Georgiana Laudi
Co-founder and CEO of Forget The Funnel, growth advisor, former VP Marketing at Unbounce
Where to hear and read about Georgiana Laudi1 episode or test
Georgiana Laudi (Gia) is co-founder and CEO of Forget The Funnel, a growth advisory firm, and a former VP Marketing at Unbounce. The one thing most worth learning from her is to research your best recent customers, pick one customer job, and measure each value milestone before touching tactics.
you want to reflect back what they said they care about not what you think is the coolest thing about your product
Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)
Georgiana Laudi: the story and the lessons
1Georgiana Laudi's path to Forget The Funnel
Laudi started in her father's retail shop and worked for him eight years. She began in the family retail business in the early 2000s, then freelanced and worked at an agency before moving into startups.
Watching her entrepreneur father's joy in the business showed her she would run her own.
Twitter opened the startup world, and burnout pushed her in-house. Joining Twitter in late 2008 put her in the tech scene, where she met Lenny around 2011. She was serving five or six companies at once and burning out.
She wanted to sink her teeth into one brand, which led her to Unbounce, where she spent five years.
She went independent and built a firm with Claire Suellentrop. Laudi left Unbounce in late 2016 or early 2017. In mid 2017 she teamed up with Claire Suellentrop, a marketing leader at Calendly, to launch Forget The Funnel.
Claire brings the customer research background and Laudi the strategy marketing background. Their framework is used mostly with B2B SaaS companies.
Laudi's network of women and her partner shaped her career. Her women's group, the "shine crew", includes April Dunford and Talia Wolf. She says her business partner Claire changed everything by sharing the journey.
2Why Laudi says to forget the funnel
Laudi cheered pirate metrics in 2012, then saw they still center the business. At Startupfest 2012 Dave McClure presented pirate metrics, and she was glad marketing now had a role after acquisition. She later saw that even these models center the business, which is why she named the firm Forget The Funnel.
Her complaint covers buyer journeys and MQLs and SQLs too, since nobody agrees on what those mean yet they sort every customer into the same buckets.
Funnels ignore the customer's life before they find you. They treat every customer and product the same and skip the problem stage. They also stop at acquisition, which breaks recurring-revenue companies that live on retention and expansion.
"you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending at acquisition otherwise you're not in business anymore"
Airbnb's journey map showed her how to see growth through the customer's eyes. In 2013 she noticed sheets of paper taped in a row near Airbnb's product team, showing the emotional journey plus direct touchpoints and indirect moments in the person's life. Internally it was called Project Snow White.
Airbnb hired a Pixar storyboard artist for the key frames. Anyone walking past could grasp the goal of each milestone at a glance.
Laudi built her own journey map at Unbounce in two days. She, the head of product and a customer success colleague locked themselves in a room for two days to draw it. It gave marketing, product and engineering a shared language.
She won't credit the map alone for the next couple of years of growth, but calls the alignment huge. It convinced her marketing owns the customer experience layer, not only awareness.
3Laudi's customer-led growth process
Laudi starts with research on the best customers from the last three to six months. Best customers get big value, pay, need little hand-holding, and signed up recently enough to remember life before the product. Questions cover the trigger, who they asked, must-haves, anxieties, deal breakers and the outcome they can now achieve.
A two-year customer "fill[s] answers with like what they think might have been going on in their life". At SparkToro, surveys were so clear that interviews were never needed.
She leads with one customer job and says it in their words. Score jobs on willingness to pay, an urgent painkiller problem, retention potential, easy reach and unfair advantage. SparkToro had a marketer job and a data-purist job, and led with marketers because it had an advantage there.
Choosing a job does not drop the other customers. It can be served later, and several jobs at once dilute the message.
She maps the journey in as few value milestones as possible. Phases run from struggle (problem, interest) through evaluation (first value) to value realization and growth. She aims for about six steps, while Airbnb's wall map had about 12.
She frames it as a storyboard of how the customer met and fell in love with your product.
Every milestone gets one KPI, and the team works on one at a time. Early stages use familiar metrics like unique visitors and CTA conversion. SparkToro's first value was five or more searches plus at least one list, realization added export, and growth meant doing it regularly.
"the only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way"
She then fixes the most broken step and adds win-back flows. At SparkToro the break was early product experience, so onboarding emails and a checklist came first. Lists and export were in the product but not front and center.
A separate win-back map catches people who fall off. More emails will not pull back people who never reached a value moment.
4What Laudi's process produced
Messaging research alone lifted a social media tool's conversion 89%. Simple research found two jobs to be done, and the team focused on one and rewrote the website. They also cut the trial from 30 days to 7. Website conversion rose 89% and trial-to-paid rose 40%.
"we didn't even touch anything after the sign up experience". She says 99 times out of 100 a site could be more effective.
Rand Fishkin's SparkToro doubled trial-to-paid with a checklist and emails. Traffic and signups were fine a year after launch, but free users were not converting. The team built the checklist and emails themselves, and trial-to-paid had doubled when Laudi checked in two months later.
Fishkin brought a built-in audience, so top-of-funnel interest was never the issue.
Autobooks' North Star usage rose about 300% after email onboarding. Nearly every company she works with has an untapped gain after signup. The same messaging carries into email and in-app onboarding so people reach the parts of the product they care about.
She cites a common stat that roughly 70% of people log in once and never return.
Laudi says onboarding is no man's land between marketing and product. Each team assumes the other owns it, so there is no natural handoff. She argues freemium is a marketing tool and onboarding should sit with marketing there, though not everyone agrees.
Her advice is to pick an owner, since post-acquisition is where nearly every company she works with finds an opportunity.
5How Laudi thinks about messaging and customer jobs
She builds a five to seven page messaging guide from survey counts. With about 100 responses, count what customers name first, second and third to rank value themes. The guide covers value prop, competitive advantages, and themes split into emotional and functional benefits tied to product attributes.
It keeps teams on track as the product changes and hands copywriters a ready brief. The count guides judgment but does not replace it.
Laudi puts customer language ahead of internal opinion. Using their words shows you understand the problem and have what they need. Internal knowledge is useful but should not come before listening to ideal customers.
She notes it is hard to read the label from inside the jar.
She replaces demographic personas with jobs to be done. Two men can match on age, place, pets and tastes yet live very different lives. She defines a job as the situation, the motivation and the desired outcome. She credits Bob Moesta as a heavy influence.
SparkToro's job: find opportunities the customer would not otherwise know about, organized and shareable, so they look like a pro to stakeholders and clients.
Laudi says a two to three week survey avoids analysis paralysis. Interviews are ideal, but a bounded survey can give a solid direction and end bickering among too many stakeholders.
She has never seen a founder learn nothing new from this research, even though founders built the product for a problem they had.
She guards her own time with blocking, Slack tags and audits. She blocks her calendar ahead, marking focus time with a brain emoji. Her team tags Slack messages "no rush", "EOD", "timely" or an alarm emoji for ASAP.
Once a month or quarter they review tracked time and adjust the next period's blocks.
Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)
Gia explains a customer-led growth process: learn from your best recent customers, pick one customer job, map value milestones with a KPI each, then fix the experience where it breaks. Applying it to a social media tool lifted website conversion 89% and trial-to-paid 40%, and SparkToro doubled trial-to-paid.
Laudi started in her father's retail shop and worked for him eight years. She began in the family retail business in the early 2000s, then freelanced and worked at an agency before moving into startups.
Watching her entrepreneur father's joy in the business showed her she would run her own.
Twitter opened the startup world, and burnout pushed her in-house. Joining Twitter in late 2008 put her in the tech scene, where she met Lenny around 2011. She was serving five or six companies at once and burning out.
She wanted to sink her teeth into one brand, which led her to Unbounce, where she spent five years.
She went independent and built a firm with Claire Suellentrop. Laudi left Unbounce in late 2016 or early 2017. In mid 2017 she teamed up with Claire Suellentrop, a marketing leader at Calendly, to launch Forget The Funnel.
Claire brings the customer research background and Laudi the strategy marketing background. Their framework is used mostly with B2B SaaS companies.
Laudi's network of women and her partner shaped her career. Her women's group, the "shine crew", includes April Dunford and Talia Wolf. She says her business partner Claire changed everything by sharing the journey.
Laudi cheered pirate metrics in 2012, then saw they still center the business. At Startupfest 2012 Dave McClure presented pirate metrics, and she was glad marketing now had a role after acquisition. She later saw that even these models center the business, which is why she named the firm Forget The Funnel.
Her complaint covers buyer journeys and MQLs and SQLs too, since nobody agrees on what those mean yet they sort every customer into the same buckets.
Funnels ignore the customer's life before they find you. They treat every customer and product the same and skip the problem stage. They also stop at acquisition, which breaks recurring-revenue companies that live on retention and expansion.
"you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending at acquisition otherwise you're not in business anymore"
Airbnb's journey map showed her how to see growth through the customer's eyes. In 2013 she noticed sheets of paper taped in a row near Airbnb's product team, showing the emotional journey plus direct touchpoints and indirect moments in the person's life. Internally it was called Project Snow White.
Airbnb hired a Pixar storyboard artist for the key frames. Anyone walking past could grasp the goal of each milestone at a glance.
Laudi built her own journey map at Unbounce in two days. She, the head of product and a customer success colleague locked themselves in a room for two days to draw it. It gave marketing, product and engineering a shared language.
She won't credit the map alone for the next couple of years of growth, but calls the alignment huge. It convinced her marketing owns the customer experience layer, not only awareness.
Laudi starts with research on the best customers from the last three to six months. Best customers get big value, pay, need little hand-holding, and signed up recently enough to remember life before the product. Questions cover the trigger, who they asked, must-haves, anxieties, deal breakers and the outcome they can now achieve.
A two-year customer "fill[s] answers with like what they think might have been going on in their life". At SparkToro, surveys were so clear that interviews were never needed.
She leads with one customer job and says it in their words. Score jobs on willingness to pay, an urgent painkiller problem, retention potential, easy reach and unfair advantage. SparkToro had a marketer job and a data-purist job, and led with marketers because it had an advantage there.
Choosing a job does not drop the other customers. It can be served later, and several jobs at once dilute the message.
She maps the journey in as few value milestones as possible. Phases run from struggle (problem, interest) through evaluation (first value) to value realization and growth. She aims for about six steps, while Airbnb's wall map had about 12.
She frames it as a storyboard of how the customer met and fell in love with your product.
Every milestone gets one KPI, and the team works on one at a time. Early stages use familiar metrics like unique visitors and CTA conversion. SparkToro's first value was five or more searches plus at least one list, realization added export, and growth meant doing it regularly.
"the only way to catch them if they fall is if you're measuring something meaningful along the way"
She then fixes the most broken step and adds win-back flows. At SparkToro the break was early product experience, so onboarding emails and a checklist came first. Lists and export were in the product but not front and center.
A separate win-back map catches people who fall off. More emails will not pull back people who never reached a value moment.
Messaging research alone lifted a social media tool's conversion 89%. Simple research found two jobs to be done, and the team focused on one and rewrote the website. They also cut the trial from 30 days to 7. Website conversion rose 89% and trial-to-paid rose 40%.
"we didn't even touch anything after the sign up experience". She says 99 times out of 100 a site could be more effective.
Rand Fishkin's SparkToro doubled trial-to-paid with a checklist and emails. Traffic and signups were fine a year after launch, but free users were not converting. The team built the checklist and emails themselves, and trial-to-paid had doubled when Laudi checked in two months later.
Fishkin brought a built-in audience, so top-of-funnel interest was never the issue.
Autobooks' North Star usage rose about 300% after email onboarding. Nearly every company she works with has an untapped gain after signup. The same messaging carries into email and in-app onboarding so people reach the parts of the product they care about.
She cites a common stat that roughly 70% of people log in once and never return.
Laudi says onboarding is no man's land between marketing and product. Each team assumes the other owns it, so there is no natural handoff. She argues freemium is a marketing tool and onboarding should sit with marketing there, though not everyone agrees.
Her advice is to pick an owner, since post-acquisition is where nearly every company she works with finds an opportunity.
She builds a five to seven page messaging guide from survey counts. With about 100 responses, count what customers name first, second and third to rank value themes. The guide covers value prop, competitive advantages, and themes split into emotional and functional benefits tied to product attributes.
It keeps teams on track as the product changes and hands copywriters a ready brief. The count guides judgment but does not replace it.
Laudi puts customer language ahead of internal opinion. Using their words shows you understand the problem and have what they need. Internal knowledge is useful but should not come before listening to ideal customers.
She notes it is hard to read the label from inside the jar.
She replaces demographic personas with jobs to be done. Two men can match on age, place, pets and tastes yet live very different lives. She defines a job as the situation, the motivation and the desired outcome. She credits Bob Moesta as a heavy influence.
SparkToro's job: find opportunities the customer would not otherwise know about, organized and shareable, so they look like a pro to stakeholders and clients.
Laudi says a two to three week survey avoids analysis paralysis. Interviews are ideal, but a bounded survey can give a solid direction and end bickering among too many stakeholders.
She has never seen a founder learn nothing new from this research, even though founders built the product for a problem they had.
She guards her own time with blocking, Slack tags and audits. She blocks her calendar ahead, marking focus time with a brain emoji. Her team tags Slack messages "no rush", "EOD", "timely" or an alarm emoji for ASAP.
Once a month or quarter they review tracked time and adjust the next period's blocks.