Jason Cohen - Hidden Multipliers
DH ### Jason Cohen
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Introduction
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Jonathan Stark: Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am rejoined by guest Jason Cohen. Jason, welcome back to the show.
Jason Cohen: Thank you.
Jonathan Stark: So today, folks, we're going to talk about Jason's new book, Hidden Multipliers, both the content and perhaps even a little bit about the process because we've been talking to a few authors lately. But first, Jason, for folks who didn't hear your previous appearance or don't follow you on LinkedIn or whatever, could you tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Jason Cohen: Yeah, sure. I'm known as a smart bear online because my previous company, two companies ago was called Smart Bear. And when I started my blog in 2007, because I'm old and that blogging was still cool, it was called Smart Bear. Anyway, I built two unicorns over the past 25 years, that Smart Bear and WP Engine. I bootstrapped. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I've invested in 60 startups. I've been writing about all this for 20 years. I just wrote a book, like you said, called Hidden Multipliers, which of course we can talk a little bit about. But I mean, I'd like this to be just action packed. And I'm not trying to hold anything back or make people buy the book in order to learn something. So I hope people want to buy the book just because they want to hear more and not because of tricks. Actually, I also have a set of AI skills that I made to go along with the book that includes a lot of the stuff that's in the book and also other articles I've written. Those are all free and open and you don't even have to put in an email address. So that's at skills.asmartbear.com. Hopefully this can be helpful. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this because to me, bootstrapping, being solo, it's the dream. It's also feast and famine. It's hard to say no to a consulting gig, but it's also amazing if you can get to that point where you're making 10 or 20k a month more or less stably and really live the life. So I just love that. I love that zone. I talk about it all the time. It's mostly what I talk about online too. I just love it.
AI Skills as Facilitators
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Jonathan Stark: Yeah. I am a long time subscriber to your list. You're one of the few people that is worth going to LinkedIn for these days. Just so much great stuff. And I was saying before the show, for anybody that has a subscription style business where churn is something they need to think about. I mean, the stuff you've shared about that, I have bookmarked and just refer back to it every time because it's very unintuitive to me for whatever reason. But it's just absolutely great stuff. So folks, you're in for a treat. Let's start with the skills, the AI skills. We talked about AI last time you were on a little over a year ago. Where are you at? First of all, how does that work? How does the skills thing work?
Jason Cohen: Yeah. So I'm actually not a big AI maximalist, whatever. And so I don't think, for example, AI should tell you what to do or solve problems in your business. So what I found is that I could, if I instructed the AI well enough, it could facilitate me finding answers better for myself because it could hold me sort of accountable to not give wishy-washy answers. It could walk me through some sort of workflow. Maybe it could do a little bit of light research like, well, you said there's no competitors, but here's 10, you know, that sort of thing. And so, of course, the best facilitator is a human being, of course. But when you're a solo founder, who exactly is going to do that facilitation for you for whether it's a strategic decision or a product decision or analyzing something or just someone being a devil's advocate, perhaps in some form. And so if the answer is nobody, then perhaps, perhaps skills crafted specifically to be facilitators, not answer givers. Could that be better than nothing, even if it's not as good as a human? So that was my goal for every one of those skills, actually, is to hold you sort of accountable, as it were, and not give you answers. So some of those things are, how should I price things? How should I position my product? How do I interview customers, like in a structured way to learn stuff? How do I decide who my ideal customer is? Exactly. These are the kinds of things that are skills there. And again, I wrote about it in the book, but you don't have to buy the book to go enjoy that. And I'm also happy to talk about any of that stuff right now anyway. Well, let's dive into that, how to decide exactly who your customer is,
Choosing Your Best Customers
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Jonathan Stark: because that is something that is super difficult for people listening. And to me, it's one of the biggest kind of Achilles heels for anyone's business growth is not really knowing what to build or who to sell it to. Or it's just, it seems people always want to fish in the ocean instead of picking a barrel of fish to service. Right. Yeah, I have a
Jason Cohen: lot of thoughts on this. One big thing, one big branch in the decision process or in the framework process is, do you already have a business with customers? And the question is, how do I focus and grow the business from where it is? Or am I starting from scratch because I think those are pretty different how you approach it. So for example, if I already have a business, then I ask things like, well, who's your best customers? Like just think of your, your best three to five customers. And you could try to define that and have numbers. And that's fine if you want to. In fact, I did this process at WP Engine called a profit whale where we did, we ranked all the customers by their individual profitability. This is when we had 7,000 customers. And just for perspective, now we have 200,000 customers. But anyway, at 7,000, we ranked them and, and it was really clear like, oh, there's these groups that are more profitable. Why is that? Of course is a good question. Ones that are very unprofitable also, why is that? And then what should we do about that? And so, um, uh, so you can, you can be sort of a, uh, objective and, and systematic about it. But I find if you just say, wait, just think of like, if I say, who's your best couple of customers? Somebody already comes to mind. Good enough. What about that makes them a great customer? Do they love you and they never call, they don't need features or the features they ask for are features you want to do anyway. So it's a perfect fit. Do they tell other people about you? Have they brought in other customers? Um, do they just pay a lot, but they don't want a lot and that's why they're profitable. And, you know, maybe in the top, even just three and five customers is there's not going to, there's probably not going to be something that's a hundred percent true of them across all of them. But like, is there some kind of trend or pattern about that, about them, which are different from the people on the other end of the spectrum? And this is key because if you just ask what is similar about my best customers, you will find things that are also similar to your not good customers because they're just what your customers are like and what, you know, what your market is like. So it has to be what's similar among them and dissimilar to people who are on the other end of the spectrum. And again, this isn't an exact science. You see what I mean? If you can find some of these things, then those are some facets in a gem, a gemstone you can imagine cutting to say, ah, this is my ideal customer. So that's, that's the kind of thing I would do with an existing company. But suppose you have, you don't have three good customers, right? And so, okay, that's fine. What if I don't have that? What do I do? And there, I think, of course you need to find a market that's healthy and growing and this and that. And I have a lot of thoughts about what makes a good market also, but I actually think it's better to start with yourself and start with what are my strengths and weaknesses? What are my capabilities and assets? What do I have already? What do I love and what gives me energy, even if I have to learn it, but, but I'm, I love doing that so I can do it all day. And even during the hard times I can push through it and so on. What are those things? And what I want is a company, especially if I'm a solar founder, but even, even at WP Engine, it was like this for me. What kind of strategy or product or market could I build and serve where the strengths I already have are what's needed to win and the weaknesses I have are irrelevant or at least not deal breakers. Sometimes weaknesses can be by the right, your things you see as weaknesses and maybe they are in certain contexts, your perfect customer, your perfect market actually sees them as strengths. That's when you start seeing like, wow, that's the strategy I should adopt. I'll give you an example because that's so, that's so generic and doesn't sound right. Right. Let's say I, um, I buy, so I, I love things like pouches and slings and backpacks and stuff like that. I just, it's just like a personal thing I like. So I like to buy pouches and I buy, sometimes I buy stuff from people on Etsy and I'll get a pouch from someone on Etsy and, oh, look, the seam is kind of weird. And there's a thread coming off here and et cetera. Right. It's not perfect because it was handmade. Now you could say that's a weakness. Here's a product that's not, it has some quality issues. One might say in the sewing department. Uh, so it's a weakness, but is it, I bought a handmade product from somebody. Of course it has a thread coming out. I would expect that. It just shows, it demonstrates that I bought a handmade product. So I like that. It's not a weakness. It's an indication of the thing I wanted, which is that it's handmade. Um, also it's kind of too expensive, right? Like you say, well, here's this little pouch with a simple zipper and it costs, you know, $30 in shipping and handling. So is that a weakness that it's too, it's, it's like more. expensive than you'd expect for what you get? No, because again, I'm supporting some craftsperson, some artist, and that's what I wanted to do. So that high price is not a weakness. In fact, it's part of what I wanted all along, which is to support somebody else. So there's a very specific thing that happens every single day, right, on Etsy, where things that in other contexts would be weaknesses are in fact either strengths, or at least they're not weaknesses, or they're indications of kind of what I wanted. So this is what I mean when I say like, okay, a product that leans into your strengths, like maybe someone who likes to sew, right, or likes haberdashery, then that would lean into that, but the weaknesses aren't. Consider that if you're selling to the right person.
Building Strategy Around Yourself
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Jonathan Stark: Right.
Jason Cohen: So if I'm starting from nothing, then I want to start from myself and ask, well, what am I? Who am I? What are these strengths and weaknesses and stuff? Or at least I should say the contexts in which these natural things of mine are strengths and the context in which they are weaknesses. So I can decide about a product market strategy, et cetera, where to win in that way actually leans into who I am. I'll be more naturally a winner. Even if there's competitors who compete the same way as I do, I'll actually naturally be better than them because it fits me. So I'll either be better than them, or it'll cost them 10 times as much or take up 10 times longer because it's not natural for them or something. I'll have advantages in other words, even though I'm by myself. So it's a natural way to get advantage. Now, of course, the problem here is you say, oh yeah, so I built the thing I like, but I didn't bother finding out if anyone else wanted to buy it. And that is very common. Okay, so obviously it can't only be what I like, obviously. And this is where strategy in general becomes difficult because strategy, which is, and by that I just mean the major decisions that you make that sort of guide what it is you're doing and not doing and why. Strategy has to take all this into account. It has to take into account what can you do. It has to take into account what's the competitors doing, what do customers actually wanna buy, what's happening in the industry or the economy at large. It has to take all that into consideration, of course, because it involves all that stuff. Well, it's hard to, how do you take all these inputs and sort of mash them up and have something like that's, it's gonna naturally be messy and difficult. So it is difficult to do that. Like it's fundamentally difficult to build a strategy. Nevertheless, I think starting with yourself and then asking and then what markets actually exist that might fit with that is a nice way to proceed if you don't have anything yet.
Jonathan Stark: Yes, exactly, it gives you some constraints so you can kind of start to narrow things down. And just to give folks an example from the service space, professional services space, one that I always used as a, I presented it in a way that it was a strength was that I was a soloist. And if companies were like asking me questions like, oh, well, what happens if you get hit by a bus or we're really looking for someone who has a deeper bench, could you bring on some contractors or are you thinking about hiring? I'd just be like, no, that's not a good fit for me. I don't want to have employees, I don't wanna manage anyone. So I would be looking for companies who are potential clients who did want to work directly with the consultant who was essentially the whole business so they weren't getting handed off to junior employees who are learning on the company's declines dime or someone who could be extraordinarily responsive and they didn't have, people who are annoyed by going through the telephone games or an account manager and then to the project manager and then to me. So for clients who were sick of these sort of communication layers and just wanted to talk directly to the person they really wanted to hire anyway, I would just present it as a strength. It's like, hey, if you want McKinsey, go hire McKinsey. But if you want someone who will give you a quick, like a great answer in 15 minutes, you just pick up the phone and boom, there's your answer, then I'm your guy. So I just wanted to come up with an example for folks who are doing services and not products, but the Etsy example is perfect.
Jason Cohen: Yeah, and I always like the analogy of the boutique. When you go to a boutique, it's not open 24 seven because it's only when the artisan is there. And then it's amazing and special and unique and all this stuff, but it's not scaled. It's not 24 seven. It's not, they only make certain things. And so a boutique I think is, it's small and individual, but in the best possible way. So that doesn't mean you have to call yourself a boutique, literally, but to me, it's a nice maybe mindset of like, well, if it were like that, what would be the advantages and disadvantages? Like you said, like who would say, well, I don't want that. Like, right, well, I'm not for everyone, of course.
Defining a Market
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Jonathan Stark: Yeah, right. So what, let's say someone listening is well aware of their strengths, weaknesses, you know, and I really like your point about what context, so let's, but let's just call them strengths and weaknesses. What's unique about them maybe is another way to put it. What, I usually talk about like things that you're amazingly good at. You might not even like them, but you're just a natural at certain things. There are other things that you just love doing and hopefully there's some overlap between the things you're amazing at and the things you love doing. And then there's, you know, the sort of third circle in the Venn diagram is like the market, like someone who cares about the overlap or someone who can have value created for them using the overlap of your superpowers and your passions. So where would someone start, solo software tech type consultant, where would someone even, like I talked to people, they didn't even really know what I mean when I say a market. So where would they start looking? And you said earlier, like what makes a good market? So how would they even recognize one if they knew what they were looking for? So there's a book, Crossing the Chasm, which was a bestseller. I think most people who talk about the chasm have read a blog post about it and think they know what's in the book and often get it wrong. Book is pretty good. It's like 30 or 40 years old. And I read it just a few years, re-read it just a few years ago and it was amazingly still relevant. So I recommend that as an interesting way to answer questions like what is a market because in there, Jeffrey Moore defines a market as a group of people who buy a certain solution for a certain problem. And I think with the way he says it is they speak to each other, but meaning if one of them said it worked for them, the next one would actually take that as evidence that it would work for them too. And this is a critical difference that helps sort of put the barriers up of what it is. So in other words, if a freelancer says, this was great for doing my bookkeeping, Google will not then think, good, we should use that for our bookkeeping too because they need different things, right? And vice versa. And so they're not in the same market even though they both need bookkeeping. So the fact that it's bookkeeping, that's describing what it does or maybe the problem itself, something like that, the utility of it. That's not the only part of the market. But people tend to say things like big company, small company, and that's not true in my experience. In the case of bookkeeping, it is, but not because Google, not just because of the number of employees, but because Google actually needs something different.
Jason Cohen: So for example, at WP Engine, we are the largest managed WordPress hosting provider, which means we host websites built in WordPress and we have 200,000 customers, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now we have lots of customers who are individual people, whether it's for a business or personal. We also have small business, medium sized business and enterprises like Google, but they don't use it for the same thing. Google doesn't use us for google.com, obviously, but mid-sized companies do use us for their homepage. So the product is this managed WordPress. It's making your WordPress website fast, scalable, secure, and have great service. And there are people who need that. Google needs it for different things than a mid-sized company needs it for. So if you were just to say, Google's big, mid-size is mid, and therefore Google isn't in the market, and the other person is, you'd be wrong. The market is people who need their WordPress site to be fast, scalable, secure, and have good service, and they're willing to pay more than usual for that to have that be the best, for people that have that mentality. And then there's all these different reasons why someone might have that mentality, and that is the market. Another thing I would just note about the market definition is you have competitors, which means other people who solve that same problem, like managed WordPress hosting, in largely the same way, those are competitors. But then you have what's called alternatives, and often those are the more interesting ones. Sometimes it's even the bigger part of the market is the alternatives. Alternatives means the problem is still solved or addressed, but not in the way that you and your competitors solve it. For example, you could say, well, WordPress, what we do, we make sure you have a good website. Okay. But Shopify makes sure you have a good e-commerce website. Is Shopify a direct competitor with us? Well, no, Shopify is not on WordPress, we are. So they're not a managed WordPress provider, but they are an alternative for someone that wants e-commerce, because they could use WordPress and they could use Shopify. And PS, in the real world, there's about half and half how many sites use Shopify, how many use WordPress. So that's a very, very real example of an alternative to solving that problem. So are they in the same market? Well, if you define the market as WordPress providers, no. And if you define the market as people have websites, e-commerce websites, then yes. So that's a little tricky, right? But at least we're putting names and words around this stuff when we say market. So having said all that, of course it's people who want to buy your stuff and like we're sort of drawing a circle around what do we mean by that precisely? When I think of like, what is a good or bad market? What I'm thinking is everything in business is hard and almost all of it is like working against you and high risk, you know? Can you make the product or can you deliver the service? Can you find people to buy it? If you ran an ad, would they click it? If they went to the homepage, would they go to the pricing page? Is the pricing okay? What about the competitors? But AI is coming to change it. But some countries are doing better than others. I mean, oh my God, right? Like there's so, that's not even all the things coming for you. Most of the answers to these things aren't good. Also, you don't have enough money. Also, you have no brand to rely on. Also, it's just so bad everywhere. So to me, it's like, all right, this is pretty rough. No wonder most companies fail. Like there's just too many ways to fail, right? So man, we need to carve off some of this stuff so that some of this stuff isn't so damn risky or some of it has some, at least has a decent answer from day one because we got enough to contend with. So part of that could be what I said earlier. Like, can we lean into your strengths and stuff? Because like, if you also have to do something that you're not good at, oh my God, you've just thrown another risk on the pile. Really? Don't do that, right? Okay, so maybe we've de-risked you a little. So when I think of a good market, quote unquote, I'm thinking, what is it about the market that's like taking some of this risk off the table? So for example, what are people buying more and more of? And we all know the answer right now is AI stuff, but there's other answers too. Okay, so being in there already, at least you know people are buying, whereas there's other markets where that's not true. Budgets are shrinking, people aren't doing it. So you could go there and hey, maybe you'll have less competition because it's a bad market that's shrinking and budgets are shrinking. So with less competition, that may not be the worst idea. So for example, you might be a consultant writing code in a language that's on the downturn because all the new kids won't write code in that language and you will, and so you can get work. So there's a good reason to do that. So if there's no absolutes here, but okay, you're working into a hard market and so that's a risk, so there better be other good news to offset that risk. But in general, a market where there's already budget, people are already paying and that's growing over time and everybody knows that, that's good. Now, yes, there'll be a lot of competition, but as I like to say, it's easy. Like even if you're at the beach and there's an ice cream stand, if you open another ice cream stand, that's probably still a good business even though there's another ice cream stand. Whereas if you open an ice cream stand where people don't want ice cream, then that's not necessarily a good idea. So it is probably, a crowded but healthy market is still probably better because you can find a niche or just find anything rather than a small shrinking market. But even having said all that, there's always, you can always say, well look, but here's a tiny market, let's say I'm in a country that only has five million people and we're not doing well economically and all this. So you could say that's a bad market. It could be, but if you're, but you might be like the best consultant for a certain type of thing in that whole country that's actually possible. Well, that could be good. If you're trying to scale a big company, then okay, I guess that's not good because you also need the market to be large in that case. But for solo folks, you don't need to do that. So who cares? Like the size of the market's actually not relevant. Notice I didn't say big, other than that it's healthy and growing and all this kind of stuff, that's good. But hey, if it's limited, but you can, like you have these other advantages where you can run all over it, that sounds pretty good to me because again, I'm just thinking about all the risks, all the challenges. Can you knock some of these down a little? You won't have no risks, right? But can you knock some of them down? And the market's a good place to do that.
Problems, Alternatives, and Categories
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Jonathan Stark: So you mentioned a bunch of things that I want to loop back to or maybe tie together. So one was, you know, who is the group of people who buy what we do? And then you kind of like said, well, what exactly is it that we do? Like, you know, using WP Engine as an example, you could sort of see it at least two different ways that you described. And you also were talking about, you know, that you guys have the capability to sell to a Google and a mom and pop or someone who's just got a hobby website. How different are the problems that you're solving for Google versus mom and pop, if at all? And how different does the product need to be to accommodate those two, like, do you have tiers that accommodate different levels of, or different categories of customer? Or are you only, you know, for example, with Google, it's like, yes, Google is a customer, but it's basically small work groups and they're intranets and that's what they're using it for. Do you know what I mean? Like, so for someone who doesn't have whatever, however many employees you have, and it's just them or a small team, they probably, in my opinion, it would be adding risk to the pile for them to try to serve lots of different markets with lots of, or even lots, like three, five different types of buyers in a way that is different for each one of them. That makes me nervous. That would sound risky to me. We don't serve, that's the whole point, is if we were to define the market as big company or something, then we would miss out on what it really is. What it really is is a person that wants a WordPress site that's fast scalable, you know, these things I've already said, right? And so there are different kinds of people for different reasons who want that same product. So the product is the same. And the market's the same in the sense that they would look at each other and say, that's, you know, if it's good for them, then it's good for me. So sometimes it is relevant to the size of the company. For example, if it's something like accounting or HR software, yes, in that case, the size of the company actually does matter, but only because companies of different sizes need different things from that software. There's no such thing as I'm just gonna do HR in the corner at Google. That's not how HR works. So in that case, yes, it's correlated to the size of the company, but again, only because we're going back to who is the human beings wanting it and why and how do they buy and what do they need from it? And in that case, it's correlated to company size. Okay, fine. In our case, it's not. In our case, the thing that's needed, there may be different reasons for that. It's because it's an e-commerce site, so it needs to be fast and stay up so that they can sell well because the faster the site is, the more transactions you get, which by the way, lots of people, there's lots of data that show that that is true. Or it's a media site. And again, the faster they are, the higher they get ranked in Google and the more people click around and that means more ads and that means more revenue. So faster, better site for media equals more revenue. So does that matter whether you're a small or a large media company? No, they both have that characteristic. In fact, a lot of times the companies that use us for a webpage actually get less traffic than our smaller companies in terms of number of people because we'll have some news site run by four people that gets a huge number of hits and then there's some large company and nobody cares about their website, so they don't get that many hits, right? So again, we're back to it's not the size of the company, it's not even necessarily the number of hits, although maybe that starts to become correlated. It's whether they care about the site being blah, blah, blah. That's why I keep coming back to that because that's how I define it. A person who cares about the following things so much so that they will pay more for it, that's what we do. And there's all these different ways in which that could happen. In our case, that's not very well correlated with things like number of employees or revenue. That may be very lightly correlated because someone with no traffic and one person isn't gonna give us 20 grand a month, right? So okay, yes, it's a very slight correlation, fine. But you see what I mean? I'm giving examples of how that's not the major axis. That's not the major way that you figure it out. So there's some tools where it could be, some not. And the answer is what is actually the characteristics that this person cares about that you're serving? And what is that? That's who you are and you're right. You should not have five of those. You should have one of those. And then there might be different reasons why a person is in that scenario or different use cases where this is the right tool for them.
Differentiating Consulting Services
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Jason Cohen: I get a little bit nervous when, because I hear a version of this from people, they're probably people listening who think, oh, I tried that and it doesn't work, because they think, oh, I'm going to, I'm a Laravel expert, and anybody that needs a Laravel expert, they can hire me. And to me that is not differentiated enough. Of course, it's not differentiated at all. Well it's Laravel and not raw PHP, I guess, or Rails or something, but differentiate means different from other people who do the same thing. And if there's two Laravel developers and they both say, only, I'm a Laravel developer, then they're undifferentiated. That list of qualities that, or you could almost call them values, it's like the promise that WP Engine makes, you know, fast, scalable, secure, da-da-da.
Jonathan Stark: What would that look like, do you think, or can you imagine, not to put you on the spot, but can you imagine, like, what a Laravel developer or consultant, okay.
Jason Cohen: Yeah, so with consulting it's extra hard to be differentiated, because at least in products you can just have a feature or two that maybe somebody doesn't have, and that might be minor, but okay. Maybe the design is, you know, the product's designed somehow, like there's even the visual design, some people will like it. In other words, there's some little places where you could have differentiation, where consultants don't have that, right, there's no little place to hang that, there's no UI and no features. However, differentiation doesn't just come from things like features, it can come from all manner of things, and maybe consultants just have to do that. So I think the most, most is probably the wrong word, a common way is to have some kind of content marketing that shows who you are, what your style is, what your attitude is, what your philosophy is, shows off that you have depth, and what specific things you may specialize in or have special opinions about. You could say, is that differentiated because someone else has content, yeah, but they're not saying the same things you're saying, they don't have the same style you have. Their writing style's different, the kinds of things they want to key off of and obsess about is different, if it's videos or a podcast, the way they talk and how they approach things is different, and that is differentiation. That's as much differentiation as a brand, or, because of course it is a brand, right, but as much as, let's say, design and software, like how it looks, how is that not like that, or even features. And so I mention that just because everyone can potentially do that, anyone can write blog posts, make videos, or whatever. Now one reason to do that is to try to get leads, and that's fine, but another way is to have a brand and to be differentiated. And so it might be useful to do that, even if it's not generating a ton of leads, because when you do get a lead, you can point at it and say, look, this is what I'm like. If you're like, mm, I read a couple of things by that guy, I want that, or I've watched some videos with her, she's, yes, I want that. Then it's a sales tool, and so it's not just maybe a lead magnet, although of course you can try to make it that too. Now you can say other people do that, I know, but that's true of literally everything you do, that other people do stuff too, so that's not really an answer. Same with product, like, we have a unique design, so does everyone else, I know, but that still, so what, I don't have a unique design because other people also have design? That's one of the things that you have. Of course you can do things like speak or write a book or something, and that generates some credibility also. This is more content, I suppose, but still, there's different forms of that. There's case studies, I just, they're okay, I just, it's hard to find people who are like, I wasn't so sure, but then I read the case study and decided to hire you, so I think it's more of a checkbox thing to have more so than something that's going to convince somebody. There's pricing, of course, so like, speaking of Laravel experts, I have interviewed some folks who have a different, a whole different, like, engagement model for the Laravel work that they do, so instead of it being hourly or instead of it being project-based, it's just like, look, swipe your credit card and we start working on the issues that you put in our tracker, period. The end of the month, you're going to be glad with how much stuff got done, no phone calls ever, no meetings of any kind, and that's just the deal, and like, that's the way we want to work, we just want to be heads down, do the work, and they're like oversubscribed, like, they have a waiting list. It's massively different in terms of the amount, the level of convenience for the buyer. Some people probably be, I mean, know this for a fact, people are, certain people are completely turned off by the idea of not being able to have meetings, jump on the phone, can we just have a quick call? But they don't care, they're like, that's, you're just, that's fine, I can introduce you to someone who's happy to jump on a phone call with you, but we don't do that.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, that's a great example of pricing, or the business model, you might say, in general, absolutely can be a differentiator, no doubt about it, and of course, like you said, there's some clients who will never do that because, I want to call, okay, then they're not, then they're not a client, like, the question is, is there enough? Another thing consultants can do is be local. Now, that's not, that doesn't always work, obviously, but, you know, what language do you speak, what city are you in? In general, people like working with people who are more local for some rough definition of that. So, that's a, that's an easy one to do.
Jason Cohen: Yeah, if that's a, yeah, that would be horrible for me because I don't, I'm more of an introvert when it comes to that sort of thing, but I know people who are very extroverted and much prefer jumping in the car or jumping on a plane, even, and, you know, meeting face-to-face.
Jonathan Stark: Well, I'm not even saying if you jump in a car, although that too, that too, actually, that'd be pretty neat. You come and work in the office, actually could be pretty cool. So if, like, if you would want to do that, that could be differentiated as well. But I just meant, I just meant, like, you know, you're Polish, so get jobs in Poland. They'd rather hire someone Polish than someone who's anything else. I mean, a lot of people would, so that's nice. You may not work and it depends on where you are and whether that's true and right. So of course, not necessarily, but it's just, it's just something to consider.
Jason Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: I've worked with some people who do all of their content marketing website and everything exclusively in German or exclusively in French.
Jason Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Stark: And it's just like saying, look, we don't want to work with people who only speak English. Well, that's probably not exactly their reasoning, but it's a, it's a strong message like that they are saying, obviously we work with French speakers, like that's the thing or German speakers or whatever. And so if you're.
Jason Cohen: And vice versa, do you want to work with a native French person and have, and do that? Or do you want to work with some, you know, multinational U.S. company?
Jonathan Stark: Right.
Jason Cohen: I know, I know what a lot of people would say, right? And not everyone, that's the point, everything you do that, that is saying something real. Some people will say, oh, goody and, and you ratchet up in their, in their estimation of you and whether they're going to want to work with you and you'll push some people away and that's good.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah, exactly.
Jason Cohen: Right.
The Fear of Closing Doors
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Jonathan Stark: But that feels like death to so many people I talked to who, who it's, it's the kind of thing that like once you get it, it's so obvious, but before you get it, it feels like you're cutting your own throat.
Jason Cohen: Yes. Because all you can do is think about the people that you're turning away and you're, you're not imagining the fact that how many people are already hitting your homepage and leaving because you're not saying anything and how many of those could have said, whoa, this is a breath of fresh air and how many conversions you could have gotten on that.
Jonathan Stark: Right.
Jason Cohen: And you're not thinking about that. You're only thinking about who's going to turn away, but what I find is two things. One is the amount, while some people get turned away, the amount that other people enjoy it is not equal. It's way more. In other words, it's 10X better for someone to go, oh my gosh, of course I want, of course I'm in, I'm in Portugal and I want to hire someone who speaks Portuguese. That's awesome. That's like 10X more than the person who's like, oh, I don't, I don't understand this. I'm leaving.
Jonathan Stark: Right.
Jason Cohen: So it's, it's, it's an asymmetric benefit. And the other thing is, um, setting language aside, cause that might be a complete barrier. Another thing is like, you'll have maybe five or 10 of these facets of these special things that you are. And the ideal customer that we could define would be the one who, every one of your facets, they're like, perfect. That's, that's what I want. And whatever else your weakness is and other crap, they're like, no, screw that. I don't even want that. That would be your ideal, right? And you're worried that if you speak to that ideal customer, you're going to turn off literally everyone else. And that's almost everyone. But what actually happens is this, because you had this ideal customer in mind that you're speaking to, you're clear and differentiated. And because of that, you will win those ideal customers. First of all, that's good because before they didn't understand that and they left and now they won't leave. But also there's so many people, a few rungs out of the bullseye.
Jonathan Stark: Okay.
Jason Cohen: They're not perfect.
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Jason Cohen: They wish you had one other employee, but you don't, but you know what? Everything else is so good. I'll do it anyway.
Jonathan Stark: Right. Right.
Jason Cohen: And that, there's like 10 or even 100 times more people like that than there are in this perfect bullseye center. And when you're specific and you communicate that, you can capture all of those, even the people that are not ideal but still in the right zone, where they look at you and say, yeah, it's a set of trade-offs, but what in life isn't a set of trade-offs? I like this set of trade-offs, and they do it anyways. That's what actually happens. So you think you're closing all these doors, and you are closing some doors, but you're just dramatically ramping up on what actually happens.
Jonathan Stark: Yes, and to maybe put that in another way, because I totally agree with all of that, the act of you publicly closing a couple of doors is so bold and different from the vast majority of especially consulting websites or agency and dev shop websites that are like, we have smart problems, smart people that solve hard problems, and just jump on the phone with us, and we'll tell you about how great our proprietary process is, whatever. Total word salad that is three levels of abstraction above what any kind of normal conversation would be. So people are like, I can't tell you, I keep a list of soggy websites where you just look at it, and you literally read the page, and you do not know what they do. Because they don't want to say no to anything. Right, exactly. And you know, it's funny, just think about how different this conversation would be. Well, you just pay me $20,000 a month, and just see what happens. And then someone says, wait, I don't understand, like I gotta pay for features, and then you say, I have a waiting list because the customers I'm doing this for won't stop. And then that's it, that's the pitch. That's the entire pitch.
Jason Cohen: That's the entire pitch. Right, like, that's a much better pitch right there than, oh, I have a proprietary bullshit. Well, everyone does. And yours probably isn't that good, by the way. And even if it is, so many people say that and don't have it, so it's poison, right? So it doesn't matter if you do that. It's not interesting, and not compelling, I should say.
Who Hidden Multipliers Is For
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Jonathan Stark: Okay, so I could beat this drum all day. We totally agree here. So let's take the opportunity to shift gears a little bit and talk about the book. I know you're not here to sell the book, but do you think that the ideas in the book are relevant for solo operators, people that are basically bootstrapping, non-VC, solo or small teams, maybe a couple of partners, maybe three people? I mean, I already know the answer from reading your blog and your LinkedIn posts, but I'm just curious how much of a fit do you think it is for someone like that versus someone who wants to build what I would call an empire business or another unicorn? Is this for people who want to build unicorns or is that just a credibility indicator?
Jason Cohen: So obviously you wouldn't have invited me on if this was for people who want to make Facebook, right? But I'll give you an even better answer because I just said that everyone listening needs to be so specific and so this, you know? I just said that. So what did I do for the book? The ideal customer profile that I had in mind writing the book was a bootstrapped SaaS software company at two million in revenue where growth has slowed and they're going, damn it, what do I do to restart growth? Because I obviously have a product that works and customers that generally like it. What the hell? I have 10 things that I could do. I don't know which ones to do and also the right answer may not even be on that list. What the heck do I do? That is my ICP. So what does that mean? It means, okay, so if I'm at one million, is it still relevant? Yeah, obviously, right? That's obviously close enough that the bullseye is relevant. What if I raised money and I'm at two million ARR? Yeah, of course it's still useful, right? Because if growth slowed, who cares if you raised money or not? Like you need to do something about this. You need tools that generally work. What about service companies? Okay, now we're getting a little further afield. And so what I would say is some is 100% on the mark and some isn't. So I have chapters about how to analyze a customer base. Well, you may have two clients. So you don't need to do that. I have a chapter about cancellations. Well, you don't have recurring revenue cancellations, so you don't need to worry about that. But then I have chapters about how to use objective things that you have to really crisply identify these ideal customers we've been talking about, like a process to go figure out exactly what that is. Well, that a consultant definitely needs. Or this stuff about how to look inside yourself and build a strategy in the shape of yourself. I have an entire chapter on exactly how to do that. Of course, using myself as an example too and other examples to demonstrate that. But I say show exactly how to do that. That is absolutely 100% relevant as a consultant. So since a solo consultant overlaps some and not others, that means some of the chapters yes and some no. And that's just the honest truth of it, right? And so, you know.
Jonathan Stark: Well, it's a perfect example, actually. Yeah, it's a perfect example.
Jason Cohen: And so guess what? Some consultants have read it and say they love it. And for some, they may say, no, I just want to read books about consulting only. And I'd say, okay, of course, do what you feel.
AI and the Future of SaaS
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Jonathan Stark: Of course. This might seem like a left field question, but based on the ICP that you just described, how does AI affect those? Do you believe that some people, I have heard it less so recently, but Satya Nadella and other people being like, AI agents can be the death of SaaS. And I'm not, certainly it's going to cause changes, but I'm still not unsubscribing from tons of things. And I'm using AI every day, but I still have, like, where do you fall? Because you're totally in the middle of this.
Jason Cohen: Yeah, yeah. So first of all, you always have to check the source. And I know theoretically we should evaluate the message and not the speaker. On the other hand, when the speaker has a motive to make a certain case, then that doesn't mean we throw out what they say. It just means we have to remember that they have a reason to make that case. And so maybe that's putting the thumb on the scale a little bit. So yeah, just like you're saying, how many SaaS products have you canceled because now you do it yourself with AI? And even someone who's deeply into AI is like, maybe one, like maybe I switched from some note-taking thing to Obsidian because it's easier for AI and like, that's it. Or like, maybe you stopped using Notion, but that's because Notion sucks now. Like the quality of, it's not because AI, like in fact, Notion should be a perfect platform for AI. It's got all the right kind of markup and it has fancy stuff and you can kind of mesh the human with the AI. It's actually perfect for AI, but it doesn't work well anymore because they forgot to keep working on the product and that's why. So yeah, like in fact, even the public SaaS companies, of course, that's not who's listening here, but if we're just talking about sort of the wider, what's wider, Satya Nath, Google is talking about the other big SaaS companies, right, not little companies. All their metrics are good. Like their valuations are down because Wall Street's not valuing them as high because of this rhetoric and other reasons. But like HubSpot stock went down. Yeah, but they grew profit and revenue at over $2 billion a year and they're still growing 30%. It's insane. Like their metrics are amazingly good. So there's nothing wrong with SaaS. Like even at that scale, there's nothing wrong with it. So I do think you have to start analyzing like, well, what is the stuff that AI is disrupting or could disrupt? Systems of record are often what a SaaS product is. In other words, my accounting is in a SaaS product. My finances are in a SaaS product. My sales data is in a CRM. My support team is using a product. My version control is in GitHub. Has AI disrupted GitHub? Nope, because the code has to go somewhere. It doesn't make sense for LLMs to disrupt where the code goes. So the systems of record, which is generally what that means, where do I put the official data? Not only is AI not disrupting it, you don't want LLMs to like just guess around the data that needs to be crisp. You want them to use, access it, maybe read and write it and all this kind of stuff, but you don't want them, it is not the system of record. So anything that's a system of record is safe. Now I say safe, you can't look out 10 years and tell me anything or even two years, I think. So all this conversation is about what's going on in sort of the immediate future. No one knows what's coming. And the reason I say that is two years ago, if I asked you what would AI be like, you'd say various things and you'd be wrong a lot. You wouldn't guess that Anthropic's now better than OpenAI and bigger than them is not what you would guess. all the different things. Also AI like doesn't do anything for a while and it suddenly jumps up and not really jumps up because it regresses and you know we all know it's kind of this this mishmash. So we can't predict things like five years in the future what it's like so I'm not doing that. But right now SAS isn't stopping and especially if it's a system of record but not only that. So no I don't think SAS is dead. Now you can say okay but some things are dying right. So like Tailwind CSS is amazing but AI can in fact do it and why would I pay for a support subscription to Tailwind when in fact AI can build things in Tailwind and also maybe I don't care anymore what my CSS is. If I'm just going to tell the AI to do it I might not even care what the framework is. So you start looking at that and you go oh okay there are things where it really is disrupting it. It really is replacing it and it's not that it's doing all at once and we don't know the timeline but if we're saying like but what what is the vector pointing you'd say yeah it's pointing away from let's say software frameworks being something that's that people adopt that people care about and certainly that people would pay for. It's like yeah I don't know about that. Things where it's content where there's a where there is an answer like Stack Overflow. One of the great software development products you might say ever. But once AI can ingest it now you can say well they shouldn't have okay anyway here we are and now like you know yeah you're right like we just don't need that because AI really can do that. So in a repository of information like that that where there's a right answer that doesn't seem like it has a future. Another way I've put it is if you if there is a very best way to do a job if that exists then eventually will be automated because once something automated can do it the best quote unquote then they will. Why would you want a human doing it who costs more and gets sick and sometimes doesn't do it perfect right and if there is a perfect and that could be a robot in a manufacturing center putting you know screwing a screw into a hole. There is a best where the screw screws in and it's there and the tension is correct and there's no like better way to do there's no better right. So that job's going to go away eventually. Of course that job has gone away largely. So you could look around and say okay what is like that but what are jobs where there's no such thing as best or finished in design, writing, code, entertainment. There's no such thing as we're finished or that's the best we're done. That's a good point. So AI doesn't doesn't like take the job. Another one is that stuff about entertainment. Computers have been better than us at chess for 25 years. We didn't have to wait for LLMs for that and in fact I should say computers have been better than the best humans for 25 years. Computers are better than most humans for longer than that right. Yeah. So chess has never been more popular than it is today. More people have never played chess than today. There are YouTubers multiple with millions and millions of subscribers doing chess stuff. There's terms like wait there's never been more humans playing chess and yet computers have been better than us for 25 years. So how come computers didn't kill chess. Yeah. And the answer is because that's not why we do chess. We do it because it's personal development. We like it. It's something to learn and then we watch it because it's entertainment. It's kind of sports. It's the human condition and so forth and so we don't want to we don't want to watch computers play chess against each other or even humans even though they're better. And so we don't. Yeah. And so what are things like that. So entertainment is one and there might be others too where we don't want to see computers. You don't want to do that even though the A.I. can do it. We don't care. And so so I know I just rattled off a bunch of things but these are a couple of the ways I think about in what way is A.I. transforming or not transforming things. And so as you think OK well obviously I'm going to use A.I. somewhat but how's it disrupting me. I mean I just see in stuff like software development or design A.I. is supporting people who are already good so that they can be better or more efficient or whatever as opposed to replacing. Now I know companies you know that used to have 100 developers maybe now they have 70 because A.I. So in that sense you could say there's a replacement. But what I don't see is zero. There aren't vibe coded software products that work. That's not what's happening. Well
Why Expertise Still Matters
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Jonathan Stark: that's here's here's where the specific thing that I've been hearing from developers who who are using these tools in their in their normal work and they they imagine that this is so easy. I just talk to it. Anyone could talk to it. Yeah. No. Yeah. No. No. I mean a lot of them recognize that their expertise is still super important because I'll tell you why it doesn't work
Jason Cohen: because L.M.S. don't work that well yet. And so what happens is it has these strokes of genius. You're like I can't believe that's that happened. And you're right. And it's like incredibly dumb the next second. Now what do you do with that. Well if you're an expert if you're a great writer great coder great designer then what you do with that is when the L.M.S. have helped you're like yes I save time or I'm just going to tell it to do this a little differently that will definitely OK. Great. And when it's wrong you fix it either you fix it or you make it fix it whatever because you know that it's wrong or at least not what you want let's say in case of design wrong is maybe the wrong word but OK it's not what you wanted. So it's a it's a tool and you use it. Right. That's why it works for you. But if you're not that person and so you don't have those skills you don't have that judgment you don't have that ability then when it does it not right you don't even know and you proceed and you get a you get something that's that's like incredible compared to what what you could have gotten five years ago. No doubt about that. But that's not good enough for things like a product that actually works and people like and as a consultant that's bad output. Right. It's it's it's not good output. So because L.M.S. are miraculous and also not very good that's why that works. Now there's one I think there's an exception which is when it when the result doesn't have to be very good. So if I'm just if I'm a content farm I don't actually care how good my content is because by the way when I was hiring people it was also crap. So now it's just it's actually kind of better because even though the A.I. is boring it at least is correct English and before my stuff wasn't even that and I was still OK with it because that's how much I don't care what this is. OK well then then A.I. is back to being good enough because you just said you don't really care about it being bad. You were already bad. Now to me it's like well who wants to do that. That's just crappy work. I mean that doesn't sound like a fulfilling life. So to me it's like well who cares about that. But there's plenty of stuff where that's the case in which case using A.I. when you're not an expert can still work because you decided you don't care. OK. Right. Yeah. The bar is so low that maybe it does work. But I like your your
Jonathan Stark: system of record phrase. It's like you need to trust it. You want it. I find myself prompting my open claw to to I'm always like OK we brainstorm this automation that I'm just making for myself for my internal systems. And now I want you to turn that into code that you just run next time. So we're not using tokens when we don't need to. And so it's got the same exact output every time. Right. And you're not improvising every time and changing your mind and using different model and doing all this crazy stuff behind the scenes. So so I talk I talk to software developers who are I would say fully a third of them at least are like someday I'm gonna build a SAS. And I've been hearing from a lot of those types. They're just like oh what's the point. Anybody could just make this now. Does it does. But I think they're talking about end users more so than competitors. But what about what about competition. If you're building a SAS what would you say to someone who's got an idea doesn't seem like there's an obvious competitor or they're significantly different from the other things that that are in the alternatives as you put it.
Distribution and Fast Followers
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Jason Cohen: Yeah. A part of me wants to say it was always like this. If you're a solo developer and you can make a SAS or you make anything then so can other people. Right. But isn't it isn't the does
Jonathan Stark: the fast follower not matter more now. It might. It might. That's why I say I want to say that
Jason Cohen: because there is there is truth in that. It was always easier to make it than to sell it. It was always harder to get distribution. It's always hard to get attention and find people who actually want to buy it who care about the thing that you think is so great that's differentiated. That was always the hard part. Right. GitHub is full of projects that work well enough that people don't want to buy. That was. But, you know, it's not, there is no repository full of amazing ads that work really well, but the product's so bad that it didn't work. That can happen, but there's like a thousand to one there. Right? So, distribution's always been the hard part.
Jonathan Stark: Now, but does AI make it even easier for people and even faster for people?
Jason Cohen: Yes, okay, I admit that, yes. It's even worse. So, I would say it's always been this way. So, I have articles I've written 15 years ago that say this. So, that proves it was always this way, because I was already observing that in companies I was investing in or doing and already observing that. So, you might even say the whole lean startup thing is based on that. Hey, we can make new features every two weeks, but what should we make?
Jonathan Stark: Yeah.
Jason Cohen: That's the hard part, right, everyone? So, it's always been that way, but okay, I agree. It's more so now, maybe it's more lopsided now. It's easier to fast forward now. I agree, so it's more so than ever, but the attitude should be, I always had to be differentiated and somehow defensible if I made a company, and now it's more so, but I would also say there's also more people to sell to than ever. The world is flatter than ever. So, there's more channels to market through than ever. It's easier to take money on a credit card than ever or other forms of payment that didn't exist before. So, there are many things that are easier for you to distribute or build a company, and also, because it's easier, more people can do it, and so you're right, there's more competition. That's also true.
Jonathan Stark: But of course, there's gonna be people that make small businesses that work. That's going to happen, so why not you? Right, right. I mean, I think the reason that the folks I'm talking about, the segment of people I'm talking about get so demoralized is because they think they're gonna make something so good it sells itself, which I think you and I both know is not, right? There's no such thing.
Jason Cohen: And again, it's always been what people thought, and they've always been wrong. And if it's demoralizing because you're like, yeah, but I don't know what's different, I would say, okay, then why do it? And at all, why are you putting another thing that's just nobody wants? The same as this other thing, right? And there's a good answer to that, because you want your own company, and you don't want to work for someone else, because it's yours, and I buy that. I'm here for it. I'm rooting for you for that. I accept that answer. But your customers don't accept that answer, because they have alternatives. And so if it's not different than the product that has 10,000 customers and is well-known, and yours isn't different in any way, then the customers don't care that you want to make a life for yourself. But again, I've tried to emphasize, when I say you're different, I don't mean it has to be radically different, and totally this, and a feature nobody has. That's not what I'm saying. But is the UX, the user experience, the flow of it, has a certain thing that's your thing? It doesn't have to be radically different, but it does have to be something that at least some people would look at and say, ooh, okay, yeah, that sounds good. I want to kind of do it like that. Even if it's only a little different than what other people do. Another thing I find, if it's a crowded market, which again, I recommend anyway, is like WP Engine's a crowded market for sure. We have literally dozens of competitors, maybe hundreds if you count really small ones. But okay, let's say dozens of, so any one feature or thing we do probably isn't unique ever. It's the combination of things we do that's unique. Right, the taste, the opinion. It's like opinionated software, like Basecamp, I always think of Basecamp.
Jonathan Stark: Well, also just even if, so 100% yes, I agree with what you just said. I was even just thinking about feature bullet points, even though of course you're right, there's like 10 other ways to differentiate. But even if it, feature bullet points, well, if there's 20 competitors, and actually if you're in something like marketing tools, there's probably hundreds of competitors. Well, if you have one feature, well, there's probably 20 competitors that have that feature. And feature B, oh, there's another 30 competitors that have that feature. But who has both? And who has it in this way? Okay, that's starting to become better. So maybe you have five or 10 features, and any one feature, of course there's many competitors that have that one. So that's not the point. So differentiation has to be this whole package. How is it all put together? What is the workflows the customer does? What does it integrate with? How do they work with it? What kinds of problems does it solve? What is the pricing model like you were pointing out? And even just brand and attitude, like you said, 37 signals, is Basecamp really the best project management software? For some people, maybe. For most people, no. And I would posit, if it wasn't for their blog and then books, would they be as successful as they are today on the merits of just the product alone? And the answer is nobody knows because we can't run that counterfactual. But I know that when I talk to people at 37 Signals, they almost always are talking about the culture of the company and the writing, and they almost never say anything about Basecamp. So I think I know the answer. But that just goes to show what I said earlier about the content you put out is part of what makes you differentiated, maybe in leads, but certainly once you capture a person and saying, here's what's going on here, do you want to support this? Just like I said with Etsy. I think 37 Signals is probably a lot more like me buying a pouch from Etsy than a company weighing all the features and deciding Jira over something else because features.
Jason Cohen: Right.
Worldview as Differentiation
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Jonathan Stark: Yeah, it's more of a cultural alignment, or cultural might be the wrong word, but it's more of a worldview alignment. That is accessible to everyone here. Now, it's hard to get attention, it's hard, like, of course. But what you do have control over is you could write 20 articles over the course of time, or make YouTube videos or whatever over the course of some time that gets into whatever you think about stuff, your opinions about stuff, your attitude towards stuff. Could be weird code stuff, it could be business stuff, it could be that you're super into the food bank in your local area and why you give 5% of your profits to there and how much it means. It could be anything that you're passionate about. This is who you are, you make that clear. There's some number of people who will go, okay.
Jason Cohen: Right.
Jonathan Stark: You know, like, and sure, if you did want to be the next Facebook or something, then what I just said isn't enough. Because to have a company that's doing billions in revenue and fighting off the biggest people in the world in the biggest markets in the world, you do need more than just that. Okay, I'm gonna do this, you do need more than just that. Okay, but who cares? We're not doing that here. I'm not doing that either, by the way. You know, like, I'm not either. So that's not what we're talking about. That's not the kind of, so when you read stuff, even by me, it says stuff like, oh, you gotta have moats and like, it's interesting and if you had a moat, that'd be good. But like, that's not what's required to be, I don't even say unique, I just say special. I don't even know what unique means. No, really, because on the one hand, it's automatically unique. And on the other hand, nothing's really that unique. And so let's just not use the word. I don't know what it means. Well, so speaking of writing and your writing, what is, is it just a habit for you now and a practice that you just thoroughly enjoy, like a meditation? That's how it feels for me sometimes. Or is there a more strategic, like, do you feel like you're supporting WP Engine by, you know, publishing on LinkedIn or is, or like, what's the-
Writing to Think
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Jason Cohen: Oh, no, no, of course I was writing way before WP Engine anyway, so no. Um, it's a combination of a truly internal drive and a sort of egotistical external validation drive. So I really do write to think and to figure out things. And I like trying to figure out really great ways of explaining something or working through something. And it helps me learn it and helps me understand it and figure out what I think about things. I have a huge pile of drafts of stuff that just aren't good enough because I realize I'm not, I'm not so clear on this. I don't know what I think about this yet, or I wrote it out and like, now I'm not even sure I agree with myself. Um, yeah, or, but on the other hand, there's things where like we tried this thing at WP Engine, it was okay, then we iterated on it, da-da-da-da, and after 10 teams tried this workflow, we've got a workflow that works pretty well for us. Now I'm gonna publish that and that's pretty darn good. And I like that I have like a record of that or something, you know, that, that doesn't mean it'll automatically work for other people, by the way. In fact, I'm a big proponent of the idea that frameworks often don't work for another group, even if they work super well for one group. I think it's cultural and how they work and attitudes and stuff like that. We're just not fitting the work style, that sort of thing. So even though something might be perfect at WP Engine, like objectively the perfect, the most perfect way, you know, even if we agree, it might only work for like 15% of other companies, you know, and I don't even know if I know when would it work or not, because I don't have, you know, I don't know, I didn't try it a hundred times and try to find out. So I just think that's how frameworks are. So that's okay. You know, you just, you try them on like clothes and see if you can find one that, cause a lot of frameworks are just, are fine, you know, but like you try on which one's gonna work for you, I think, including my own, I would say that. Anyway, so, but you're saying about writing. So, so the writing is my way of doing a lot of that. And I have written things that I've never published and that kind. goes to show that I'm writing it for me, because I write things that I don't use for other, you know, I don't know, to get attention or something, or like this book I just wrote. The reason I say I'm not here to sell it, like, of course I want people to buy it and read it, duh, but I knew that if 10 people read it only, I was going to write this book anyway because I had to do it. I had to take my best ideas and new ideas I hadn't written about before and write them up in this way. I just had to. It took me over a year and I poured so much energy into it. I read the audio book myself with the producer and all this kind of stuff. I wanted to make my best work that I've ever made, regardless of whether anyone read it. And I did do that for me. So even now, like, I'm not running ads on it on Amazon, although I'm thinking of doing that because it'd be interesting, but like, I haven't. And you know, I'm not, I don't know, I don't have a PR firm to go do that. I don't know. I don't have a PR firm to go do that stuff, which shows that I didn't do it only to sell the most number of copies or else I'd do that too. I did want to write my best work and of course I love when people do it. Now having said all that, of course I want the ego boost of people saying, I love that. I like it when I, when my tweets get likes, I like it when I get a sale of the book. I like it when people, but more than a sale of the book, what I like is when I get an email or something where people just say, oh my God, I stopped reading after chapter one because there was so many notes of things to go do. I wouldn't, I started going to, okay, that's what I want now. That's the best thing. So I don't care how many of those I get. Like scale is not important to me in that sense. But each time something like that happens, that, that feels really good. And that's external validation, not internal. And so sometimes I, sometimes I feel bad about that. Like is that, you know, you shouldn't care what people think you should do things intrinsically. That's probably true, but I do care what people think and I do care about what people think about me and I do care what they say and maybe I shouldn't, but what can I do? I do. So I feel like for those kinds of things, obviously external motivation like that can be healthy because it's motivation for me to make my best work and put it out there so that I earn the kudos, right? So in that sense, I think it's healthy. And then of course it can become unhealthy. It can proceed from there into an unhealthy place. I feel bad about myself because one troll said something bad, even though 20 people says something good. That's bad. Or I feel like I'm, uh, if I feel like I'm an imposter or not good enough because I don't know, Alex Ramosi sells more books, so I'm, I suck and there's no reason for me to write books. That would be bad. So that would be that letting it bleed over into something bad, which of course sometimes I do because I'm a human being, but I can at least try, try to, um, to use it in a, in a, in a positive way. Another thing I would say that I, it goes to a previous point of yours, which is, which is when you said people said like, well, why should I even bother? And you could say the same thing about writing. Why should you bother writing another thing about writing code and Laravel when it's all been said? And I think you should bother, uh, besides the reasons already given, just like I should write things up that you've maybe read before. I mean, hopefully a lot of my stuff is, is new or something, but, um, but okay. Even if it's not for the following reason, and I hope, hopefully this is inspiring for people just to do things, but, um, but not a bullshit inspiration. Um, think of a teacher or a coach or someone in that kind of capacity who really changed you. Maybe they altered your, the, the, um, the course of your whole life, but maybe it's more like there's a phrase that you never, that you've always remembered or a little something that triggers up sometimes, you know, they, they, they touched you in some way. Right. Did that teacher invent any portion of the subject matter that they taught? Like if it was a math teacher, did they invent any new math that, you know, Euler and Newton didn't and Gauss didn't already invent? Right. No. This is a person who in that sense invented nothing ever and said something new, never. And yet you just said it changed the course of your life. Why? Because the exposition matters just as much how they explained it, what they did for you, et cetera, mattered just as much as inventing the damn thing in the first place. They're both valuable. Obviously invention and saying something new is great. You should do that. Awesome. Of course. But how you do it matters just the same. And so that should be motivation. It's motivation for me personally that like, even if I write about something, someone else wrote about it. Well, duh. Um, yes, but I'm doing it my way in my style, with my exposition, with my life experience mixed in, even just my writing style and so on. And maybe someone needed to hear it that way today. Right. In which case I've really done something even, you know, whether it's selfishly or not selfishly, I've really done something, uh, if that's the case and that's, that's great. Like that's enough. That's worth it. You know? So, so with that attitude. Yeah. Someone else wrote it. I know. And you're right. If you just copied it word for word, that's done. If you plagiarize, you're right. Or if you just have AI write it, you're right. That's not adding anything. You're right. style, exposition, experiences to it, that is a contribution just as good as inventing a new thing.
Jonathan Stark: Hmm. That's great. I, that's probably a great place to leave it, honestly. That was fantastic. Let's leave it there. And could you tell folks before we go where they should go to find out more about what you're doing? Maybe buy the book, subscribe to your LinkedIn. I'll link to all of this in the show notes, of course. Yeah. Where's the best place to go?
Where to Find Jason
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Jason Cohen: Yeah. The book is called Hidden Multipliers. So hidden multipliers.com. You can see all the chapters. There's the introductions there too. You can buy it there or you can buy it on Amazon, all the things, Kindle and paper and audio book in either way. There's the skills that's also linked from there, skills.asmartbear.com. And then my regular website, asmartbear.com. That's got all like literally almost 20 years of articles. And again, I don't have any paywalls. I don't have any, I don't even collect your email address. There's a, there is a newsletter if you want to know when I write a new one. But other than that, you can just look at all that stuff. If I'm fortunate that I was able to make money actually building companies and never had to make money on content, that means everything can just be free and open and everything. Cause I don't care about, I don't want ads. I don't want affiliate links. I'm not trying to sell you consulting or a course or anything like that. So I can just, I can just do it for the love of the game. Oh, and I have a new podcast called Smart Bear Live. Dot com also has no ads or anything cause the love of the game. And uh, and so yeah, that's it. That's another thing. And those podcasts go to like two hours. So this is nothing. I'm just getting warmed up here.
Jonathan Stark: Oh, fabulous. That is so great. And, and folks, if you haven't read Jason's stuff, I think you're going to be blown away. Some subjects probably not going to be on the nose for my listeners, but lots of them are and it's just, the thinking is just so clear and crystallized. It's fantastic. It's really great stuff.
Jason Cohen: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Jonathan Stark: All right, folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me again next time on Ditching Hourly. Bye.
