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

**Georgiana Laudi** (0:00)
The problem with funnels and pirate metrics and them 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 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, about 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 to a funnel. And then probably particularly relevant for SaaS companies is that recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending an 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:04)
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 Laudi. 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 and opportunities, often doubling or tripling conversion and 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.

**John Cutler** (2:10)
Hey Lenny, excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:11)
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?

**John Cutler** (2:23)
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 to us.
So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach and send data to other destinations. Experiment in CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:44)
And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?

**John Cutler** (2:48)
Yeah, so Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups.
There's never been a more important time for growth.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:57)
Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.
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