korrents

Jason Cohen

@jason-cohen · 24 positions · 0 changes of mind

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear, and the author of the long-running startup blog A Smart Bear.

Jason Cohen did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

  1. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:06:51 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 1st of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:11:00 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 2nd of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  5. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:12:44 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 3rd of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  7. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:15:38 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 4th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  9. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:16:42 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 5th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  11. 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
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:18:56 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 6th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  13. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:19:46 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 7th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  15. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:20:49 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 8th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  17. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:22:14 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 9th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  19. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:27:06 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 10th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  21. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:30:50 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 11th of 24 in this recording

    LLMs

    Interesting

  23. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:37:13 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 12th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  25. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:39:23 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 13th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  27. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:46:08 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 14th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  29. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:47:09 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 15th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  31. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:54:56 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 16th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  33. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 0:55:50 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 17th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  35. 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?
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:08:19 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 18th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  37. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:11:37 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 19th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  39. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:19:52 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 20th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  41. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:22:47 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 21st of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  43. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:28:43 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 22nd of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  45. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:31:10 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 23rd of 24 in this recording

    Interesting

  47. 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.
    spoken · machine transcript hear it at 1:34:43 · all korrents from this recording

    ↗The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)youtube.com 24th of 24 in this recording

    Interesting