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

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“What I would say is the rules are true everywhere because they're based in the mechanics of finance and the business. Now you were right that in the consumer segment or small business segment, for that matter, they tend not to grow. So, that doesn't mean the NRA question is invalid, it means dang, we can't think of anything. That's okay. Then you go on to the next question because you can't think of anything. But you know, but it would be more strategic if we could. And are we trying hard enough? As a consumer, I do not want to spend more with ATT, but they're also not giving me any more value. There are other products as a consumer like Amazon where they do.”
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
“As consumers on the other end of that, we don't like it. And that's not a good long term strategy, even though it might work in the short term, as many bad long-term strategies 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
“Can be coerced into making pricing or other kinds of policies that in fact are not good for the customer. So one tool I use is when anyone claims anything really, is that really true or is that really actually good for the customer? Because we are going to do things that are selfishly good for us. We have to. We can't just do things that are bad for us. But is this in fact good for the customer? Because often even in an internal proposal, we say it as if it is. Oh, this price will be good. It'll raise prices on everyone. But it's better because of this reason that we were sort of justifying, right? It's like, well, the customer say this is better? If the answer is no, it's like, okay, it's not better for us, but sorry, we have an equation where it has to be better for us and better for the customer. Sorry, it's an and of course not all companies do that. We experience that on all of us.”
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, I think that's right. And maybe you don't deserve it. Like, in other words, Especially when there's investors or other sort of forces saying, like, hey, we need the X, Y, and Z, forces that are not the customer saying that. Yeah, you can be.”
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 when you do that, you're keeping the customer forefront in mind. You are taking the splitting means you get some. Let's not forget. It's not a charity. And on the other hand, first we should think how we generate value for customers and then think, and then we can take a little, we've now earned the ability to take a little piece of that. So to me, this is the right way to think about NRR, not just we'll add a feature and make them pay true, but let's actually take it from this different, let's get there from this different perspective.”
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
“Better than some metric that's just operational. And even if it's qualitative, okay, can we do that? Can we talk to customers and ask them qualitative questions to try to say like, you know, I would just say like do your best here because only when you generate more value for the customer you can then decide how to split that with the customer in terms of things like price, right? But that's in fact how I think of it, that very phrase. How do we create more value for the customer and then split that with 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
“Up, they won't be willing to pay. So even if we start making them, they'll leave. And we all know we were all pretty done it ourselves. We've all had products we love. But then as we scale, the price goes up faster than we feel the value is. And then we start looking for other products that we've all experienced that. So that's what I'm saying. To do that, you want some sort of measure of the value the customer is getting. If you're really lucky, that can be a number. That would be wonderful. Then go do that and maybe that's your North Star. But admittedly, it's not always possible. So then the question is, the usual questions of metrics, are there proxy metrics that we understand or not the full picture, but they're helpful. They're part of it, you know. And I'm a big believer in saying not all important things are numbered. Even things like how differentiated are we in the market, not a number, but it's very important. So this might be one of those things that's important, but not a number. So, okay, can we get some proxy metrics even of behavior to other things? That's something.”
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
“Can do it's sort of obvious. I would say, oh, look, it's tied into pricing because their behavior, but the main thing is you want it to where the customer themselves would agree when they pay more that they are getting more value. Hopefully they even think they're getting far more value than the price going up, right? I'm going to say this as if it's precise, which it's not, but they need to feel like if the price doubles, yeah, but I'm getting five times the value. So that's fine. Like that should be the feeling whether they can measure it or not. A good way to do that is to say, well, then you should be measuring whether they're getting value out of it. Often we measure like usage metrics and other kinds of metrics within our product because we can. But actually what's really important is to measure how does the customer value this? And we need to measure that so that we make that go up. Because if we make that go up, they'll be willing to pay in whatever structure. And if that isn't going...”
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, yes, that's what it takes. You can't do this. You're limited unless your goal may or may not be to get that big, but the point being, it's mandatory for growth. Now, if the literal customers are just leaving like that, you got to plug that hole first, like you said. But okay, if they're okay, that's why this is in order. If that's generally okay, now we turn to NRR to say, okay, but the ones who stay, they're hopefully happy, they need to grow. Okay. So that's the kind of the full story of NRR. I think people don't quite people who've heard of NRR don't necessarily think about all those things and realize that. So a good question is, okay, what do I do with NR? But I think the answers are pretty clear. Like you add features, you have different tiers, you change the pricing in some way with usage or seats or something that kind of goes up automatically as they get more value out of it. So I don't think that's terribly interesting to double.”
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
“Like, that's how it goes, and those companies have horrible financials and their values valuations are bad. Like, it's not good. It's not a good thing, right? So, and in fact, the median for a IPO'd SaaS company like at IPO, the median NRR is 119%.”
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
“Only gets us to 96%, actually. So, this is why, again, I believe in NRI. I'm saying you got to log and track it. It's good. Just in the back of your mind, realize it's not quite that good. And looking at N helps you honest about what's really going on with these customer cohorts, right? So that's why they're both useful, in fact. But this is why they're both useful. So NRR, of course, is important. A nice way to see this is, if everything I'm saying is true and there's these limits and stuff because of cancellation, then there should be no way to get a big company like a public SaaS company unless NRR is greater than 100. Like otherwise, cancellation should just win. And that is in fact the case. There's over 100 SaaS public companies and something like two of them have NRR less than 100%.”
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
“No, because 20% were then 80 is 96. So if it goes down 20% and up 20%, it does not come back to zero. It's worse. When 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. This is why NRR isn't quite right. Because NRR is saying that a loss of 20% from cancellations is offset by 20% from upgrades. As we just saw, no, it's 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
“Because think about it. Like a lot of times people think so if you've heard of NRR, you might think, well, that's my golden metric. I'm done. But the issue is if NR is positive but n goes down too fast, it doesn't matter because not enough people are left And so there's not enough people left over to upgrade. And so actually, you're wrong. And so NR does not include that. And therefore, it actually undercounts what's going on in a bad way, like in a way that hurts you. There's yet another way to see why what I'm saying is right. You know, there's this thing in investments where, let's say I started out at $100 and the stock goes down 5%. So now it's at naive. No, it goes down 20%. Now it's at 80 It goes up 20%. Is it back to 100?”
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 that is an answer. And maybe that's obvious, but it's useful to tie it back to the sort of mental model we've got going. And of course, the metric here is NRR net revenue retention. And the way that's computed is you say, what is the revenue of customers right now? Like so existing customers, existing whatever, just all total. And then one year from now, what of that remains? So not new customers coming in, not talking about them because we're asking about the cohort that exists. What remains? So with cancels, it goes down, with downgrades it goes down, but with upgrades it goes up. So when I say remains, it could end higher than we started if upgrades exceed cancellations and downgrades. And now we are talking about MRR and not n because n doesn't have this. N doesn't have an upgrade and just only goes down, which again is why I think the n is actually the most important one.”
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 pricing right, and why do we think it is? We probably don't have good reasons yet. Okay, so the third one is our existing customers growing. I think everyone probably knows this, but just to say it, okay, if cancellations overtake marketing in magnitude. One way to come back, I mean, one thing is okay, make the cancellations lower, but it can't be zero. So, what else do we have to combat cancellations that would be proportional to our size so that it keeps up unlike marketing, right? Or, you know, basic direct marketing. So one would be, all right, 2% left, but of the remaining 98%, some of those upgraded or otherwise paid us more, maybe it's usage-based, whatever it is, they're paying us more. And so that covers the gap.”
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
“People. I don't want to sell to a big company. We're never going to make a product for them. We don't want to. This is who we are. This is what we want to do. This is what's fulfilling to us. So we're not going to go there. So it can be cultural. It can be certain goals. It can be, it can be other aspects of the business model or the strategy. But it's not this kind of like, oh, I'll just change this. It's a decision about the whole strategy. And that too, we could talk about for hours. I'll just caution that Oh, I'll just go enterprise is, of course, not how it goes.”
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 can't just raise prices. Like these new customers have different demands. Now maybe you need Sock 2. Now your other governance stuff matters. Now integrating to certain systems you didn't know about matters. Maybe now they need professional services. Like you can't just raise prices and change market in like that's it. And maybe that's wise to do, but maybe it's not. Maybe you realize that, sure, of course that other market has certain advantages, but they also have disadvantages. And we don't want those either because we'll no longer be competitive because the way that we're distinguished competitive special, interesting, valuable is only valuable in the market we're in. The next market does not value it like that. And so uh oh, actually that would be really bad for us or it could even be cultural We are a company like buffer is a great example buffer could go up market and try to sell you know social media tools to whatever but they realized we are a company for the little”
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 gets easier. The thing, I don't want to go off too much of a tangent, but the thing you have to remember is that pricing is not this knob that you can turn separately from the rest of your strategy. So when you say, like, even when I just said raise prices or whatever, but”
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, yeah, so it's a long way of saying, so again, what I think is your pricing correct, I'm thinking in maybe a more general way than just like the number I'm thinking about the structure, the positioning, and all that. And my guess is when growth is slowing, that there's a lot of improvement that could be had there.”
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
“Sell more of what the company values like growth. It doesn't have to be growth, it could be something else. The retention for their customers, how competitive they are in the market. There's various things they could value. Growth is an obvious one. Sell them that they're going to get more of what they value as opposed to saving, cutting ROI saves time, saves money, more efficient. And again, there's nothing wrong with saving money saves time. It's just that it caps this price and this value that they perceive that you do. Whereas if you deliver more of the value that they already value, I don't want to say uncapped completely, but like the cap is maybe an order of magnitude higher than saving. So again, it's valuable to save. They're not doing anything wrong. Like that's not how to talk about what it is and therefore help set the price.”
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
“Positioning, it's how their budgets work, it's how it's structured, it's per site or it's per usage or it's per seat or it's per all of this stuff is part of what pricing is. And often even if it's the same price or the same product, depending on how that's structured, it either seems fair and good or it seems like unfair and too expensive or whatever. And so in particular with the positioning, the big lesson for product managers 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
“Everyone's happy because the CEO goes, What did you do? And they said, Oh my god, I doubled leads. Yeah, I mean, at the same ROI as we had before, same CAC, I doubled leads. CO goes, how could we do more of that? Like, I mean, just everything is so much better. Same product. Now, I know it's a little bit of an exaggeration, et cetera, because I'm trying to make a point, right? But the big point is. The largest point is pricing is not just the number on the page.”
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
“Just said, I believe it's been 40k for this number of leads. So doubling it, I'm willing to spend 40k to double So, if I give double down 40k, not 5. The same product, which the leads are cheaper, but now the pitch is I doubled the leads for 40K instead of having the cost for 5K. So double down gets 8x the money because it gets 40k for this product, not 5k for this product.”
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, we'd really like the CMO to tell the CEO is I increase the growth rate of the company. Not so much I save money. That was way better. So here's how we could do that with double down. Double down has the cost, but what that means is right now, the company is paying $200 per lead, let's call them leads, right? Whatever this is outputting, right? Well, if I have the cost of a lead, I could get twice the leads for the same money. I'm already willing to spend $200 a lead, and I'm already spending $40K a month for it. So if double down has the cost, it means I can get more leads. So, the way I could pitch double down is double the leads per month. Now, if I'm willing to spend $40K for this number of leads, how much am I willing to spend to double the leads? 40K.”
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
“About these two situations that the CMO might be or the chief product officer might be in talking to the CEO at the end of the year. Well, a scenario one goes, we started using this tool double down and it halved our costs. So we able to spend that money on some other stuff. We were able to save money. And the CEO would say, great, that's good. We're going to renew and I'm happy to hear it. Again, nothing wrong here. But let's take a different tact altogether. What does the CO want to hear more? Growth or saves money? Growth are good. I know which one is healthier for the company, increases market share, is better competitively, and also makes the company more valuable. It's the growth.”
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
“Well, if you do cut my AdWords in half, then I saved 20K, but I'm not willing to give 20K to double down because then I'm not saving any money. Or to actually save money, I need to give double down less money. How much less? I don't know. Let's just call it a quarter. So I pay double down 5K to save 20. So I'm really saving 15, double down's making 5K a month. That's pretty good. Everyone's pretty happy at this $5 grand a month price point. So there's nothing wrong with this. No one's doing anything wrong. Like, that's a perfectly valid company. However,”
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 charge eight times as much for the same product just by talking about it differently. So just by positioning it differently, eight times as much. Again, this happened to me, but it's too complicated. It's not interesting, those details are not interesting. So say there's this company called Double Down. And the idea is that it halves the cost of your ad words because it makes it so efficient. So that's what it says on the webpage. Cut your AdWords costs in half. Is a very good pitch, isn't it? It's simple, obviously valuable. You think so? Let's suppose I'm a customer and I spend $40,000 a month on AdWords. What am I willing to pay for double”
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
“I love the interview, right? So, like, so I believe in all that, no problem. I believe in it. Nevertheless, they also say it's art and science and it's very difficult to, and also once you auger it in, the world changes like five, ten years later, the market is different, the world's different. And so it's still unclear. Also, price is not just the number on the web page. It's easy to think that, right? How it's structured is just as important, how the product's positioned is just as important. So, for example, this example I've written about before online, it actually was something that I that happened in my life, but I changed the story to make it simple and visceral and clear without having to get into lots of detail. So the sort of story version is how this company was able.”
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
“None of us know, but it's more like a Mesa and not a line that goes up to down, like in the textbook. For that market, it's only the very lowest, you might even say worst in terms of metrics end of the market that has the microeconomic slope that you're worried about. So what happens is you raise prices and you enter a different market. And that's why the signups go up or okay. You leave behind perhaps a worse market anyway. And of course, everyone will tell you, you know, the more they pay, the higher retention is and all the kinds of stuff goes better when you charge more. So this question is pricing correct. This is kind of what's in my mind when I ask that question. It's like probably the answer is no because pricing is very hard. It's just as much art as it is science. You've had some really good people on here on pricing. In fact, so good that I've bought some of the books that those people have talked about because I love 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
“Not mature enough, it's not going to do enough, the support's not going to be good enough, they probably don't have good governance policies or other things that we need, you know, et cetera. Whether that's true or not, like this is what it looks like is it's low quality, cheap, whatever, aimed at SMB. So they just won't buy. They're not in the market for the thing. So it's not true that they have this demand curve where, oh, since it's cheap, they all want it. That's what microeconomics curve says. It's so cheap that they should all want it. No, they don't. None of them want it because it looks bad. So as it gets into a price range that makes sense for the kinds of things that they need, then their demand actually goes up. Then it can stay up while it's in a good range. And then, of course, at some point, you are priced out of them. That particular kind of company is like, look, I'm not going to spend $10 million a year on it. Are you kidding? So yes, it does slope down and go away. So it's not a normal curve, but it is like it slopes up and then it's something and slopes down. Who knows exactly what it looks, what shape it 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
“So if you only think of the market as people with very limited budgets, barely can do anything, not getting much value out of it, then it is true that if you raise prices, you'll get fewer of them. They were never getting that much value out of it anyway. They don't have that much money. So if you raise prices, they're gone But think about just even a midsized company. Forget about enterprise. Just think about a company with a thousand employees and 400 million in revenue or whatever. And if they see a product that's, you know, $2 a month or even $100 a month, the thought is like, well, that can't be good enough.”
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 he did, and he's still got one or two per week. Like, nothing changed. I'm like, okay, what are you going to do next? And he goes, oh my gosh, well, now I have so much more money and profits I'm going to like hire an engineer. I'm going to do this marketing. And I'm like, time out. What you're going to do is raise prices again. Like you just told me you 12 Xed' the price and nothing observable changed. That means you're not near the price yet, right? You don't have to 10x it again necessarily. Maybe you 2x, maybe 50%. But like, you're not done. I mean, you can do those other things too, but you're not done with the price. It didn't even occur to him still. Okay, so why does this happen? The reason is that pricing selects the market.”
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
“Talk to a guy. This is really funny. I'm not going to not say the name to protect the name, right? So you hit a product that he was selling essentially to enterprise and government, so larger companies. And it was to me way too cheap. So he said something like, yeah, I charge $300. Like $300 a month, that's not enough. He goes, no, per year. They're like, okay, wait. Said, okay, just do me a like how many signups do you get a week? And he's like, one or two because this is enterprise and it was a startup. I said, okay. Just for fun, just change it from per month per year to per month. So in other words, we're 12xing the price, 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
“Understand, I think everyone understands right, but maybe you raise prices by 10, but signups go down only 5%. So overall, it's better. But the opposite could happen too. If I'm on the other side of the demand curve, and okay. So that's how most people think of it. However, this is not how it works. So that's how it works in Elix 101 textbooks. That's not how it works in the real world often. So what usually happens is you raise prices and sign ups don't change. When I say signups, I mean like signups per month, you know, the rate at sign. Or signups go up. Happens all the time, even for solopreneurs on Twitter who have strange projects or everything happens all the time. They raise prices. They're like, I was scared, but then sinus went up.”
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
“Like, yeah, are we just picked whatever our competitors are doing? And that's it, or we added or subtracted something because reasons. Right, that's probably not good, and people are scared to raise prices for obvious reasons, but if we set aside the emotional reasons, whether they're correct or not, the sort of economic reason people normally give is they have in their mind this microeconomic supply and demand curve thing and the demand curve says that if you raise the price demand goes down. That's why demand curve is always going that way, right? And so”
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
“Still, probably a good idea to work. It's probably a good ROI for you to work on it, but it's possible that you've got diminishing returns and that this isn't really the reason, or it's not really reasonable for it to go. I mean, how low can it go for S&B? Like there's some floor, and you might be near it. So the first question is, is logo turned too high and trying to set a threshold that lower than what people normally want to do? So the next question I have is, is the pricing correct? Of course, pricing is a perennial interesting topic, I know. There's this funny thing of, especially with newer companies, that the pricing is always too low. It's not always, but like that's the common thing. Patrick Campbell, who has 4,200 data points about startups, let that sink in a little, has this great quote, which goes like this. Your prices are way too low because you just guessed and you haven't changed them. It's like, yeah, if you really look deep within and you realize.”
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, I kind of look at it like a question. So, like, the first question is Are people leaving it too much? Because if your monthly cancellation is 2% for SMB, that's good. So you could try to work on it, but since it's already 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
“It's just what your customers do, just what anybody does. So it's what the good customers have in common that are different from what the bad customers have in common. Okay, so with that in mind, this kind of like it has to be both, or else you're sort of not getting, you're just getting correlations that are not helpful. The cancellations, or talking to people who are in trouble is another application of that. So what is correlate with people who actually end up canceling, not just what, you know. And so I think that mindset is correct if you add the other side of that to 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
“I haven't seen that. What I would say is not hard. You don't need a lot of customers to go talk to the ones who are in trouble. You do need a lot of data or customers to mathematically know what behaviors are correlated with cancel and therefore to spend your time wisely, then you need a lot more data. But to your point, even if you have that data, it's not entirely clear whether some kind of mechanistic thing is all that important. One way I look at it is it's very common advice you should try to get more good customers and fewer bad customers. Of course, you should. And so therefore they say you should see what the good customers have in common. That's not the end of the sentence because a lot of the things that good customers have in common, they also have in common with the bad customers.”
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 topics will be. I already know what the topics will be. It'll be stuff like I couldn't figure out how to do this, this integration, right? Like the topics are actually not going to be that surprising probably. It's the details that are going to be the triggers for actionable actionable stuff or patterns or something like that. So yeah, AI is not useless, but it's not as useful as it sounds. It's probably still a good idea to just read all this stuff. Although AI might be able to clean up, you know, people's grammar is bad. It's a weird language. Okay, yes. That's annoying. You could clean that up, but I wouldn't rely on AI to do the thinking for that reason.”
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, I think what I find with AI is this, with this sort of thing, with surveys, is this. AI is good at picking out themes. It is bad at picking out details that are actionable. When I say AI, of course, I mean LLMs, which is probably what we mean when we're looking at natural language, right? And if 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. One way that I found that's sort of useful is, yes, I'll ask it about themes, but then I'll say, now pick out every specific detail that goes under one of these themes. Put it along with like which customer said it and the link to, you know, blah, blah, blah. So you have to, you know, play with this to tune it right. But like that kind of thing so that a human being can then still see the detail, which is what triggers in your mind. Wait a minute, but that means we should do this, right? Because the topics won't do 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
“You're going to believe them when they say it's because of the cost? Right, like it just doesn't even make sense when you put it that way, 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
“So that's a huge change. And so the SAS equivalent is, as we all know, if they leave early, not only is it bad, but it's super unprofitable because you spent all this money to acquire them and then they never stayed around long enough to pay it back, much less to be profitable. So if you can do a little bit in the onboarding or shift the onboarding percentage a little bit, it pays off enormously in revenue and profit over time by making them successful. So again, if you don't know what to do, onboarding is a good bet. And even if you do know what to do, I'll still bet that onboarding is a good bet for where to go.”
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, in that crazy looking curve, for the people that watch it for 15 minutes, maybe there's something you could do to keep a few of them staying to the end. But that's not going to change very much how many people get to the end. Whereas for me, I've only done a few, but what I see is about 50% fall off in the first 30 seconds. Well, if I can get that from 50% to 55% stay. That's an additional, and at the end of the line, I only have 20% still there, which is pretty good for a long, longer video. But if I get it from 50 to 55, I might go from 20 to 25% staying. In other words, if I shift a 10% at the front, which maybe I could do, like I can't be dramatic, but maybe a little, then in the output, I might be able to increase it by 20-30%.”
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 also small changes in the onboarding can have large effects on cancellation. Whereas later on, that's not necessarily true. It could be, but it's not necessarily true. So a really dramatic version of this is if you've ever done YouTube videos, which I mean, I know you have, but if a listener has ever done YouTube video and you see the retention quote unquote of the viewer on a YouTube video, it has this thing where it falls like just so much you can't believe in the first 30 seconds. And then if it's a decent video, it'll flatten out as people decide to watch the video.”
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
“Can catch them when they seem like they're off the happy path they're in trouble, that's that's a better time to do it. And then the last thing I would say about this detection is if you don't know what to do or all else being equal, then focus on onboarding. Almost all companies have a whole lot more cancellation in the first day, 30 days, 90 days depends, right? But the first period, then the whole rest of the customer's life.”
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 that's the big thing about listening. Another thing is you got to ask when people are in trouble but not yet canceled. You might be able to save them. You certainly can learn more because you can talk to them. They're not shut off yet from you. So this might be, they never uploaded their data, so they're not being successful. They are calling tech support too much. They're in trouble. They're not calling tech support enough. They're not engaged. They didn't log in for a while. Like there's all kinds of things where, now, of course, this is all going to, the details are going to depend on the product, obviously, but there are signals that are correlated with cancellation. Now, if you have a lot of data, you can literally correlate signals with cancellation and try to extract that precisely. But even without data, you can guess. And guessing and having a theory acting accordingly. And as you get more data adjusting yourself. This is a wise way to proceed even without data.”
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
“Our target segment. And so, yes, that one case of that one project that's not your fault unquote. But by saying that you're just ignoring the fact that there is maybe something to do about it. Now, all this is maybe. None of this proves you should change your market, right? But the fact, but when you say there's nothing we can do about it, you are closing the door on these things that might be the right thing. And very often, as I think probably a lot of people here on this listening to this know, the market segment you pick has a lot to do with your retention rate. Everyone acts differently, right? And so anyway, so I know it's a lot on this topic, but I just feel constantly people make this particular mistake of not getting, you know, not just like abdicating responsibility or just listening to the first thing they hear and saying that's the reason and that's not 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
“See, that's incorrect. That's only true if you only look at the approximate thing, which is project ended. You're correct that you can't make that project not end exactly. Okay, but wait a minute. If your software was more successful and the project was more successful, would it have ended or is that actually an indicator that your product wasn't that useful or didn't do its job? It's possible, like in this case, who knows, right? But that's possible that it really is your fault. Another example is But you picked what target segments you were going after did you pick like a market segment that was easier to sell to but their projects end like small business and consumers where very often the small business does go out of business where the project ends etc because when things are small they're they're you know have high variance and lots of things can knock them off the the path and so on and so is it your fault for picking the wrong ideal customer profile”
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
“Let's be a little bit more smart about that. So, anyway, these things too expensive. This is not it. Maybe Project Ended really is project ended. Okay. But even there, I see just today, today on an entrepreneur forum, I am on, someone said, yeah, you know, we're starting to see more people have project ended as the reason. And so there's nothing we can do about 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