Lenny's Podcast · Sep 29Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)
Traffic and signups were fine but free users weren't converting to paid. Customer surveys defined the job and first-value KPI (five or more searches plus a list), and an onboarding checklist with emails doubled trial to paid within about two months.
Tips
- Interview or survey your best customers from the last three to six months▶ 22:50SparkToro's surveys were decisive enough that follow-up interviews were not needed.
- Pick one customer job using willingness to pay, urgency, retention and your unfair advantage▶ 25:00SparkToro chose the marketer job over the data-purist job because it had an advantage with marketers.
- Attach a measurable KPI to every journey milestone▶ 44:40SparkToro: first search tips users into evaluation, first value is five or more searches plus at least one list, value realization adds exporting, and growth is doing it regularly.
- Put the features customers value most front and center in onboarding▶ 40:00SparkToro doubled trial-to-paid within about two months of rolling out the checklist and onboarding emails. Another company's North Star product usage jumped about 300% after email onboarding.
- Replace demographic personas with jobs to be done▶ 57:10SparkToro's job: help me identify opportunities I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, in a way that is organized and shareable, so I can look like a pro to stakeholders and clients.
- Run a survey for two to three weeks to avoid analysis paralysis▶ 58:15Gia has examples of companies running surveys in two or three weeks and getting something solid.
