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

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)

(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.

Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.

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?

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.

And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?