Jason Cohen
Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine. On 6 shows, 6 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorinvestor@asmartbear ↗LinkedIn ↗asmartbear.com ↗
Jason Cohen is the founder and Chief Innovation Officer at WP Engine. He also founded SmartBear Software and writes the startup blog A Smart Bear.
6shows
6appearances
83statements
13resolved
8supported
2contradicted
62%fully supported
96said about them ↓ Everything Jason Cohen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Cohen: Routine A/B testing is an enormous waste of time
“You can't AB test the important things and the details are mostly false positives. So it's an enormous waste of time unless you're incredibly sophisticated.”
Cohen: Servant leadership leads founders to do scut work and burn out
“This crappy word, servant leadership, it leads to stuff like this. This is the scut work that needs to be done, and I can do it, so I'll do it so the team doesn't need, doesn't have to do it. That sounds altruistic, and what it does is burn you out because you…”
Cohen: Hyper-narrow ICP positioning attracts a 100x larger adjacent market
“If I'm very specific about what I am, then my ideal customer will definitely buy, which is already a reason to do it, but like a hundred times larger market than that. We'll see that specificity as a reason to buy your set of trade-offs, even though they're no…”
Cohen: VC-backed companies refuse human support due to gross margin compression
“So the fact that we had great human support is something like no VC wants you to have that because that's expensive and it comes out of your gross margin. Maybe it means you're not, you're quote unquote, not a software company because your gross margin is less…”
Cohen: Studies show AI does not make software engineers 10x more productive
“Like in coding, it's not, right? Like all the studies in, in real engineering departments is not that AI makes them 10 times better. The only people who claim that are the people selling AI products, the users of it. You know, there might be individuals claimi…”
Cohen: Any monthly churn rate over 3% is terrible
“Anything about three percent per month cancellation is, is, is terrible.”
Cohen: 'Too expensive' is never the real reason customers cancel
“I think anyone who's looked at cancellation data at any company We'll agree that too expensive is often the number one, or at least like top three reason in one form or another. And that is never, ever, ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already look…”
Cohen: Raising prices often maintains or increases signup volume
“So what usually ha what often happens is you raise prices and signups don't change. When I say signups, I mean, they're like size per month, you know, the rate at sign or signups go up. This happens all the time.”
Cohen: Acquisition channels eventually sag downward rather than plateauing
“What happens is it starts with an S curve and then starts sagging. It's butt starts sagging down. So I wrote an article about this called the elephant curve, which is what I named it.”
Cohen: Probability and expected value frameworks fail for major personal decisions
“Where you want to use probability and expected value. It's unlikely that dot, dot, dot. Right. But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value. And anyway, even i…”
Cohen: Founders should accept acquisition offers that cross their financial freedom line
“This is why when you get offered some money to sell the company, it's often a good idea to take it. Of course it could be big in the future, but if you haven't crossed over to this life-changing amount of money yet, what I was in that post called the freedom l…”
Cohen: Expected value is the wrong way to evaluate startup acquisition offers
“Now what's interesting with the box game is if you're a statistician or you're an economist, what you would say is there's no difference between the two boxes because the expected value of both box is ten million. So they're the same. And my point is, no, they…”
Cohen: Achieving a Truly Rich US Lifestyle Requires Roughly $20M
“I think nowadays it's much more clear that you need something like twenty million. This is all in the US, by the way, to have what would be considered to be like a rich lifestyle in America.”
Cohen: Raising capital is usually the wrong fix for lagging growth
“So if the feeling is, man, I'm not growing as fast as I want, or I'm not as profitable as I want, or I'm not getting this or that goal that I want. Usually the answer is not, oh, I gotta go raise a bunch of money, right? Like almost always we, even if you have…”
Cohen: Linear is beating Jira by focusing on users over buyers
“Linear is a great product. It's starting to beat Jira in a lot of ways because of their design decisions and their focus on an ICP, by the way, laser focus on that. And it's the user, not the buyer, which is super interesting.”
Cohen: Monthly churn grows exponentially and inevitably overtakes linear marketing acquisition
“Cancellations automatically grow as you grow, even if you're doing everything right, but marketing doesn't. Marketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. We all know that's quite hard. Actually it's linear. It's hard to find new channels that aren…”
Cohen: Pricing selects the market, and cheap software deters enterprise buyers
“Pricing selects the market. 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... But think about just even a mids…”
Cohen: Value-growth positioning enables 10x higher pricing than cost-savings pitches
“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 is, they…”
Cohen: Only about two of over 100 public SaaS companies have sub-100% NRR
“There's over a hundred SAS public companies and something like two of them have NRR less than a hundred percent. Like that's how it goes. And those companies have horrible financials and their values valuations are bad.”
Cohen: Products strong in direct sales rarely succeed in SEO or social
“A product that's sold really well direct actually doesn't do well in things like social and SEO and vice versa. If you're getting a lot of traffic through SEO, adding ads often like costs a lot and doesn't really move the needle”
Cohen: Stalled companies can maximize profits instead of forcing revenue growth
“If we define you as this product in this market, in this company, the answer might be no. What we need to do is have a different product or in a different market or a different thing. Or you could change the word revenue. If you say, do you need to grow revenu…”
Cohen: 'If you're not growing, you're dying' still applies to bootstrapped startups
“I would submit that even at a bootstrap company that has other values and culture other than growth at all costs, that that phrase is still fairly relevant because if the company's stagnant for years, is that a great environment for everyone?”
Cohen: Most social media growth advice lacks validated data backing
“I think the question of how to quote unquote, how to do social media well. I don't think is very data-based and you could potentially argue it's not possible to be data-based cause it's too complicated and there's too much that the noise of what happens online…”
Cohen: Law firms are a low-probability niche for software startups
“I don't think lawyers are a good niche ever. Like the number of startups that try to do lawyers, like it's a very, very low probability success niche. It's just, they don't get tech. They don't like to spend money oddly because they have a lot of money.”
The other half of the tape: Jason Cohen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 85 times in 38 episodes across the shows. 11 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 59James Kennedy 7Lenny Rachitsky 4Eric Siu 4Derrick Reimer 4Sam Parr 2Einar Vollset 2Laura Roeder 1
Statements about Jason Cohen, by other people (11)
Walling: Building an audience is not worth it for SaaS founders
“If you're going to sell info products, build an audience, not for SaaS, not worth it. There's other things you should do”
Vollset: SaaS Growth Stalls at $1M–$3M ARR Without New Products or Channels
“And I think the biggest mindset change that I've observed repeatedly is people, once they get past about a million in ARR two or three, they get to the stage. They're like, oh, like my growth is stalling out now. Like what I was working, like my market saturat…”
Reimer: Buffer lowered prices to serve its ICP and recharge growth
“Then he gave the example of Buffer, who in service of their ICP lowered their prices in order to recharge their growth.”
Walling: Bringing Bootstrapper Pragmatism to Venture Capital Is a Superpower
“Now that I have like raised funding with tiny seed and I see companies that raise a few million, you know, we have a bunch of tiny seed companies that have done this. If you do it well, if you think about it like a bootstrapper, and you approach it like Laura …”
Rob Walling: Repeat SaaS Founder Success Proves Early Validation Is Learnable
“I'm going to point to Jason Cohen. I'm going to point to Heaton Shaw. I'm going to point to David Cancel. I'm going to point to myself. I'm going to point to Ruben Gomez. I'm going to put, you know, how many like two, three, four times successful founders? The…”
Walling: Online creators fail to credit established startup frameworks weekly
“Not a week goes by, literally not a week, sometimes it's more than that, that I don't see someone on Twitter, or YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, claiming a concept, or even not claiming it, but not crediting a concept that's pretty well-defined, that either I in…”
Rob Walling's $20,000 WP Engine angel check is his third-best asset
“When I scraped together, you know, a couple, 20 grand, I think, which was an enormous amount of money for me at the time. To write Jason Cohen a check, and I was honored to be part of it, and it paid out a tremendous, tremendous payout for me, and it's probabl…”
Rob Walling: Jason Cohen obtained 40 customer pre-commitments validating WP Engine
“I had modeled my approach after Steve Blank's original customer development, but realistically, more so after Jason Cohen's validation or pre-validation of WP Engine. And he talked to a lot of people, and he got 40 yeses.”
Walling: Jason Cohen paid consultants' hourly rates to validate WP Engine
“I know that Jason Cohen, when he was vetting WP Engine, he would actually pay consultants or agencies, or he would offer to pay. He's like, I know your rate is a hundred dollars an hour, And I'll pay you know, for a half hour or for a full hour of your consult…”
Walling: Drip secured 11 commitments and WP Engine 40 before coding
“With Drip, I got 11 yeses. With WP Engine, Jason Cohen got 40 yeses before he started coding.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 70
Top Founders 5
Lenny's Podcast 4
the Startup Ideas Podcast 4
My First Million 2
2025 14 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- Episode 782 | Why I Succeeded: My 10 Best Entrepreneurial Decisio...
- Episode 800 | The 12 Commandments of Startups for the Rest of Us
- Episode 796 | Marketing Isn't Easy?, How to Grow Your Company, an...
- Episode 792 | Hot Take Tuesday: GPT-5 Struggles, the A.I. Bubble,...
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 37 mentions in 14 episodes 3 per episode
- Episode 700 | Playing the Long Game
- Episode 709 | The 7 Greatest Investments of My Life
- Episode 731 | How to Delegate as a Perfectionist, SaaS Partnershi...
- I can't believe he gave away these GENIUS 3 AI startup ideas (watch this)
- Episode 696 | The Truth about Product-Market Fit + Doing Sales as...
- Episode 738 | Encouraging Word of Mouth, Educating a Market, and...
- The 2024 Milly Awards
- Episode 733 | Good vs. Bad Distractions, Weaknesses vs. Blind Spo...
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 24 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- Episode 676 | Exit Valuations, Choosing Between Ideas, and More L...
- Episode 646 | Building a Recurring, Annual Price Increase Into Yo...
- What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (The Beautiful Mess)
- Episode 681 | Why Launching a Second Product is Usually a Bad Ide...
- Episode 671 | Working on What Matters, Left-handed Threads, and B...
- Episode 648 | Competing with a Non-Profit, Driving Traffic to A L...
- Episode 685 | 7 Things You Should Never Do (A Rob Solo Adventure)
- Episode 680 | Problems vs. Solutions, Doing What it Takes, and Mo...
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2020 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2018 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jason's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 21 | 50% 2/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 16 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 15 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Top Founders → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 13 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 11 | 100% 1/1 | full record on My First Million → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine | 1 | 7 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |