Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:07 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jason Cohen
[00:01:07] S0: What comes next? [00:01:07] S1: 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? [00:01:19] S0: 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 share 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 going to have him back. In this conversation, we spent the entire time talking about his very actionable and 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 going to walk away from this conversation with your mind buzzing. [00:05:26] S1: Thank you. It's an honor to be here. [00:05:28] S0: It's an honor to have you here. I have wanted to get you on this podcast for so long. You are both an incredible builder and a founder, and you are such a great communicator. You have been writing at asmartbear.com, which I want to get the backstory on for so long. How long have you been writing there, by the way?
00:05:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jason Cohen
[00:05:28] S0: It's an honor to have you here. I have wanted to get you on this podcast for so long. You are both an incredible builder and a founder, and you are such a great communicator. You have been writing at asmartbear.com, which I want to get the backstory on for so long. How long have you been writing there, by the way? [00:05:47] S1: Almost 20 years. I started when blogging was cool. And I'm still waiting for blogging to come back and be cool again, but it's not yet. [00:05:55] S0: I think it is cool. [00:05:55] S1: It is? Okay. [00:05:56] S0: Newsletters are cool now. Yeah. [00:05:57] S1: Newsletters are cool. Okay. [00:05:58] S0: I don't know if you saw Twitter now is encouraging long-form writing. There's this articles feature, so I think it's cool. I think you've survived the trough. [00:05:58] S1: Yes. Okay. [00:06:07] S0: I was also out talking to Gemini trying to figure out how many posts you've written. I was like, "Count the number of blog posts on a smartbear.com." Do you have a sense of how many things you've written on there?
00:06:14 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:06:14] S1: Yeah, it's not that many. It's something like maybe a hundred and... Well, I would say between 150 and 200 that I'm proud of and probably about 300, 350. And that's it over about 18 years. And that's because I only write in-depth. Some are long, not all are long, but none are short, I guess. And I've always had a rule, even though you're supposed to write really regularly and not just for algorithms, but they used to say, again, back in the aughts where I started, "Oh yeah, it needs to be really regular so people know when to expect your thing and they plug it into their day and all this." So it's always been true that you should be regular. And I never was because my attitude was always, I will only put out stuff if it's the best that I can do. It's up to the reader to decide if it's good or useful. And so if I don't have that, I'm just not going to publish. That's the way it is. And so there's years where I've published once or twice only the whole year. Maybe I was busy or didn't have the energy. Other years were, yeah, I posted 40 times or something, but even then, it's only that, because I can't do something of that magnitude. And also found unicorns, which I did during that same time and run them. I can't do that all at the same time and produce a lot. So it's fewer and hopefully better, but that's in the eye of the reader, of course. [00:07:30] S0: I like what you say. I've done 300, not too many. [00:07:32] S1: Well, not for 18 years. Over that time, you expect-
00:07:32 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:07:32] S1: Well, not for 18 years. Over that time, you expect- [00:07:36] S0: Well, I think this actually, this is where I was going to go, but I think this is a really important lesson I've also learned. I always used to tell people the key to being successful writing stuff online and just content in general is quality and consistency, but I've just more and more realized quality is actually the only thing that matters and the consistency doesn't matter. So the only difference is the more rarely write, the more awesome it has to be. [00:07:59] S1: It is a lot of pressure. I feel that. And then I tell myself, that will just prevent you from writing anything and that's not good. So yeah, you tend to want everything you make to be the best thing you've ever made. And on the one hand, I want to hold onto that because it's motivation to be good and not to let the bar slip. On the other hand, you can go into paralysis, which is obviously bad. So yeah, I still struggle with that, but I think that is the tension.
00:07:59 · Jason Cohen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:07:59] S1: It is a lot of pressure. I feel that. And then I tell myself, that will just prevent you from writing anything and that's not good. So yeah, you tend to want everything you make to be the best thing you've ever made. And on the one hand, I want to hold onto that because it's motivation to be good and not to let the bar slip. On the other hand, you can go into paralysis, which is obviously bad. So yeah, I still struggle with that, but I think that is the tension. [00:08:26] S0: Okay. So with 300-ish posts, 200 you're proud of, there are so many directions we can go. There's a few that I've picked that I want to spend most of our time on. The first is you have a really pragmatic way of approaching growth stalling. And the reason I want to spend time here is because a lot of product teams, a lot of founders build something, it starts to show some success, it's going, it's growing, and then all of a sudden it just stops growing. And I think that's one of the most painful things to go through. And I've never come across a way to think about how do I solve this? Because I think a lot of people are just like, "Okay, I guess that is not working. Let's move on to something else." You have a very specific way of approaching this problem. And I want to read actually a quote from Will Smith, and this is something that has stuck with me ever since I read it because it's so true. So in his biography, he has this line. People ask him, "What's it like to be famous?" And his answer is, "Becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag. Losing fame is miserable."
00:09:29 · Jason Cohen
[00:09:29] S1: That's funny. So first of all, I think a lot of people are experiencing this right now. You have a lot of companies that have reasonable products and their growth has slowed. Why? It could be the economy because it's not as good as a lot of indicators say. We all know that, for example, jobs are not as good as the indicators say. It could be because AI or the threat of AI or the expectation of AI, blah, blah, blah. Who knows? It also can just be size. As you get bigger, growth slows because you know what? You're not going to grow 2X a year forever. So it slows. There's just mechanical things. So there's many reasons why things slow. And sometimes it's all of a sudden, although then maybe there's some event like an algorithm changes or something happens. But actually, I think what's really common is it just slowly gets slower. In other words, it decelerates. But I wouldn't say sneaks up on you because most people are looking at growth all the time, so it's not sneaky, but it is sort of a little bit more gradual where just like, you just feel more like you're running through mud like, "Ah, God, we're just still doing so much work and it's not having as much of an impact." And so that's what I see. And when I say that's what I see, so I've built four companies. The last one is a unicorn. The one before that is also a unicorn. The previous one was bootstrapped. This one was VC-funded and I've invested in about 60 startups. Some of them failed completely. Some of them were very successful, some in the middle, because of course, right? And so when I say that's what I've seen, that's the context of what I mean by what I've seen. So there's, I wouldn't say a checklist, but there's a series of questions that I asked 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. Just like if, I don't know, maybe if you had a marketing funnel and there's a step where everything falls apart and you're like, "Well, I'll just tune the bottom of it a little." It's like, "That's not going to work. It's not going to help enough. You got to go where the biggest issue is." So this is in that sort of order. So the first question is are customers leaving, i.e. logo churn, right? Churn within.