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

A lot of product teams, a lot of founders build something, it starts to show some success, and then all of a sudden it just stops growing.

There's a series of questions that I ask to diagnose why is growth slowing? The first question is, are customers leaving? Think about the gauntlet they went through to get to the product. How do they even find out about me? That was hard already, and improbable. They didn't just bounce off the homepage, [chuckles] which is again, improbable, and they got to the pricing page. That didn't scare them off. They actually had the budget and bought the stupid thing, and after all of that, which clearly means they wanted it to work, they're like, "No, bye." [chuckles] What? Like, like just on an emotional level, you gotta go, "Wait a minute, that's terrible!"

Step two is pricing, positioning.

Your prices are way too low because you just guessed and you haven't changed them. What often happens is you raise prices and sign-ups don't change. Just think about a company with 1,000 employees and $400 million in re- revenue or whatever. If they see a product that's $2 a month or even $100 a month, the thought is like, "Well, that can't be good enough."

We position this conversation as how to deal with stalled growth, but it's actually just as useful, how do I grow more?

Do you know right now which channels are saturated and which aren't? You can't just rely on marketing forever. Just adding one little feature and then hoping we can flog AdWords is not going to work.

What comes next?

The last question is, do you need to grow? We all have heard the phrase, "If you're not growing, you're dying." Is that true, or is that the kind of thing that investors use to make founders try to grow even when they shouldn't?

[music] Today, my guest is Jason Cohen. Jason is a four-time founder, including two unicorns, one being WP Engine. He's not just an incredible builder and entrepreneur, he's also an incredible writer and sharer of product wisdom. He's been sharing his advice online for over 20 years now. I've been a huge fan of Jason's from afar for so long, and it was such a treat to have him on the podcast. There are a million things we could have talked about, and I'm definitely gonna have him back. In this conversation, we spent the entire time talking about his very actionable and a very helpful framework for what to do when your product's growth stalls. I found his way of looking at the problem incredibly practical and real and actionable, and if you're looking for ideas for how to rekindle your product's growth or just accelerate the growth of your product, you're gonna walk away from this conversation with your mind buzzing. Also, I'll add that after 20 years of blogging online, Jason is about to publish his very first real book. It's called Hidden Multipliers. You can now pre-order it online at hiddenmultipliers.com. I am gonna grab a bunch. I bet after listening to this conversation, you will, too. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an insider subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of over 20 incredible products, including a year free of Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Gamma, n8n, Linear, Devon, PostHog, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Perplexity, Warp, granola, Magic Pattern, Drake, Cast, Sharpair, dMobit, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Jason Cohen after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by 10Web, the company that pioneered AI website building before ChatGPT. In the last three years, over two million websites have been generated with 10Web's Vibe Coding platform. 10Web's Vibe Coding platform is a powerful way to build websites. Think of it as lovable for WordPress, front-end, and back-end. Users can build any website at any complexity: e-commerce, portfolios, information websites, blogs, and it comes with a WordPress admin panel and thousands of ready-to-use plugins. 10Web also offers website generation as an API as a service for SaaS companies, marketplaces, hosting providers, MSPs, and agencies. SaaS companies can embed it via API, so that users can launch AI-generated sites directly inside of their platform, connected to their own data. Agencies and MSPs can get a white label dashboard to manage clients and resell under their brand. Hosting providers can self-host the API builder on their own infrastructure. Check it out at 10web.io/lenny and use code Lenny for exclusive free credits and 30% off API or white label solutions. That's the number 10W-E-B.io/lenny. Vibe Coding platform as an API. This episode is brought to you by Strella, the customer research platform built for the AI era. Here's the truth about user research: It's never been more important or more painful. Teams want to understand why customers do what they do, but recruiting users, running interviews, and analyzing insights takes weeks. By the time the results are in, the moment to act has passed. Strella changes that. It's the first platform that uses AI to run and analyze in-depth interviews automatically, bringing fast and continuous user research to every team. Strella's AI moderator asks real follow-up questions, probing deeper when answers are vague, and surfaces patterns across hundreds of conversations, all in a few hours, not weeks. Product, design, and research teams at companies like Amazon and Duolingo are already using Strella for Figma prototype testing, concept validation, and customer journey research, getting insights overnight instead of waiting for the next sprint. If your team wants to understand customers at the speed you ship products, try Strella. Run your next study at strella.io/lenny. That's S-T-R-E-L-L-A.io/lenny. [music] Jason, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.