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

Jason Cohen’s framework begins with an uncomfortable question: are customers leaving? Customers have already discovered the product, avoided the homepage, accepted the price, bought it, and invested time in onboarding. Cancellation therefore signals that the product or its promise is failing in a fundamental way. He recommends calculating the ceiling created by churn: new customers divided by the cancellation rate. If a company adds 100 customers per month and loses 5 percent of its base, the ceiling is 2,000 customers. The number makes churn more concrete than arguing over whether a monthly rate is acceptable.

The framework then asks whether pricing and positioning are correct. Cohen argues that companies often guess a low price and never revisit it. A low price can signal low quality to a larger customer, so raising prices may change the market being addressed rather than merely reduce demand. The same product can also be positioned around savings or around growth; the second promise may align with a budget that is much larger. Pricing is therefore not just a number on a webpage. It includes the market, the customer’s goals, the product’s structure, and the value the customer believes it receives.