How Stillio unlocked product messaging for their most powerful use cases
Forget the Funnel gave us peace of mind. Having a blueprint on where to look for, where to aim at—that’s a big advantage. Now we have all these incredible foundational documents and resources that not only give us a roadmap for a year, but also help us hand over to new team members so they can deeply understand what’s going on from day one.
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Signups on the decline
Stillio found itself in a tough spot, one that many SaaS companies faced in 2024… After years of steady growth, leads and revenue began to dip. For every customer they added, another would churn.
Ultimately the team hit a ceiling with their year-on-year growth.
That’s an alarm bell for any startup, but as a small, three-person team, no one had the bandwidth to dedicate to marketing. But they knew they needed to try something—anything—to turn things around.
So for an entire year, the team hired freelancers to implement copywriting, LinkedIn campaigns, partnerships, and a referral program.
Like with so many horizontal tools, their team was trying to serve all use cases for all personas and ICPs. So they borrowed every growth strategy they saw working for other SaaS companies, hoping something would stick. As Steve, CEO of Stillio, explained: “It’s really easy to get caught up in marketing tactics for the sake of marketing... getting excited about channels and looking at what other people are doing, seeing what their results were. It’s very alluring to jump into just marketing and using just your gut.”
But without the foundation of understanding the intersection between Stillio’s service and its customer needs, none of the marketing tactics Stillio tried produced stand-out results.
Guessing wasn’t working.
(Editor’s Note from Gia: Even experienced marketers get caught in the trap of marketing for marketing’s sake. There’s so much pressure to feel like you’re making progress, moving things forward, so you forget to think about the foundation of your marketing strategy. If that’s you then I highly recommend you give our book a read.)
“There was no real marketing team. We were just copying what other SaaS were doing and throwing things at the wall hoping they’d stick.”
Diego, CCO at Stillio
Finding the kinda customer you wish you had more of
Stillio is in a niche market, but the tool could be used by any industry for countless use cases. At first this sounds great! You might think, ‘An endless supply of people who need our tool? Fantastic!’ But with a broad audience comes a big challenge: focus.
After reading Forget the Funnel’s book, Steve (CEO) and Diego (COO) realized what lay at the core of their issues: a crystal clear understanding of their best customer. Foundational insight into Stillio's ideal (rather than generic or most frequent) customer would help them:
- Cut through the noise of feature requests from one-time customers
- Get clarity on their most valuable customer segments
- Start reaching their ideal customer with messaging that actually converts.
As Steve puts it, “It’s difficult when you do have such a diverse pool of customers to really see the nuances between who is really likely to stick with us for years and who is only here because they need us for one project.”
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The lack of clarity on who their best customer was, also caused issues beyond marketing. Minor feature requests coming in that were technically simple to add, but were not what Stillio was really built to do. Was it worth the light lift to keep a customer that didn’t quite fit or not?
With this and similar questions flying around, Forget the Funnel launched into uncovering Stillio’s most valuable customer.
How to ask the right customers the right questions
The team’s big question was who should Stillio be targeting?
To get the much needed answers, the Forget the Funnel team conducted and analyzed Jobs-to-be-done Interviews. We were looking to uncover:
- Use cases for Stillio
- Emotional and practical triggers that led them to find and use the product
- How customers described long-term value (what made Stillio sticky)
First, surveys helped quickly get a broad view of the ideal customers and begin finding patterns in the data.
Next, Forget the Funnel jumped into a series of customer interviews with people who were actively using (and loving) Stillio’s service. The kinda people we want to duplicate.
Through conversations with their customers, though, we learned that there was a particular persona with a particularly business critical Job-to-be-Done; ensuring a record of compliance for their highly regulated orgs. Customers “hiring” Stillio for this “job” were straight up “stickier” than everyone else. Budget was no issue for them, and LTV & retention was higher.
Compliance-focused customers—those needing to prove adherence to regulations or maintain records for external stakeholders—were the most loyal, and long-term buyers. A look at the data showed they had a much higher LTV and had a strong, immediate need to solve a problem with an excellent retention rate.
Beyond the insights and Voice of Customer gathered in this analysis, Forget The Funnel created assets to further support the team:
- A messaging guide, a standardized source of truth that can be used when developing marketing assets
- Onboarding email sequences, triggered using the current stage of the customer journey.
“The interviews gave us the words and emotions our customers were using. It was things we hadn’t even thought of, like using the word ‘reliable.’ It seems small, but those details make a big difference. Knowing that information about your best customers can be incredibly powerful.”
Steve, CEO at Stillio
The results
The messaging guide was immediately implemented, as Steve says, “One of the easiest, quickest wins for us was making some changes on the homepage. There were no strings attached to that—we simply changed it and created a new video.”
Stillio’s next priority is to implement enhanced onboarding emails to boost new user activation. While it requires adding additional functionality, it means that new users would be getting messaging that was relevant to moments of value and key actions vs generic timed messages about simply “getting started”.
“We realized how much we were leaving on the table with data-based onboarding. The technology exists to use product triggers, but it’s surprising how common it is to base onboarding on time. We’re confident this will make a big difference in customer activation”
Steve, CEO at Stillio
No more guessing
It’s tough for anyone to see past declining numbers. Especially after a year's worth of effort. Forget the Funnel didn’t just help Stillio find clarity; they provided a strategic roadmap that showed exactly how to move forward with confidence. Steve explains, “Even though the time was difficult, it really helped us to not be pessimistic about where it’s heading but to see more options.”
Clarity and confidence in their priorities meant those options led to a clear roadmap for the year that included:
- Feature improvements targeted at compliance use cases.
- A shift in marketing and sales strategies to appeal to compliance-driven users while maintaining accessibility for other use cases.
“We were a bit nervous to invest in Forget the Funnel because it was quite a chunk of our budget –more than we ever spent in one go on marketing. But I would absolutely do it again, knowing what we now know. It really helped us to not be pessimistic about where we’re heading and instead see what options were open to us. The best part was, you gave us many growth tactics that we can do ourselves. It wasn’t like you said ‘oh, you need to do a big advertising push and spend $20k a month on Google ads.’”
Steve, CEO at Stillio
Dig into the details
If you’re interested in learning more about Stillio’s journey, check out the full podcast episode. You can listen to it on your favorite podcast platform or watch the video below.