Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)

September 29, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Georgiana Laudi, founder of Forget The Funnel, argues that traditional funnels, pirate metrics, MQLs, and SQLs center businesses over customers, ignore pre-discovery context and post-acquisition growth, and treat all customers identically. Her customer-led growth approach for B2B SaaS starts with research on best customers—recently onboarded, happy, paying, low-maintenance users—to uncover their jobs-to-be-done, map value-delivering milestones, set product-tied KPIs, align messaging, and fix experience gaps.

Researching Best Customers' Jobs-to-Be-Done

Laudi uses jobs-to-be-done theory to reveal what customers hire products for: a shift from struggle (painful old ways) to desired outcomes (better results). Survey or interview recent ideal customers to learn triggers, influences, must-haves, anxieties, and post-product changes. Prioritize one job based on urgency (painkiller over vitamin), willingness to pay, retention/expansion potential, marketing ease, and company advantages like SparkToro's edge with marketers over data purists. This avoids diluting focus across multiple jobs initially, though others can follow.

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What you'll learn

1 **[01:04] Why Forget The Funnel**
2 **[04:38] Georgiana's Career Background**
3 **[08:58] Proven Impact from Forget The Funnel**
4 **[14:00] Airbnb-Inspired Customer Journey Maps**
5 **[19:46] Core Process Overview**
6 **[20:34] SparkToro Case: Research & Jobs-to-Be-Done**
7 **[32:06] Mapping Milestones & KPIs**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Georgiana Laudi is the co-founder and CEO of a consulting agency called Forget The Funnel, where she helps SaaS companies scale and improve conversion rates through customer-led growth. She’s also a marketing and growth advisor to companies like MarketerHire, SparkToro, and Sprout Social. Previously, she was the VP of Marketing at Unbounce and has worked in growth marketing for over 20 years. In today’s episode, Gia speaks about how to identify your ideal customer, how to map their user flows in order to find the biggest growth opportunities, and examples of product changes she’s recommended that have led to the largest growth unlocks. She shares the exact process she works through with founders to uncover opportunities, as well as how to increase subscriptions and retention for SaaS businesses.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/customer-led-growth-georgiana-laudi

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Where to find Georgiana Laudi:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggiiaa

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgianalaudi/

• Website: https://www.forgetthefunnel.com/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/