Episode 665 | How to Find More “Best Fit” Customers for Your SaaS

In episode 665, Rob Walling chats with Georgiana Laudi, who is the co-author of the new book, Forget the Funnel. They dive deep into key concepts from the book, including specific Jobs-to-be-done interview examples and how to apply these insights to your marketing strategy.

They also chat a bit about the process of writing a book.

Topics we cover:

2:37 - Gia and Claire's intentional decision to keep the book under 200 pages

5:28 - What size SaaS companies will get the most value from Claire and Gia’s new book?

9:49 - The customer-led growth framework

11:29 - Why you shouldn’t think in terms of marketing funnels

15:51- Jobs-to-be done interviews

20:27- An approach for founders who are skeptical about customer research and JTBD interviews

25:15- How to use information gathered from customer interviews to inform your marketing strategy

29:47- What was the experience like recording the audiobook?

Links from the Show:

Claire Suellentrop @clairesuellen I Twitter

Georgiana Laudi @ggiiaa) I Twitter

Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Driving Predictable, Recurring Revenue 

MicroConf Youtube Channel

If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you.

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Transcript:

Rob Walling:

Being a startup founder is like playing a never ending game of chess, except the pieces keep changing, the board is on fire, and nobody knows the rules. This is Startups For the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. That joke, not very good, was written by ChatGPT, if you can believe it. I mean, ChatGPT is good at a lot of things, but it's still working out its humor.

This week, I have a great conversation with one of the authors of Forget the Funnel. Gia Laudi and Claire Suellentrop run an agency that works with SaaS companies to help them grow their businesses. It's called Forget the Funnel, and their book is called Forget the Funnel. And so if you're already sold on this or you get two minutes into the interview and you want to pick it up, it's on Amazon. You can just search for Forget the Funnel.

But the book dives deep into jobs to be done, with very specific examples where they have used it to help companies improve their onboarding rates, to help them grow their businesses overall, to find more customers like the ones that are already successful using their product. And what I like about the book, you'll hear me say in the conversation, is it's short, it's compact, doesn't waste your time, and it has a lot of extremely concrete examples from their experience doing this for clients.

But before we dive into that, if you haven't checked out our YouTube channel, I'm releasing effectively a Rob solo adventure every week, 52 weeks a year, over at MicroConf.com/YouTube. It's a 10 to 15 minute video covering all the topics that you would hear us discuss on this podcast, so it's things like idea validation, it's how to improve your marketing and sales funnel, how to hire, who to hire.

And I even told my story of buying, growing, and selling HitTail and building and selling Drip. And I told them in a way, like a compact format, in a way that I haven't done really on this podcast or in any onstage talks that I've done. So while the content on the YouTube channel is in the same spirit as this podcast, it's not the same stuff regurgitated. It's genuinely new content covering new topics. So MicroConf.com/YouTube if you're into that sort of thing. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Gia Laudi.

Gia Laudi, thanks for joining me on the show.

Gia Laudi:

Thanks for having me, Rob.

Rob Walling:

So we're going to be talking about Forget the Funnel, which is the name of the book that you co-authored with Claire Suellentrop. Folks who listen to this podcast will recognize Claire's name. She's spoken at Mic