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

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 MicroConf multiple times, she’s been on MicroConf On Air, and you actually spoke at MicroConf Remote, what, about six, eight months ago.
So the subtitle of Forget the Funnel is A Customer-Led Approach for Driving Predictable Recurring Revenue. And the first thing I noticed about the book, as I normally do is, man, this is amazingly short. I love 150, 200 page books. When I pick up a book, a business book that is 400 pages, 450, I’m instantly like, “This is bull,” like some ghost writer pulled a bunch of anecdotes about Microsoft and Intuit from the ’80s to pad it so it looks big on it. And when I see Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, when I see Forget the Funnel, 150, or my own books, I was telling you offline, 200 pages is about where I stop. And if I need more than that, I’m going to write a separate book. So I’m curious if that was an intentional decision on your part.

Gia Laudi:
100%. I definitely took a page, so to speak, from April there. I remember hearing her talk about having a bunch of coffee chats with founders and they all described how they read books as being on a flight. And so she was like, “Okay, so it’s got to be read in a flight,” and I figured if I can take a lesson from April, which I will take all of them, her goal was to write half a book. And all the fallacies around why does a book need to be 300 or 400 pages or over 30K words, and it’s like all about the spine of the book being wide enough and it’s actually pretty arbitrary.
And so, yeah, we were pretty dedicated to write a short and also useful book. So April, big influence there. Rob Fitzpatrick, as well. I would say between the two of them, they were very, very close to Claire and I as we were writing this out.

Rob Walling:
Rob Fitzpatrick, did he write The Mom Test, right?

Gia Laudi:
He wrote The Mom Test, but he also wrote two other books, and one of them was called Write Useful Books. And then he wrote another one about workshops, I’m forgetting the name of it right now, but Write Useful Books was really the book that inspired the brevity in this one. Also, another aspect of this, that it had to be short, was a lot of what we talk about in the book is very practical and very tactical, as we were like, well, we can’t go down that rabbit hole because we need a video walkthrough for that or we need a template or a tool to communicate how to do this specific thing.
So there’s a lot of sections in the book where you’ll get to, where it’s like actually to dive into how to do this process, we’ve got this other resource over here. So we’ve got a complementary workbook as well, which is laughably almost as long as the book itself, it’s like 110 pages, and it’s all tools and stuff to make use of the core material.

Rob Walling:
Obviously we can’t cover the whole book in a podcast, but we’re going to dive into a bit the concept you came up with called customer-led growth, not product-led growth. But I want to first kick us off by finding out, a lot of listeners to this podcast, a lot of different stages, from idea to literally eight figure SaaS companies. What is the ideal stage for this book?

Gia Laudi:
So the companies that will get the most amount of value out of this book, or the teams, I should say, are definitely those who have happily paying customers. So you’ve got a product, whatever your vision might be for it, obviously you’re going to be continuing to evolve your product, but as long as you’ve got customers happily paying for it today, you can get value.
The other aspect of this that I would say, if you are in a situation where you’ve got a product that you have these happily paying customers, but you’re in this situation where you’re like, why haven’t I yet figured out how to articulate what we do, why do I feel like I’m not doing a good enough job describing what we do to our target customer, and why haven’t we been able to bring more people through the front door and activate them in the product, that’s the other flip side of this, is that you’ve gotten to this point where you’ve got high retention, high value, very happy customers, but now you’re like, okay, how do I take this thing to the next level? That’s also who would be a great fit for the book.

Rob Walling:
Got it. So I think of it as a growth book. That term growth hacking and all that, growth marketing, came out whatever, it started to become popular a decade ago. Marketing has always been drive leads to a point and then they stop. Usually it’s like, start a free trial, “Cool, I’m out of here.” Marketing moves on to the next thing.
But it feels like, to me, growth goes much deeper than that. Growth looks inside the product and says, people aren’t onboarding, what do we need to change here? How can we then find more of them? How can we retain them all that? That’s what Forget the Funnel is about.

Gia Laudi:
Sort of. I disagree a little that marketing is solely responsible for leads. In some organizations, yep, 100% that is the understanding for marketing, that marketing is responsible for going out in the world, finding customers who are a good fit for this product, bringing them to the front door, and then converting them on the website. That’s some people’s understanding of marketing as ending there.
We are pretty bullish about marketing’s role post acquisition. So through product activation, getting to value within the product, product retention, continued engagement, customer education, expansion, customer marketing, really even post solving the customer’s problem. So we think of marketing as being very holistic and spanning the entire customer experience. Now, you may not call it marketing. Some people call that product marketing, some people call that-

Rob Walling:
Customer success.

Gia Laudi:
Yeah, customer success. Also, some product teams think about the customer experience through that lens and think about optimizing all of those different areas of the customer experience. So we think of it as and describe it primarily as product marketing, but because product marketing is so wildly misunderstood, we have a hard time using that term. It’s getting a little better than it was when we first started out, but product marketing is a good way to think about it.
Growth is one of those terms that I just, like I can’t. What was marketing doing before the growth term came around, as if marketing wasn’t focused on growth anyway, but I understand that there is an understanding and a function for growth within a lot of companies that is very well-defined as being sort of in that middle of the funnel, so I get that. So yes, I would say it’s kind of all of the above, but predominantly what brings people to this, like we’ve got to solve this scalable customer sort of growth or acquisition is they think it’s marketing. They think, oh, we need more traffic to this website. We need to find out where people are. Marketing is not working. We need to figure out our messaging. That’s what the founders and the teams that come to us think is the problem that they’re solving, is we just need more people to the front door.
And people think of that as a marketing problem to be solved, but truthfully, what ends up happening is we do tip over to the other side and we see that actually you’ve got this opportunity post sign up to introduce your product in more advantageous ways and optimize that experience post-acquisition, help customers get from trial or free into paid, help them reach value as quickly as possible, and then turn them into really high LTV customers. So even though they thought they were coming to us and they think that this is a marketing problem, actually what they discover is that like, oh, it’s really a lot more holistically. And that’s the battle we’re picking with the funnel, too.

Rob Walling:
And I want to talk about funnels in just a second, but in the book you say, “We call this three-phase process the customer-led growth framework. It’s a method we use to help companies of all sizes calm the marketing chaos and hit ambitious revenue targets.” And the three steps are, number one, get inside your best customers’ heads, which you talk copiously about doing interviews, some surveys, but a lot of interviews. Step two, map and measure your customers’ experience, and step three, unlock your biggest growth opportunities.
So CLG, you don’t call it that, I call it that because I look at it-

Gia Laudi:
We can call it CLG.

Rob Walling:
But is that something-

Gia Laudi:
[inaudible 00:10:26]

Rob Walling:
Do you? Oh, that’s cool, because everyone’s talking product-led growth these days and I’m like, eh, slow down, you’re not Slack. But customer-led growth is a nice framing of this thing. You have something in the market, you have some customers that are being successful with it, but what do you do next? And that feels like what the whole book is about.

Gia Laudi:
Yeah, we are definitely not anti-PLG. We love, if anything, we lean towards more product-led companies, and I really, really believe that in order to be successful as a product-led product or business, you need to intimately understand your customers so that you can create effective and scalable experiences for them. If you don’t understand your customers, you don’t understand what led them to sign up or what motivates them to choose you and what parts of the product deliver that value, you’re not going to be able to create scalable product-led experiences for them. So CLG is actually a perfect fit for product-led companies. In fact, the majority of the companies that we work with are product-led.

Rob Walling:
And so let’s talk about funnels a little bit because when I hear the book title is Forget the Funnel, and that’s also the name of the agency you run, correct?

Gia Laudi:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
You and Claire. Yeah. So see, I was a developer and then I became a marketer and I learned about funnels and I actually like funnels so I don’t want to forget the funnel. But the more I read in read your book, I was like, oh, it’s a cool name, it’s super memorable, but they don’t want me to forget the funnel. This actually helps optimize my funnel. This makes my funnel way more effective. That’s how I was interpreting it. Do you agree with that?

Gia Laudi:
I mean, yes and no. I find that those tools like that, funnels or pirate metrics or lifecycle, sort of the MQL, SQL lifecycle terminology and tools that we use, they’re helpful for teams to think about and communicate about what parts of the customer experience we’re trying to optimize for. And they help facilitate conversation.
And I still use the term funnel when we’re talking about awareness level marketing campaigns. We might slip in a, it’s the top of the funnel in a couple of conversations, but truthfully, that’s kind of where their value ends, in that it’s a helpful communication tool, it’s helpful for creating context. It’s helpful because it’s so well understood. It’s helpful for making sure that you’re talking about the same thing in conversation with others.
But again, it kind of ends there, because my biggest bone to pick I think with those models are that they’re generic. And the idea here is that your product, your customers, and your team even, you’re unique. And if you are thinking about your customers as falling into the same buckets of experiences as all the other products and all the other customers out in the world, you’re losing that nuance. You’re losing that customer understanding and that depth of understanding that can help you be really, really successful.
The other actually thing I would say about funnels is that they have this sort of beginning and an end and we’re in recurring revenue business here. We’re all trying to build a product that serves customers over the long term, builds a relationship with them, high LTV relationships, and funnels don’t account for that. I’ve seen the upside down funnels. I’ve seen all of that (censored), and still, it still doesn’t do the job of communicating that we’re in a relationship here and it’s about helping you get value and helping to solve a problem for you, and not only solving that problem, but what happens after that? What happens after somebody has become a customer and they’ve built a habit around our product? The story does not end there.
Where SaaS gets really, really interesting is after that stage. When we start to get into expansion opportunities and net revenue retention and those kinds of conversations, that’s where things get really, really interesting in the world of SaaS. That is typically not thought about until later stages of growth. But that’s where things get really, really interesting. And so this has a little bit more legs as well.
It also feels less gross for teams to talk about, oh, well our customers are, we’re trying to help customers get to first value, or we want to help our customers reach full value realization. That’s better than saying I’m building a campaign for bottom of funnel. It’s more meaningful. It pays a level of respect to the teams creating the programs as much as it does the customers. It just elevates the conversation a little bit.

Rob Walling:
I often think of funnels and funnel metrics. I have all my rules of thumb of if you ask for a credit card or don’t, and it’s a bunch of numbers, it’s great, but it’s the moment you ask, well, why? Don’t know, funnel doesn’t care. It’s like going to Amazon and seeing a bunch of one star reviews and a bunch of five star ratings without the full review and being like, well look, we got all these one star reviews. Why? Don’t know. There’s no actual review.
And that’s what a funnel is. A funnel tells you numbers, and I can look at a SaaS business and say, ooh, trial to paid is really messed up. That’s a problem. You need to fix that. And to me, that’s a great quantitative thing to know, but there is no, it’s the moment you say why, it’s like now you have to go start talking to people. Now you have to do all the things to find out why it’s broken.
And that’s where I feel as I read through Forget the Funnel, I was like, yes, this is the why. This answers the why of how to make this better. Something I really liked, obviously a lot of jobs to be done stuff in the book, one of the most helpful, I mean it’s like six or seven bullets in a row, it’s on page 24 of the book. And I was reading through it and it said, “In order to get inside your best customer’s heads, you need to understand,” and then it’s these bullets. And I was like, yes, yes, yes. It just gets better and better. The first is what life was like for your customer before they started using your solution. What happened that made them realize this isn’t working, I need something else? What they did next and next and next until they found you. What led them to choose you over all the other options? What value they experience?
And there’s a couple more, I won’t read them all, but it’s like this is textbook to me, at least I’m not a job [inaudible 00:16:30] expert, but as I understand jobs to be done, this is a switch interview. Is that the context?

Gia Laudi:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
So many people who are listening to this have no idea what I just said, what that means. And I know that most of the best founders I know, they either directly know this about jobs to be done or they intuitively do it without knowing they’re doing it. They’re talking to customers and they’re just in their customers’ heads because they’re so close to the [inaudible 00:16:54]. So you want to talk a little bit about that, expand on how I’ve introed this?

Gia Laudi:
Yeah. So thank you for reading that and not making me remember what they all were, although I know you didn’t get to the end of the list. So the idea there is definitely to have that bird’s eye view, or how we sort of describe it, as that documentary understanding of your customers’ relationship with you from before they even knew you existed. So a lot of times I’ll be on calls with founders and I’ll ask who are your best customers and what led them to sign up? What was that moment that your ideal customers decided that they had to solve this problem or that they couldn’t go on with life anymore the way it was?
And many of them just sort of stare blankly. They don’t know the answer. They want to answer this question, well, they’re at companies of a hundred plus employees and they’re in this certain vertical and we know they have titles that sound like these, but they don’t really understand the why, as you were saying before, of what led to somebody to actually sign up, what was that pain? What was that struggling moment that led to somebody seeking out a solution like yours?
And then what was that life, and that experience, rather, of going from holy (censored), I can’t live like this, there’s got to be a better way. Who do they go and talk to? What conversations do they have? Where do they go? What watering holes did they hang out in? Who did they try to have some conversations with? Who or what were the influences that led them to find you and discover you? And then what was it about your solution? And I’ll even talk from a website perspective, what was it about your website or marketing materials that convinced them to try the thing? And then once they got into the product, what was it that convinced them to keep going?
There’s an amazing question that we ask in research, which is like, what was it that convinced you that this was going to solve your problem? And the answer to just that question can give you so much insight into what sort of not only experience you should provide once somebody gets into your product for the first time, but also what should be the carrot to dangle, so to speak, on the website, and the way to message and position your product for them. So having that deep level of understanding and really all the way from experiencing the problem through to singing your praises or even expanded product usage is kind of what we’re getting at there. Having that holistic understanding, like I was describing before, that funnels just don’t do that good of a job of, but it really gets you that intimate understanding into why somebody chooses you.
And just from getting that understanding, you can do a ton. The world opens up to you in term in terms of opportunity. It’s a good thing and a bad thing when a bunch of opportunities open up to you. So there’s a very specific process that we talk about to deconstruct the customer experience and start thinking about your customers’ experience through the lens of these milestones or leaps of faith that your customers have in your relationship with you so that you can really figure out what are those moments of value that we need to help customers reach, and then once they’ve reached them, then move them on to the next moment of value. That’s the operationalizing of that understanding that we were just describing in that documentary.

Rob Walling:
There are a bunch of people listening to this who either do this natively, intuitively, or they have [inaudible 00:20:15] jobs to be done and implemented it because it was such game changer as it’s hit our space. But there’s also a big chunk who I think don’t do it and they’re skeptical of the value.

Gia Laudi:
You mean of the research side of things?

Rob Walling:
Like we say, talk to customers a lot. I guess I’ll start by saying, we say talk to customers a lot, we all say this. And people say, what do I ask? Well, read Forget the Funnel because there’s a great list of questions on page I think it’s 54, we might even get to them in this. I might do another dramatic reading of your own words back to you. But I mean, it’s just a really good list of questions.
But I think for someone who’s listening to this and they do have successful customers, and whether they’re doing 10K a month or 100K a month, if you don’t know what’s working then when it stops working, how do you fix it? That’s the thing, and that’s what, even if it’s working well, I still think that you need to be having these conversations with your customer. Product market fit is a moving target in almost every space. Even if you found it and everything is working today, is the market going to be the same in eight months, in 10 months, in two years? It’s unlikely, unless you’re in a really regulated space or for some other reason.

Gia Laudi:
Or you add somebody to the team or start working with somebody else who is responsible for creating materials or collateral or programs to help your customers, and they don’t maybe have that same intuitive understanding of your customers that you do. So that’s another advantage to doing the research and operationalizing it, is that it can be used with your team and it democratizes that customer understanding for everyone who’s working on your product and supporting its growth.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, actually. That was a struggle. So at my last SaaS company, Drip, my co-founder and I were there from day one. It was just the two of us, and we knew our customers inside and out. We didn’t have it from the start, but by the time we built the product up, we were years into it, it’s like we just knew it.
The moment we tried to explain any of this, a new engineer or a designer, or frankly, our first product person we hired when we were at a couple million [inaudible 00:22:18], I was like, huh, I’m not sure how to communicate any of this. So it was just a huge interview. I was like, all right, ask me questions.
And then the cool part is one of them did. He was an experienced professional product manager. And so unlike us hacks who just figured our way through it. But he did put together a ton of documents based on that, that would’ve been way easier. And he actually did go and do a bunch of this. He asked a bunch of maybe not switch questions, but he did talk to a lot of customers to try to codify it in a way that wasn’t just, you know how co-founders are. They’re just like, “I don’t know, we just kind of got here. We figured our way out.”

Gia Laudi:
Just ask me. I know the answers. Just ask me. I’m right here.

Rob Walling:
Super helpful. And that totally works when there are 10 of you. And when I left, there were 120 of us, and it didn’t work anymore because everybody was asking me everything. And it’s like, no, you have to at a certain point scale it.
So I do want to get to some of these questions. I was just reading them again. And this is the type of stuff, Michelle Hanson’s book, Deploy Empathy, is tactical like this. I really like it. Forget the Funnel is the same way, where every few pages I’m like, oh my gosh, a list of questions. Oh, this is exactly either what I used to ask, or I would ask them in different ways, or I should have asked that and didn’t. And it’s that type of stuff, where it’s very prescriptive in a way that I like, especially because I’m not a professional at this. I don’t know this stuff intuitively. I’m not a professional product manager, I just am figuring it out.
But here’s a few of the questions. How are you using product name today? When did you first start using product name? Okay, so with that timeline in mind, take me back to life before product name. Prior to using this product, what were you using instead? If you were using a combination of tools, what were they? Tell me about the moment you realized old way wasn’t cutting it. This is good. What caused that moment? What compelled you to look for something different? Where did you go to look for new solutions? Did you try anything else? And there’s like five or six more just on that page. So is this from you and Claire just doing these interviews a cajillion times?

Gia Laudi:
Yeah, I mean some of these questions are best practices, and also I’m sure some of them come straight from Bob [inaudible 00:24:20], truthfully. But yeah, they are the gold standard style of questions. I don’t know that if you go look for jobs to be done interview questions, you’d probably find similar-ish questions to this. This is the way that we like to word them.
And with the right interviewer, mind you, amazing, amazing insight can come out of asking those questions, an insight that is not only just interesting and insightful, but also can be used in actions and actually turn into something that the team can create some experiences for and optimize for in the short term, and also build upon, as you said, the product evolves, the market evolves, and your customers evolve. So yeah, we really like them and yeah, that’s definitely a popular list for us for sure.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I like having it here in one place. And so to give folks an idea, we can say talk to customers and we can say talk to potential customers or talk to cancel customers. I mean, talk to whatever to get this information. And then am I right that this information you gather, you’re using it to inform our marketing copy, our messaging, our positioning, our onboarding, even our product direction, even features?

Gia Laudi:
Yeah. So one thing I just want to back up a bit on is turned customers would probably not be the right fit for this type of research. And the reason being that we want to learn from the customers who have been successful with your product. I’m not saying there is no place for win-loss analysis or exit interviews. There absolutely is, and you should be learning from customers in that way, but not if you haven’t done this style of research first. So we’re really trying to figure out of those customers who are really successful with your product that represent what you believe to be a really great opportunity for the future of your company, what are those customers’ answers to these questions?
It is more challenging to do with potential customers for obvious reasons. You can’t ask them about what was it about our product? Obviously they don’t have that context. Learning from potential customers is very interesting and can be helpful, particularly for marketing. But it’s not validated necessarily because those customers have not yet put money down, so to speak, and have been successful in the long run with your product. So I would always start with your existing happily paying customers and then you can supplement with other types of research after that. So this is sort of the foundation, and we use jobs to be done to not only guide the style of research but also encapsulate or capture what we learn.
So we lean really heavily, actually, on customer job statements, as simple as they are, to help not only us while we’re doing the research and making decisions about how to prioritize different groups, but also for the teams that we work with to understand in an instant, so to speak, and really easily understand what are these customers trying to accomplish, what do they need to see in our product, and what are those desired outcomes that they were seeking out?
And that’s just that customer job statement, which is included in a couple of spots in the book. If you can take that research from those amazing customers of yours, those customers you want to clone, so to speak, and articulate what they were trying to do in this customer job statement, then you can think about those customers through that very sort of strategic lens.
You may also do that customer research, by the way, and identify that there’s two different jobs to be done here. That actually happens. I won’t say it happens all the time, but it does happen quite often, where we’re working with companies where there’s like two or three sets of customer jobs that show up in the research and then there’s a decision to be made. Do we want to continue to serve all three of these customers or is there one that we want to lean into? Do we want to park one for a moment and prioritize another?
That happens a lot, especially in situations where you can imagine, oh, we want a low touch SMB offering and we want a more robust, higher touch offering, and we still want to be able to serve both of those customers, but we can’t optimize for most of those customers with all the same materials and experience. So we need to pick one, park the others momentarily, and go forward with the customer mapping process and then go back later and do the same for those other more managed or higher touch customers who may have very different needs coming through the front door, very different needs for their evaluation process. And there’s all that higher touch way to operationalize that.
So you’re conducting this research, you’re not just going to end up with this homogeneous list of like, okay, well here they are, great, now we understand our customers. You’re actually going to see, oh (censored), look at that. Some of these customers came through and I’m glad they’re successful, but truthfully, do we want more of them? Probably not. So let’s eliminate that group and focus on this higher value group that you want to scale and do a better job of optimizing for.

Rob Walling:
So in this conversation, we’ve covered the first piece of the three parts of your book. The first part is getting inside your customers’ heads, and if folks want to dig into the next part, which is mapping your customers’ experiences and then operationalizing your customer insights, they should head to amazon.com, search for Forget the Funnel, or forgetthefunnel.com. Now question for you, it’s on Kindle and physical copy. Do you have an audiobook on the way?

Gia Laudi:
We have recorded the audiobook. It is currently being edited.

Rob Walling:
Edited? Okay. So side jag here, I just finished recording the audiobook of SaaS Playbook last week and I have an editor cranking on it, and of course I listen back and I’m like, oh, should have said that part different. And I was hammering an hour a day just every day, seven days a week until I got it done. I was doing it on weekends because I could do it at my house. And I was just like, yeah, but I can’t do more than an hour because it was driving me nuts. So I really just want to hear what was your experience like recording the audiobook, and you have two authors, did you get together in the same place?

Gia Laudi:
We were in Denver, Rob.

Rob Walling:
At MicroConf?

Gia Laudi:
Yes.

Rob Walling:
That’s amazing. Yeah.

Gia Laudi:
Yeah. That’s why I was in Denver. And so Claire came to speak at the event and she was like, “I’m going to be in Denver. Do you want to meet up?” And I was like, “Hell yes.” So we were in the same location. We didn’t have to record in the same location, but we kind of wanted to. We did it in a day.

Rob Walling:
Holy moly.

Gia Laudi:
I mean, advantage, two authors.

Rob Walling:
Two authors, and it’s 160 pages, so it’s manageable but that’s still got to be, that must have been six hours of recording.

Gia Laudi:
Yep. Yeah, yeah, about that. Well, full recording. I think it’s going to, once it gets edited down-

Rob Walling:
It’ll edit down to about three and a half, four, I would think.

Gia Laudi:
Four hours, that’s right. But it was rough because we were in Denver, and both, do you remember Claire getting up on stage and saying, “I’m losing my voice?”

Rob Walling:
Yes.

Gia Laudi:
So I landed and she was like, “I’m losing my voice, I don’t even know if I can speak tomorrow, let alone the audiobook.” And then I proceeded to lose my voice. So we were both pretty rough. She had recovered and I had not quite recovered yet. So chapter two, I’m like real nasally, it’s terrible.

Rob Walling:
Like you smoked two packs that day. Oh, it’s going to be good.

Gia Laudi:
Oh no.

Rob Walling:
And now that is how everyone will think of your voice. It’s going to be on audible.com forever.

Gia Laudi:
We may have to rerecord. I might listen to it and be like you and be like, no way, I’ve got to rerecord this. I’m nervous to hear it, truthfully.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, well, I’m excited for it. And again, folks can head to Amazon, Forget the Funnel, and then you on Twitter are @GGIIAA. That’s cool, so it’s kind of like Gia, but it’s doubling all the letters, GGIIAA

Gia Laudi:
Yeah. That was my very, very poor choice back in late, early, it was January 2009 and I could have gotten my first name, but I was like, Twitter. I didn’t take it.

Rob Walling:
That’s a three letter.

Gia Laudi:
I could’ve gotten Georgiana. Georgiana, I could have got, not yet. So I couldn’t have gotten the G-I-A, but Georgiana, I could have had my first name and I didn’t take it because I was like, ah, whatever. This is for fun.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, good old Twitter.

Gia Laudi:
Turned in, it was like 13 years ago or something, 14 years ago.

Rob Walling:
And we’ll see. Each week, I wonder how long Twitter’s going to be around.

Gia Laudi:
I know. I know.

Rob Walling:
Anyways, thanks for taking the time to come on and talk Forget the Funnel.

Gia Laudi:
Thanks for having me, Rob.

Rob Walling:
Thanks so much to Gia for coming on the show, and thanks for listening this week and every week. Here’s another bad joke from ChatGPT. As a startup founder, I’ve learned that naming your company is a bit like naming your child. You spend ages thinking about it, you finally pick one, and then you find out someone else on the playground has the same name. This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 665.