YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Cohen

lines on the record: 129
first: 2026-01-25
most recent: 2026-01-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, to be useful, order the book hidden multipliers.com. Or, of course, you don't have to. I have all these articles online for free. So you can go to a smartbear.com. And I'm on Twitter and other stuff that's all linked off of that website. And the articles, they're free. I don't have ads. I don't sell courses. I don't sell anything. So that's very, very non-commercial. And so in fact, the one thing I've ever done with writing that costs money is the book because, you know, it's a physical book. I've got to charge something so I can ship it and everything. But I think hidden multipliers is certainly my best work. So I'm very, I'm very proud of that. But you don't have to buy it. It's okay. The links are the chance.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To everything, the success of the company, the culture, the basically is a co founder, and that's exactly what Heather is like at WP engine. It's now been 11 years since she became the CEO. So this is lots of data to back us up. And I used to say to people at WPNG, if I just told you that Heather was a co-founder, you'd say, yeah, no kidding. I'm like, right. That's why I think of it that way, because so do you. Casodo to anyone, because that's the impact she's had. So we co-won that award, which is nice because you almost never have co-winners. In fact, I can't remember another one. I mean, I know there are others, but it's rare enough I can't think of another one. So it's really cool that we co won that entrepreneur award.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2017 for Central Texas, which I co-won with the CEO of WP Engine Heather Bruner. Which is awesome because I often call Heather a late joining co founder because that's what LinkedIn, that's what Reid Hoffman called Jeff Liener because Jeff was like four years in, but was so impactful”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the people who love you or like what you do also want you to be yourself because that's what they love. And if you're changed, then they wouldn't love that.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be yourself. Everyone else is taken. And it's attributed to Oscar Wilde, but I've tried to look into that as I tried to get all my annotations correct for the book. And there's no evidence that he said it. But there's also no evidence who said it. So let's say it's Oscar Wilde because he said lots of things like that.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is probably not unique, but Whisper Flow for dictation. It's really good. I like the keyboard shortcuts because I just use it all the time in all the software. And anything Anchor makes, they have power stations and docks and rechargers over the case. Yeah, A and K. You're right. And just all their stuff is super high quality and works really well. Everything seems to charge twice as fast when plugged into an anchor thing. So I don't know whatever it is, it's really good.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1994 to 15 seasons. Why do I say that? Besides the fact, I think it's good. I have a 16-year-old daughter. And we're now in season, I think, 13 watching this whole thing. She says it holds up after 25 years and being, you know, Gen Alpha, whatever. I don't even know what it is. And so if this is an era when shows were an hour long and seasons were forever, and she says it's great TV. It must be great TV.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To cut, I love this phrase where he's on a panel with this guy who is like an amateur writer. And his kind of summary is to that guy is. The guy told him, I never knew writing could be hard. And Zinzer says, I never knew writing could be easy. I think both of those kind of summarized the turmoil of being a writer.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, part of that's because he defines a market among other things as, and the people in the market. Respect the opinions of the other people in the market. And that's when you realize, oh, so jumping to a different market, it's not impossible. It's just like case studies aren't going to work.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For writing on writing well by William Zinzer. I know I'm not the only one, but that's kind of the point. On my best day, I write like that. And then for product, I actually like crossing the chasm, which of course everyone's heard of. But what I find is no one's read it. So you know the little picture and you think you know what the chasm is, what I find is very quickly I realized, oh, you haven't read the book. You saw a blog post. And there's so much good stuff in there how to define a market and really what to do with this model. It's fantastic. So I highly recommend reading the book.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, even so on your own podcast when you were interviewing the guy from Shopify, and he was saying how Maybe a third of the things that they found with their systems just disappear just magically disappear. They have a team of 100 people and they're really good at it, and like their effects disappear all the time, so they double check later whether the immediate effect goes away, because even that.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the fact that you will get false positives even if the tool is statistically accurate means that most of them are false positives. Even if the tool is 95% accurate, when the thing you're looking for is rare, which it is in the case of A-B testing, the false positives happen more often than the actual thing happens. And so most of the results you get are false positives anyway. So as a result, this isn't true of all AB testing, but for what most people do when they just do the sort of the mundane A-B testing, you can't A-B test important things and the details are mostly false positives, so it's an enormous waste of time unless you're incredibly sophisticated. I know there's special groups that actually are very sophisticated. Fine, if you're not doing that, it's sort of like the poker table. If you don't know who the Patsy is, it's you, right? If you don't have all of this information and knowledge about A-B testing, then you're the Patsy.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep doing that, you pick the best one, and then you go on and you find another one, you pick the best one, and then a year later you look back and you should be like 50 or 100% better because you've stacked these things and you look back in like nothing's different. The conversion rates are the same as they've always been. See, what the hell happened? I thought I picked the winner. And the answer is, and a combination of the tools not being statistically accurate, which they're not.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A B 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 A-B test whether Uber's a good idea. And then even when you do A b test the details, where I agree like sometimes that can work, what happens is people will try things like, oh, I'll just try this verb and that verb and this ad and that add. And then like, oh, the seventh or eighth one, I got a positive result. That must be good. And what happens is”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very useful. And so all of a sudden, you can get 10 examples of something and test a theory where before it was kind of just too hard and you didn't.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of data on the internet, and it's often in things like images, which makes it hard to do your own analysis or plug it in or et cetera, come up with your own models or apply it. But I found that AI is really good, actually, especially Gemini, saying that you just give it to it and give a chart to it and say, like, make this into a table that I can paste, like literally say that I can paste into Google Sheets. And it will do it in a way that literally you can copy and it will actually paste correctly into Google Sheets, and then you can do stuff. So especially with the book and my articles, I love to use real data whenever I can, of course. And so I do that all the time. So I think that kind of interpretation is.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's so many ways to get it wrong. Because all, like we said, all these things have to be right. You just said another one, which is, and you have to say it in a way that when this person hits the homepage, they know it. True, but do they know that it's just so many things have to go right?”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't say all the pieces naturally fit into place, but certainly isn't that sort of the root thing that is going to make all this stuff work? Then there will be a good way to do pricing. They will stay as long as possible. And these things will probably be right if that. So this idea of creating value for the customer and then figuring out how to split with them is probably the root idea. And of course, I hesitate because platitudes like that are actually not actionable, not very actionable. Like, all right, well, I'll move on with my day. And that's why Twitter's not so useful. But given that we've gone into so much detail, perhaps that's a nice way of summarizing it.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you tried to find a common thread throughout all this stuff about growth, it comes back to the customer getting value. And I know we already talked about that, but I think if there could be one thing where it would help solve kind of all of it, it would be that they really are getting value. Your product actually promises the right thing, and then it actually delivers on that thing, and the customers can onboard so that they can do the thing. And the customers know, they realize that they're getting the thing and you're measuring the thing. So, you know, it's increasing. That is probably, if I was an LLM, I'd probably say that's the common thread. There's many ways that manifests, of course. But if that's your North Star is how we actually creating value in the way the customer values it and their language and their way and their way of understanding it.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the book is called Hidden Multipliers, and you can pre order it at hiddenmultiers.com, or I guess if this is out long enough, I'll, it'll order it, I guess, depending on when you're listening to this. And it's a lot of stuff kind of like we were talking about today, these questions of, it's called multipliers because the idea is little things that you can do or little decisions you can make that have a huge impact. And like moving the cancellation rate from 5 to 4%. Sounds small, has a huge thing. Onboarding as opposed to later huge thing. So those are some examples, but the book is, of course, full of different kinds of topics, but all of this idea of the stuff that has such a big impact on things like revenue or profit. And either, just as you said earlier, either like either maybe you have never thought of it that way so you didn't really you weren't thinking about it right or”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't say what is right, but it's not that. And so, which is nice because you can put those tools down. I'll do some market research to see if I steal my company. Nope. That's not where the answers are.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a book almost out now that's on pre order about topics like what we've been talking. The next book I want to write is on this topic of How do I make these decisions of uncertainty? Like maybe it is time to quit. Maybe I shouldn't move to a different city. Maybe I should marry this person. Maybe I should launch this company. Maybe it's time to, maybe I should use this strategy where you want to use probability and expected value. It's unlikely that, dot, dot, right? But 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. And anyway, even if you could have expected value, I am a human being. This is my life. And I either sell the company or I don't. And so all this stuff about probability and like, that's not, that doesn't apply to me. I need other ways of sorting this out. So I guess I would just say briefly, probability is not going to work for these decisions.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're probably copying other people's style. You probably don't have that much unique things to say. So there's a lot of that's okay. You're just trying to get going. It's okay. 20 years later, if you have no style and no voice of your own and nothing new to say, that's probably not good. But to get going, sure. So sometimes we have this thing where we get going with maybe looser, I don't want to say values. I'm not saying that's unethical, but like looser sort of bar or a pride that we have in our own work and we tighten it up as we're sort of able, as we can afford to, you might even say. So good, but that's then that becomes a nice filter here of like, what, what is it in a greater sense I'm trying to do here? I'm willing to do here. So if you're not growing your dying fair, but like there has to come with these limits and the more successful you are, the more you can be serious about those limits.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, help you avoid. Doing unnatural things that you actually regret to grow. So, like, if growth at all costs is just the thing, like there's probably ways you could quote unquote grow the newsletter that you would just say, I just wouldn't be proud of that. And the newsletter is doing so well. I don't need to do that. And so again, maybe that's a softer version because growth hasn't actually stopped, but okay, it's a softer version of, I certainly don't agree with growth. You might say, I certainly don't agree with growth at all costs. I want to grow as much as possible within the things that I'm proud of. If we grew fast, but the content was crappy, I'm just not willing to do that. It's like not the point. So it helps set up these boundaries of like, wait a minute, not if, dot, dot, dot. And, you know, early on, we may not have that flexibility. You could argue that you should have those values early on because that's who you are and that's what you're doing and people respond. So I could argue you should have that all along. But I could also argue that at the beginning, you're just trying to do something where you don't die. You're starting to blog.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you have to only ask this at the end of the chain? No, of course you should feel fulfilled. And of course, you want to be checking in with yourself at least annually. Of course, but I sort of put at the end of my list in the sense that I'm assuming the original question is about the company. Especially with smaller companies, but also with big public companies. There's plenty of big public companies that aren't growing, aren't there? So this is true of all scales because there are natural sizes for things. So, yeah, it's a little philosophical, but I think it's quite important.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This final question Do you need to grow, or if you're not growing, you're dying? Is that true? And are you therefore dying and what needs to happen? So, if you were looking for more metrics in another framework, sorry, as existential, but it is. It is existential.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, I don't mean to overstate this, and I certainly don't mean to claim that there's some answer that's right for everybody, of course. But surely this is the right kind of question. And surely for many people who are listening to this, the answer is, yeah, I mean, in some sense, some very rough sense, that's probably right for me. And so if I'm in a stagnant situation and really every other option has been exhausted and isn't going to happen, this is simply a stagnant thing. Maybe there's something else needs to happen. I need to leave. The company needs to change some drastic way. I sell the company. I change jobs. I don't know. Of course, it's going to be super context specific and personal, right? But like something dramatic may need to change because nothing incrementally is changing.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you are not growing, then in some sense maybe for some people, you're dying. Maybe if you're listening to this, that's you. You're a shark and you got to go. And we all know in people too who claim they hate work, or maybe they do hate work, let's not say claim, they do hate work, but then they retire and kind of go downhill because they don't have a purpose or this or that and the other thing. In that case, it was true if they're not growing, they're dying, literally.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes we forget to take a step back and go, wait a minute, what is this? Is this still right or do I need to turn the page and have a new chapter of life right now? And so this question, do you need to grow, or if you're not growing, you're dying? Well, for some people, no, they like doing the same thing forever, and that's great, actually. That's nice. But for many people, especially the kind of people who want to get into product and build stuff and innovate and people who start companies, a lot of people like that are not the kind of people that want to just kind of do rote things for 20 years. And so the not growing part, what I like to say is maybe the you and You are not growing, you're dying, is you the person.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer could be yes. If I'm a CPA and I have some clients and life is good, the answer could be yes. I'm not saying I'm not dictating the answer here. I'm just asking because a lot of times whether it's our careers, whereas founders, our companies, a lot of times we've just been in the mode of, well, I've got to grow, I've got to get promoted, I've got to do more, I've got my resume, we've got in that mode for so long, like maybe our whole life. I was going to say lose sight of it. Maybe we never had sight of. Wait, does this make me happy? Is this what I really want? Am I fulfilled doing this? Or even if I do have these goals, have I gotten stuck in a rut where my goal is growth and I don't know more money, more everything and I'm stuck in a rut here.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that true, or is that the kind of thing that investors use to make founders grow or try to grow even when they shouldn't? Might be, but I would submit that even at a bootstrap company that has other values and culture other than growth at all costs, that that phrase is still fairly relevant because if the company's stagnant for years, is that a great environment for everyone? As the founder, did you start this company in order to do the same thing every day? Is that why you did it? Do you really want to do, is that fulfilling for you? What about everyone else? Nobody wants to further their career. They just want to do the same thing every day and never further their career, not really learn anything, not really innovate. Does it feel good to just not be growing?”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been maximizing revenue, but maybe we maximize profit instead. And so this is a company like 37 Signals, or really lots of Bootstrap companies who have hit some sort of limit and realize that's okay. Like the founders are getting paid millions of dollars a year in dividends and like it's okay. But I don't have to get, in fact, if I got bigger, it might be an organization that I don't like or serving a market segment that I don't want to serve or whatever. And so maybe growing forever isn't the goal, actually, or growing revenue isn't. You could ask philosophically, why grow anything? Why isn't just okay to have stasis? And we all have heard the phrase if you're not growing, you're dying. This is a classic company thing.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last question is Do you need to grow? Okay, growth is stalled. And if we assume every question before has been answered in a satisfactory way. You could ask hey, is that a problem? What do we mean by grow? Do we need to do exactly now? Of course, you should know these kind of things, the goals all the time And again, like obviously, the answer could be once again oh new products, these other things were like this company, when we say do you need to grow if we define you as this product in this market in this company, the answer might be no what we need to do is have a different product or in a different market or a different thing Or you could you could change the word revenue if you say do you need to grow revenue you could change the word revenue and say you know what We could do is maximize profit instead of revenue now.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's easy to hear stuff like, well, if marketing is full, do something else. And you go, I know. But then you look at people's behavior and it's like, well, you're not acting like you know. Maybe it needs to be said in enough detail that you actually do something about it.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plant one foot into some strength or asset that you have, move the other foot, which is the risky bart. But the idea is that, yeah, where we have this big upside. So we're taking that bet. And like that becomes a smart bet. So with things, of course, that's true for any of these things, but especially if acquisition channels are full and it's like we literally can't ask the marketing department like that's just not one of the choices it almost forces us to start taking these more drastic bets to say well we got to do something and that's not one of them”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throw through agencies that create WordPress sites. So there could be something that's not direct anymore. That's another channel of human beings or something like that. Could in fact dramatically change your growth rate? There's lots of examples like those. But it could be like it's time for the next product. And I said that earlier because it's always possible. Of course we all know that's very hard. It's risky. I have sort of a framework that I use to think about that kind of expansion, which I'm happy to provide. I've also written it up, but I'm happy to say it right here. But usually you want to stay in the target market you're already good at and grow from there, but sometimes the whole point of the expansion is to change target or add something where you're leveraging something else about the company that you have as an asset going somewhere else. So this is what this framework helps decide. But one way or another, you probably want to.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effective physically being in these cities and dragging people in for $20 a month product, like no way. It was very effective and actually solved in that moment their restarted growth. They were very clever about, first of all, it's a clever idea, but then they were clever about how to do it. They took like power users who were also agencies. So these could become customers of their okay. It's all like you could be clever about like, how is it that we do something different, something new. So that's possible. Of course, it's always hard to say think of something clever. That's a weird finger wagging thing to do, but okay, it's true. But yeah, it could be a different type of channel. For example, HubSpot famously tested selling through agencies instead of direct, it ended up being 50% of the revenue after four or five years. So it's one of the main reasons why they're able to continue growing. The same thing happens with my company, WP Engine. Tons of our websites are sold through.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, you know, should you do that? Yeah, probably, especially if you're at some scale and you can just afford to because it's such a clear thing to do. But probably you'll have to get more creative about what it means to add a channel or something like a new product or a new market where it's actually new. It's expanding in a new way rather than trying to incrementally expand what you're already doing. So an example of getting creative on a channel is what constant contact did when they had this very problem of growth has slowed. We don't know how we sell email, marketing, newsletters to small business before all these modern tools existed. And one of the things they did that restarted growth is they physically went to a bunch of cities and held workshops showing here's how to do email marketing for your small business. So the restaurateur and the dentist and everyone would come to these sessions and they teach them how of course teaching them how to constant contact so they became customers, right? Now you would think there's no way this is cost.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Done direct, maybe we should try things like SEO and social and these other indirects, or vice versa. We're really good at SEO, but we never taken out ads. Often, if you've done ads and they're optimized, you know what content might be good to write stuff for SEO and maybe even vice versa, maybe. So it's a good idea, and sometimes it works, but here I have no data. I only have my feeling here. And actually, you probably have a lot more visibility into this, but my experience is a product that's sold really well direct actually doesn't do well in things like social SEO and vice versa. If you're getting a lot of traffic through SEO, adding ads often like costs a lot and doesn't really move the needle. You can tell me is that because I don't have data to support that theory.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It needs to change how you think. Just adding one little feature and then hoping we can flog outwards is not going to work. Even if the feature is great, not going to work. So there's different things that could work, but that's not one of them. And yet that's probably what we're doing. Let's add another feature and marketing can flog it is often the answer. But if you're in this state, that isn't the answer. So this is why like you could say it's obvious to say this or that, but if, but are you acting like this is true? You know, often we don't. Okay, so there are many things to do. Again, we don't have to enumerate all of them or something. It's just simply the right question to ask. But for example, some people are like.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they sag. Oh no, like it's even harder to keep up. So it's kind of like the secret in reinforcing my very first point here with this. But here are they all saturated because we could flog marketing all we want. It's not going to work. So maybe growth is slowing because this is all our channels are saturated, possibly even sagging, but even if not, okay, not growing. And so we can't just flog the marketing department. It's going to take something else, right? The obvious thing is get more channels, but again, maybe there aren't any. So again, there's many possible things to do, but this is like this critical thing to notice because I guess I would put it this way. Do you know right now which channels are saturated and which aren't? If the answer is no, I'm like, well, okay, maybe that's because the answer is all”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conferences are the same way. Attendance is great. Attendance is great. Oh, wait, we're out of business because we couldn't get enough people to come. What, what? They said it was great. But more quietly, AdWords, Facebook ads, even SEO searches, this does happen all over the place. Affiliates, it can happen. And now with AI, I don't even know, right? It's disrupting everything. We've all heard stories going all different directions. I think the answer is, I don't know. Shrug is the answer. And what will it be like in two years? Another shrug. But the point being, they're not all going to be growing a lot. Like that's not one of the features that AI will bring. So it has the sag. That's just a very long way of maybe trying to prove this point, but it's yet another reason why you can't just rely on marketing forever, because you try to stack things, but there's not like infinite number of marketing channels you could advertise in that your customers are actually going to.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true, but workers seem to think so. Okay. Well, one of the things is someone has to see it seven times before they act. Okay. All right. Well, maybe they saw it seven times already, so they don't want it, or they saw it 20 times, right? So initially, you hit people who hadn't seen it yet, right? But now you have. And especially with magazine ads as I used to do before there was no such thing, that's exactly what would happen. You'd have this nice surge and then like, well, we've seen this, we've seen it before. So you still get a little trick, you still get some because, you know, it was just that moment they needed to see it again. Okay, but like there's this sort of, but a lot of people have already seen it and they don't want it, or the channel is declining, and they'll never tell you when I did magazine ads every year, they would tell you what their circulation is, and every year it would go up, and then the magazine would go out of business.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then it kind of taps out. And then we go into this optimization mode. Can we eke out another blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is right. Oh, that's right. And you call that an S-curve because it's shaped like that. But that's not what happens. What happens is it starts with an S-curve and then starts sagging. Its butt starts sagging down. So I wrote an article about this called The Elephant Curve, which is what I named it because it's like this trunk. But then it's this butt. And there's different reasons why this happens. But if you talk to any marketer, they'll all tell you, oh my God, let me tell you this story, right? All the stories about it because, yeah, this is what happens. There's different reasons that, first of all, the audience gets saturated, you know, because there's all these little marketing isms. And I don't know if they're true or not. I don't think any of it has any data that actually proves it, but whatever. Like, you know, if words start with the same letter, that's better. I don't think anyone's ever proved.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe this is it in some sort of physical law. There literally isn't anything else, or maybe this is it just this is how good we can be. We're just not, this is it, right? But there really are limits. There's different words for it. Inventory is sort of the old word, like with magazine ads, inventory was the word. But there's just this amount. Like there is only so many searches in your area. And you can only appear once in the search results for a given keyword. So there is this limit of like what you can get, even if you were number one position for everything, you know, other things that are that are not even practical, there's still a limit. And there's some kind of practical limit that's below there that we don't really know. But maybe we're there or maybe we're close. And worse, channels tend to decline over time. So I think people talk about S-curves, right? Oh, I didn't figure out this market. Then I figured it out. You know, we unlocked it. Now we're getting 100 leads per month through Facebook or whatever.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've done three. There's more. More you can do. So, okay, logo churn. Pric NR, and then maybe it stalls, so this is really a stalled question. Maybe your acquisition channels, your marketing channels are saturated. We're done. I mean, what we tend to do is flog the people doing AdWords, get more, flog the SEO people, get more searches, right? It's possible that this is it.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because if growth is good, yeah, sure, you want to grow more, but it's not the problem. If growth is really good, the problem is generally operationally scaling to meet the growth. And so you're focused on that. It's when growth slows, you're like, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait. We have to focus on growth now. Must, as opposed to, of course, it's always nice. So, yeah.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In B2B that may not be true, right? I don't get a mid size company to refer, that doesn't make sense. So once again, this question of how do we have the existing base help us grow is still correct and consumer, but its manifestation could be very different. Of course, I agree with that. How could how could we not say, I mean, of course, things like word of mouth and invited friend, of course, that's enormous with consumer. And this is one of the reasons why.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, like, so is it harder? Yeah, of course, of course. All of these are easier and harder in different segments and ways. Like, of course, of course. I'm not trying to say otherwise. But I would say the mechanics of how the finances work is the same. You're just saying, I don't have this lever to pull. And then I would say, okay, well, then you need different levers. One that we didn't talk about is one way to offset the cancellations is existing customers grow. But another way is if existing customers bring in new customers. So they didn't grow, but they brought their friend. Now, this is absolutely something that happens in consumer, but it's also an answer to this thing where cancellations grow exponentially because existing customers bring in new does triple if you have more existing customers. Aha. So this is stuff like refer a friend and all this kind of stuff. Again, like some of this is obvious. We don't need to enumerate that. But so those things are good. And so in consumer, you might say, oh, it's easier to try to get someone to invite a friend with a coupon and blah, blah, blah, blah than it is to try to get them to grow.”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're right, but it would be as a product manager. It would be 10 times more valuable for you to think of something like that than to move on to other things, et cetera. Or there's other ways like other products. We didn't talk about it and it's okay because of course each one of these is you could go on forever, right? But another way is a second product. Second product sold to the same segments that you're in so that your existing customers can buy it. Well, I don't know why that wouldn't work in consumer. It certainly works in consumer in apparel”
2026-01-25 · Lenny's Podcast · 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source