The Best-Customer Research Survey
Survey only recent, happy, paying customers, with questions that reconstruct their decision.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Rather than surveying all customers, Laudi narrows to a tightly-defined 'best customer' cohort and asks a fixed set of questions designed to reconstruct the buying decision from struggle to outcome. The output is a voice-of-customer document that feeds the customer job statement, the messaging guide and the journey milestones. It is deliberately fast — two to three weeks — as an antidote to the 'research takes forever' objection.
Origin
Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop's research method at Forget The Funnel, guided by Jobs-to-be-Done theory (Bob Moesta and colleagues). The recency criterion is Laudi's own emphasis.
Core principles
- 01Best customer = gets a ton of value + already pays + happy + low maintenance + signed up recently enough to remember life before.
- 02The three-to-six-month window is load-bearing: memory of the struggle decays fast.
- 03Surveys with enough volume beat waiting for the perfect interview program.
- 04Answers to 'what convinced you this would solve the problem?' literally define what your first-value experience should be.
How to run it
- 1
Filter to the best-customer cohort
Pull a list of customers who get high value, pay, are happy, are low-maintenance, and signed up roughly three to six months ago. Exclude long-tenured customers.
Pro tip Ask customer success and support who the low-maintenance delighted accounts are; they know before the data does.
Watch out A customer of two years will fabricate a plausible-sounding 'before' story rather than recall the real one.
- 2
Ask the struggle and trigger questions
What was going on in your life/work when you started seeking a solution? What was the trigger moment? Who did you ask, what did you read, who influenced you?
- 3
Ask the evaluation questions
What were your must-haves in a solution? What were your anxieties and deal-breakers? What moment convinced you our product would solve this problem?
Pro tip The 'what convinced you' answers map directly onto the first-value milestone — they tell you which parts of the product to push to the front of onboarding.
- 4
Ask the outcome question
What can you do now that you couldn't do before? This yields the desired outcome half of the customer job statement.
- 5
Pattern-match into customer jobs
Read all responses, identify the critical repeating patterns, and cluster them into two or three distinct customer jobs. Count how often each value theme appears to build a hierarchy of what matters most.
Pro tip With ~100 survey responses you can rank value themes almost numerically — first-most, second-most, third-most cared about.
Watch out Only escalate to interviews if the survey patterns are ambiguous; often they are decisive on their own.
In the wild
Forget The Funnel surveyed SparkToro's best customers instead of running interviews. The patterns were clear enough that the planned interview phase was cancelled. Two distinct jobs emerged — a marketer/service-provider job and a data-purist job.
→ A decisive customer job — 'help me identify opportunities I wouldn't otherwise be aware of' — plus a voice-of-customer doc and messaging guide, delivered without an interview program.
Laudi's recurring objection from founders is that they built the product to solve their own problem, so research is redundant. She counters that products, markets, customers and teams all change, and nothing can live entirely in one head.
→ In Laudi's experience, no founder has ever run this research without learning something new they could use to improve the product experience.
Common mistakes
Surveying everyone
Mixing churned, unhappy and long-tenured customers into the sample dilutes the signal and pulls messaging toward people you don't want more of.
Waiting for the perfect research program
The fear of analysis paralysis stops teams from starting. Laudi's counter is a two-to-three-week survey that produces something decisive enough to act on.
Is it for you?
Best for
SaaS teams with at least ~100 recent paying customers, needing a fast evidence base for positioning, onboarding or activation work.
Not ideal for
Very early products with too few recent paying customers to pattern-match, where one-on-one interviews are the only option.
From the transcript
“what I mean by best customers is those that get a ton of value from your product doesn't exist today pay obviously they're happy they're…”
“because if you go to somebody that's been your customer for two years they're just Gonna Fill answers with like what they think might have…”
“what was the moment that convinced you that our product was going to solve this problem for you and the answers to that question are…”
From the episode
Customer-led growth
Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel)