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

By Lenny's Podcast

Categories: Product, Startup, VC

Summary

A founder who built 2 unicorns shares a framework to diagnose stalled growth: focus on customer churn, pricing, and saturated marketing channels - surprising advice that can accelerate product growth for builders and founders.

Key Takeaways

1. The first step to diagnose stalled growth is to check if customers are leaving - even if they went through the entire buying process, a high churn rate is a red flag.
2. Pricing is often too low - you should raise prices until signups don't change, as big companies won't trust a cheap product.
3. You can't just rely on marketing forever - analyze which channels are saturated and which are still open to find new growth opportunities.
4. Growth isn't always the answer - the question is whether you even need to grow, as the 'you're dying if you're not growing' advice may not always be true.

Topics

• Product Strategy
• Startup Growth
• Pricing Optimization
• Marketing Channels

Transcript Excerpt

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, which is again improbable. And they got to the pricing ...