#418 – Jason Cohen on hidden multipliers

A story about the growth levers you can't see from inside.

This episode is for SaaS founders who are working harder than ever and are not seeing the growth they aspired to.

Most growth problems are hiding in plain sight.

Jason Cohen is the founder of WP Engine and author of Hidden Multipliers. He has built four companies over 25 years, two of them now worth billions, and invested in sixty more.

Across all of them he kept finding the same thing. A few small changes moved growth far more than everything else combined. Most companies never spot them.

And this inspired me to invite Jason to my podcast. We explore why the biggest growth levers in a business stay invisible to the people running it. Jason shares what he learned about customers who cost you money, about pricing that works against you, and about strengths you never counted as strengths. You'll discover why the same product can be worth ten times more without changing a thing.

We also zoom in on two of the 10 traits that define remarkable software companies:

Acknowledge you cannot please everyoneSell the idea, not the productBoth are chapters in The Remarkable Effect.

Jason's work proves that remarkable companies don't find more to do. They find the few things that decide everything.

Here's one of Jason's quotes that captures why the answer is often already in front of you:

"A lot of times people do know kind of what the answer is already, but they don't want to face it. They're scared to face it. It means they have to admit something they don't want to admit, or it means they have to do work they don't want to do."

By listening to this episode, you'll learn: