Jason Cohen

longform.asmartbear.comChange: Damned if you do, damned more if you don’tEveryone wants change, but doesn’t want to change. Though inevitable, change is uncomfortable and exhausting. Manage it with kindness.

16h

A successful company can break in at least two ways: 1. It forgets why it won. It changes the pricing, the product and the pitch, and breaks the thing that was working. 2. It's stuck in the strategy that did win them their success, but they don't adapt when the world changes. (1/3)

16h

After a change of control, it's often (1). But the founder -- who I suppose you revere -- is likely to do (2). The thing is, it's not even wrong, for a long time, maybe years, so there's so much apparent reason to stay the course. After all, you don't want to make changes and end up with… (2/3)

16h

…(1). You don't know exactly which parts are 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 you successful. The channel? The pricing? The timing? Brand, at least now? How do you even know what needs changing and what you need to fight to never change? Change is hard: (3/3)

22h

“Distribution is the new moat” -- so say many people. Only some are. Folks with great SEO 2 years have discovered it’s not a moat. A truly entertaining and valuable YT channel is a moat. New rules, post-AI.

Outliers are not followers. Still, notice how often “outlier thinkers” reference other thinkers, writers, mentors, team mates. Don’t allow self-actualization to prevent you from absorbing wisdom, else you will lag behind, in ignorance.

youtube.comE10 w/ Jessica Malnik: How to Find a Repeatable Growth ChannelBrett Lindenberg’s startup Mindstamp puts six figures of profit in his pocket every year, helping businesses create interactive videos for training and sales…

You picked a niche because being specific wins. Then you added a cheaper plan to reach more people. That plan fights your niche. Most segments ignore you 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 you're cheap. Mindstamp's founder did this. We solved it on Smart Bear Live E10:

youtube.comE11 w/ Mariya Delano: How to Fix a SaaS Trial-to-Paid Conversion ProblemAbout half of Userlist’s paying customers never fully set up the email automation they paid for. Jane Portman and Benedikt Deicke built Userlist over nine ye…

Userlist’s founders had a $1k onboarding fee in mind. My cohost Mariya Delano: “No, no, it needs to hurt.” She knows a one-person business that spent $20k on consulting fees alone. Smart Bear Live E11:

New Smart Bear Live E11 just dropped! About 50% of Userlist’s paying customers never fully set it up, and Jane Portman says they “didn’t dare” force onboarding. Cohost Mariya Delano and I workshop it with Benedikt Deicke and Jane Portman (Userlist):

longform.asmartbear.comReframing “Freemium” by charging the marketing departmentFreemium means high costs, low conversion, and customer feedback dominated by the non-ideal customer. Treat it as a marketing expense to ensure ROI.

Freemium is a fun way to grow, but often unprofitably. A normal free-to-paid rate is about 1%. So 99 of every 100 users need servers, engineers and support, and pay you nothing. That's why the freemium winners usually raised millions.

The newest Smart Bear Live (E10) ends with a founder saying: "Wow, I get to wake up and play this game every morning." That's the spirit of the whole show. Recommended:

You can't let the world change who you are; otherwise you're somebody else. But the world does exist and you can't control how other people react and think. Therefore, maintain yourself but be fluid in what you do to maximize the results of who you are.

Are you a product company or a consulting company? The test: if you stopped consulting for a customer, would they leave at once? Then you're consulting. We workshopped this with Brett Lindenberg in Smart Bear Live E10:

longform.asmartbear.comStubborn Visionaries & Pigheaded FoolsHow do you know when to stop, versus when to push through? You don’t, not even in hindsight. But these guiding questions can help.

What’s the difference between blind obstinance and determination? Whether you are questioning, actively seeking evidence to the contrary, being introspective, with guidance like the questions in the second half of this post:

“Startup” isn’t a word reserved only for those wanting to raise money or become a Unicorn. A “startup” is when you undertake a venture full of uncertainty and challenges, one that might not succeed, yet you dive in, driven by passion and giving it your all.

Sometimes in my "panel of experts," an expert spins off or doesn't actually judge anything. So now Claude is suggesting that another panel ensures the first panel is being a panel. What a weird life we're building for ourselves.

longform.asmartbear.comWhat makes a strategy greatMost so-called “strategies” are vague, wishful thinking, written once and never seen again. Don’t do that. These are the characteristics of great strategy.

One of the many tricky things about strategy: Often the details are the key, and yet an 80-page detailed strategy is too hard to communicate or follow. Thus: Details in the making, simplicity in the write-up.

Open source is free like a puppy is free. (Vibe-coded software is worse.) You pay for everything after it: the food, the vet, the walks in the rain, the chewed couch. (1/5)

Then explain why: the onboarding, the training, the bugs-fixed, the new features, the integrations to ever-changing external systems, the zero-day security patches, and on and on -- things they would have to do themselves, not just for the cost of the tokens, but their time. (4/5)

And at what hourly rate I wonder? Most people don't think their time is worth $1/hour, but that might be how they're acting. This is just one of the insights from the newest Smart Bear Live. E10, out now: (5/5)

Open source is free like a puppy is free. (Vibe-coded software is worse.) You pay for everything after it: the food, the vet, the walks in the rain, the chewed couch. (1/5)

Free software -- or vibe-coded software -- works the same way. Your customer pays in setup time, in hours spent training the team, and in workarounds. When the tool breaks, nobody is there to fix it. (2/5)

So when a prospect says a free tool does the same thing, your price isn't the problem. They haven't seen the bill for "free" yet. Don't defend your price, and don't apologize with a discount. Turn the objection around: "If you think I'm expensive, you should see how expensive 'free' is." (3/5)

Don’t treat this as a stepping stone. Treat this as your entire reason for being. Throw everything into it. Be the best, but where “the best” is defined by what you do in your special way, with your taste, talents, and even foibles. (1/2)

Because how you live your days is how you live your life. Even if it 𝘪𝘴 a stepping stone, this is how to take the biggest step. (2/2)

Companies think training videos cost $X00 to make. The real cost is X0,000 people-hours fake-"watching" videos. That's just one insight Brett Lindenberg, Jessica Malnik, and I found for Mindstamp in Smart Bear Live E10:

longform.asmartbear.comLegacyHumans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.

I learned to write by copying the styles of other writers and seeing what fit, and what 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 didn't, and what else emerged. (1/6)

Plagerism is still wrong, of course, in its own right. But if you take the long view, at least your idea is arriving somewhere you weren't yourself going. That's one way to define a legacy. (5/6)

Maybe a better one than how many people remember you name for another few decades after you could possibly care. (6/6)

longform.asmartbear.comLegacyHumans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.

I learned to write by copying the styles of other writers and seeing what fit, and what 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 didn't, and what else emerged. (1/6)

Then people started copying my best ideas without credit, and I was indignant. Maybe even bitter. Who wouldn't be? I mean, at least just toss a name and a link out there. But that matters only if the goal is to be known. It doesn't matter if the goal is to have an effect on someone else. (3/6)

This is how ideas move. Someone tosses a stone into a lake. The waves spread in every direction, far past the splash. Everyone forgets the stone, or never knew it was there. Especially when you think on timelines like a lifetime, or several lifetimes. (4/6)

longform.asmartbear.comLegacyHumans have always tried to live forever. Maybe you can, but not in the way you imagine.

I learned to write by copying the styles of other writers and seeing what fit, and what 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 didn't, and what else emerged. (1/6)

Copying style, not substance. Although… is that true? Or did I really "have that idea" in 2008 because that's the sort of thing Seth Godin or Jason Fried was saying in 2007? (2/6)

longform.asmartbear.comThe fundamental forces of scaleThese forces make larger companies slower and more difficult to execute, but also more effective when harnessed and leveraged.

Stop calling it "tech debt" when your code breaks at 100x the load. Debt is a shortcut you take on purpose. Code that breaks at 100x is evolution due to growth. If you call it debt, your engineers feel like they failed. They didn't. The company grew.

Your stickiest customer may not be your heaviest user. My cohost on Smart Bear Live E10, Jessica Malnik, does positioning for B2B companies for a living. She found Mindstamp's stickiest customer: the one who cares about a certification "at the identity level." (1/4)

The second kind stays for identity, like Mindstamp's customer. Your product gives them something that's part of who they are. They don't even consider the competition. They'd be OK with a small price increase, and they spread the word even when features are missing. (3/4)

Lock-in keeps a customer because leaving is hard. Identity keeps one because leaving would mean giving up part of who they are. So look at your best customers and ask what they care about at the identity level. Then check that your worst customers don't care about it. Watch Jessica work: (4/4)

We've now seen two kinds of sticky customer on the show. The first kind is locked in. On E01, ScreenshotOne's customers build its feature into products they sell. Unless they rip that feature out, they stay forever. (2/4)

Jason Cohen reposted

Nate Ritter

@nateritter.com

Replying to @asmartbear.com

One of my top 3 books of all time. No joke. No smoke. Already recommended it to many people. Using the skills daily. I can't express how on target and organized the whole package is (book, skills, etc). Slow 👏. As if I wasn't fan-boying enough, you go and do a thing like this.

longform.asmartbear.comScaling by “delegation” isn’t good enoughDelegation doesn’t scale your business. What does: Creating a team that is better than the current team. Including you.

“Delegation” means you still own it, but someone else does the work. That’s why “delegation” is not “team-building,” and doesn't scale. It buys you time; it doesn’t make the organization better. But "make the organization better" is your job.

An A player in one domain is a C player in another, and vice versa. Culture-specific, team-specific, project-specific, role-specific. So, yes, hire A and fire C… …and if you’re the C right now, go find the place where you’re already an A.

longform.asmartbear.comTelling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his AssYou worry about competition from the big, brand-name, deep-pocketed company. But there are better things to worry about and ways to avoid running into gorillas in the first place.

When Microsoft entered our market at Smart Bear, they had everything a startup fears: money, a brand, and customers they could sell to tomorrow. Their code review feature in Visual Studio was a check-box. It said that, somehow, somewhere, a code review happened. (1/7)

If you attack the first list, you can win. Microsoft could add a check-box. They couldn't make code review good enough to stop us. (6/7)

If you try to win on the second list, you lose. Only one side can win a fight for the same marketing channel, and they can afford to lose money on a channel just to keep you out of it. They're stuck with both. You get to pick where you fight them. And here's how to do that: (7/7)

…screenshot in the docs. You can change yours this afternoon. (4/7)

But a big company is also "stuck" with a marketing machine that works, customer research, media attention, high-quality internal services, governance and security. It can survey its customers while you're struggling to get one of yours on the phone. Both are true. (5/7)

They validated our market (further) by entering it. And we sold a ton of Code Collaborator to Visual Studio shops. Microsoft is huge, and that's exactly why they couldn't do better. (2/7)