Jason Cohen
Jason’s five-step framework: logo retention, pricing, NRR, marketing channels, target market.
Episode
5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder)
Summary
Jason Cohen, two-time unicorn founder (WP Engine, Smart Bear), walks through his five-question diagnostic framework for stalled growth: logo retention, pricing, net revenue retention, marketing channel saturation (his "elephant curve" concept), and whether you actually need to grow at all. The discussion is grounded in specific mechanisms — why low prices signal low quality to enterprise buyers and why most A/B testing at normal scale produces mostly false positives.
Key Takeaways
When growth stalls, start by checking logo retention before anything else — a customer who went through the entire funnel and still churned is the most alarming signal that your product isn't delivering.
Your prices are probably too low because you guessed and never raised them. At enterprise, a /month product reads as "can't possibly be good enough" — raising prices often doesn't reduce signups.
Marketing channels follow an "elephant curve," not just an S-curve: they surge, then decay. Assume your current best channel will eventually decline and start exploring the next one before you need it.
A/B testing at normal scale produces mostly false positives — if you can't run experiments at Shopify scale with holdout groups, you're probably stacking noise on top of noise.
Before trying to fix stalled growth, ask whether growth is actually required. For bootstrap founders, flat but profitable is a viable outcome — clarifying your real goal prevents growth-at-all-costs mistakes.
Notable Quotes
“And what happens is you keep doing that. You pick the best one, and then you go on, and you find another one, and pick the best one. And then a year later you look back and you should be like 50 or a hundred percent better because you've stacked these things, and you look back, and like nothing's different. The conversion rates are the same as they've always been. You say, "What the hell happened? I thought I picked the winner."”
“Your prices are way too low because you just guessed and you haven't changed them. What often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. Just think about a company with a thousand employees and 400 million in revenue or whatever. If they see a product that's $2 a month or even $100 a month, thought is like, that can't be good enough.”
“And by the way, as you approach that number, growth is very slow because you bring in a bunch of customers and almost the same number leave, so growth is slowing. Ah, look, we've diagnosed by growth slows automatically at all SaaS companies. So that's why this is the first thing, because it's such a hard cap limit and it means that people don't want your product. These are two reasons why it's the most important thing.”