Run the Numbers · Nov 12, 2026 · 1h 3m · 53m saved
With Jason Cohen, Founder, WP Engine and SmartBear; author, Hidden Multipliers
WP Engine's price for a product called Code Reviewer climbed from $35 to $1,300 per seat over four years, and both signups and revenue grew the whole way. Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and SmartBear and author of Hidden Multipliers, told CJ Gustafson on Run the Numbers that price itself selects which market segment even considers a product.
"I believe the price is just as much what the product is as any feature or as your brand." — Jason Cohen
Jason built four companies over 25 years, including two unicorns, and ran WP Engine for 15 of them. He has since written a book on the handful of levers that move a company's revenue and profit far more than everything else combined.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 63 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
A genuine business ecosystem is one where every participant makes more money by being in it, than they would alone
WP Engine paid its top 7 affiliates roughly double in exchange for exclusivity, deliberately "pinching the oxygen" on a channel competitors needed
WP Engine's 50 most profitable customers were worth as much as roughly 1,000 typical ones, the "Profit Whale" chart showed
Viewed as margin percentage, firing 150 unprofitable customers would have moved gross margin from 55% to 80%, Jason said
A customer calling support daily is usually a product bug, not a reason to fire them
Raising Code Reviewer's price from $35 to $1,300 a seat over four years grew both signups and revenue, because price itself selects the market
Revenue growth is uncapped while cost-cutting has a floor at zero, and exponential churn eventually beats linear customer acquisition regardless of market size
Jason says the real "cost of growth" metric is spend divided by net new customers, not spend divided by new customers
1. 25 Years, One Ecosystem
Jason described building four companies over 25 years, bootstrapping some and raising hundreds of millions of dollars for others. Two became unicorns: SmartBear, started in 2002 and sold in 2007, and WP Engine, the largest managed WordPress hosting platform, which he ran for 15 years.
A real ecosystem makes every participant richer for being in it
"An ecosystem [is] a thing in which all the participants are making more money by being part of it than they would have had they not been part of it." — Jason Cohen
He pointed to Shopify's consultants and Salesforce's practice of publicly reporting ecosystem-wide revenue, excluding its own, as examples. WordPress itself grew from roughly 8-9% of the internet when WP Engine started to 43% today, though its open-source, democratized nature keeps revenue per customer modest next to an enterprise product like Adobe Experience Manager.
"If you don't look at numbers, then you're blind. And on the other hand, if you're only looking at numbers, then you're not really understanding what's going on." — Jason Cohen
