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What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.
Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.
With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.
"I would wager that there is something even deeper and that there is a context in which your members are living that would be wildly valuable for you to understand. And if you have a couple of conversations, even 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe 10 conversations with different members, and you run Jobs to be Done style research with them and style interviews with them, I would wager that after those 10 even probably 5 conversations, but ideally, you would get a little bit more than that, you will start to see the patterns emerge in those conversations.” - Georgiana Laudi
Joe Casabona: I remember touring the Murano glass factory on our honeymoon in Italy. Basically, as soon as we stepped foot in the place, the man giving us the tour had us pegged. He knew that we were newlyweds. He knew we were on our honeymoon. He knew that we were jet-lagged and filled with glee. So when it came time to sell us something, he didn't just ask if we wanted to buy some glass art. He painted a picture of a unique conversation piece that we could put in our home to help us remember the time at the beginning of our marriage. Something that we could turn into a family heirloom when we had kids and grandkids. He wasn't selling us glass. He was selling us a vision of our future, and it worked like gangbusters. I said to my wife, I know what he's doing and it's going to work anyway.
So how can we do that for our customers? That's what Georgiana Laudi is here to talk to us about. She is the co-author of Forget the Funnel, a book that had a profound effect on my business. And today, we're talking all about Jobs to be Done, research, and capturing the voice of our customers.
Look for these top takeaways.
1. Understand the Jobs to be Done. Customers aren't buying products themselves, but rather the solutions the products offer. Identify the specific jobs your product or service helps customers accomplish.
2. Capture the voice of the customer. Conduct customer interviews to capture actual language and patterns from customer conversations.
3. And finally, do continuous customer research. Regularly conduct foundational research. Gia recommends every 6 to 12 months and ensures it's continually validated based on industry shifts.
I loved this conversation. And while there's no pro show this time because we talked for the entire time and I thought it was great for everybody, There will be a bonus episode about the profound effect the book Forget the Funnel had on my business. So if you wanna get that bonus episode and every episode ad-free, you can sign up over at [howibuilt.it/join]. But for now, let's get to the intro and then the interview.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without spending too much time on it. I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and each week, I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It's like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs.
By the end of each episode, you'll have 1-3 takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.
All right. I am here with Georgiana Laudi. She is a Strategic Adviser and speaker and author of one of my favorite business books of the past year, Forget the Funnel. Gia, how are you today?
Georgiana Laudi: I am awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for being here. We got to meet in real life in Cabo Press. I'm contractually obligated to mention Cabo Press because Chris, is a good friend of mine, anytime I have a guest on there. So it was great meeting you in person. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Georgiana Laudi: I'm so happy to be here.
Joe Casabona: So I'm gonna set the stage a little bit for our listeners because your book, Forget the Funnel, fundamentally changed the direction of my business in a very good way. Because I was one of those people who I just kinda, like, did what I thought, like, you know, I ran my business on gut feeling, and that somehow worked in Web Development. I don't know. People just needed websites, and I was good at making websites. And, like, for coaching and messaging and, like, changing my niche didn't work so much anymore.
So those who have been long-time listeners know that when I first got into podcast coaching, my whole thing was like, I'll help you make money with sponsors. I'll help you make your first $10,000. I'll help you launch your podcast. None of that messaging resonated.
And so, yeah, that's everybody says that and also, like, nah. Like, there were companies who were like, well, we spend $10,000 a month on our podcast. Right? And so after your book, I was like, maybe I should talk to people about what their problems are. And there was this one crystallizing question, like, I was doing, like, webinars and inviting people who attended my webinars to learn more about them and people in my mailing list to learn more about them. And one question I got from somebody who attended my webinar was, how do you run 3 podcasts and also have 3 kids? And I'm like, this is good. Let's talk more about that.
And so I use that as a jumping-off point. I talk to more people about it, and, yeah, a thing that kept coming up was I spend too much time on my podcast. That's why I'm inconsistent, or that's why I haven't done it, or that's why I'm putting it on the back burner. And so I thought I could save you, like, 12 hours a week on your podcast. That messaging has so far in the very young 2024, it really started resonating with people like end of last year, but it looks like 2024 is gonna be a very good year for me because of that messaging. So I wanna thank you for the for your book. It was awesome.
Georgiana Laudi: This story makes me so happy. I love it. I love it.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. So today, I wanted to talk about something that I've kind of heard a lot about from your book and then subsequently from other people. Caitlin Portia. Oh my gosh. I should have checked. Burgoyne. That's it. Yes. Talks about it a bit. But, you have a chapter on Jobs to be Done. So maybe we could start here with what is Jobs to be Done? I know that feels grammatically incoherent. What are Jobs to be Done?
Georgiana Laudi: What are Jobs to be Done?
Joe Casabona: What are Jobs to be Done? Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. So I just wanna say off the bat, I definitely do not feel like the most qualified person to define Jobs to be Done in general. Part of the reason why I say that is that there are many people in my, like network and in my sphere that are much more familiar with the Jobs to be Done methodology and Jobs to be Done approach, but I will absolutely do my best.
One of the folks in that sphere is one of the co-architects of the Jobs to be Done methodology, Bob on himself, and Caitlin as well. I think Caitlin, Bergwijn, she had a, she might have done a podcast episode with Bob about Jobs to be Done that I'm sure was excellent. I can't remember the exact moment when it was, but it basically, the the idea is that your customer is not buying your product or your service. They're buying what your product or your service can help them accomplish. It's kind of akin to, you know, your customer isn't buying a nail. They're buying the hole. Right? Or the, I can't remember exactly what it is. It's like the screwdriver, this hole with the screwdriver helps you make.
Joe Casabona: They're not buying the thing the tools build. Right?
Georgiana Laudi: Like, they're…
Joe Casabona: buying, like, you know, they're not buying the house. They're buying a place to live or whatever. Right? Like
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. So there was also this visual representation before I even knew of Jobs to be Done.
There's this visual representation of, and I don't know if you've ever seen this, like, the Super Mario and then the Super Mario that, like, gets the flower, and then it's the Super Mario that turns into I don't know any of the namings on this, but it was, this I wanna say I'm trying to remember the name of the company that originally came up with this visual, I'm failing to remember it at this moment, but it's kind of this idea. Right? They're buying a better version of themselves. They're buying what your product or solution allows them to do. Part of the approach of Jobs to be Done and why it's so valuable, and it was a complete game changer when I learned about it, and I know when my cofounder Claire learned about it, was this ability to ask a series of questions which would give us insight into what was going on in their world that led them to seek out a new solution to decide that I can't go on like this anymore.
I've gotta try something new. What was it about our product or our solution that convinced them to give us a try? What did that buying decision look like? What was involved there? What were their anxieties, deal breakers? What motivated them to make that decision and move forward? And then similarly, you know, what is it that they're able to do now that they weren't able to do before? That's often described as like this better life.
So what I just described is kind of like this documentary of how your customers first feel a need for your product or solution, go about finding that solution, like, what kind of research do they do? Who do they talk to? What are the watering holes they gather in? You know? What are the forces of influence in their life in that in that time, all the way through to making a decision to choose you, all the way through to adopting your solution and eventually achieving that better life and that desired outcome.
When we work with recurring revenue businesses, like SaaS businesses, we often also talk about like, now that you achieved your initial desired outcome, and you can accomplish what you hired this product or solution for, what is the next thing that you wanna solve? But that's a bit of a power-up. Like, that's like the 201. But at its essence, it's really understanding not why like it, you're not asking questions like, why did you do this, or did you like, you know, this feature more than that feature, or you're not asking for, like, conjecture. You're asking questions that are easy for your customers to answer and basically just let you know, like, what actually happened so that you can draw and see the patterns between these different conversations that you have with your customers. because when patterns emerge, that tells you, oh, there's something there. And what may have happened in your situation is, like, you heard that one person mention, I just don't know how you do 3 podcasts with 3 kids. There was very likely other sort of you probably heard that in essence in other places, and then you did some pattern matching to be like, oh, there's something here.
And so that's essentially what you do with those conversations is you identify the patterns across your customers, and then you make a decision about do we need to reposition around this way of positioning our or a value proposition. Is there a way we should change our offering to better address customers' needs? Even, you know, positioning and messaging is kind of table stakes like that would change generally out of this type of work, but sometimes also the direction that you take your service or your product in can also change.
So I kind, I'm answering in this, like, kind of high-level way. I would highly encourage anybody who's interested in Jobs to be Done to pursue it further. I would consider forget the funnel, like, a bit of it, like, a primer, and maybe enough to be dangerous. But if you, like, really wanna geek out on it, I would really encourage checking out, like, demand side sales, which Bob Mesta wrote. The rewired group does a lot of Jobs to be Done work especially for, like, high-tech and just geeking out on the Internet, on the plethora of resources there are about Jobs to be Done.
Joe Casabona: I love that. But this is really good. Right? Because, like, I feel like this is a lot of I feel right now, but I've been a freelancer /solopreneur since high school. And it wasn't until a few years ago when I had, like, real stakes, like, I was out of school and had, like, a mortgage and a family to support, that I really thought about how I got business, and, like, most of it was word-of-mouth. It felt very, like, field of dreams either. Like, I just built it and people came. Right? And, like, that's not really the way to build a business and scale it and, you know, make it something that
Georgiana Laudi: Certainly not the way to scale it. But
Joe Casabona: Right. It's certainly not the way to scale it. Yeah. Right? Because, like, you only know so many people and you don't really you know, I can build a website for anybody. Right? But and the path I took last year, again, like, thanks to your book was I had this realization that every podcast hosting platform has a how-to start a podcast guide. Right? It ranks super well on Google, and at the end, they're gonna be like, so start your podcast with us. And so that didn't feel like a good way for me to I'll just help you launch your podcast, like, that's, like, I can do most of that for free.
Or how to make money with your podcast, like, that's a question that everybody answers, and, like, the root of it is not really getting sponsors. It's like growing your podcast in such a way that you're positioned to make money, but the save time thing that really does get to the root of a problem, which is, like, what's your pain? I never have time to make an episode. Right? It's always, like, Sunday night, and I gotta publish Monday morning, and now I'm stressed. And what is leading you to fix that? Well, I really like doing the podcast, but, I don't feel like I have time to do the podcast. Right? And so this framework is really good.
And I wanna touch on something else you said in your book because I think this is really important. Open-ended questions are the only way to gather real words and phrases your customers naturally use. Right? Because my friend, Becky Pearson Davidson, came on the show last year, and we touched on this a bit too. We talked about scrappy research and why, like, would you buy this is maybe the worst question ever to ask.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah.
Joe Casabona: So you touched on some of the questions, but how do we make sure I'm, like, jumping a little bit to act 3 here, like, to the third part of our interview. But since we're on the topic a little bit, like, how can we start thinking about the, like, open-ended questions to figure out, like, what the Jobs to be Done are?
Georgiana Laudi: Oh, boy. So I'm really glad that you mentioned that open-ended questions, but also the additional reason why they're valuable, which is the actual voice of the customer.
So there are multiple reasons why asking open-ended questions is really valuable. One is you're not inadvertently injecting yourself into the answer in any way. And by the way, asking open-ended questions takes practice. It's an art.
Actually, I'm not sure when this episode will roll out, but we just recorded and launched a podcast rolled out today about the art of interviewing and how to ask those open-ended questions and how not to mess up your interviews because they are easy to mess up. But part of that advantage is that you don't want to inject yourself. Right? You don't want to inject your solution or your product. You don't want to inadvertently influence their answer. Because you genuinely want to know just what happened. Tell me the steps that happened. When this occurred, what happened next? What else is there to tell me about this very open-ended, leaving yourself out of it as much as possible.
The other massive advantage to asking open-ended questions is that you capture amazing voice of customer. What I mean by voice of customer is, like, actual quotes. So you have this conversation. It's obviously recorded. You take that recording. You transcribe that recording, and all of a sudden, you've got these amazing direct quotes that come right out of your customers' mouths that when we work with companies, we put together what's called the voice of customer brief. And so when we parse the interviews, we basically organize the findings from that interview into these themes.
The themes are like previous solutions, like, what were they struggling with before? And one of the themes is, like, the trigger moment that led them to seek out a solution, differentiators, anxieties, all these themes, and we organize the voice of customers from those interviews into this voice of customer brief all through the lens of these themes. And all of a sudden, you've got this document that is, like, just marketing gold. And it makes me so happy when the companies that we work with are, like, eyes just, like, wide on these documents because they're like, woah. There's so much in here.
We worked with Bitly and the CMO of Bitly, Tara Robertson. She was on the podcast and she was like, I live in the voice of a customer brief. She's like, I'm in there all the time because it's just, it's such a great way to stay close to your customers. What actually matters to them, but also for crafting, marketing and messaging and materials for your website, your value propositions, your benefits statements, your problem statements, your product pages, your service offering pages, your pricing pages, email flows, like, all of these marketing materials, your ad copy, you know, your blog copy. All if you just lived in that document for a couple of weeks and, like, we often do is we'll go through that document, and we'll be like, okay. Blog content, highlight in pink. And we just, like, just ideas of, like, blog posts that we should be writing. Okay. For, like, for, you know, the product onboarding because we work with a lot of SaaS companies. We'll, like, highlight others, like, okay, here's the anxieties that we wanna make sure is tied to, like, this part of the specific product that answers that, and we kind of mark it up in a way that makes it really, really actionable.
So, the voice of the customer, the asking open-ended questions is wildly important for understanding what’s actually going on so you're not injecting yourself ,but also one of the amazing outputs of these conversations is that voice of customer that turns into all those things that I'm describing.
So there's a lot of reasons to get good at interviewing and they're all really beneficial. So I would highly recommend it to everybody.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, before I follow up on that, what is the name of your podcast?
Georgiana Laudi: It's called Forget the Funnel.
Joe Casabona: Forget the Funnel. Great.
Georgiana Laudi: We're not super creative when it comes to naming.
Joe Casabona: But, hey, clear over clever. Right? Like…
Georgiana Laudi: Right. Yes. Yes. I've learned that lesson many, many times. Yeah. It's called Forget the Funnel. We have, I mean, obviously, we're on, like, Apple and Spotify, the usual suspects, but we also rolled it out with a YouTube channel. So we now have, like, videos at a company because our audience has over the years become accustomed to video content. So we also are doing that over on YouTube. It's fun.
Joe Casabona: Nice. Well, Forget the Funnel wherever you listen to podcasts. I will link to it in the show notes as well. Everything we're talking about, yeah. The book and the other books and any links that we talked about, they'll be in the show notes over at [howibuilt.it/412]. So that's the episode number 412.
So, okay. You get the voice of the customer. This is really important for a number of reasons that like you just said, but you're also using the right language. Right? Like, as a programmer, when I was a programmer at least, like, I would read landing pages for plugins that was like, we used React with JavaScript, and I'm like, no one cares. No one cares what you used to build your tool.
Georgiana Laudi: Oh, boy. Is that ever real? It happens everywhere. And there's this analogy of, like, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar. And that is true no matter what. When you're so close to your solution, you think people care about the types of things that you have to care about because you were so close to the building process. And often, we make a lot of assumptions about, I mean, there's the high level assumptions we make about why people make the decisions that they make, and then there's the more granular assumptions we make about, like the language that they use. So, yes, thank you for bringing it back to that voice of customer.
Reflecting your customers' language back to them, wildly effective. If that is a topic that interests you, I would highly recommend checking out, like, Joanna Wiebe's work.
Joe Casabona: Yes.
Georgiana Laudi: Copyhackers. She's the best. Yeah. She is the best. There's lots of content that she has written about, like, swiping your voice of customer and the VOC brief. Like, that's a VOC brief is our favorite way to do that after we've parsed interviews because, again, you're sort of, why would you use your language? Why would you try to come up with something from scratch when your customers literally gave you the answers? It's right over here in your transcripts. So you don't have to be a writer. I think that's kind of how Joe positions it. Like, you don't have to be a writer. You just have to be good at taking what your customers say and reflecting it back to them.
Joe Casabona: I love that. And so I wanna get into, I think, this big question that probably a lot of people think of because they are really close to their product. But before we do that, I do want to take a quick break for our sponsors.
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Joe Casabona: And we're back. Okay, Gia. So, you know, we're doing a lot of research. We're figuring out what other people want. Why can't I just build the thing that I want to build because I am a user. Right? I'm the user of it, and so I'll know exactly what I want.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Well, the answer is you can. You can for a time. So I guess maybe the example that I'll use because it's the one that I see the most, is founders of companies. I guess it doesn't really matter what kind of company at this point, but what I've got in my mind's eye is like a software product or, you know, somebody who's selling a product. Founders of companies generally found companies, found products, and build products because they experience a need themselves, or they see a need, or they yeah, they identify a need that they think that they can address generally. Right? It's not just like on a whim.
Most founders start a business because they think there's a market for it or because they've seen signals that there's a market for it. And, generally, that type of intuition can work in the early days. You get direct feedback. You're talking to your customers or your clients all the time. You maybe are your customer. You may be working in house and, you know, experience this thing, and then you decide you wanna build a solution for it, and you are your first customer and your first user of your product. That happens a lot where you end up getting into trouble is when you sort of stop there in your learning.
So customer development, pretty well any I mean, I'll speak for the industries that I know best, which is like in the product space, product developers and product people are very good at doing customer development level research. They know that in order to build a product from, like, from the ground up from 0 to 1, you need some inputs. And so, generally, teams and founders are pretty good at that where we run into trouble is when we try to scale it, and we try to move beyond that initial set of, sort of, like, early adopter customers, beyond that initial set of customers that we have maybe direct relationships with, and we try to go out into the market and get more customers and try to scale it up. We hire people, right? All of a sudden, there's other people writing our marketing material for us or building our product with us, or other people selling our product or producing marketing and content and all kinds of things.
The other thing that happens is that the product evolves undoubtedly. And then the other thing that happens and these are all big. Right? Everything that I'm pitching is huge. Like, your team changes, so it's not just you producing the material anymore. Your product changes. So, like, the very value that it provides to your customers changes. Your customer evolves because the customer evolves, right? Other products and services and options become available on the market, the competitive landscape changes over time. And then there's, like, the market forces, which is very real right now, which is like economic shifts. I mean, think of what COVID did to a plethora of businesses. Some, it exploded their business. Others, it crashed them, and that's because the dynamic in which somebody was making a purchase decision or thinking about that use case for that product completely shifted and that shift happened almost overnight with COVID, but it also happens over time all the time. So the economy, you know, people's budgets change, new technologies come on the market, new competitors come on the market, people on your team leave. Right? Like, this knowledge about your industry sometimes walks out the door.
And so because all of those things shift and change, relying on intuition and relying on you as being the sole sort of holder and keeper of all that knowledge just isn't realistic, and it also scales over time. So you're much, much better off running a type of customer research that, like, if you're, if you've been in the market for a little while and you've got some traction and you have some happy customers, yesterday was the time to do this research to get that if you again, like, if it hasn't been done in 6 months, let's say, it's probably time just because of how quickly the market is shifting right now and technology as well. Right? Like, I mean, just think about how AI is disrupting things and inevitably going to disrupt a lot of, like, technology companies. This type of research needs to be done, I would say, depending on your industry every 6 months to a year. And then once you've done that foundational type of research, like the one that you were describing, you should be constantly validating it again, probably every, like, every 6 months, every year, depending on the industry that you're in. So foundational understanding, what is it that we do for our customers? What is the value that we provide to their lives? What is the context in which they make these decisions and experience this need for a solution like ours, getting that foundational understanding, we use Jobs to be Done, right? If you have those identified Jobs to be Done in your customer market, I can talk about tons of examples of companies that we've worked with where we identify like 2 or 3 different Jobs to be Done within their customer base that are all viable. So you have these Jobs to be Done that you move forward with.
Again, depending on your industry, you should probably do it again within, like, 6 months. There might be one that shifts a little bit more quickly, but you should always be sort of revalidating because, again, the team changes, the product changes, the market changes, too many things. You can't rely on yourself if you want a team to help you scale this thing. You gotta get it out of your head. You gotta put it in a format where your team can leverage it and build upon it and constantly validate it.
Joe Casabona: I love that. And I wanna touch on, like, the text ad a little bit before moving on to a pretty recent example for me of kind of crashing and failing, and somebody I think you helped do the opposite. You know, I have in our notes here, like, dogfooding your product. This is a term I first heard from 37signals basecamp, whatever they're called now, but it dates back even further than that. But I feel like at least my generation of Web Developer or Founder maybe was really shaped by them. Right? Because they're like, we built this thing for us, and we say no all the time, and it's only if we need it, and we are way smarter than everybody else. That was editorializing, but it's also true. And so, like, hearing you talk about this is good and really important because maybe, like, there was a time in the 2000, maybe, like, the early 10, 2010’s where, like, you could get away with that.
And I have, like, dozens of stories from the back catalog when I talk to WordPress people about, like, well, I needed this WordPress plugin and I built it and then I sold it, and now I have a business.
And let me know if you agree or disagree with this. I think we'll be like, in 2024, we are well beyond that now. I don't think that works as well anymore.
Georgiana Laudi: So, I mean, I can tell you what I have seen and experienced in the SaaS space specifically because, I mean, that's an industry that completely shifted over the past 20 years. So it would be completely erroneous to say that SaaS started in the 2010s. I mean, if we think about, you know, Salesforce and whatever, mostly what I'm talking about there, by the way, just to clarify is, like software that lives in the cloud versus, like on-prem type of stuff because, yeah. On-prem software was designed more for specific use cases and designed for inside of companies, and it was then maintained inside of companies versus cloud software, which is, like, more of a one to many often in a one to many model. And that SaaS exploded in the last 10 years
So I happen to know MarTech quite well and MarTech since I can't remember when he first did this. So Scott Brinker did this like MarTech landscape, so marketing technology landscape. I think he started it in 2010, somewhere around there.
The MarTech industry alone, that is a subset of SaaS, has grown over 7,000%. I believe it's like 8,000 percent in the past 12 years. Like, think about the software companies that launched 10 years ago versus what they are currently dealing with. And I'm saying 10 years, but it's all relative, right? Like, even if you launched 2 years ago, the market looks completely different. Your competitive landscape looks completely different. I mean, we know the market looks different than 2 years ago, but the competitive set is different. The way your customers is making decisions now is different. So you could get away with, like, build it and they will come a little bit more 10, 15 years ago.
Even, yeah. I'll say yeah. Maybe we're talking about like the 2010th, maybe. And that's generous because even then it started to become a little a lot more competitive. I mean, that's when the landscape started to be, that's when people started counting. It was, like, around 2010, 2012, people started counting. Oh, SaaS. It's really blowing up over here, and they started counting the landscape growing. So that's when you knew it was starting to explode.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean, the same could be said of podcasting. Right? Like
Georgiana Laudi: Oh my god.
Joe Casabona: The way that I launched my podcast in well, the one I launched in 2012 was just like a, it was just like dudes talking, like every podcast. Right?
Georgiana Laudi: It's podcasting.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. But, in 2016. Right? Even though, like, the way I launched in the format then, like, this show has evolved especially over the last year. Right? Like, as podcast tech got easier, right, and more people could do it more cheaply, you need to differentiate in some way.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. There's a lot of parallels actually. It's interesting with pod. I went to a pod.camp in, I wanna say it was 2010, and it was an in-person event. And I remember this guy being on, like, a panel, and he was like, everybody's doing podcasts now. This is 2010 or and and he was, like, oh, you know, back in, like 2007 when it was new. And like, we're 2024, and we're still having the same
Joe Casabona: Same conversations.
Georgiana Laudi: Same thing as like SEO is dead, email is dead, podcast is dead. Like It's all the, we're on we're on repeat a little bit.
Joe Casabona: That's so funny. Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi: It's embarrassing.
Joe Casabona: It’s, if I haven't seen it, it's new to me. Right? Like, that's like the
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Joe Casabona: So, I teased this a little bit. Right? But a couple of weeks ago, as we record this, I put out an episode called Why I killed My Membership. Right? It was like a, it was something that every solopreneur and creator was told they had to do in 2019, 2020. And I was like, yeah. Obviously, I want a membership. Like, people just paying me to, like, create, like, amazing. I would love that. And finally, like one of my, like I'm in a mastermind group, and they're like, “Joe, how often do you think about your membership, and how many members are in it?” And I'm like, “Probably, like, 10, 13 in a good month.” And they're like, it sounds like you're thinking too much about this. Like, maybe you should kill it. And I'm like, yes. You are right. And it's fundamentally because I didn't understand what my members, what potential members would want. Right? Oh, ad-free. Right? The only negative comments I have on Apple Podcasts is the too many ads, so we'll make it ad-free. Right? It'll be great. And there'll be an extended episode, and it'll be great. Right? And these are the things that, like, huge podcasts do because when they sell it for $5 a month to 10,000 people, they're actually making money, like real money versus me selling it at $5 a month to 10 people and barely covering the cost of my podcast hosting platform.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Talking about missing the forest for the trees. Right? Like we get,so we think a lot about the how and not the fundamental, like, why.
Joe Casabona: Oh, man.
Georgiana Laudi: Why are we doing this for these people? Why would anybody care? What's in it for them? It's funny. We actually also prefer the term sunset. By the way, I also prefer the term, drinking your own champagne to dogfooding. We use drinking your own champagne.
Joe Casabona: I like that. Because
Georgiana Laudi: Because gross.
Joe Casabona: Because gross. Right? No one actually eats no person. Well, I shouldn't say no person, but…
Georgiana Laudi: You never know. But we drink our own champagne. Yes. We also sunsetted our community and membership where we were doing. I don't wanna say some something similar because I don't know that much about what your membership was. But it was mostly because we were spread too thin, and we didn't invest the time in scaling it because we were spread too thin. But, yeah, I think you were gonna probably allude to this at some point, but we, it's a very popular thing to do.
And if you are the type of business that has, like, you know, training material and membership, and you've got this sort of you're running a recurring revenue business,at the end of the day it's not SaaS. It's not software, necessarily. You know, it might not be what's that, with,like Birchbox or like subscription box service. Right? Might not. But it's still a recurring revenue business where a lifetime value, the lifetime value that you provide to your customers is the name of the game of your business. That's the business that you are in. You are not any transactional business. It's not just about getting that initial purchase. It's about providing value, continuous value over time. That is true of software as a service businesses just as it is true of membership businesses and other types of recurring revenue models, whether e-commerce or otherwise.
So it's the same goes for if that's your situation. If you have happily paying members in your community that are getting a ton of value, and then you've got this other set of customers that are, like, they fall out. They start, they're not engaged anymore. A little you know, they are a little bit of beginning, and then they sort of fall out of engagement.
And getting new members in the front door feels like harder than it should be. If that is your situation, then those members that are getting a ton of value out of your offering today are your lifeline. Those are the customers that you need to talk to. Like, what was going on in your world? Like, all the stuff that I was saying before. Right? Like, what was going on? Where were you? How did this occur that you felt the need for something like this? What was it that convinced you? And probably the most importantly in this situation is, like, what is the value that you truly get? Now I know what everybody's thinking, which is like, oh, it's a membership. It's gonna be like the community. Like, come for the content, stay for the community. That's what every membership is sort of you know, that's the sort of through line of a lot of these communities.
I would wager that there is something even deeper and that there is a context in which your members are living that would be wildly valuable for you to understand. And if you have a couple of conversations, even 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe 10 conversations with different members, and you run Jobs to be Done style research with them and style interviews with them, I would wager that after those 10 even probably 5 conversations, but ideally, you would get a little bit more than that, you will start to see the patterns emerge in those conversations.
The connection, the pattern that you started to see was that actually it's like they're often parents or caretakers of others that are wildly passionate about their content and, you know, what they're doing, but are struggling to balance, find balance in their lives. And the thing that will always take the hit is never gonna be the person like, the people that they're caretaking for, it's gonna be the podcast. And so that even just having context similar to that about your members, whatever your situation is, would be wildly valuable to understand. Because then you can capture that voice of the customer or, you know, reflect it back to them.
And I'm kind of skipping over the, like understand the foundational Jobs to be Done, the foundational job that your members are hiring, I'll say, community or business solution product for it doesn't actually matter. This is actually why we love Jobs to be Done because it can be applied across any one of these. If it's true if you have a business, it is wildly valuable and critical if you run a recurring revenue business. You have to understand what that job to be done is. You have to understand what that continued value is that you deliver to them, what that better life is, and how that better life delivers continuous value to them as they make the decision to repurchase every month or every year that has to be clear, or you're not in business. And also marketing becomes so much more straightforward and easy if you have that context that they're making that decision in as well, let alone your actual offering that you provide.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. And this is so true. Right? Because I think I got from my members, the people I actually, like why'd you sign up? Like, what problem did I solve? I got, I think, the most, like heartwarming answer, but, like maybe the least helpful, which was, I just really like what you're doing. And I'm like, that's great. And now I need to find what the 1000 people that really like what I'm doing, I guess. And, like, again, like I love that answer because it really…
Georgiana Laudi: But it's not helpful.
Joe Casabona: But it, yeah. But it's not helpful to take it to the next level. Right?
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. The demand side sales actually does a really good job of this. Bob Moesta's, like, I don't know, 2nd book or something, does a really good job of talking about, like how to get below the surface of questions like that. It's so, it's akin to in software, it's always save time, save money. Right? Like, every software is save time, save money.
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi: So if you're on a call and somebody's, well, it save me time. No. That's not enough. Oh, it saves me money. No. That's not enough. There's something deeper there. There's a motivation behind that, that you need to get to, not to tell you conversations again.
Joe Casabona: Right.
Georgiana Laudi: Or maybe you would probably be well served to sort of dig beneath the surface and get more understanding of what's going on in their lives outside of your membership or your offering. More more context.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. And I think another really important thing. Right? And I, you know, we talked about this in the preshow, but this is probably the last interview I'm doing where the show is called How I Built It. There's a real disconnect now between my offering, like, in my podcast business and what I was talking about on this show. Right? Like, this is my biggest platform, easy, and I'm not, like, doing myself any favors by having a membership that's totally disconnected from my podcast offering. Right? And so I think, like, that was part of it too. Right? And so part of it is, like, okay. well, at least I experimented with the membership, so now I can go, like, go back to my clients and students and be, like, here's how, like here's the technical side of how to run one, but, really, like understanding and positioning. Right? Like the sales page for the membership was, here's what you get. Right? Not like, here's how your life will be better. And like, if like there's one thing. Right? Like, I have, like an automations database that was members only. Like, you know, okay, you pay once and then you get that and then you're gone. Right? And so, yeah, I think that that's really helpful to think about.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. I mean, it's hard. Entrepreneurship is hard in every context. But at the end of the day, we all feel much better about what we're doing when we know we're solving a real problem for people we care about. Right? And so you're always going to be best served, serving a customer that you care about helping and deeply understanding how to help them and the value that you're providing in their life. That is always gonna be the most gratifying type of work. And that is true whether or not you're a solo operator or inside of the larger tech companies that we work with. This is also true. Those teams want to feel good about what they're doing every day, that legitimately, they're helping customers get to value as quickly as possible. They're solving a real problem in that person's life. They're delivering value. It's not just about credit cards entered. It's not just about MRR growth, and it's not just about, like weekly active users or monthly active users and logins. It's about actual value being delivered to customers.
So, it's true whether or not you're a solo operator or a team that's building out a customer experiences at scale, deeply understanding why our customers like, what makes our customers tick, the context in which they make decisions, the problem that they're looking to solve, the value that we provide in their life that's always gonna make everything easier. That's gonna grease the wheels on every part of your business.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I love that. I think that's super important. And that's one of the reasons why, again, like, in adjusting kind of, like, my mission statement and my ideal listener avatar or whatever for this show, I finally started saying, like, busy solopreneur parents. Like, I always hesitated. I'm like, what if I alienate? But all of my origin story for this is like, I had a panic attack during the pandemic because I was trying to watch 2 kids at home while my nurse wife was at work. Right? And so, like everything I say, like resonates with parents, and those are the people who I want to help because that's where I'm at. And so with that, like can let's, like take this home and I guess the overarching question is like, how can we be better about finding Jobs to be Done? But like, what are those, like 2 - 3 pieces of actionable advice for someone who's like, yes, I am ready to do this yesterday. Like I needed to do this yesterday. I'm ready to do it yesterday.
Georgiana Laudi: I mean, I would say depending on your situation, as the answer is, it depends. If you are like a solo operator or like a team of 1, I would say if you have happy customers, do a little bit of research on how to run on Jobs to be Done and how to run a Jobs to be Done interview. You can use our book. You can use our workbook. We have, like, questions and stuff in there. Have at it. And so run some customer interviews and have those conversations. Suspend disbelief. Don't ask leading questions. Just have those conversations, make sure they're recorded. And then after a couple of calls, ask yourself if you've actually seen some patterns emerge, get them transcribed, and legitimately look for the patterns across those conversations. And you could have as few as 5 before you start to see those patterns emerge.
If on the other hand you've got a team, and you are looking to sort of like scale out this learning in a more like low touch scalable way where you enable your team, then I would encourage you to probably outsource that research. I'm not saying outsource it to us necessarily, but finding an outside skilled interviewer that knows how to do the outreach to, like a larger segment of customers with a high success rate, like response rate, run those calls in a way that maximizes the benefit of those calls, can synthesize the interviews for you, and bring those insights back to you on a silver platter that will save you a ton of time. I don't say that to the solo operator because you've probably got 1 on 1 direct relationships with all your customers as opposed to if you're in a situation where you've got a couple dozen or a couple 100 or even a couple 1,000 customers, then the type of research, your outreach is gonna be slightly different. And also, you probably wanna move a little bit more quickly and have a little bit more resources to maybe work with an outside researcher to do that research for you and synthesize it for you.
If on the other hand, you're at like a larger tech company, I would definitely say, like call us because we do it in 6 weeks. Like, you will not find a faster way to get this done. But, yeah. That's what I would say is, like, start having those conversations, start pattern matching.
Another thing that you could do is run a survey. That's a low, low barrier thing to do, but they're very qualitative-style surveys. But where do we, where's the resource that I could send to? I guess, really, the book is gonna be the best sort of resource, the book and the workbook. So I think, I believe,well, [forgetthefunnel.com], you can find the book, and then[forgetthefunnel.com/workbook] is where all those, like, templates and interview scripts and survey templates and all that stuff are, which could be a good sort of grab for anybody listening.
Joe Casabona: I love that. And, again, I will have all of that in the show notes which you can find over at [howibuilt.it/412].
Now, I wanna ask you one more question about this. Right? Because you're right, like a solo person. First of all, I love that you said, like, 5-10 conversations because, like, you know, you hear research and you think, oh, man. I've gotta have statistically significant numbers. Right? But, like, you don't, at least not to start. Right?
Now if I am like a solo, well, I am a solo operator. I've heard some thoughts that maybe have somebody else ask the questions anyway because if you do have that personal relationship, you might not get honest feedback.
Georgiana Laudi: I didn't wanna say that because I don't wanna scare anybody away from doing it, but yes. So oftentimes, we have the companies that we work with ask if they can sit in on the calls and, like, yeah, they can sit in on the calls in like situations where there's fewer customers to learn from. So for instance, like with enterprise, some of these companies only have a couple of dozen customers to learn from. And so every interview is like highly, highly important. And so in that situation, you don't wanna jeopardize the interview for anything. And one of the things that can jeopardize the, like candid, I don't wanna call it feedback because you're not asking for feedback. You're asking for them to tell you their story and what your experience was. But in order to get the most candid sort of responses, it can help to have an outsider run those calls. It's like an unbiased sort of third-party advantage.
The other thing is that the margin for error is a lot lower when it's an experienced interviewer. They're gonna ask the right questions. They're gonna know what answers to dig in on, like where to ask the follow-ups versus just like the again, the most recent episode of our podcast goes into all of this in detail, so that's a great reference. You're really looking for that, like documentary, but because Jobs to be Done is the approach that it is and is so documentary like in nature and what you're looking for, you can get away with 5, 6 interviews before you start to see those those patterns. So it doesn't have to be this huge multi-month tens of 1,000 of dollars research project. You can start small. A lot of the time, the teams that we work with did their own small-scale version of the research, and then they wanna sort of level it up and validate. So that happens too. Like, you can always build on it.
Joe Casabona: That's fantastic. Again, like, that's right. It's you're not asking for a huge lift to get some of that information. And, like, I will say, like, I don't know. I'm, like, Italian. I'm from New York. We're very emotional and direct. Like, it doesn't matter who's sitting on the call. Like, if you need real feedback, I'll give it to you. Right? Like, I love you kind of way, but I do get that, like, you know, it's just like when the camera's on, people act differently. Right? It's like it doesn't matter if you say you're gonna act naturally. Like, the fact that other people could be watching this means you're gonna modify your behavior somehow, and so I really like that. I'm really curious. Oh, so this is out now, the Forget the Funnel podcast. I know that, like…
Georgiana Laudi: It's new..
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi: Go easy on me, Joe.
Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh.
Georgiana Laudi: We're new to this. We're new to this.
Joe Casabona: Not at all. Get your reps in is what I tell everybody who's like, how do I get better? Like, just do it. You do it more, and you get a little bit better over time. Right?
Georgiana Laudi: Yes. So same with customer interviews, by the way.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Love it. Love it. So, Gia, this has been absolutely fantastic. Definitely check out Forget the Funnel, the book, the workbook, and the podcast. See, this is easy. Right? Just forget the, just Google Forget the Funnel or find it in the show notes over at [howibuilt.it/412].
Gia, if people wanna learn more about you, is there any place else they should go to find you?
Georgiana Laudi: I mean, I would say probably only LinkedIn. I'm trying to be as active as I possibly can be. I gave up on Twitter, unfortunately, after a very, very long time
Joe Casabona: Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi: On my beloved Twitter. So it's mostly LinkedIn that I'm hanging out on right now. Yeah.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link that in the show notes as well. And I will share that with you. I was like I joined Twitter on April Fools' Day 2007, and I know that because I'm like, was I the fool for joining? But, like, it's I miss…
Georgiana Laudi: I wasn't that far behind you. I was 2008.
Joe Casabona: Nice. Nice. That was like, pre Oprah. Right? Like, it blew up after Oprah.
Georgiana Laudi: I mean, I owe my early career to Twitter. It complete, I mean, I was doing marketing before Twitter, but my, like business, my consultancy, my freelance, my, like getting out of the traditional businesses, working for my family business, actually, my family's business. That was my Twitter, was my, like, I'm very appreciative. I have a warm place in my heart for the Twitter that was.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. and, like, I mean, going back to what we're talking about. Right? Like, the things that worked in, like, the 2010’s, late, Yeah. The late aughts. Like, I could tweet, “Hey. I need a sponsor for next month for my podcast.”
Georgiana Laudi: Yes.
Joe Casabona: And like, I'd have a sponsor. Right? Like, you can't. I can't do that anymore on Twitter.
Georgiana Laudi: Oh, yeah.
Joe Casabona: So I gotta say something that's like inflammatorily wrong and then backpedal it. Like, that's how you Twitter now, and I can't do that.
Georgiana Laudi: Or the what you have to do now, what businesses have to do now is get really, really crystal clear on who your customer is and how the language that you use and your positioning and like, the job that your customers hire you to solve and really know your customers really, really well, that is the unfair advantage right now.
Joe Casabona: I like that. All the more reason to really understand them. Right? And the last point, like, got distracted with, like looking up the episode. But the last thing I wanted to say about that, right, only needing, like, you know, 5 to 10. The idea here is that, hopefully, you've at least niched down enough that you don't have a bunch of different avatars. Right? Like, I'm not talking to, like the stay-at-home dad and the 20-year-old Computer Science whatever.
Georgiana Laudi: Actually, to that, I disagree. That, I would challenge.
Joe Casabona: Oh, alright.
Georgiana Laudi: Because a lot of, yeah. We should've talked about this before. A lot of, like, horizontal type of products, for example, like, you know, if you think of products like Typeform or Bitly is now very sort of horizontal. Right? There's lots of use cases, lots across, lots of different profiles of people or different avatars as you were referring to them. Jobs to be Done is perfect because this is the example that we often pull from. It's like King Charles versus Ozzy Osbourne. Profiles are completely, like they're identical, Right. But they're very different individuals, but they're exactly the same. Right? They live in the same place. They drive the same cars. They have dogs. They're divorce. They live just out of London. Blah blah blah. Like, they're identical. I think they have, like, almost close to the same birthday.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. I saw that. I saw that meme. I thought it was really funny.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And profile. You may be in a scenario where you've got a stay-at-home dad and an executive, you know, woman in her fifties, and they have the same job to be done.
Joe Casabona: Mhmm.
Georgiana Laudi: And they use the same like, ideally, they use a similar type of language to talk about their job to be done. Like, it depends on what you are offering. You may be in a verticalized, a more verticalized and more persona-based situation or you may be in a situation where like, Jobs to be Done actually would serve you a lot better.
Actually, there's also a LinkedIn article that was, we did a podcast about personas versus ICP versus Jobs to be Done. We did a podcast episode on that, and there's also an article on LinkedIn about that, like, where you would use one over the other. Yeah. You might not need all of them. You might be able to skip the personas and go right to Jobs to be Done because you've got a horizontal type of offering.
Joe Casabona: I love that. We just like, kinda like Lord of the Rings to them a little bit. Like, we started to end and then we brought them back for like, a little extra. Right? I love that.
Georgiana Laudi: Just when you thought you were in.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. This is like Frodo, like, waking up. Right? And then, like, Sam looking weird and all happy and everybody's in white somehow. So but I'm really glad that you brought that up because we do think of, like, oh, yes. My ideal customer is a 35-year-old dad with 2 kids. Right?
Georgiana Laudi: Not necessarily. Yeah. It might be. It might be. It's like and for you, Joe, like, that could be really pertinent to how you frame your offering and what you do with your offering and how you articulated in your messaging strategy, but it doesn't necessarily mean it might not apply to every scenario where your offering actually addresses lots of use cases across a lot of industries or verticals, but it's a very specific there's like the depth and the breadth. Right? And like, there's crosshairs there, and often Jobs to be Done can find those crosshairs.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Right. It's like Canva. Right? Like I use Canva, and then my college kids use Canva. That's a good example. We're like in different stages of life, but we both can't use Photoshop probably. And that's why we went to Canva because it's easier. Right? Like…
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. Exactly. But you can have very different profiles. Or actually, I know they do have very different profiles of people that use their tool for tons of things. So Jobs to be Done has an unfair advantage, especially in situations like that.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I love that. Great place to end, I think. Georgiana Laudi, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Georgiana Laudi: Yeah. This was super fun, Joe. Thanks for having me.
Joe Casabona: And thank you for listening. Thanks to our sponsors.
And until next time. Get out there and build something.