Lenny's PodcastCustomer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
130 min read · 26,271 words- 0:00 – 7:03
Georgiana’s background
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
The problem with funnels and pirate metrics and, you know, the, those favorites that I love to pick on are like MQLs and SQLs is that like nobody knows what those mean. It puts every customer in like these ... The same sort of buckets. It assumes that all customers and all products are the same. It puts businesses, or they I should say, puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center, right? It's about the value to the business, not the value to the customer that's being measured. Also, it just kind of feels gross for people, right? Like this idea of pushing people through a funnel. And then probably, uh, uh, uh, particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses you cannot think about, you know, marketing and growth and, and the business overall as ending at acquisition, otherwise you're not in business anymore. And the vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition retention, expansion, all of that into account. So yeah, in a nutshell, funnels are bad. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today my guest is Georgiana Louddy. Georgiana, aka Gia, runs a consultancy called Forget the Funnel where she works hands on with SaaS companies to help them unlock and accelerate growth. As you'll hear, she often finds huge unlocks in opportunities, often doubling or tripling conversion at various points in their product flows. In our conversation, she shares the exact process that she goes through to help companies figure out where their biggest growth opportunities lie, and also how to execute on them. We chat about how to identify your most important customers, how to very practically map their journey through your flows, and set goals, and then execute on your ideas. There's a lot of wisdom and some fun stories packed into this episode. And so with that, I bring you Gia. I'm excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.
- NANarrator
Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude they think of product analytics, but now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?
- NANarrator
Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments, and learn. That's the heart of growth for us. So the big ah-ha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach, and send data to other destinations. Experiment and CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?
- NANarrator
Yeah. So Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John. And head to amplitude.com to get started. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I've been hearing about AG1 on basically every podcast that I listen to like Tim Ferriss and Lex Fridman, and so I finally gave it a shot earlier this year, and it has quickly become a core part of my morning routine, especially on days that I need to go deep on writing or record a podcast like this. Here's three things that I love about AG1. One, with a small scoop that dissolved in water, you're absorbing 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens. I kind of like to think of it as a little safety net for my nutrition in case I've missed something in my diet. Two, they treat AG1 like a software product. Apparently they're on their 52nd iteration and they're constantly evolving it based on the latest science, research studies, and internal testing that they do. And three, it's just one easy thing that I can do every single day to take care of myself. Right now, it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition. It's just one scoop in a cup of water every day, and that's it. There's no need for a million different pills and supplements to look out for your health. To make it easy, Athletic Greens is gonna give you a free one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/lenny. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/lenny to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. (instrumental music) Gia, welcome to the podcast.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Thanks so much for having me, Lenny.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
It's my pleasure. So we actually met over a decade ago, I think, maybe, or just around a decade in Montreal. I was working on my startup. You were helping companies with their websites, optimize their websites. Then you went on to lead marketing at Unbounce and a bunch of other great stuff. So just to set a little bit of foundation for listeners, can you talk about what you've done in your career in like 55 seconds? That's your time box. (laughs)
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
55 seconds. Okay. So marketing for probably about 20 or so years, which sounds completely ridiculous when I say it, but I started working for my father's retail business very ear- like in the early, early 2000s honestly, like probably 2000 actually. Worked there for a number of years, and then eventually left and started freelancing, worked at an agency, terrible. And then actually probably around the time I met you, the, the ... I had this little like sort of catalyst moment where I joined Twitter in late 2008 and I discovered the, like tech scene and startups, and that was, again, probably around the time that you and I met, maybe 2010-ish. And that was 202-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
2011.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
What's that?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
2011.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
2011. See there you go.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
So it was right around that time, and then late 2011 I decided the like supporting five, six, you know, companies at a time and their marketing and stuff like that was, was ... I was starting to get burnt out and I, you know, I was, I was doing a lot and-I was like, what it w- would feel like to, like, sink my teeth into one brand, and so I decided to go in-house, then I moved out west and joined the team at Unbounce, and I was there for five years. And then in late 2016, early 2017, I decided it was, like, time to move on, and so I decided to go back independent and just started working with companies and supporting them through marketing and growth and product marketing, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But in mid-2017, I actually paired up with Claire Suellentrop, who led marketing at Calendly, and her and I have been working together since about mid-2017. That's when we launched Forget the Funnel and we, you know, started pairing up on working with companies and sort of married this, like, her customer research background and my, like, strategy marketing background, and we developed this framework that we now use when we work with predominantly B2B SaaS companies, is who we work with right now.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. So we're gonna spend a lot of time on what you've learned working with companies through Forget the Funnel.
- 7:03 – 8:52
Why funnels are antiquated
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Why did you call it Forget the Funnel?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
'Cause funnels are gross. Ugh. Because, I mean, uh, it's a really antiquated idea, and it's not just funnels that, you know, we sort of take issue with. It's, you know, buyer's journeys or even, I remember actually in, uh, Startup Fest 2012, I wanna say, Dave McClure was talking about pirate metrics and I was like, "Huzzah! Marketing has a role post-acquisition. Everybody understands now!" And it was like a real moment for me. But the problem with funnels and pirate metrics and, you know, the, the favorites that I love to pick on are like MQLs and SQLs is that like, nobody knows what those mean. It puts every customer in like, these, the same sort of buckets. It assumes that all customers and all products are the same. It puts businesses, or they, I should say, puts businesses at the center of the business versus putting customers at the center, right? It's about the values of the business, not the value to the customer that's being measured. Also, it just kind of feels gross for people, right? Like, this idea of pushing people through a funnel. And then probably, uh, uh, uh, particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about, you know, marketing and growth and, and the business overall as ending at acquisition, otherwise you're not in business anymore. And the vast, vast majority of these models don't take post-acquisition, retention, expansion, all of that into account. They also leave the problem stage out, so like, the world that customers are living in prior to discovering you, which is a really critical, like, that, that context is unbelievably, you know, valuable, especially for marketing. And so to leave that out of the equation is, you know, a big problem. So yeah, that's, uh, in a nutshell, funnels are bad. (laughs)
- 8:52 – 13:59
Better positioning and messaging to find the ideal customer
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay, so I'm excited to dig into a lot of the stuff you've learned, but, uh, a couple other things I just wanted to talk about to set the foundation.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One is, can you talk about some of the impact that you've seen working with companies through the process that you've come up with? What kind of impact have you seen? What kind of numbers have you seen?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I would say far and away the biggest, most immediate impact of the type of work that we do is realigning with that ideal customer. Generally, the lowest hanging fruit outcome is, like, realigning around, like, better positioning and messaging, and identifying more resonant positioning and messaging that, you know, speaks to that context that I was talking about before, right? Before people, you know, discover that you even exist, have that moment where they're like, "Oh my God, this has to change. This sucks." Ties that in, ties in, you know, what they care about and what is valuable about your product and then also that desired outcome. I mean, uh, for, for, for those in the know, jobs to be done is like a big sort of influence here. But if you can identify that type of information about your customers and get to know them at that level, then you're in a way better position to be able to not only position your product, but also use your... much more powerful messaging. So typically what we do is we'll, like, identify those gaps of, like, almost, I, I mean, n- uh, I w- I shouldn't even say nine times out of 10. 99 times out of 100, a company's website is not doing as much as it can do. It's not being as effective from a messaging and positioning standpoint as it could. So websites tend to get update. Like, we, we will do a lot of, you know, overhauls on messaging on a website and improve performance there. One of my favorite examples of that is a, uh, a social media tool that we worked with where we did really very simple research for them, honestly. Identified two different jobs to be done, zeroed in on one of them, and then updated the messaging on the website. We shortened the trial fr- from 30 days to seven. The conversion rate on the website went up with this new messaging by 89%. But the thing that I, that I love the most about that particular story is that we didn't even touch anything after the sign-up experience. We hadn't even gotten there and the trial to paid conversion rate increased 40% and we didn't touch it. It was just because a more qualified, better fit customer was coming through the door. So there was more of them and they were better qualified. So that's a really specific example that is very typical of this type of work. There's other examples though, like product adoption and using that messaging and positioning past the website, but even in the product onboarding itself, you know, email, in-app, whatever, and just making sure that they're getting to and, and have the comms to get to the parts of the product that they care about the most, which can increase, you know, trial to paid or product activation. You know, with Autobooks, the product usage, like the North Star product usage jumped by like 300% or something within quite a short period of time after rolling out email onboarding, right, to support that product experience. And, uh, SparkToro as well, which I think we might end up talking about again when we talk about the process, they doubled their trial to pay conversion rate when we worked with them because of post-acquisition optimization to their messaging.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I imagine people are listening to this and they're like, "This is what I'm waiting for," some kind of, like, huge win-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... some huge conversion.... a success. I'm curious, how often do you find companies have something like this? Like a latent opportunity to double, triple conversion. Like, you know, everyone's hoping-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Oh, boy.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... there's something like this? Yeah, what's the general hit rate on these?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I, uh, y- so many. I mean, I would say, uh, pretty well every company we've ever worked with has... Not pretty well. Every company we've ever worked with has learned something new about their customers that they can apply at some juncture of their customer's experience. Whether or not it is in campaigns to reach the right people out in the world. Whether or not it's, you know, having a, doing a better job with their messaging and positioning on their website, or like their go-to market, uh, or acquisition strategy on their website, right? Like using a, a sandbox account, or like a b- getting a full freemium account, right? To get, let people kick the tires of their, of their product prior to getting on a sales call. Like that's a, you know, something that could potentially happen. The post-acquisition experience like I'm talking about, it is so often an afterthought somehow-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... where that additional sort of layer... I think part of the reason why it's an afterthought is because on, product onboarding in particular, and you've probably heard this too, it tends to be kind of like no man's land. Like, who owns that? Is it marketing? Is it, if it's freemium, in my opinion, it should be marketing just because freemium's a marketing tool. But like, not everybody subscribes to that, right? Not every, you know, company would necessarily agree that that's the case. A lot of companies might say, "No, it's product." So we end up seeing a kind of a messy middle there, bec- because again, there is no natural handoff. So pretty well every company that we've worked with has had an opportunity to improve, especially product onboarding and, and product activation.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. So basically everybody will benefit from what we're about, about to talk about?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
100%.
- 13:59 – 19:23
How Gia was inspired by Airbnb’s storytelling
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing. Great.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
All right. We've got rapt attention-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
(laughs) .
- LRLenny Rachitsky
As a way to maybe transition into your process, you told me that... So, uh, you were visiting us at Lens, and I invited you to the Airbnb office. We were having happy hour.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And I gave you a tour, and you told me later that something you saw while you were walking around the office transformed the way you think about growth, and kind of informed the way you think about approaching this problem. Can you talk about that?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes. This is one of my favorites. So it was 2013. So you and I might have met in like 2011, and then a couple years later I was in town for a conference. And yeah, we toured the office, like the HQ and everything. And of course, it was all, you know, stars in my eyes 'cause what a beautiful office too, right? So it was, it was quite like... It was, uh, I would have remembered it regardless. But we went downstairs, very different from like the very polished upstairs. We went downstairs to where your, uh, uh, working area was, where the, the product team was. And there were, uh, sheets of paper taped to the wall, like a bunch in a row. And it was kind of e- it would have been easy to miss 'cause it's kinda chaotic down there. But it was the customer journey of an Airbnb customer through two posts. And what struck me, I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." Like, I'm in the middle of building one out for us, right? Leading at Unbounce, leading, you know, marketing at Unbounce at the time. And I was interestingly with... The customer success head was also with me. So Ryan Engley was there with me, and it was the perfect sort of that hi- him and I saw it together. It was a customer journey that was focused on the customer. So versus that pirate metrics problem, or that, you know, the typical buyer's journey problem that I was talking about earlier, it was the complete reverse of that, right? It was illustrated, there were... You know, i- it was like the emotional journey was part of it, the role that Airbnb played as a dir- like direct touchpoint and also indirect. Like, what was going on in the, in the person's life that had nothing to do, you know, outside of Airbnb, which I thought was really interesting. It was like the beautiful little, like, milestones really encapsulated in a sort of snapshot way, uh, such that anybody walking by it or anybody, you know, being reminded that it existed could sort of understand at a glance what the goal was at each of those milestones. And I was like, "Holy shit, this is completely different." It, this is completely through the lens of the customer versus the business. And the grossness of (laughs) of like the funnel is just so far removed from that experience that I was like, "Ryan, look at this. We need this." And he was like, "Oh, yeah. This is good." I took a picture. Can't find it for the life of me. But we returned back to the office the following week, and co-founder and head of product, head of CS, so Ryan, so, uh, uh, Carter Gilchrist, who's head of product and co-founder Ryan and I, head of marketing, the three of us sort of locked ourselves in a room for two days and made our own. It was a circle. (laughs) It was like... I mean, looking back it's hysterical but, uh, it was sort of democratized to the rest of the team in a way... Because it had that buy-in, everybody was like, "Oh, yeah. No, okay, this makes sense and I understand." And it made feel, everybody feel a lot better about what they were doing 'cause it was about value, delivering value at each of the points. So that grossness sort of goes away and we're like, "Oh, cool." Like, I don't wanna be too kumbaya about it, but it was, it was, uh, a bit of a moment. And also it made communicating with the, especially the product team and the engineering team a lot easier for me. So we were using a shared language. You know, the, the, uh, eh, the rest of the company who aren't necessarily customer-facing really understood, I think at a different level, you know, what we were all doing together and KBIs, yada, yada, yada. So it, it was, uh, it was amazing. And honestly, I mean, um, I can't credit only that obviously to our growth, but it was a pretty impressive couple of years that followed that. And I think i- i- the alignment that that brought us was huge. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story. Sorry that wasn't super short, but it was-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) .
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... it was big.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That's great.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
It was a big thing. G- yes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
We're gonna link to, uh, pictures of this in the show notes. Internally it was called Project Snow White-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... because it was inspired by-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes (laughs) .
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. It was inspired by Bryan reading the biography of Walt Disney and they needed to create these, the storyboard basically, to create Snow White because it was so complicated to make that movie. It might have been the first animated film with storyboards. Okay. And so it was basically a storyboard of a trip on Airbnb and, of a host and a guest. That's right, yeah. And a detail, I forget if I told you this but Airbnb hired a full time storyboard artist from Pixar to draw these key frames and
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I think I did know that. I was very grateful to, to have seen it. Like I didn't realize at the time but it changed the way, like you said at the beginning, like it changed the way that I thought about marketing because it really made it obvious to not only me of course, but, and to everybody that, you know, there is that customer experience layer that marketers are so good at, has such an incredibly important role. Like in, in driving revenue, right? Not just in building awareness but in playing a major role in helping customers get value and, you know, catching them when they fall off and, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it changed the lot for us.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And it informed the way that you approach your consultancy with 3W Get The Funnel.
- 19:23 – 21:54
How to analyze what’s successful and what to invest in
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And so as a transition to talk about that- Mm-hmm. ... the way I'm thinking we approach this is imagine a customer. What is the process you go through? What are the steps? How do you go about helping a company figure out where they should invest, what they're doing right and wrong? I should also mention, you're writing a book about this-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Right.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... that's gonna explain this whole process that's coming out later in the year.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And so we'll talk about that at the end as well. Yeah. So I'll turn it over to you.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Cool. I mean if, if I go down a rabbit hole and you wanna like pull me out and have me sort of unpack something, let me know. So the, the process is pretty straightforward. At the highest level the idea is understand your best customers, map their experience, right, like we were just talking about. Map, map their experience through the lens of, of delivering value to them, make it measurable, and then evaluate what you're doing today that is out of alignment with that. Pretty straightforward. I mean, that's not, that doesn't sound too hard of a job, of course. But research is an really important part of that. So the story that I was gonna use to sort of illustrate this is there's a, a company that we, we work with from time to time. This is g- we've worked with them at least twice, may... Yeah, arguably three times. So Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of Moz, he started a new product. It's an audience research tool called SparkToro. And when they first launched, actually even prelaunched, Rand and Casey came to Clara and I to sort of help with their positioning and messaging as they were sort of, you know, going forth to, to launch. I mean, Rand and Casey, they're both very, very thoughtful and they take their time with stuff and so they were just sort of, you know, looking for that extra layer of like, "Is this good enough to launch," kind of thing. And so we helped them with their positioning and messaging and off they went. About a year later, they came back because though they were doing a decent job generating, you know, traffic and interest in SparkToro... I mean, Rand is no, no small fish, right? So he's got a good audience built in, which is fantastic. But those that were getting to the website and those that were signing up for the product, like that weren't, those weren't issues. But the people that were signing up for their free product weren't converting to paid in the way that they believed they could. And so we decided to work with them and basically go to the source and find out of, you know, SparkToro's, from SparkToro's best customers what can we learn from them that we can then reflect back in the product experience and the, and the customer experience for them.
- 21:54 – 26:37
The ideal customer to learn from
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
So I mentioned it before but we are heavy believers in the jobs to be done theory, which is basically this idea that people don't buy your product, they buy the better version themselves, yada yada. I don't need to explain any of that. But we use that to guide our research. And with SparkToro, we were in a position, and the purists will hate me saying this, but we were in a position to be able to run surveys. So yes, interviews are ideal, always, but we did think that we could learn a ton from surveys to then, if needed, double down with interviews. We didn't end up actually needing to run the interviews because the surveys that we ran were pretty decisive and clear in terms of what we learned. So what we did was, uh, we identified SparkToro's best customers. Now, what I mean by best customers is those that get a ton of value from your product as it exists today, pay obviously, they're happy, they're low maintenance, and very importantly, they signed up for your product recently enough that they remember what life was like before. So generally we say that's like in the three to six month range, right? Because if you go to somebody that's been your customer for two years, they're just gonna fill answers with like what they think might have been going on in your, their life. But if you ask customers who remember what life was like before, you're gonna get a lot more interesting responses, right? A lot, a lot more accurate sort of depiction of what was going on. And so those are, that's the... With that criteria, we went forward, surveyed their customers, you know, we're trying to uncover from them what was going on in their life when they were seeking out a solution, right? What happened? What was that trigger moment when they did start seeking a solution? You know, who did they go to? Who do they talk with? You know, what were their influences? Which P.S. that's what SparkToro does, um, is helps you identify those. But also what were they looking for in a solution, right? What were the must haves for them versus, you know, what were some of the anxieties that they had, some deal breakers, things like that. So basically unpacking like what is it that was critical for them in their solution. And then of course what is it they're able to do now that they weren't able to do before? So that desired outcome. So out of that, we identified a couple of different options, like a couple of different jobs, customer jobs and, um, we had to prioritize one, of course.... because if you start, you know, right off the bat with like, "Okay, we're gonna solve for all of these different customers' jobs," then you end up not being as resonant, you're not- you can't be as effective. So, we focused in on one, and the way that you make a decision on which one you focus on is similar to best customers, right? So, uh, high willingness to pay, right? There's no question whether or not they would pay for a product like yours. The handholding that they would need would be minor or- or less so, and I say that understanding full well the difference between (laughs) product-led and sales-led. I'm not saying that sales-led is not good, but sometimes there's a decision to be made. If you're not pr- if you're not set up today to support a sales-led or a high-touch, then you may want to opt for the more product-led approach, and the reverse is also true. If you've got a robu- a robust sales team, well then, you might actually be better off, you know, leveraging sales more in that scenario and- and might wanna, uh, tend towards that. But there's that criteria that, you know, you would think through. So willingness to pay, it's really obvious. Maybe the most important one is that they have an urgent problem, so the whole painkiller versus vitamin thing, you always want to be s- you know, selling a painkiller. So who has an urgent problem that needs solving, not something that they might have a problem with six months down the line? Who has a high retention or even expansion potential is also really advantageous (laughs) for very obvious reasons. So customers who would have a long-term need for this type of product and even potentially have that need expand, right, or change over time, and evolve in ways that you envision the product can- can help them. And then, uh, there's other criteria too. So, sometimes you might want to prioritize one customer job over another if those customers congregate in a way that make them really easy to market to. That's an advantage. Or, another advantage, and this was the case for SparkToro, is you have an unfair advantage with this market in some way. And so, there were two different sort of customer jobs that were coming out of SparkToro. One was more focused on marketing and service providers and marketing, and the other one's more focused on, like, data and those, you know, data purists and those that really wanted, you know, verifiable data. Well, SparkToro has an advantage on the marketer side more so than, like, on the data analyst side, right? So that was another thing too. So with that, we made the call to focus on one of those customer jobs. Uh-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Can I-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah, I-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... ask a question here?
- 26:37 – 32:21
How to choose which customer job to prioritize
- LRLenny Rachitsky
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah, go.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So, there's kind of two parts of this. There's-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... figuring out who you're gonna go after, and then what problem you're solving for them, and which do you think is more important at this point? 'Cause kind of step one in this process, just to zoom out a little bit, is figure out your customer and what their problems are so that you can actually solve them well.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And do you start with, "Here's who we're gonna go after, and then here's their biggest problem"? How do you- do you kind of think about it?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
They're sort of- they're sort of one and the same.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
So, because we learned from SparkToro's ideal customers, we already know that they're a fit for the product. Those- they're their happy, happily paying, you know, prime out of your- prime out of their cold, dead hands customers, right? They're- they're the customers that we want more of, so we've already validated that there's a demand from that customer base. Now, what I'm describing about choosing between two different customer jobs is really just, you know, of those ideal customers, which one- which customer job do we wanna lean into? It's not that-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Mm-hmm.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... you wouldn't necessarily still be able to solve for that other customer job, it's just not the one that you would lead with. And I'm always cautious around this too, 'cause with- sometimes with founders, what'll happen is, uh, the- there's a- a sort of level set that, like, just because we were prioritizing one customer job in the short term doesn't mean you can't serve that other customer job down the line. Uh, a classic example of that is, like, products that serve both brands and, like, agencies, for example. So the c- the- the customer job for brands will be slightly different than agencies, and if you've got, uh, you know, an advantage with one, you would just start with one and then you would go back after it. That's a bit of a, like, level up, the after the fact. It's not part of the core- core process, it was- it's what you would do after. But i- it doesn't mean you can't solve for the other customer jobs, it just means put one foot in front of the other. Do a really good job at one thing first, and then we'll add that on later. I don't know if that, like, 100% answered your question though.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Yeah. Yeah, and then-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... the reason that you start here is, like, basically what you're trying to do is help SparkToro in this example grow faster.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
We were trying to help them figure out why their free-to-pay conversion rate was lower than what they wanted, right? That- that was the challenge they came to us with. Like, "We- our traffic numbers are good. Even our sign-ups on our website are good, like, our positioning and messaging on our website is clearly doing a- a good job, but once people get into the product, there's not enough of them getting to value, you know, quickly enough." I mean, they still had healthy, you know, hel- healthy customer base, but they knew that that number could be, you know, increased. So we knew what we were solving for.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Got it. Okay, that helps.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And so step one here is figure out who do you want to focus on, not just... 'Cause a lot of people would go at this problem like, "Okay, conversion is whatever, 10%. How do we increase it? Let's look at this data. Let's look at their- their bouncing."
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
"Let's look at why people are confused." And your approach is, "No, let's focus on the people we really want to get into this product and focus on making them convert and not as focus as much on every- on the general case of conversion."
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
O- right. We would get to that though. Like, that's a- a- it's a really important part of the process, but it comes after figuring out who you're even solving for, right? But it's definitely important to look at those numbers. I mean, I'm not saying don't look at the data. (laughs) Obviously you have to. They wouldn't have identified a problem had they not been looking at the data. So, the- the challenge that happens so, so often, and I mean, this happens with a lot of teams, particularly marketers fall sort of victim to this, like, tactical way of approaching things and sort of piecemealing things to, like... Piecemealing campaigns or programs to prove that, you know, we're doing something and we're- we're driving up numbers, and they don't take big enough sort of swings. So this is- this is, like...... zoom out for a second, figure out who is it that you even want coming through the front door. I mean, the, um, social media platform tool that I mentioned, the trial-to-paid conversion rate bumped up 40% because it was a higher qualified person coming f- through the front door, right? And so that, i- i- it, it matters. So if you can zoom out and k- keep in your mind's eye that ideal customer job, that thing that you're solving for. Like, we're not a personas. We don't care about personas at all. They're important when you start talking about, like, advertising and targeting and, like, that demographic data that you have to know, you know, when you're doing advertising and things like that. That is not what I'm describing here at all. I find the jobs-to-be-done too helps sort of tie and bond marketing and product and customer success together a lot more, right? Because they, you know, all three of those teams, or arguably four with sales, should all be focused on the same (laughs) customer. That's not, you know, revolutionary. So this is a, a just so, sort of helpful way to do that, and like, product teams know and, and subscribe for the most part to the jobs-to-be-done theory, so marketers should, you know, follow suit, and there's a lot to be gained, anyway, on the marketing side. So anyway, the short of it basically is that because we knew we were fo- f- we were focused on increasing that free-to-paid conversion rate, the next step after the job is the mapping, right? So it's identifying, okay, for this ideal customer, what are those key milestones in their relationship with our product? What are those big sort of leaps of faith is how I sort of describe it. I mean, I don't need to explain the (laughs) you know, the, the Airbnb customer journey tells that story, right? Like, where's a value moment in this relationship? Where are they reaching value? They-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Are there some examples of that for folks that are trying to do this for themselves potentially? And then also, how many of these moments would you suggest people have?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah. So it completely depends on the product and the customer for that matter. I shouldn't leave that part
- 32:21 – 36:45
Value moments in the customer relationship
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
out of it. Obviously, that's important. In general though, what we would do is we'd break it down into a struggle phase, an evaluation phase, and a growth phase. Struggle phase is they're experiencing the problem, life sucks. They're using the old way, something's gotta happen. They've gotta solve this thing. In general, the struggle phase would break down between like out in the world experiencing the problem and, for the first time and another stage, which generally we call... so we would call that problem, and generally there would be another one called interest, where it's like, okay, now they're starting to shop around. They're starting to, they're getting into solution-seeking mode, right? They might be on your website. They might be on your competitor's websites. They're, you know, reading product reviews, things like that. That's like the interest stage. And then there's the evaluation phase, which generally breaks down, I will say, two or three milestones within the evaluation phase. I say two or three because if you have a more complex product, (laughs) a more complex customer is the more likely scenario, there may be more leaps of faith (laughs) that they have to, or more milestones, heavier lift for you to take. So we have worked with companies where the evaluation phase has been three or four milestones. I would always default to as few as possible. So if I'm, I'm cutting it down to, like, lowest common denominator, let's say a first value would be the first milestone within evaluation. So you wanna get them to that product activation really, really quickly. And then value realization is the milestone where you're solving that customer job. So y- they reach a point with your product where they're like, "Hell yes, this is it." And for the, for the first time, they reach this critical threshold of product engagement. Now, what that product engagement is with your unique, you know, product for that specific customer is up for debate, but there still needs to be that moment. And then there's the growth phase, which is about the sort of continued value, so getting into frequency of usage and that, you know, a healthy, building that habit, getting into a cadence that makes sense, what type of, you know, feature usage and end product usage shou- should you wanna see there, and then on what frequency becomes really important. And then there's another milestone generally after that where you're like, "Okay, cool. They're, they're in. They're pro now. What else do they need? What else do they need from our product? And also, how else can we amplify them or work with them to, you know, either start teaching our tool to other people?" I mean, there's all kinds of things that can happen about growth, right? That's where the sort of, eh, the, the promise of exponential growth with SaaS sort of comes into play.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And as people listen to this, just to maybe help if it's not super obvious, what people shouldn't imagine is like a little key frame fr- like a storyboard frame of like, "Here's something your customer's doing," right?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes. Yeah. We often t- talk about it and describe it as like, the story of like how I met and fell in love with your product, right? I mean, it's like this documentary of like being out in the world, finding it, realizing that like, "Hell yeah, this might actually solve a problem for us." This, this might be it, right? Getting that m- enough value to convince them to keep going to full value realization, to continued value, to value growth.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
This episode is brought to you by Maven. I've been an investor, an advisor, and a customer of Maven from day one. I even taught my product management course through Maven. Maven is a cohort-based learning platform where you learn alongside peers with a direct connection to your instructor. Maven's got a ton of courses for product managers, founders, and executives to help them level up in all kinds of ways. Over 10,000 people from Airbnb to Coinbase to Google to Tesla have taken courses from real experts and operators that have spent decades honing their craft. As part of their fall season, which Maven just launched, there are over 100 new courses starting in the next few weeks. Many of the people I've had on this podcast are teaching courses, like Jackie Babbaro on product strategy, Arielle Jackson on startup branding, Emily Kramer on B2B marketing, plus Annie Duke on decision-making, Nir Eyal on behavioral design, and how to break into product management with Merely Nika. Check out all of my favorite courses and learn more at maven.com/lenny.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Now, again, like I'm- I'm saying that as if it applies to all customers and products, and that's not actually the case. Sometimes it's more complicated than that, but in general that is what we have found. So that's what we did for our first group of customers
- 36:45 – 44:40
Applying customer feedback
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
based on the research that we did. And there's... The research that we do, we basically take all the responses, we identify the critical patterns, and that's how we identify the customer job. From those critical patterns, right, if we segment down just that customer job, we can look at responses and say, "Okay, here's what they're likely doing when they're out in the world experiencing this problem." This is how they described the pain of their current solution, and then here's what they say about how their search for a solution started. Here's, you know, what they told us about, you know, how they started to do that research or find a solution. And then there's the questions that are asked in the research like, "You know, what was the moment that convinced you that our product was going to solve this problem for you?" And the answers to that question are gonna tell you what your first value should look like, right? What should that first product activation experience, whatever language you like to use, what should that look like for them? What parts of the product do you need to push right up to the front of that experience so they can get to it really, really quickly after they sign up? And then value realization obviously would be close to, if not the desired outcome, right, of that customer job where you're solving that customer job. And then you've got all kinds of, um... Generally what happens when I'm going through this process with teams is that all kinds of ideas start to come up about what more they could be doing even, like, post-solving that customer job, right? Especially the product team gets really excited because they've got all kinds of ideas about where the product can go, and so that really helps sort of tie everybody together too. And we... A critical part of that process, obviously, is identifying, you know, we have to measure success along the way. There should be a KPI for each of those stages in that customer journey. And for the most part, they won't be a big surprise on the struggle side of things, like, people out in the world experiencing the problem, how are we gonna know we're doing a good job reaching them? We bring in new unique website visitors, right? In general, that will be the measure of success for the problem milestone, and then next piece of the puzzle is like, okay, once they discover that we exist, even if they are visiting... You know, reading product reviews and visiting competitor sites or, you know, whatever, we'll know we've done a good job of convincing them that we can help solve their problem and deterring the people that we don't want, right? We'll know we've done a good job when, you know, the conversion rate on our... Whatever our- our primary CTA is on our website, whether or not it's start a trial or request a demo, something like that. That's the- generally, the struggle phase is very straightforward in terms of measurement. That's like marketers' bread and butter, that's where they live and breathe all day long. Where things start to change though, generally, when we're working with companies is helping them figure out how should they be measuring first value or product activation and how should they be measuring actual product engagement. And generally what we do there is we can associate basically what they told us brings them the most amount of value with the product attribute or parts of the product that deliver that value, and we try to tie the KPI, obviously, to some sort of product... Meaningful product usage of that key part of the product or- or product attribute.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Can you share some examples of that? 'Cause that's a really important piece.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah. So for... I'll use SparkToro as an example just 'cause it's the one that we started with. So for SparkToro, the customer job... I don't remember the exact, like, customer job statement necessarily, but for them what they said were the parts of the product that gave them a ton of value was two specific features, lists, so being able to sort of organize their findings in a way that made it not only easy for them to organize within their own files, but also share, because a lot of them work with clients or, you know, type... Stakeholders that they want to be able to share it with. So, lists were a- a specific feature that honestly was not... It- it was in there, but they weren't front-loading the product experience with that, right? So it was... I'm not gonna say it was hidden, but it wasn't front and center enough. So that was one feature that we could associate with, like, you know, being able to organize the data, being able to continue to build on it and make it, like, usable over time and also share. And then there was another feature as well which was an exporting feature. Again, it's not that it was hidden, but it wasn't front and center enough, and so we tied KPIs to them making use of those features coupled with, you know, obviously the core feature which is searchability. It was like pairing, uh, the search functionality with the list functionality and then pairing the search functionality with the list functionality with the export functionality. It's a- it's- it's a bit abstract than me just like saying the words, it's easier with a visual, but the story is basically like help them use the search functionality first, right after that make sure that they're using lists, and if they don't use lists, let's help them get back to using it so that they get to that important critical sort of value moment, and then the same applies for, you know, the exporting features that we were talking about.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Got it. And to be clear, you basically set a metric for each of these moments.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah, milestones.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Milestones, yeah.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Or stages or whatever. I mean, you have to. I mean, it always surprises me when a- a team is like, "Oh yeah, yeah, you're right, we don't do that," and I'm like, "What? What do you mean?" So it's... At a given milestone, unless they've reached that value moment, you can't keep them on the train to something else. Like if they haven't even discovered that really, you know, f- to them most valuable part of their product, you need to focus on getting them to that value. Otherwise like, you can't just keep firing off emails and hoping they're gonna, you know, jump back into the product as if they're gonna care. So, a lot of what we do is actually proactive sort of customer experiences, whether or not in app or email or whatever tool, to help them get to that moment within the product, and if they don't get to that moment, which measurable again, that's why it's a KPI, right? Then we can be...... you know, sort of reactive in helping them get back in. And so identifying like, okay, well, not that you would say this, like, you fell off the train, but just helping them, nurture them back into the product and really discover that product, eh, that feature if they missed it the first time around. So it's, like, proactive in pushing them forwards, but then also catching them if they fall. And the only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way. So we have like a, you know, that storyboard that we were talking about. We also have a map where it's like, the experience to get them to a certain, you know, value moment, but then that win-back experience to get them back in should they, you know, fall out for any reason. I mean, people get hungry and get distracted and, like, there's a ton of reasons why. I mean, there's a lot of stats on, you know, the, the percentage... I think it's like 70% of people log into an app, log into a product once and never come back. It, it's wild. So the fact, the fact that so many companies don't have some sort of win-back or re-engagement always kind of blows my mind.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs) So just to recap, and then we'll keep going with the, the process. Step one, understand what your customers are going through, figure out the most important customer and their biggest problem. Then map out the journey that they go through, the struggle they go through before they, uh, discover your product, the steps they go through to evaluate, decide to use your product. And then once they use your product, them continuing to use your product and using it more and more and then once you've figured out these steps. And is a rough number like 10, 12 steps? Like, what's a, what's a good number just to put it?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Oh, no. I would hope it was-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
No? Okay.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... more like six. I-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Six? Okay, great. (overlapping dialogue)
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I'm always trying to bring it down, lowest, lowest... Only as long as it absolutely needs to be. I mean, that's, that goes for-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. All right.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... home pages, landing pages, same thing for customer journey maps.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Airbnb had 12, I think, so you're-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... kind of all of them.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I like that. Okay, and then you've come up with a metric to tell you if that step is performing well. Is it-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
If they've gotten there. Did they get to that value?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
If they've gotten there. Cool.
- 44:40 – 49:45
Metrics for measuring the customer’s meaningful engagement
- LRLenny Rachitsky
One last question before we move on to the next step.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Can you give, like, two maybe examples of, like, an actual moment, say, in SparkToro's case and then-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Mm-hmm.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... the metric that they used to measure if they've gotten to that point?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yes. So the measure for success at the, that tips somebody over into a valuation is performing their first search. So when you're on their website, it's you perform a search. It's not signing up for a trial or, or signing up for free, although it does tip you into signing up for free when you perform your first search. So signing up for... Getting your first search and seeing your first search results is that first sort of measure. And then following that, it is for first value, it is using search again. So generally, I mean, this is very product-specific, like I said, but generally a first search is like a, kind of an experiment where you're sort of trying the tool on for the first time. Generally, searches start to just get better when you do, you know, your second and third. So we try to encourage at least five plus... So that first value KPI is, I think it was five plus searches, plus at least one list. So the, it's the combination of those two things that have to happen before somebody's gonna be, really see what this thing does. It's not that they won't get value if they don't use lists, but because we know that SparkToro's ideal customers really get a ton of value out of lists, people can hang out in that stage all day long if they want to. We're, we're not gonna worry about them. We're gonna worry about the people that really want the actual functionality of the real full, like, fully-featured tool. So that was the first value. That's how we kn- we would know that they got to product activation. And then the next one, as I mentioned before, is a combination of actually three things. So it is conducting a minimum amount of searches within a span of time, creating at least a, a certain number of lists, I can't remember exactly what it is, and then discovering/exporting at least once. And then that is they've reached a, a meaningful enough threshold of product engagement. And then value growth was that they do all of that on a regular enough basis so that we know they're not, like, a flight risk basically, right? So that we know that they're getting continued value from the product. And if they ever fall out of that ongoing engagement sort of measure of success, then we can, you know, trigger either a one-on-one outreach, an email, whatever. I mean, obviously it can't be an app, right? Because if they're not logging into the app, then can't reach 'em. But to, uh, to help them back in and to say, "Hey, what's up?" and, "Can we help?" and, "Is there anything that we can do?" and basically be proactive in getting them back in. And then value growth, I believe is, I think it was expansion or upgrade in, in their case. I, I don't, can't remember exactly.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Cool. So you end up with these, say, six KPIs.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I imagine this becomes goals you track and then you probably pick one of these to focus on, say, per year, per quarter. Awesome.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Hopefully not for a year. (laughs)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Per, per week.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Hopefully shorter.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Because, I mean, I will say that with some of the KPIs it's very straightforward, right? With new unique website visitors or the website conversion rate, that is... I mean, depending on who owns the, the website, that's not something that should take you a year... Like, you should never be focused on only your website's conversion rate for a year hopefully. But these other KPIs and these other milestones, I mean, I, I have no disillusions about. Like, if it impacts the product, obviously there's a lot of implications there and so yes, generally once you tip over into, into that sort of in-app and more product experience, timelines vary widely, to say the least.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay, cool. Let's move on to the next step.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
'Kay. So after that point, we had, you know, a, a rich voice of customer document that came out of that research. We had a, a messaging guide for them to use, not only in their marketing materials, but also th- through the entire, you know, sort of product experience, and also identifying the parts of the product that were so meaningful.And actually, so their VP of marketing, the new VP of marketing, Amanda Natividad, actually ruled out checklist. They built a checklist, like a product onboarding checklist, and also product onboarding emails, and their trial to paid doubled. Like we've, we were like, "Okay, cool. You know, let us know if you need any help" or whatever. And they're like, "Oh, we're good. We got this." And checked in two months later, and their trial to paid had doubled.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I feel like you skipped the important step of, hey, we got KPIs.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And then you're like, "Oh, we gave them all this information." And so I'd love to spend a little more time on there. You came up with messaging for them, positioning stuff. Yeah. What-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Well-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What, what happens there?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
This is the thing.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
The KPI.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
They, they have a team in place, right? They've got very highly skilled, and not a huge team, but highly skilled, you know, uh, uh, marketer there at the helm. I mean, not the least of which is Rand Fishkin, their, you know, their, their CEO. So basically what we did was we gave them... It's like a framework. So it's like here's the, here are the, the bones of this, right? So got a messaging and positioning guide for you. Generally they're, you know, I mean, when we do them, they're like five to seven pages
- 49:45 – 51:15
What’s included in the messaging and positioning guidebook
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
long. They hit on the value prop, they hit on the, you know, major competitive advantages. They hit on the major value themes that you wanna focus on. Those value themes can be broken down by the emotional benefits and the functional benefits tied to the product attributes that derive that value. And so that document, and there's, there's more that goes into it, but that messaging guide basically can be used as the baseline for all kinds of marketing collateral and material, but also email onboarding, right? So when they're writing their e- email sequences for whatever it is they're trying to solve for throughout that cust- whatever milestone they're solving for, they can use that as their baseline. Like, this is what we're going for. This is the, the goal here. And that messaging guide rolls up to the job to be done. So it's like the job, the job to be done is sort of like the top line, and then we've got that messaging that serves that job to be done, and then we've got the sort of operationalized customer experience with those milestones and KPIs. And then you sort of zoom in on like, where's the e- experience most broken right now? We already knew that for Smart Shore. We knew that we wanted to influence that first early product experience. So that's where we zoomed in and, and decided on what programs they should just sort of roll out. And email onboarding was a natural, as was the checklist.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
For folks that want to work on messaging, say, so you, you kind of are just like, "Hey, here's a bunch of messaging advice," any tips for how to message well, how to think about messaging once you have
- 51:15 – 54:13
Tips for messaging
- LRLenny Rachitsky
a sense of your journey, maybe some goals? Any just pro tips here you could share?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Oh, boy. Um, I mean, that research and the voice of customer, I mean, I'm always gonna go back to that. That's, y- you can, you can guess and you can do, uh, you know, use your best judgment and you can use internal, uh, sort of stakeholders and, and, you know, the, the internal team knowledge. And I'm not saying that that is not valuable and that you shouldn't use that at all. You can. But it should never come before learning from and listening to your best ideal customers and using the language that they use. You wanna reflect them back to them, right? That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have, and that your product has exactly what it is that they need. And the hierarchy of messaging is really important as well, right? So, I mean, there's the classic, like, sometimes it's hard to see, you know, the label from inside the jar. So it, it's really helpful to get out and be like, okay, how do customers see us? And generally, you can identify the hierarchy of what is important to them, right? What is the thing that they say is most valuable, uh, about their product? What was that, you know, aha moment, or what was that first, uh, value moment, or what is the thing that makes you stand out over everybody else? And, like, it can literally be a numbers game. If you take, you know, a hundred, uh, yeah, a hundred or so survey responses, you can break that down. Like here's the thing they said they cared about most. Here's the thing they said they cared about second most and third most. Like, not to be so paint by numbers about it, but, uh, and it, there's, you know, there's art in the science. But in general, you wanna reflect back what they said they care about, not what you think is the coolest thing about your product. That's obviously not the best way to go. And that something that, like, we all inherently know, but it becomes really hard when there's a lot going on and things are changing and the product is evolving and there's a lot of teams and people are coming and going. It's easy to lose sight of that, especially when you're just trying to, you know, get shit out the door. So that messaging guide is mentally like, "Okay, here we are. Like this is, this is where I'm... This is my baseline. These are my guardrails for everything that we produce." It's also really handy to hand off to copywriters, right? When you bring in, I mean, not just copywriters, lots of people, but particularly when you're producing copy, providing that messaging guide is like silver platter for them.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Is your book... Or is this available anywhere, the template that you end up sharing with the customer? Just like, here's a guide to layout messaging recommendations.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Oh, I've got so many. (laughs) There's so many.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Maybe little...
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Like templates and stuff. Yeah. Uh, we can... I'll include a couple links, so-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Great.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
...like in the show notes.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Put them in the show notes.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
We want lots of stuff like that. Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay, great. A few final questions around jobs to be done.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
So you said that they doubled their conversion from free to paid.
- 54:13 – 55:58
Example of a customer job at SparkToro
- LRLenny Rachitsky
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing. What was their job to be done in the end? And then, and then I just have a few questions about the, the jobs to be done.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
The key was when you're struggling, when they're struggling to identify opportunities that aren't as obvious. So generally when you're doing, you know, marketing research, you'll end up finding the same things over and over again. And if you are a service provider or if you're in-house for that matter, and you're like tasked with always coming up with like novel and new and more, more, more, you tap that pretty quickly. And so what-... customers were coming to them for was like, "Give me more. I need, I need to impress" (laughs) . "I need to impress here." Like, "I need more to work with. I need to identify opportunities that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of." Actually, that was exactly what it was. "I, I, help me identify opportunities I wouldn't otherwise be c- be aware of." And then so that, so that the customer jobs statement is when I am in a certain situation, help me, which is filled in by what those, those things that they're looking for, those motivations. So I can, which is the desired outcome. The help me was about, I believe it was like in a way that is organized and that is shareable and like usable over time that I can like build on and really, you know, rely on over time. And the desired outcome was about, I mean, this isn't gonna be surprising, but like, it was about getting stakeholder buy-in (laughs) and getting people on board with, and sharing and, and looking good, but looking like a pro, right? And doing their job more effectively and, and driving better results for either their, their own team or for their clients.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. We got there. We glossed-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... a little bit over Jobs To Be Done. I don't, I imagine many people listening have no idea what this is, so maybe as our final question,
- 55:58 – 59:50
What is the Jobs to Be Done framework?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
uh, can you just kind of explain what this framework is and how folks can learn to use it? Or are there any resources you recommend-
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... that comes to mind?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I mean, a heavy, a heavy influence for us definitely is Bob Moesta, who's one of the original sort of architects of Jobs To Be Done. There are lots of materials online for jobs. I am not the foremost authority in jobs at all. There's, I think it's jtbd.info is a, a good website. There's a, there's a, a bunch. Also, Bob Moesta wrote a book called Demand Side Sales that goes into it. There's also, there's also lots of books written about Jobs To Be Done. When Coffee Met Kale is one that a lot of people love. I digress. Point being that what matters is identifying what it is that customers are trying to accomplish. So demographic data doesn't matter. The classic example is like if you look at, oh, King Charles (laughs) . Now the example has changed. If you look at Ozzy Osborne and, and it was Prince Charles in the original, but now it's King Charles. If you look at those two men, they're the exact same age, they live in the same area. They both have a dog. They both love cars. They both, you know, they, they... From a demographic standpoint, they are identical, but they obviously lead very different lives. What motivates them is very different. And so like, that is where typically personas sort of fall down. And so what Jobs To Be Done does is help you figure out like, what is that, you know, desired outcome? What is that better life that customers are seeking out? You're just the vehicle to get them there. And so that, that's all it is. It's like, I mean, there's so many tired analogies (laughs) that I don't even want to use them, but-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Milkshakes, maybe.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
What's that?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
The milkshake analogy.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
The milkshake one is the, is the, it's not even the analogy.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Right.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I think that was like the original, one of the original job stories that is the milkshake one.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Any other things you wanna share about the process that you go through with the companies, things you've learned, before we get to our very exciting lightning round?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah. One of the, the sort of objections that we often get to this type of work is that research takes a long time, and that research can often lead to more questions and can like slow everything down. You can end up in, in sort of like analysis paralysis. But it doesn't have to be that way. It can be very straightforward. Honestly, in a survey scenario, like with, with SparkToro, in just that scenario, I have lots of examples of companies where we ran surveys. It can be a couple of weeks, like two or three weeks, you can actually come out with, you know, something solid to move forward with. And you don't get stuck in this like, the bickering or the, the, the sort of, you know, the, all those stakeholders are the too many c- cooks in the kitchen. Like, you, you can come to something decisive. You can get value out of that. The other thing too, the other objection we get a lot from founders in particular is because they build products to solve a problem that they had, which is cool and it definitely makes you one of the most knowledgeable people about your solution, but products change, markets change, customers change, uh, teams change in a ball. Not everything can live inside of your head. And there's a ton of value in getting, learning and getting inside the heads of your best customers that like, you may have been really close to the inception of the product, but if any span of time has changed, you will all- you'll always learn something new. I've never been in a scenario like this where a founder has not learned something new from their research and been able to leverage it in a way that makes their, their product experience better.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Awesome. And we'll come back to how folks can reach out to you if they wanna experience this process, could work with you, learn more. But before we get there, we've gotten to a very exciting lightning round. I've got five quick questions for you. We'll go through 'em quick, whatever comes to mind.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
And that's the, that's what we're doing.
- 59:50 – 1:04:18
Lightning round
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Sounds good?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. What are two or three books that you recommend most to people looking to get better at marketing?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I very, very, very rarely read marketing books. Um, but there's two that I think are, are pretty foundational in the recent, so obviously Awesome by April Dunford. I'm sure you've heard that one a ton. It's kind of like required reading, I would say, especially for founders. And I told April when she first wrote, I'm like, "I'm gonna require every single founder I work with to read your book before we work with them," because it's like foundational. You have to know that. And then the other one that I really enjoyed, flip side, was Hooked by Nir Eyal. So that one was great too. But like I said, I don't read many marketing books. The other one that I would be remiss not to mention is ours, that we're writing about the process, which is, you know, really about like the step-by-step how to do this thing. So as much as like we love going through this process with companies, and I sort of took a page from April here too, and that like...... telling the process and having people be able to roll this out and do this internally themselves has been, like, wildly gratifying. We do it with a training, a training program, and this is our next sort of step in that, in, in, like, you know, getting out into the world even more. So, you absolutely can do this stuff yourself. And so that process is laid out in that book. And then another book that I read recently, which has nothing to do with marketing at all, but was like, really nice, was Four Thousand Weeks. I don't know-
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I'm reading that right now.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Oh, yeah. I enjoyed it. It was a nice sort of, like, coming back to, like, base a bit. I don't know if when I read it, it was just like, it was, I just finished it a couple of weeks ago. It was just the, the per- the timing was perfect. I feel like what's going on in the world right now and how everybody's probably feeling right now, it's a b- it's a good solid, it's a good solid read for, for now.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
I'm enjoying it. I just started
- NANarrator
Okay.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
... in fact, you will encourage me to keep reading it.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Okay. Favorite recent movie or TV show?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
I have young kids. I just bought a ano- a second property. Uh, we're like renovating, like, three houses right now. I, I do not watch movies e- almost ever. Uh, the only thing that I'm currently binging is YouTubers that do, like, DIY interior design and, like, renos. Reason being, my partner and I bought a property with four very, very old cottages, like lakefront, tiny little, like, almost like tiny houses, li- little cottages. And we are, like, slowly renovating each of them. So, my sort of fill is, uh, learning about interior design and, like, DIY home renos. That's, yeah.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Who's had the most impact on you in your career?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
This is the (laughs) worst question. I hate saying this but it's probably my dad. I have to say my dad because he's, like, a, a, an entrepreneur through and through, and I remember very vividly. I worked, I worked for him for I think eight years early in my career, and one of the things that he always sort of said was like, it was the joy of the business, like, he didn't care what... He's like, "It doesn't matter what you're selling." Like, he could be selling anything and, but it's the joy of entrepreneurship, and I, that really stuck with me. And so, even when I was in-house, I always knew that I needed to do, you know, something on my own and be sort of i- i- in charge of that journey. And I, and his joy in it is, has, has impacted me a lot. And he was the reason why I knew I was always gonna do this. Other than that, I would say I have an incredible network of w- women that I have been very lucky. We're, we're part of a group that we call SHINE Crew. I think I'm supposed to, like, copyright (laughs) that to them or something, to somebody, 'cause I think the term SHINE Theory is, uh, is what it's based on basically. But I'm very, very lucky to be, like, heavily influenced by April Dunford, Tara Robertson, Joanna Wiebe, Talia Wolf, and then obviously my business partner, Claire, uh, uh, you know, obviously changed everything for me. Uh, having that, like, partnership in business, I don't think I would've, I definitely, uh, I don't think I would've lasted (laughs) this long. So yeah, definitely a huge influence for sure.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
What's one thing that helps you stay focused and productive during the day?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Definitely carving out time, like, time blocking. I do a lot of
- 1:04:18 – 1:06:46
How Gia manages her time
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
time blocking, like, hour in advance with, like, a little brain emoji (laughs) of, like, safeguarding my time. Something else that we also do, 'cause we're a small team and we use Slack obviously, something else that we do to pre- protect each other's time is we, like, time, not timestamp, but we, we put, like, a little code in all of our messages that's, like, either a, like, "You don't have to listen to this before the end of day," or, "It's timely," or, "It's no rush," so that we know when we need to mentally process messages in Slack so that we can only, we can drop in there just periodically. And then the only other thing that I would say that I do maybe once a month or once a quarter is we do time, we're, we're pretty buttoned up about our time tracking. And so we go back and it sort of keeps us honest about how our time is actually spent, um, and then we can sort of, like, adjust (laughs) and time block accordingly to sort of make up for, like, the shortcomings of our previous quarter.
- LRLenny Rachitsky
That was really clever. I haven't heard of that trick. What's the emoji for, uh, "You can do this later"?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
We actually just use "No rush," or "EOD," like, for end of day, or "Timely." We do have, like, a, the alarm emoji is the, like, "Now" (laughs) -
- LRLenny Rachitsky
(laughs)
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
... "This has gotta be dealt with ASAP."
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Amazing. Gia, thank you for making time for this. Final question, where can folks find you online? How do they pre-order your book? How can they learn more? And then also just how can listeners be useful to you?
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Thank you for asking. Uh, Twitter is probably the best way. My Twitter handle is atrocious. G-G-I-I-A-A is me on Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn every once in a while obviously. My email address is gia@forgetthefunnel.com, so if anybody has any questions, whatever, feel free to email me if you want any templates or whatever that don't get included in the show notes, just ping me and no problem about that. And then forgetthefunnel.com, we've got a book page where there is a wait list for the, yeah, the, well, we're gonna do pre-sale and then the published book, like, the public physical, published physical book will be early in 2023, but we are gonna do pre-sale 'cause get it in those hands, why not?
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Love it. Gia, thank you for being here.
- GLGeorgiana (Gia) Laudi
Thank you so much for having me. (instrumental music)
- LRLenny Rachitsky
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Episode duration: 1:06:47
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