Transcript
A (0:02)
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode we're talking with Asia Orangio, founder and CEO of Demand Maven, about how SaaS companies can use fast focused customer research to troubleshoot growth challenges and drive real results. From making KPIs talk to bringing executives into the room during interviews, Asia shares practical ways to turn Insights into action, all without slowing down. Enjoy the show.
B (0:32)
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
A (0:51)
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal Content Marketing manager at Usertesting and joining us today as host is User Testing's Leah Hogan, Principal for experience research Strategy. Welcome to the show, Leah.
C (1:07)
Thank you Nathan.
A (1:09)
And our guest today is Asia Orangio. Asia is the founder and CEO of Demand Maven, a growth consultancy that helps SaaS companies find traction, scale and get unstuck. With a deep background in go to market strategy, product led growth and customer research, Asia brings sharp insight into what it really takes to grow a product led business. Welcome to the show Asia.
D (1:34)
Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to be here. I'm so pumped.
C (1:39)
Well, I have to reciprocate because I 1am very passionate about just connecting with people and making sure that we're creating really relevant products and services and that's what you do. So I'm so thrilled to be having this conversation too. So actually to get started, obviously understanding customers and what their motivations are and their needs is at the core of what it is that you do. How did you get there? Like kind of take us back to where you got started and what got you thinking about and focused in this space.
D (2:22)
Yeah, definitely. So I, we don't have to go way, way back. But my not many people know this. My degree was actually in art and it was specifically in oil painting. So I specialized in figure work and portraiture. And one of the things that you learn in portraiture and figure work especially is capturing likenesses of people, but then also studying them. What's their vibe, for lack of a better phrase, what's their energy like? And what's beautiful about art is just being able to express what you see and how you are experiencing that person in that time. And I've always been fascinated by how people think and how they work. When I graduated I moved into tech pretty quickly for a number of reasons, but and I went into SaaS companies and I pretty much never looked back. But I want to say I've been running demand maven now for eight years. I've worked on 100, over 100 SaaS companies, helping them troubleshoot growth. And it all started with me doing demand generation consulting. That that was the skill, the practice that I had. And I remember the more I was learning about SaaS, the more that I learned that even if I scaled the top of the funnel, even if we got a thousand new customers or 10,000 new trials, we were actually only going to convert a very small percentage of them. And then beyond that, we were only going to retain an even smaller percentage of them after six months. And that was when I realized, oh, all this marketing work actually might not be the right work. And so that that got me into growth, what we now call product led growth. And the more that I worked with other companies, the less that marketing was the focus and the more that kind of untangling this web of nuanced, complex engines in the business became more the focus. And so that's how it started. It was definitely a gradual thing. It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to make a growth consulting firm that specializes in troubleshooting growth for SaaS companies. But that's kind of how it happened, just over time, slowly. And now I would say in the last one to two years I've really leaned into it pretty heavily.
