5 questions to ask when your product stops growing

Jason Cohen is a four-time founder, including two unicorn companies (one being WP Engine), and a long-time writer on product and startup topics at asmartbear.com. The conversation walks through a practical, ordered diagnostic for when a product's growth stalls, covering churn, pricing and positioning, net revenue retention, saturated acquisition channels, and whether growth is needed at all.

01Key learnings

• Compute your growth ceiling: new customers added per month divided by monthly cancellation rate gives the maximum customer count you can ever reach if nothing else changes.
• Ask 'what made you cancel?' rather than 'why did you cancel?' and use open-ended responses, since multiple-choice lists skew toward the first option.
• Be skeptical of 'too expensive' as a cancellation reason; customers who already bought didn't find the price too high, so dig into the underlying cause.
• Focus on onboarding first when unsure, since most cancellations happen early and small onboarding gains compound into large retention and profit gains.
• Your prices are probably too low; raising them often leaves signups flat or increases them because price signals which market you are in.
• Reposition pricing around outcomes the buyer already values, like growth instead of cost savings, which can justify a far higher price for the same product.
• Track net revenue retention alongside logo retention, and remember that a percentage loss needs a bigger percentage gain to recover, so NRR can hide real problems.
• Assume every acquisition channel will saturate and decline over time (the 'elephant curve'), and keep exploring new channels before your current ones fade.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.