This episode of The Forget The Funnel Podcast, Gia dives deep on how we’ve become data-rich but insights-poor and the 4 growth stalls you’re likely experiencing as a result. If you're a SaaS founder or product manager bogged down in the weeds of hypothesis-mode and product growth challenges, you’ll want to tune in.In this episode, you’ll learn:How understanding the full customer journey—not just metrics—can transform your growth strategy (and how Gia’s team hit 900% revenue growth).How to unc...
AI is everywhere. We’re using it in our marketing, in our products, in our day-to-day task management. We’re all using it in one way or another. But when it comes to learning from and understanding your customers and what drives them to make decisions, proceed with caution.Here’s how we see it:To grow revenue, you need to increase conversions. To increase conversions, you need to create better customer experiences. To create better customer experiences, you need to understand the why - t...
If you’re trying to scale your SaaS, but you’re stuck tweaking features, following best practices and listening to experts who know nothing about you, your customers or your product… you’re doing it wrong. In this no-fluff episode of the Forget The Funnel podcast, Gia and Claire cut through the noise and give you the exact steps for growing your product by understanding what your best customers actually need.Forget building for the masses. Forget best practices. Forget guesswor...
“Sell benefits, not features”. We’ve all seen the UserOnboard image of Mario + the magic flower = Super Mario. Or Popeye + spinach = super extra-strength Popeye. It’s the best practice that says you should focus on selling the benefits of your product, rather than the features. What if we told you that this is a best practice that’s lazy and risky?Welp. It is. Different customers value different things at different stages of their decision-making. We can’t assume that our customers only care ...
SaaS teams use the best practice of A/B testing like a crutch for marketing, messaging and product growth decisions. And it makes sense. If you think about it, A/B testing something relieves you of so much burden. Not sure which headline is gonna resonate? Test it! Teammates have an (ahem, questionable) idea for how to improve conversions? Test it!Here’s the problem with the “test everything” approach: The vast majority of A/B testing is void of customer understanding and designed ...
If you’re building a racecar, friction is bad news. But when you’re building an onboarding experience for your software product, things are a little more nuanced. This week, we’re dialing into why the pervasive push for a frictionless user experience in your product onboarding isn’t just overrated—it might be undermining your growth potential.At some point, SaaS founders and product managers started taking for granted that friction in the user journey was always a bad thing. But that so-...
How do you empower your team to make better decisions in their day-to-day work to increase conversions and drive more revenue?Here’s the thing: Most companies claim to be customer-led. They say things like, “We talk to our customers all the time,” “Our CSAT scores are great," and “User testing is part of our DNA.” But actual customer-led growth means mobilizing your entire team around the ideal customer’s experience. Not piecemeal in Product, Marketing or CS.If you’re going to mobilize a trul...
We need to talk about voice of customer — because there’s been a misunderstanding.Voice of customer isn’t just for huge companies. It’s also not an abstract, academic concept that’s too broad for teams to use. Done right, insights pulled from the words your customers use are practical and actionable. And they can help your team make better business decisions day in and day out. Best of all, you don’t have to undertake a massive, endless research project to start putting the words of...
It’s rough out there in SaaS—everyone’s feeling it. Whether you’re trying to lower your acquisition costs, make the most of organic inbound interest, or better meet the needs of your technical buyers, you might be ready to take a more product-led approach to growth.But if you’re a sales-led organization, the transition to product-led can be bumpy, and the idea of switching probably raises more questions than answers. How do you validate that there’s a real ‘product-led’ opportunity for your S...
“We don’t need customer research; we already know our customers.” “Research takes too long.” “Is qualitative research even valuable enough?” These objections to customer research are super common—every day, founders and teams use these excuses (and oh so many more) not to learn more from their customers. Maybe you’re wrestling with these objections yourself or trying to move others past them to get internal buy-in for customer research. Either way, here’s the bottom line: There’s no...
From competitive analysis to NPS surveys to UX research, research can help you grow your business and revenue. But you're wasting your time if you jump into those research types without a foundational understanding of your ideal customer and what they’re trying to accomplish. You’ll end up down unhelpful or misleading paths that leave you with more questions than answers. As they say, you’ll be ‘missing the forest for the trees’.Starting with qualitative customer interviews—conversations with...
One study found that 70% of people who sign up for a product log in once… and then never again. That’s why customer-led KPIs aren’t just about measuring when someone becomes a “customer” — they’re about measuring the critical customer outcomes that lead to high retention. To do that, you must focus on genuine customer value: getting them from their first moment of value to value realization, continued value and beyond. So, how do you define your own customer-led KPIs? You need to kn...
If you’re measuring everything, you’re measuring nothing. It’s so important for you to pick a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your team to focus on — or they won’t end up moving the needle on anything. But how do you pick KPIs that matter, so you can motivate and incentivize your team to drive customer value (and ultimately, growth)? Instead of transactional measures of success, focus on customer-focused KPIs that let you measure moments of value. You need to know which parts...
Not all customers are created equal.Increasing conversions with the right message to the right person at the right time is a pipe dream for most teams. The problem is that you haven't figured out how to meaningfully segment your customers to do it yet.We got you. In this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Claire and Georgiana deep dive into the de facto segmentation tools that have so many teams tripping over themselves – Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), Personas & Jobs-to-be-Done (J...
You operate in a crowded market. How are you going to stand out? That's what Claire and Georgiana discuss on this week's episode of the Forget The Funnel podcast.Differentiation is essential in helping cut through the noise and bring in more best-fit customers. Yet, many SaaS companies try to compete by obsessing over their competitors' strategies and messaging. We can tell you from experience… it never works. Drawing on real-world examples from their work with "landscaping.io" and "hiring.io...
The numbers are in: SaaS growth is flat or down. Cost to acquire customers is up.Global startup investment over the last twelve months reached $285 billion — a 38% decline year over year, according to Crunchbase*. Gone are the days of ‘move fast and break things’. SaaS leaders are being forced to think about efficiency or risk running out of runway.And we think this is a really good thing.Why?Finally, rather than spending more on the ‘top of the funnel’, founders are looking more closel...
On this episode, Georgiana and Claire are joined by Steve De Jong and Diego Richards, the CEO and CCO of Stillio, who started working with Forget The Funnel earlier this year. Steve and Diego share their journey from blindly experimenting with marketing tactics and dangerously slow growth to a renewed sense of optimism for the future. With a new understanding of their amazing customers, they learned that growth doesn’t have to come from spending more on top-of-funnel marketing. We unpack the ...
In this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Georgiana and Claire discuss what happens when SaaS businesses prioritize customer research but screw it up, and how this can lead to perpetuating the vicious cycle of resistance to research in the first place. They dig into why this happens, from misaligned goals between teams, wasting time with research that isn’t actionable, and why looking to win/loss analysis, big quantitative surveys or even UX research to guide product and marketing dec...
On this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Georgiana & Claire are joined by Dan Stuart, President of EverCommerce companies Invoice Simple & Joist. Dan shares the moment he realized that the data his team relied on to make growth decisions about their 400,000 customers wasn't helping them make real progress, the importance of continually validating core beliefs about your product, and the advice he would give to other SaaS leaders to get out of their own way and capture bu...
In this episode of the Forget the Funnel Podcast, Georgiana and Claire sit down to discuss the consequences of not understanding what really matters to your customers and how product and marketing teams find themselves in this situation way too often. They talk about the signals that show your team has less insight than they need to make good decisions and how you, as a team leader or founder, may be making the problem worse. Finally, they share a real-world story of a customer who ...