Forget the Funnel

Georgiana Laudi had spent roughly 20 years in marketing—starting in her father's retail business in the early 2000s, freelancing, working at an agency she describes as "terrible," and eventually joining Unbounce in late 2011 as an in-house marketer. By 2013, while visiting Lenny's Airbnb office, she witnessed something that transformed her thinking: a customer journey map taped to the walls downstairs, created by the product team, that visualized the complete customer experience—emotional journey, touchpoints, life context, and all—rather than the typical business-centric funnel. "It was completely through the lens of the customer versus the business," she recalls. "The grossness of the funnel is just so far removed from that experience."

That moment stuck with her. When she returned to Unbounce, she and Brian Angley locked themselves in a room with co-founder Ryan Carson and head of product Ryan Gilchrist to create their own customer journey map. The shared language and alignment that emerged was powerful—suddenly everyone from engineering to product to marketing understood they were delivering value, not pushing people through a funnel.

In late 2016, Georgiana left Unbounce to work independently with companies on marketing and growth. By mid-2017, she partnered with Claire Selentrop, who had led marketing at Cali.ly and brought a strong customer research background. Together, they launched Forget the Funnel and developed a framework they still use today. The name itself was provocative: Georgiana had become convinced that funnels, buyer's journeys, pirate metrics, NQLs, and SQLs were all fundamentally flawed. "Nobody knows what those mean," she explains. "It puts every customer in the same buckets. It assumes all customers and products are the same. It puts businesses at the center versus customers." Most critically, for recurring revenue businesses, these models end at acquisition—they ignore retention, expansion, and the fact that ignoring post-acquisition means "you're not in business anymore."

Forget the Funnel's first clients came through Georgiana's existing network and reputation. Her work at Unbounce and her visibility in the startup and marketing communities meant founders and growth leaders knew who she was. Early customers included Rand Fishkin's new product, SparkToro, an audience research tool. SparkToro came to them initially for pre-launch positioning and messaging help. About a year later, they returned with a specific problem: traffic and signups were solid, but free-to-paid conversion rates were lower than expected.

Forget the Funnel's approach is deceptively simple but rigorous. They start by identifying a company's "best customers"—those getting tremendous value, happily paying, requiring low maintenance, and having signed up recently enough to remember what life was like before (typically 3-6 months). Using jobs-to-be-done theory as a guide, they surveyed SparkToro's best customers to uncover what problem they were solving, what triggered their search, what they looked for in a solution, and what they can do now that they couldn't before.

From that research, they identified two different customer jobs but prioritized one based on urgency (painkiller vs. vitamin), willingness to pay, retention/expansion potential, ease of marketing to that segment, and unfair advantages. They chose the marketer job over the data analyst job because SparkToro had a natural advantage there.

Next came the journey mapping—breaking the customer experience into clear milestones: the struggle phase (experiencing the problem, then showing interest in solutions), the evaluation phase (first value, then value realization), and the growth phase (continued value, then expansion). For SparkToro, they measured success by: (1) performing a first search (getting to evaluation), (2) five-plus searches plus at least one list (first value/activation), and (3) consistent use of search, lists, and export features (value realization).

The results were striking. SparkToro doubled their trial-to-pay conversion rate. For a social media tool they worked with, they identified two different jobs to be done, zeroed in on one, updated the website messaging, shortened the trial from 30 days to seven days, and saw website conversion jump 89%. Even more impressive: without touching anything after signup, the trial-to-pay conversion rate increased 40%—because a more qualified, better-fit customer was coming through the door. At Autobooks, rolling out email onboarding to support the product experience increased North Star product usage by 300%.

Georgiana continues running Forget the Funnel with Claire, working hands-on with predominantly B2B SaaS companies. The framework has proven remarkably consistent: nearly every company they work with discovers significant untapped opportunities, often doubling or tripling conversion at various points. She attributes this to a simple fact: most companies have never properly understood their best customers or mapped their journey through the lens of value delivery. The lowest-hanging fruit is almost always repositioning and messaging—getting more resonant positioning on the website that speaks to the context customers were in before they discovered the product. Beyond website work, they optimize product onboarding, email sequences, and re-engagement campaigns using the same customer-centric philosophy. She's written a book explaining the full process, set to publish later in the year, cementing Forget the Funnel as both a consulting practice and a methodology for growth-focused teams.