to use it they've been very successful. Cause I think right now I'm not in a business development mode, but it's Exa Websets I don't know if you're familiar with Exa. So think about like, you know how we just prompt,

ChatGPT for so many things, I can prompt Exa and be like, you know, give me a list of YC founders who went to Stanford and are working on AI products in the last two to three years. I want their LinkedIn, I want their email. And it will actually generate a list ⁓ for you. ⁓ And it's like the next generation of like business

David (26:24)
that's exciting. mean, it's so interesting to see ⁓ more companies besides Perplexity taking away Google's search monopoly.

Sefunmi Osinaike (26:37)
Yeah, yes. Yeah, it's I feel like Google's some executives at Google are probably being like damn. How do we get here? Like it's it's so I think it's very odd for a company like

Ilan (26:45)
Ha ha.

Sefunmi Osinaike (26:49)
like that to not be leading this AI revolution. But I think they're doing their best and I'm pretty sure we're going to see some great products from them moving forward. But I would say like the speed at which other companies have gone to market has been astonishing.

David (27:04)
It's really

well, Hey, Sefunmi. Thank you so much. ⁓ it's been a great conversation. Where can people find you?

Sefunmi Osinaike (27:10)
LinkedIn I write on LinkedIn every day. Thank you for having me. Yeah I try to show up every day as much as I can But yeah, LinkedIn Sefunmi Osinaike first name, last name you find me So drop me a follow drop me a note. I'm happy to be connected with people on there

Ilan (27:27)
Amazing. Thank you so much Sefunmi

David (27:27)
Awesome.

Sefunmi Osinaike (27:29)
Yeah, thank you so thank you for having me.

Ilan (27:31)
Thank you again to Sefunmi for coming on and thank you all for listening. Give us a like, drop us a follow at PNC Podcasts on any of the socials and leave us a comment. What did you think of this week's episode? What was your big takeaway? And who would you like us to talk to you next?

With that, we'll see you next week.