korrents

korrents · Lenny's Podcast

The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)

Jason Cohen · 1h 46m · youtube.com ↗

24 korrents from this recording

1h
Jason Cohen did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

  1. 0:06:51 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Writing on a schedule is worth less than only publishing what is the best you can do, even if that means one post a year.

    Their wordsmy attitude was was always I will only put out stuff if if it's the best that I can do. It's up to the reader to decide if it's good or useful. Um, and if so, if I don't have that, I'm just not going to publish.
    Interesting
  2. 4 min later

  3. 0:11:00 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Diagnosing stalled growth has a strict order, because fixing a later problem does nothing while an earlier one is still broken.

    Their wordsthere's a there's a series of of questions that I ask to to diagnose why is growth slowing in this order because it's one of these things where the first one that's a problem, if you don't fix that, it doesn't matter if you fix one of the ones below.
    Interesting
  4. 2 min later

  5. 0:12:44 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A cancelling customer already survived an improbable gauntlet to buy, which makes churn an emotional emergency before it is ever a metric.

    Their wordsThey actually had the budget and bought the stupid thing. Then they went through onboarding and invested their time etc etc. That is a crazy gauntlet that almost no one gets through.
    Interesting
  6. 3 min later

  7. 0:15:38 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Cancellations always overtake marketing, because cancellations grow automatically with the company while marketing grows only as fast as you can improve it.

    Their wordsMarketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. We all know that's quite hard actually. It's linear. It's hard to find new channels that aren't trivial. Like, it's hard. Of course, we're going to do it, but like it it's hard. Whereas, cancellations grow automatically as you grow, right? So, cancellations always overtake marketing for this reason.
    Interesting
  8. 1 min later

  9. 0:16:42 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Every subscription business has a hard ceiling on its size: new customers per month divided by the cancellation rate.

    Their wordsSo let's suppose you add 100 customers a month and you have 5% cancellation. So 100 divided by 5% is 2,000. So a company like that will never have more than 2,000 customers.
    Interesting
  10. 2 min later

  11. 0:18:56 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A cancellation-reason drop-down measures list order rather than reasons: randomise the options and every one of them gets picked equally.

    Their wordsAnd I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally
    Interesting
  12. 1 min later

  13. 0:19:46 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Asking a leaving customer what made them cancel, rather than why they cancelled, gets materially better answers.

    Their wordsWhat you want to do is say what made you cancel? In other words, what about the product or situation or whatever caused the cancellation? Just phrasing it that way, you get much better results.
    Interesting
  14. 1 min later

  15. 0:20:49 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    "Too expensive" is never the real reason a customer cancels, because they already decided the price was acceptable when they bought.

    Their wordsAnd that is never ever ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you promised, looked at the pricing page, and decided to buy it.
    Interesting
  16. 1 min later

  17. 0:22:14 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Complex systems do not have one root cause, so root-cause analysis is the wrong thing to be doing.

    Their wordsAnother as a sidebar, I hate the idea of a root cause. Complex systems do not have one root cause. They often have many interlocking things that could be done to detect earlier or to change it or to reduce or and not one root cause.
    Interesting
  18. 5 min later

  19. 0:27:06 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Most cancellation happens in a customer's first days, so small onboarding changes have effects that later changes never have.

    Their wordsUm all almost all companies have a whole lot more uh cancellation in the first day, 30 days, 90 days, depends, right? But the first period than the whole rest of the customer's life. And also small changes in the onboarding can have large effects on cancellation.
    Interesting
  20. 4 min later

  21. 0:30:50 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    An LLM is an averaging machine, so it is good at themes and bad at exactly the un-average details that make customer research actionable.

    Their wordsif you think about it, it sort of makes sense because the LLM is an averaging machine, right? It's predicting the most likely that's an averaging kind of a thing. And so when what you're looking for is a kind of average, it's usually pretty good. So, summarization, topics, themes. But when you're asking for like what is interesting and not average, it's actually pretty bad at it.
    Interesting
  22. 6 min later

  23. 0:37:13 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Raising prices usually leaves signups unchanged or increases them, which is not what the textbook demand curve predicts.

    Their wordsSo what usually h what often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. When I say signups, I mean the like signups per month, you know, the rate at sign or signups go up. This happens all the time.
    Interesting
  24. 2 min later

  25. 0:39:23 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Price selects the market: a serious buyer reads a low price as evidence that the product cannot possibly be good enough.

    Their wordsjust think about a company with a thousand employees and 400 million in revenue or whatever. And um if they see a product that's, you know, $2 a month or even $100 a month, their thought is like, well, that can't be good enough. They're not mature enough. It's not going to do enough.
    Interesting
  26. 7 min later

  27. 0:46:08 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Price is not the number on the page; the structure and the positioning are as much a part of pricing as the number is.

    Their wordsthe the largest point is pricing is not just the number on the page. It's positioning. It's how their budgets work. It's how it's structured.
    Interesting
  28. 1 min later

  29. 0:47:09 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Selling a saving caps what you can charge; selling more of what the buyer already values raises that cap by an order of magnitude.

    Their wordsIt's just that it caps this price and this value that is they perceive that you do. Whereas if you deliver more of the value that they already value, it's I don't want to say uncapped completely, but like the cap is maybe an order of magnitude higher than saving.
    Interesting
  30. 8 min later

  31. 0:54:56 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Net revenue retention flatters a business, because a percentage lost always needs a larger percentage gained to get back to even.

    Their wordsWhen you have a loss, a percentage loss, you have to have a greater percentage gain just to get back to where you were. In this case, a loss of 20% requires a gain of 25% to get back to where you were.
    Interesting
  32. 1 min later

  33. 0:55:50 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    No software company reaches real scale with net revenue retention below one hundred percent, because cancellation simply wins.

    Their wordsthere should be no way to get a big company like a public SAS company Unless NR is greater than 100, like otherwise cancellation should just win. And that is in fact the case.
    Interesting
  34. 12 min later

  35. 1:08:19 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Marketing channels do not settle onto a plateau; after the S-curve they sag, which is why the shape is an elephant and not an S.

    Their wordsBut that's not what happens. What happens is it starts with an S-curve and then it starts sagging. Its butt starts sagging down. So, I wrote an article about this called the elephant curve, which is what I named it, right?
    Interesting
  36. 3 min later

  37. 1:11:37 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Adding one more feature and asking marketing to push harder will not restart growth, even when the feature is great.

    Their wordsJust adding one little feature and then hoping we can flog Adwords is not going to work. Even if the feature is great, not going to work.
    Interesting
  38. 8 min later

  39. 1:19:52 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Growing forever is not automatically the goal; a company that has hit its limit can choose to maximise profit instead of revenue.

    Their wordsBut what we could do is maximize profit instead of revenue now. We've been maximizing revenue, but maybe we maximize profit instead.
    Interesting
  40. 3 min later

  41. 1:22:47 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    "If you're not growing, you're dying" is truer of the person than of the company.

    Their wordsAnd so the not growing part, what I like to say is maybe the you and if you are not growing, you're dying is you the person as opposed to you the company.
    Interesting
  42. 6 min later

  43. 1:28:43 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Expected value cannot decide the once-only decisions, because you know neither the probabilities nor the shape of their curves.

    Their wordsBut the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value.
    Interesting
  44. 2 min later

  45. 1:31:10 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    Every question about stalled growth reduces to whether the customer is actually getting the value you promised.

    Their wordsI think if you if you tried to find a common thread throughout all this stuff about growth, it comes back to the customer getting value.
    Interesting
  46. 4 min later

  47. 1:34:43 · watch on youtube.com↗

    Our reading

    A/B testing cannot touch anything that actually decides a company: not strategy, not vision, not insight.

    Their wordsAB testing doesn't work very well and it doesn't work on most things. It won't work on strategy or vision or insights like nothing actually important to the success of the company. You don't AB test whether Uber is a good idea.
    Interesting