How to Unblock Stalled Product Growth: The Founder's Framework

Why Growth Stalls (And How to Fix It)

You've built something meaningful. Early traction felt incredible—viral moments, happy customers, smooth scaling. Then one day you notice it: growth has stopped. Not crashed, just... stopped. You're pushing harder on marketing, adding features, running campaigns, but nothing moves the needle.

This is the moment most founders panic. They think, "Maybe our product isn't good enough" or "We need to pivot entirely." But here's what serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen discovered after building two unicorn companies and investing in 60+ startups: stalled growth isn't random. There's a systematic way to diagnose why it's happening—and more importantly, how to fix it.

The pain is real. After customers overcome tremendous friction—finding you, clicking through, pricing shock, onboarding complexity—to finally commit to your product, having them leave feels like betrayal. But before you overhaul everything, ask yourself: which problem are you actually solving?

Core Diagnostic Framework: The Churn Question

Most product teams miss the most important metric entirely: logo churn. Not revenue churn. Customer churn—the actual count of customers leaving.

Here's why this matters viscerally: A customer had to overcome an impossible gauntlet to get to your product. They discovered you somehow. They didn't bounce off your homepage. They saw your pricing and didn't run away. They secured a budget. They went through onboarding. They invested their time and energy. And then they say goodbye.

"On an emotional level alone," Cohen notes, "you think: wait, this is terrible."

But the math is even more brutal. Churn grows faster than your marketing can scale. This is the leaky bucket problem most founders don't understand:

• Marketing is additive. Whether you have 100 customers or 10,000, Google Ads brings in roughly the same number of leads. Marketing doesn't naturally scale with your customer base.

• Churn is exponential. If you have a 5% monthly churn rate and triple your customer count overnight, the absolute number leaving also triples. Churn scales mathematically with your size.

This creates an invisible ceiling. Here's the formula:

Maximum customers = New customers acquired per month ÷ Churn rate

If you acquire 100 customers monthly and have 5% churn: 100 ÷ 0.05 = 2,000 customers maximum. Period. No matter how hard you push marketing, you'll never exceed this number as you approach it, because nearly everyone leaving equals everyone arriving.

The visceral feeling of hitting this ceiling? It's "running through mud"—doing massive work with minimal impact.

The Real Reason Customers Leave (It's Not Price)

Most cancellation surveys are worthless. When you ask "Why did you cancel?" with a dropdown menu, people often just select the first option. Randomize that list? Suddenly all options get equal clicks. Complete noise.

Here's what actually works: Ask open-ended questions like "What led you to cancel?" not "Why did you cancel?"

When Cohen's company Smart Bear tested this with Groove (a company that published research on this topic), changing the email copy from "Why did you cancel?" to "What led you to cancel?" doubled useful responses from 10% to 20%.

The key: you're making customers think about the product, not generate excuses.

Then dig deeper—much deeper. The first answer is almost never the real reason. "It's too expensive" is the #1 cancellation reason cited across virtually every company. But it's never, ever the real reason.

Why? Because they already looked at your homepage, read your pitch, saw your pricing, and decided to buy anyway. That means price wasn't expensive in their minds—they made a conscious decision. Something else happened.

Think like a medical examiner. When someone dies, doctors identify the proximate cause (respiratory arrest) but dig for the actual root cause (undiagnosed diabetes, lack of preventative healthcare, patient behavior, structural inequality). The proximate cause is surface noise.

Similarly, when customers say "budget got cut," that's proximate. The real cause might be: the product didn't deliver enough value to justify the spend when budgets tightened. That's actionable feedback about your product, positioning, or onboarding—not about pricing.

Three Tactics to Reduce Churn

First: Ask the right question. Open-ended prompts beat multiple choice every time. Then let AI summarize themes—but crucially, have humans review the raw details. Cohen warns that AI excels at averaging and patterns but misses the specific, surprising insights that actually spark "aha!" moments. You need both: the themes to see what's common, and the quoted details to spot what's different.

Second: Catch customers before they churn. Most churn happens early: day one, 30 days, 90 days. Small improvements in onboarding have outsized impact. If a YouTube video improves retention by 10% in the first 30 seconds, final completion jumps 20-30%. Same principle in SaaS: customers who leave early never generate ROI. Improve early-stage onboarding before optimizing later stages.

Third: Recognize that churn signals product problems. When customers cite "project ended," many founders shrug: "Nothing we can do." Wrong. If your product had delivered more value, the project wouldn't have ended. This is feedback about product-market fit, not an excuse.

Pricing Is Your Hidden Leverage

The second diagnostic question: Is your pricing correct?

The answer is almost certainly "no"—because most founders guessed their price and never changed it. Patrick Campbell analyzed 4,200 startup data points and concluded simply: "Your price is too low. Because you just guessed it and never changed it."

Here's the shocking truth: raising prices often doesn't decrease signups. Sometimes signups increase. Why? Because price defines your market.

Consider a mid-market company with 1,000 employees and $400 million in revenue. When they see a product priced at $2/month or even $100/month, they think: "This can't be good. It must lack features, support, governance policies. It's built for SMBs, not us." They don't buy because it's cheap.

Pricing isn't a line on a demand curve that always slopes down. It's a plateau-like shape with flat sections where demand stays stable or increases, then drops off only at extreme price points. By raising prices, you often enter a better-fit market segment, leaving behind lower-value customers who don't appreciate your product anyway.

One real example Cohen shares: A client was charging $300 annually to enterprises and government agencies. Cohen suggested converting to monthly pricing—a 12x increase. Result? Still 1-2 signups weekly. Nothing changed. The founder didn't even consider raising it further.

How Positioning Multiplies Pricing (The 8x Example)

But pricing isn't just a number. It's positioning, bundling, and narrative.

Take a fictional company "Double Down" that cuts AdWords costs in half. Simple, valuable pitch. If you spend $40,000/month on ads, saving $20,000 sounds amazing. But here's what you'd actually pay them: $10,000/month (keeping $10,000 in actual savings). That's the reasonable price point.

Now, what if you repositioned? Instead of "Cut costs in half," say: "Double your leads monthly." If you're already spending $40,000 for current results, how much would you pay to double leads? Often $80,000—or even more.

Same product. Same value. But by framing it as growth (what CEOs care about) instead of efficiency (limiting factor), you've increased pricing 8x. The financial impact is real: Double Down earns $5,000 monthly under the first message or up to $40,000+ monthly under the second.

This reveals a critical insight: sell what your customer values. Enterprises value growth, market share, and competitive edge. They value this far more than savings, efficiency, or cost reduction. Reframe your positioning to emphasize what they actually want, and price accordingly.

Of course, raising prices isn't costless. You'll need SOC 2 certification, additional integrations, potentially professional services, and different go-to-market strategies. You're not just changing a number; you're changing your entire business. That might be right—or it might misalign with your culture, like it would for Buffer, which deliberately chose to stay in the SMB market instead of going upmarket.

The point: pricing is a strategic lever that touches everything.

Expand Revenue from Existing Customers (NRR)

The third diagnostic question: Are your existing customers growing their spend with you?

This is where Net Revenue Retention (NRR) comes in. Unlike churn, which is your escape hatch, NRR is your growth engine within the customer base.

Here's the calculation: Take your revenue from existing customers (excluding new logos). One year later, what percentage remains? Churn reduces it. Downgrades reduce it. But upgrades increase it. If upgrades exceed churn and downgrades, you might end up with more revenue than you started—that's NRR over 100%.

Top SaaS companies have NRR exceeding 100%. Median for public SaaS companies: 119%. Below 100% means you're in trouble.

However, NRR can mask problems. If churn is so high that you don't have enough customers left to upgrade, NRR doesn't help. You need to track both: customer count and revenue per customer.

How to improve NRR:

The traditional advice is "add features and create pricing tiers." That's necessary but not sufficient. The real question is: Are customers genuinely receiving more value, or are we just charging them more?

This requires measuring value—sometimes numerically (leads generated, time saved, revenue impact) and sometimes qualitatively (conversations with customers about what they perceive as valuable). Create more value for customers first, then share that value through pricing.

The expansion strategy matters enormously. If you start a customer at $10,000 and try to expand to $100,000, someone will ask: "Why am I paying 10x?" Anchoring prices low limits your ceiling. This is why market positioning from day one matters. Entering a market at $10,000 creates one expectation. Entering at $100,000 creates another.

One Duolingo example: They've dramatically improved NRR through micro-transactions, gems, and premium cosmetic features. Customers don't feel extorted because the value delivery increased, and pricing aligns with usage and actual willingness to pay.

Marketing Channel Saturation (The Elephant Curve)

The fourth diagnostic question: Are your customer acquisition channels actually saturated?

Every growth channel follows an S-curve, which then sags like an elephant's trunk. The pattern is predictable:

1. Discovery phase: You find a channel that works (Facebook ads, SEO, direct sales). Early results are amazing.
2. Peak phase: The channel hits optimization mode. You squeeze every marginal gain.
3. Saturation phase: Potential customers see your ads repeatedly. Magazine circulation declines. Conference attendance drops. The channel's audience is exhausted, and growth slows.

This isn't dramatic—it's gradual. Cohen calls it the "Elephant Curve" because the decline is as inevitable as the initial rise.

The hard truth: There are finite marketing channels. You can't infinitely add new channels. There's a limited amount of search volume. There's a maximum number of people you can reach on Facebook. Eventually, either you've reached that audience, or they've seen your message so many times they ignore it.

When this happens, many teams respond with the classic advice: "Add a feature and push harder on ads." But if your channel is saturated, that won't work—no matter how good the feature is.

Instead, ask: Do I know which channels are saturated and which still have room? If all channels are plateauing, you need to think differently.

Finding Unconventional Growth Channels

When traditional channels are full, smart companies find creative new ones.

Constant Contact example: Faced with stalled growth, they pivoted to in-person email marketing workshops for small business owners (dentists, restaurants, etc.). Seemed expensive upfront, but it reignited growth by reaching customers in a new, high-trust channel.

HubSpot example: Discovered that selling through agencies accounted for 50% of revenue within 4-5 years—a channel most SaaS companies ignore because it requires different sales models.

WP Engine example: Built success selling through WordPress agencies, recognizing that agencies already have relationships with the right customers.

The pattern: When direct channels are full, distribution through intermediaries (agencies, partners, ecosystems) unlocks new growth. You're not starting from zero; you're starting from their existing audience of 10,000.

This also explains why Emily Kramer advocates for ecosystem-based growth. Combining influencers, content, and partners creates compounding distribution effects that simple ads can't match. The quote: "Why start from zero when you can start from 10,000?"

Other emerging channels: ChatGPT's app store could be massive. New platforms always emerge. The key is being willing to experiment with something genuinely different—not just trying another ad network or SEO hack.

The Existential Question: Do You Actually Need to Grow?

The fifth and final diagnostic question is philosophical: Do you need to grow?

We've all heard: "If you're not growing, you're dying." Is that true, or is it investor pressure disguised as wisdom?

Cohen argues both are true—in different ways. Some companies reach a natural size where growth doesn't make sense. Buffer deliberately chose the SMB market and profitable growth over chasing enterprise deals that would force them to change who they are culturally.

But here's the personal side: For founders and teams, "not growing" might mean something different. Are you growing? Doing the same work for 20 years without learning, building, or advancing your career—that's actually a form of stagnation. Many people need the challenge, the growth, the sense of progress.

The question isn't "should my company grow?" but "what do I want?" If you find genuine satisfaction maintaining the status quo—like a solo practitioner CPA with thriving clients—that's valid. But for ambitious builders, stagnation can be psychologically painful.

This is also why knowing when to quit matters. Matt MacInnis (CPO of Rippling) noted that if a startup isn't working after 4-5 years, odds of success decline sharply. The question isn't "can I eventually win?" but "is this the best use of my limited time and energy?"

Cohen's forthcoming book, "Hidden Multipliers," explores decision-making in uncertain situations where probability and data aren't enough. Because ultimately, deciding whether to grow, pivot, sell, or quit is a personal choice that transcends metrics.

The Common Thread: Customer Value

Strip away all these frameworks, and one principle connects everything: Are customers genuinely receiving value?

• If churn is high, customers aren't getting value (or not perceiving it).
• If pricing is low, you're either underdelivering or talking to the wrong market.
• If NRR is stagnant, you're not expanding the value you deliver.
• If marketing is saturated, you've exhausted people in your current positioning.
• If growth feels pointless, perhaps the value you're creating doesn't align with what you want from life.

The diagnostic process works because it starts with customer outcomes, then works backward: Are customers leaving? Are we in the right market? Can we expand? Have we exhausted channels? Do we want this?

Each question reveals whether you're delivering value and communicating it effectively. When all these align—customers staying, proper positioning, expansion opportunities, new channels opening, meaningful purpose—growth follows naturally.

Conclusion

Product growth stalls for systematic, diagnosable reasons. The framework is simple: Check churn. Verify pricing. Expand existing customers. Evaluate channels. Decide if growth serves you. Work through these in order, because fixing later steps is pointless if the first step is broken.

Most founders skip this diagnostic work and simply do more marketing. But sustainable growth requires examining the foundations first—customer satisfaction, market positioning, retention leverage, and personal alignment.

If you're experiencing stalled growth, start with churn. Ask customers what led them to leave (not why). Focus on early-stage onboarding. Then move to positioning and pricing. Then explore expansion and new channels.

The good news: Most stalled growth isn't fatal. It's a signal that you need to examine your fundamentals more carefully. And when you do, the path forward becomes clear.

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원문출처: The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine)

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