Summary of 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (2x unicorn founder)

Overview of 5 questions to ask when your product stops growing | Jason Cohen (Lenny Rachitsky)

Jason Cohen (four-time founder, two unicorns, long-time writer at asmartbear.com) joins Lenny Rachitsky to walk through a practical, ordered diagnostic for when product growth stalls. The episode is a how-to: five core questions to ask (and actions to take), plus formulas, examples, and tactical advice you can apply to SaaS and many other product businesses.

The framework — five diagnostic questions (in order)

Jason emphasizes you must fix the biggest constraint first. His ordered questions to diagnose stalled growth:

• 1. Are customers leaving? (logo / customer churn)
• 2. Is pricing/positioning correct?
• 3. Are the customers who remain growing (NRR / expansion)?
• 4. Are your acquisition channels saturated? What new channels are available?
• 5. Do you actually need to grow? (reframe objectives: revenue vs profit vs lifestyle)

Each question is actionable and (if ignored) can make fixes lower in the list ineffective.

Detailed breakdown & key takeaways

1) Logo churn (customer churn) — the highest priority

• Why it matters:
  • Churn creates a hard cap on future size because cancellations scale with customer base while most acquisition channels don’t.
  • Lost customers sometimes actively hurt growth (bad reviews, negative word-of-mouth).
• Crucial metric and mental model:
  • Maximum steady-state customers ≈ (new customers per month) / (monthly customer churn rate).
  • Example: 100 new customers/month with 5% monthly churn -> max ≈ 100 / 0.05 = 2,000 customers.
• Practical actions:
  • Ask the right cancellation question: use open-ended phrasing — “What made you cancel?” (not “Why did you cancel?” or a multiple-choice dropdown).
  • Randomize choices if you use lists (first-item bias).
  • Talk to at-risk customers before they cancel (signals: low onboarding activation, low usage, lots of support tickets, etc.).
  • Focus on onboarding and early activation — small improvements early can produce large lifetime benefits.
  • Use qualitative follow-up to dig deeper than proximate reasons like “too expensive” or “project ended.” Look for underlying causes, integration gaps, missing outcomes, or wrong target segment.

2) Pricing & positioning — price selects the market

• Key idea: Pricing is more than a number. Price + positioning + packaging determine what buyers you attract.
• Counterintuitive point: raising price can increase signups because it signals quality and moves you into a different buyer segment willing to pay more.
• Example (illustrative): the same product positioned as “cut AdWords costs in half” might only command $5k/month; positioned as “double your leads for the same ad budget” can justify charging ~$40k/month — same product, very different perceived value.
• Practical actions:
  • Reassess not only price but structure (per-seat, usage, per-site, professional services) and value metric you sell against (growth vs cost-savings).
  • Test raising price (carefully) — many companies are priced too low because they guessed once and never iterated.
  • Consider org/product implications of moving upmarket (compliance, integrations, professional services).

3) Net Revenue Retention (NRR) & expansion

• Distinguish N (number of active customers) vs revenue metrics:
  • Logo churn reduces number of customers (hard to recover).
  • NRR accounts for downgrades, upgrades, churn in revenue terms for an existing cohort.
• Important math nuance:
  • Percent losses are asymmetric: a 20% loss requires a 25% gain to return to original; NRR gains don’t perfectly offset percentage losses.
  • Both N (customer count) and NRR matter. High NRR with rapid logo churn can still be fatal.
• Practical actions:
  • Measure both logo churn (customer count) and NRR (cohort revenue retention).
  • Drive expansion by raising product value (new features, tiers, usage-based pricing) so customers willingly pay more.
  • Consider land-and-expand dynamics carefully — initial price anchors limit future upsell potential.

4) Acquisition channels — saturation & the “elephant curve”

• Channels have limits and often decline over time (S-curve then a sagging “elephant” butt).
• You can’t rely forever on the same channel(s); channel saturation or declining effectiveness is common.
• Practical actions:
  • Map which channels are saturated vs still runways for growth. If you don’t know, investigate now.
  • Try creative/new channels: partnerships, ecosystems, agency/reseller channels, events/workshops, product integrations or platform app stores.
  • Consider ecosystems and influencers — leverage existing audiences (“start with 10,000 instead of zero”).
  • If channels are full, consider product changes, new verticals, or a new product to unlock growth.

5) Do you need to grow? (strategy / existential check)

• Question the premise: growth is not always the right objective for every product or founder.
• Alternatives:
  • Shift focus to profitability or maintain a sustainably-sized business that matches founder values.
  • Sunset, spin out, or build a new product if the current market/scale no longer fits your goals.
• Practical actions:
  • Re-evaluate company goals, culture, and trade-offs before taking risky or identity-changing moves to chase growth.
  • If you must grow, be explicit about what “grow” means (users, revenue, ARR, profit) and what you are willing to change to get there.

Tactical, concrete checklist (quick todo)

• Compute your monthly customer churn rate and new customers/month. Calculate the implied max customers (new / churn). Ask: is that acceptable?
• Start asking canceled customers: “What made you cancel?” Collect free-form answers; follow up with interviews for signal-rich details.
• Prioritize onboarding: find early drop-off points and experiment with small fixes (guided setup, success milestones).
• Revisit pricing & positioning:
  • Test price increases; observe selection effects.
  • Experiment changing the value message (growth vs cost-savings) and pricing structure.
• Track both logo churn (customer count) and NRR (revenue retention) for cohort analysis.
• Audit acquisition channels: which are saturated? brainstorm 3 creative alternate channels or partner plays.
• Reassess business objective: revenue growth vs profit vs lifestyle business. Make a strategic choice.

Notable quotes & insights

• “Cancellations grow faster than marketing.” — cancellations scale with customer base; acquisition doesn’t automatically scale the same way.
• “Pricing selects the market.” — your price communicates quality and attracts a different buyer profile.
• “If you don’t fix logo churn, nothing beneath it will save you.” — focus first on preventing customers leaving.
• “Ask ‘What made you cancel?’ not ‘Why did you cancel?’” — small language change yields better explanations.
• Jason’s one-line north star: make customers clearly get more value, measure that value, then split that value fairly with customers.

Contrarian views to be aware of

• A/B testing: Jason argues A/B tests are overused and often yield false positives for most teams. They’re useful at very large scale and with statistically rigorous holdouts, but not a substitute for strategy and insight.
• “Consistency over quality” in content: Jason prefers quality-first; posting infrequently but high-quality beats regular mediocre output.

Resources & references mentioned

• Jason Cohen’s writing: asmartbear.com
• Book: Hidden Multipliers — pre-order at hiddenmultipliers.com
• Recommended books Jason often recommends:
  • On Writing Well — William Zinsser
  • Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey A. Moore
• Examples and patterns to study: onboarding optimization, cohort-based retention analysis, land-and-expand motion, building partner/agency channels.

Final takeaway (one-sentence)

When growth stalls, diagnose in this strict order: stop customers from leaving first (logo churn), then reassess pricing/positioning, drive expansion for those who remain (NRR), evaluate acquisition channel limits and new channels, and finally ask whether growth is the right goal — and act accordingly.