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Jason Cohen

Founder & Chief Innovation Officer, WP Engine

Search every verified Jason Cohen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear, has been promoting his book "Hidden Multipliers," which argues that businesses can restart growth using existing teams and budgets without new investment. In podcast appearances, he has discussed concepts from the book, including the "profit whale" method of segmenting customers by profitability, the importance of traffic quality at the top of the sales funnel, and the idea that small changes in areas like pricing and customer selection can produce outsized results. He has also stated that products can often be repositioned to sell more value, potentially allowing for higher prices. Cohen has also discussed his approach to business strategy, saying he aims to build companies where his existing strengths are what's needed to win and his weaknesses are not deal breakers. He has commented on the impact of AI, arguing that jobs with a single "best" version will likely be automated, while jobs without such a standard may be less affected. He has relaunched a podcast called Smart Bear Live, which features long-form, unstructured conversations with founders about their business challenges.

Recent appearances

  • #418 – Jason Cohen on hidden multipliers

    October 07, 2026 · 📺 Ton Dobbe - Value Inspiration

    A story about the growth levers you can't see from inside. This episode is for SaaS founders who are working harder than ever and are not seeing the growth they aspired to. Most growth problems are hiding in plain sight. Jason Cohen is the founder of WP Engine and author of Hidden Multipliers. He has built four companies over 25 years, two of them now worth billions, and invested in sixty more. Across all of them he kept finding the same thing. A few small changes moved growth far more than everything else combined. Most companies never spot them. And this inspired me to invite Jason to my po…

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  • Episode 1: Permission to Build Your Way

    October 06, 2026 · 📺 Dr. Sherry Walling

    Jason Cohen has founded two unicorn companies, WP Engine and Smart Bear, and written at asmartbear.com for almost twenty years. His new book, Hidden Multipliers, opens with a founder lying awake at 4 a.m. feeling like a fraud — which tells you it isn't a normal growth-tactics book, and this isn't a normal growth-tactics conversation. We get into why the people who love your work often love it for the things you'd call weaknesses, why Jason would rather have fewer followers who actually care than ten times the audience and a version of himself he'd have to fake, the three-word question he ke…

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  • Hidden Multipliers: Jumpstart Growth with your Existing Budget and Team Audiobook by Jason Cohen

    September 27, 2026 · 📺 Free Audiobook

    Listen to free audiobook on Audible : https://amzn.to/4hopIfn Title: Hidden Multipliers: Jumpstart Growth with your Existing Budget ...

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  • Hidden Multipliers: The New Book for Every WordPress Business Owner

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 PublishPress

    Jason Cohen is a four-time entrepreneur across 25 years. He's sold two companies, and built two unicorns, including WP Engine. In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, he joins Steve to talk about his new book, "Hidden Multipliers" and the ideas behind it. Jason's book has a heavy focus on pricing, customer research, profitability, and how companies can make better decisions with the team and budget they already have. Our chat centers on WordPress businesses, but the underlying lessons apply much more broadly: strategy has to fit the market, the product, and the customer. We discuss…

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  • Hidden Multipliers in Your GEO Program w/ Jason Cohen

    September 17, 2026 · 📺 Content and Conversation

    Ross Hudgens welcomes Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear, to unpack the "multipliers" behind outsized marketing results. They get into how WP Engine grew affiliates into a channel competitors couldn't touch, why most A/B testing quietly produces nothing, and Jason's core argument that the quality of traffic at the top of your funnel matters more than everything below it combined. Along the way: exclusivity deals, multi-brand strategy, defining a truly actionable ideal customer, and why showing your product's bad reviews can actually lift sales. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00…

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  • 2x billion-dollar founder: The unexpected way to win customers | Jason Cohen

    September 04, 2026 · 📺 Matt Verlaque

    Get Jason's free AI strategy skills: https://skills.asmartbear.com Book your AI Opportunity Assessment with my team: https://try.precision.co/lp1?utm_sour... ———————————— Jason Cohen built not one but two billion-dollar companies, WP Engine and Smart Bear, and he says most founders have niching down completely backwards. You don't win by fixing your weaknesses or trying to appeal to everyone. You win by finding the customer who loves you for exactly who you already are, flaws included. We get into why publishing your negative reviews increases sales, the real reason prospects who love your…

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  • Jason Cohen - Hidden Multipliers

    August 21, 2026 · 📺 Jonathan Stark

    Double-unicorn founder (WP Engine and A Smart Bear), Jason Cohen, joined me on Ditching Hourly to talk about the ideas behind his new book, Hidden Multipliers. We talked about using AI as a facilitator rather than an answer machine, choosing ideal customers, differentiating a consulting business, how AI is changing SaaS and software work, and why writing can help you think in public. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:56 - AI Skills as Facilitators 04:16 - Choosing Your Best Customers 09:42 - Building Strategy Around Yourself 13:40 - Defining a Market 22:29 - Problems, Alternatives, and Categor…

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  • RS362: Hidden Multipliers with Jason Cohen

    August 11, 2026 · 📺 Rogue Startups

    How do you build a durable SaaS business when AI is changing the rules of software, marketing, and work? In this episode of Rogue Startups, Craig Hewitt sits down with Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine and SmartBear and author of Hidden Multipliers, for a deep conversation about SaaS growth, business strategy, product positioning, and the future of entrepreneurship in the age of AI. Jason argues that founders shouldn't try to predict exactly what technology will look like five or ten years from now. Instead, they should focus on what customers will continue to value, such as saving time, gener…

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  • The Profit Whale with Jason Cohen

    August 06, 2026 · 📺 Founder Mode

    EPISODE 68 Jason Cohen has spent decades building companies including WP Engine, and nearly 20 years writing practical advice for founders at A Smart Bear. In this episode, he joins Kevin and Jason to unpack his new book, Hidden Multipliers, out August 10th, and the case that growth comes from a few well-chosen moves rather than more hustle. He explains why most things are going poorly most of the time even when a company is winning, and how a handful of small pricing and packaging changes at WP Engine in January 2012 took the business from one million to five million in ARR in a single year.…

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  • 69: Sound, Actionable Advice with Jason Cohen

    June 06, 2026 · 📺 Ghostlight Media

    Derrick is away, so Ben welcomes Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine and four-time entrepreneur. Jason knows a thing or two about startups and mentoring them to achieve profitability and growth. Jason is a straight talker and tells it like it is to get to solutions sooner. He encourages bootstrap founders to find an advisor who aligns with their goals. You need to know how to take advice and use advice that is right for you and your business. Even if you get great advice, think for yourself! Today’s Topics Include: • Advice is not enough; luck, execution, and other pieces…

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  • 69: Sound, Actionable Advice with Jason Cohen

    June 06, 2026 · 📺 En trea whisky

    Derrick is away, so Ben welcomes Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine and four-time entrepreneur. Jason knows a thing or two about startups and mentoring them to achieve profitability and growth. Jason is a straight talker and tells it like it is to get to solutions sooner. He encourages bootstrap founders to find an advisor who aligns with their goals. You need to know how to take advice and use advice that is right for you and your business. Even if you get great advice, think for yourself! Today’s Topics Include: • Advice is not enough; luck, execution, and other pieces…

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  • 69: Sound, Actionable Advice with Jason Cohen

    June 06, 2026 · 📺 边角聊

    Derrick is away, so Ben welcomes Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine and four-time entrepreneur. Jason knows a thing or two about startups and mentoring them to achieve profitability and growth. Jason is a straight talker and tells it like it is to get to solutions sooner. He encourages bootstrap founders to find an advisor who aligns with their goals. You need to know how to take advice and use advice that is right for you and your business. Even if you get great advice, think for yourself! Today’s Topics Include: • Advice is not enough; luck, execution, and other pieces…

    Read the verified transcript → Watch on YouTube ↗

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“You take all your customers and you compute each one's gross profit in dollars. Meaning how much revenue do they give you minus the expenses specific to that customer? How much do they call you in tech support and what does that cost? How much in the case of a software like me, how much server resources are they using? Even things like the cost of running their credit card, although that's pretty small, but okay, sti”

“The first thing you should ask is, is this my fault? Like they're really unprofitable, but maybe it's my fault. So for example at WP Engine, the example in the book is literally the data from WP Engine of 7,000 customers from 2014 when I ran this exact thing and we did all this. This is not theoretical. This is my actual data and what we actually did. And we were losing a million dollars a year at the time and we cou”

“The way I look at it is that there's kind of three main pricing strategies when it comes to the price and how much value you would deliver. The three things are what I call more for more, which is I'm getting the very best and it costs me a lot. The opposite of that is less for less, which is the lowest end of the market. This is the cheapest thing I can buy. It's very cheap though. Of course, I don't expect it to be”

“My contention is that the quality of traffic, quality, not quantity, quality of traffic at the top of the funnel is more impactful than anything else in the funnel, even combined. Here's how I'll prove it. Let's suppose I send only perfect customers to your website. Like they're exactly your target market. They got budget. They're ready to buy now. They don't like your competitors. And every feature you have, they're”

“The first observation is that affiliates when you plot them in terms of how much they can send you, it's this crazy power curve. It's like maybe it's an ultra power curve, right? It's like there's a few big ones and then there's this massive tail that doesn't matter. And it in fact a lot of them in the tail, what they do is they send you one forever. Like they'll never send you another one because what's really happe”

“The way to think about it is that up until now our data center business has been almost entirely GPUs. Vera is our CPU, and you know what's really exciting is that Vera opens a brand new 200 billion TAM for NVIDIA, a market we have never addressed before, and every major hyperscaler is partnering with us to get it deployed, and that's huge for the company because for the first time we have a second engine of that sca”

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