A series of miracles (with Jason Cohen)

That's very nice. Thank you.

Maybe even in the moment, especially when I'm talking to people face to face, in the moment they're like, 'That was really harsh. I didn't like you right then,' but then later I was like, 'You're the only person in the whole day that told me the truth.'

Um, Jason, maybe just give us an update on what you've been doing for the past few years. And just to apologize for the surprise visit, what actually happened is Justin messaged me like three days ago, 'Hey, we're doing a show and it's relevant to you because we're quoting something you said. Do you want to come on?' And then I didn't look at Twitter for, you know, days. So a couple hours ago, I was like, 'Sure.' So that's why it's a surprise. It's my fault.

Yeah. So that's okay. We can improv. I actually left WP Engine about two years ago. I'd been there for 15 years.

Sorry, WP Engine. I said, that's how long it was. I left WP Engine about two years ago. I've been writing a book which is now on pre-order. I'm not here to push the book. That's not why we're doing this. So, I'll let Justin push it at some point. I'm not pushing it at all. It's called Hidden Multipliers.

So, yeah. So it's funny. We were just talking before the show. I think when founders or executives leave, they always have an excuse. And the typical excuse is, 'I'm leaving to spend time with my family.' Because who argues with that? Sounds great. Everyone goes, 'Oh, that's so noble.' And then they leave and then three weeks later you read, 'So and so's been appointed the senior vice president of sales of North America for...' and you're like, 'Wait a minute. That was not a lot of time with your family, dude.' And so, I was really sensitive to that. So, when we were talking about it internally, I was like, 'Look, it's just there's nothing wrong, nothing bad. It's just been 15 years. It's just time. Like, I just want to rest a little. I'm older. My daughter's about to go to college. I want to go visit colleges with her a little bit.' But like, it's just mostly, it's been a very long time. It's just simply maybe time for the next thing, whatever that is, which is not another company. I said at the time, I'm not starting another company. Here it's two years later. I have not started another company. So there you go.

Yeah. Not that anyone believed that at the time, but you know, there it is. But what's ironic is I have spent a lot of time with the family. We've been traveling a lot for college and taking vacations every second we can. And so the truth is I have spent more time with the family, but that's not what I said.

Yeah, I mean it's really fun playing with code, especially stuff that... like both the coding of it but also running your whole life. Or you know, I think it's interesting since I'm writing a book, it's interesting to ask how can AI be helpful but not write the book. Like the only reason people read what I write is because it's my experiences and ideas and my writing style also. So AI can't do any of those three things. But that doesn't mean it's not helpful. So for example, I have a skill just to find typos and things which is obviously a good idea. But also things like when I'm using a word slightly incorrectly. So for example, I would use this phrase, I would say 'blah blah blah blah, but that begs the question blah blah blah' like some next question. And it flagged that like that's not what begging the question means. I think what you mean to say is that raises a question. Begging the question is actually this philosophical fallacy which is when you implicitly assume the thing you're proving and then prove it with itself. So you're begging the question. And so that's not what you're saying. Like, oh yeah, obviously I was confused about that. So typos but also this kind of careful word usage. So that's a great use of AI. So, the skill has been very helpful to me, but again, that's not writing the book for me. That's like a smart copy editor or something. So, there's other ways, but you know, that's been very interesting.

Well, you know, since I've been writing for almost 20 years, as you know, and fortunately, never for money, never trying to make my, you know, and so I've been able to do whatever I feel is best for me. So I've had a rule from the beginning that it's supposed to be fun. And so, for example, I have no deadlines ever for anything. And so sometimes I've had years where I publish every week like clockwork and years where I publish once or twice only the whole year. For whatever reason, I don't have the energy. I don't have the time. I don't want to. Whatever. So, as a result, I've been able to keep the quality high because I'm allowing things like you said, consistency. When you said that, I thought I'm not consistent at all. I post very randomly. But as a result, things like the craft or the style or the ideas, the consistency of whether the idea is good enough, I've been able to keep up because I let things like deadlines not drive things. And of course, for algorithms, that's bad. And so a lot of people say, 'You should have 10 times the number of followers on Twitter or on the blog.' And it's like, 'Yeah, maybe, but I'm just not going to do that algorithm stuff because again, I just have a different set of constraints that I'm running under. But it allows me to have the quality at least at the best of my own ability, whatever that is.' And so for anyone who likes that, then good.

Yeah, nothing's real time. Like even the Twitter stuff that's all buffered up and so a lot of times I'm surprised myself like, oh, I wrote that like nine months ago. So I mean my buffer is deep. I'm not even joking.

It is a massive queue. And what's nice about being so ahead of the queue like that is I can say things which in the moment... I wouldn't if I didn't have such a deep queue, there's things I wouldn't have said because it was so close to the moment that the person or event or thing I'm talking about, they would know or other people in their team would know. And that's the last thing I ever want to do to anybody, right? Like it's nice to say, 'Here's something I observed or a lesson.' Very bad if I'm calling out someone even by accident, right? But if there's a nine-month queue and I write that, there's no chance you could at least, you know, anyone even deep in the thing, they could maybe think, 'Oh man, was he talking about that thing from a year ago?' But that's so vague that at some point like that's just my experience. I have to relate it. So or I don't have to, but it makes sense. So, it's actually great because I can say more things than I might have otherwise said without worrying about how I may be affecting other people in that particular sense. The posts I have literally hundreds of posts in drafts, some of which are like an idea in one sentence and some are long things. I just don't... I'm just not feeling it or just not feeling the editing or maybe the idea is not good enough yet or something. And of course, most of them will never work. And so, it is again kind of sporadic. Sometimes I'll just have an idea and bam, I write the whole first draft in one sitting and then all it needs is editing. And then other times, and so even so, that'll be hours because I go over it and I edit it a lot. I want to find every problem. I want the style again. I'm not just trying to put out something. So like, is this written well enough? Is it structured well enough? That sort of thing. Are the examples good? And of course, what's too long and all that. So it still will take a lot of time in editing, but sometimes the original's fast and sometimes the whole thing gets rewritten a bunch. There's one people like a lot that's called the elephant curve. It's called the elephant in the room, but it's about the elephant curve, which is just a name I came up with for this particular idea. That one is very long and has a million graphs and data points because I have this thesis about how growth works or how exponential growth doesn't work, you might say. And I have this thesis about here's how growth works and why. And then I back it up with a zillion data points from all kinds of companies, bootstrapped, venture funded, the biggest ones ever, old ones, new ones, and of course my own data. That one took 10 years because I had this idea that long ago. Like I published this I think in 2022, but I had that idea because I remember publishing it like I've had this idea for so long. And the reason there's so much data is that I had this idea and I never got around to making it into some sort of thesis. But every time I saw another example, I'm like, 'God damn it, there it is again.' And I would snag it and throw it in the file, you know? So the file ended up being like I have maybe three times as much stuff as what's in that article even, right? I've accumulated and then finally for no reason I can explain to you. I was just like I had the bug and I just was like it's time to write this damn thing after all.

I did. And so that's part of why it's so deep. So it can be like that too. I think so. So that's kind of a non-answer of like what's my process? I guess the answer is...

Yeah. The answer is like different things just happen differently. I allow that and I don't worry. I don't sweat that. And a real professional writer cannot act like me, you know, right? Like if you need to publish every day, if you're writing for a newsletter or even if it's for money and you're getting paid $20,000 for an amazing article in the Atlantic, you still need to go do that thing for a few months. And so since I don't need to, I have the freedom of that. But what that means is I can do my best work. I don't let it intrude. I cannot let it intrude on the rest of life. But that means I can be the best writer I can be, the best thinker I can be, put out the work that I'm most proud of. That doesn't mean it's all great necessarily. It's just that my best that I can do is what... that's why I keep repeating that. And that's something everyone can adopt and do. Everyone can decide, oh, look, I'm not going to be a professional writer, but I would like to be the best thinker and writer that I can be without letting it intrude. In other words, you can take that attitude and whether you call that a process or not, I don't even know. But you can do that if you want and that's what I've done at least.

Yeah, I think that's what happens when it's this fragment of an idea that's not that good and so it just doesn't feel worth writing it because if it's something where you're like, I've figured something out. Now again, this is just your opinion and your feelings. That's fine. But like let's set all those qualifications aside for a second and just assume that I have figured out something. Now maybe someone else has already figured that out probably, but I nevertheless independently came up with it which I'm very excited about. I'm very proud of. I'm really using this. To me, it's easier to even come back like, 'Oh yeah, that was a really important idea.' And I can get re-excited. Another thing that happens to me sometimes is I'll like you say halfway through set it aside and then two years later I'll have the same idea and forgot that I already had that idea and I'll start writing it again but then I'll find oh I have some of these ideas already and then I'm like wait a minute let me take all that stuff together. Obviously together it's not organized but in this pile of things is there some crisper better way to say the root idea that's actually interesting. Another fun thing is naming it. Like I've named a million things never after myself, right? But I... you know this Fermi decisions and Fermi estimation and the bin stack and slick and we were just saying the elephant curve and all this stuff. I know this... it's kind of silly but also it's almost like well I have to finish explaining slick, you know, as opposed to this nameless formless idea that's only half good, right? I feel like I have to explain the thing so that may be a little trick even if you don't use the name in the end at all but it might be a trick for that. There's all these writing tricks I'm sure you know them already and it's so personal writing so like there's no one trick that works for everyone of course but there's these tricks like what is the central question that the reader has that this answers. I find a lot of times when I get a half idea I'm not interested... like I also can't explain what that is. It's sort of like I had a half-baked thought but I can't really answer your question other than like a very boring answer. Whereas if I can answer that really crisply, like for my book for example, this Hidden Multipliers book I'm working on now, the central question is... well I'll be even more specific, I'm a bootstrap SaaS founder at 2 million in revenue and growth has slowed and I'm stuck and I don't know what to do next. And I have a list of things I could do. I know that just doing what I'm doing won't work because that's what I'm doing and it's not... it's like I have to do something else. I have a list of 10 things I could do. I don't know which one is really the thing that's going to break me out. And also maybe the thing that's going to break me out isn't on the list. Not even sure. So what do I do now? That is the central question and ideal customer you might say of the book because I can say that so crisply and I talk to people all the time like that. It's very motivating to me to like, yeah, I've got to show you things. Like I don't know exactly what will work but I've got to show you really good things that could work. We've got to get you out of this. So on a smaller scale like a blog post, who is that for? What is exactly that central question that can be motivating to like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got to tell... Another trick is once you have that in your mind, you can do the thing where you just say it like I'm doing right now. You just verbally spew, you know, of course with AI turning your spew into a text. And often just talking aloud, you end up with something which you can now reform. And if you don't care so much about your own writing craft, of course, you can use AI and say, 'All right, I have this half-written thing. I have this spew of ideas. Let's first decide what kind of article structure makes sense. Is it like surprising thing, background context, here's the solution and here's like a couple tips' which is a lot of mine to be fair. Is that the right... and so you can work with the AI a little like what's the right outline structure and they're like okay we'll take all the stuff I said and sort of do that. And it won't be very good but like maybe as we all know editing is easier than writing from scratch and so even if the AI produces something that's just okay but it's structured fine and then you edit literally every single word, that was still really helpful that versus starting from your quarter-done thing and some spew and being like, I don't know. So I think that sort of thing is a way to leverage AI to get you past let's say a writer's block, a kind of writer's block. So anyway these are just some ideas.

You know that I have pieces like that that are like okay this probably should be multiple articles and sometimes I do write that and actually so here's a funny thing I just thought of this because I forgot I did this. Sometimes I'll do exactly that. I'll be writing and it turns out like oh my gosh of course the rabbit hole goes deep and I can't cover it all here. What I'll do is I'll say whatever I'll still write this monster thing but then what I'll do is I won't publish it and I don't have to polish it to death either. And then what I'll do is I'll look through and then these are all ideas for me for other posts. And so whatever I'm kind of excited about I've got a paragraph or two because of the root post. And then I'm like, okay, if I were to write this and I were to send the reader off to another post for details, what would that be? Now, it's easier for me to focus on the one thing because in my mind, I still have the full idea over here. So, it's almost like I've given myself permission to go focus on the one thing. So, I've had posts like that. In fact, the book I'm writing now was a post about what to do in growth stalls. That's the name of the post. And I had all these sections and each section, it's like, oh my god, I could write a book about each one of these things. And I'm like, wait a sec. So that's actually... I still have that in draft. So I literally have written an entire book about 300 pages in the technique I just said. That's how much I went into detail on each one. But yeah and then some but then sometimes you can publish the master or the main one because the trunk and you have all these links and I have a couple posts like that too. The kung fu one is like that and actually the top one on the website right now is like that. The path to product market fit except not really because it's not a strict path but here's a path idea anyway and of course that thing is just nothing but links to other stuff. So that's another example of that. So yeah writing and not publishing it but using it for your own technique is good. So I would... I mean that sounds really useful to do. I think it's very different if again you're doing it for personal development and getting your ideas out there you might even say legacy although that's a big word like me or it's like you're saying it's my business I have to do certain things I have these goals we need to achieve. Okay. Well, then I would use things like content calendar is maybe a little... like the old version of content calendar is not right, but like maybe the idea that I'm going to be writing on different topics throughout a month and roughly what is the pace and schedule of that and then how can I use AI to... because AI is good at stuff like what are a bunch of topics in this area or what's an outline for something. These are kinds of things where AI is quite good and so it's possible to have a lot of ideas and things with some help and then I think probably there's... using AI and it's all... I mean I'll spend the next hour going deep on that if you let me go on it but anyway Justin, what do you got?

I agree with Jordan that the phrase, you know, you read into it what you want and therefore it doesn't mean anything. And it's also not new. I mean, to the extent that distribution could be a moat, that isn't new information. And to the extent that it's not a moat, that phrase is not accurate. There is a very... so in that sense it embodies the very funny thing, I forget where this comes from, it's very old but there's like a beginning of a paper or something and it says there is much in this paper that is new and much that is true but the stuff that is true is not new and the stuff that is new is not true. So this reminds me of like this distribution is a moat is kind of an embodiment of that like this is a nonsense thing. It's either not true or it's not saying anything new so therefore this is... so I think that's what Jordan was saying too and I agree. I do think so when I hear moat I just think of Warren Buffett of course coined this phrase and so I think of the Warren Buffett version of it which is that competitors cannot stop us from running the business we're running. To me that's what the moat is. Now, you normally think of it as you often think and I've said it as a permanent competitive advantage. I think that's a fine way to say it, but if we're going back to the original thing, it's sort of that it's not even an advantage. Although, it is. It's that a competitor can't stop me. Because he said, 'I want a company that has a castle with a moat with lots of alligators and stuff so that no one can storm the castle,' which isn't quite the same thing as saying that we have some sort of unique advantage over others. You might say it the other way. Having a unique advantage over others could be a moat, but a moat isn't right. So in that...

So many competitors. We had the reputation of we're the most expensive and also the best. A lot of people don't want the most expensive and don't need the best. In fact, most people don't. And I agree. And that's why GoDaddy is a great business because for $3 you can get a lot. Like what you get for $3 is insanely good. Like the ROI of GoDaddy is insane. So that's fine. So like they have that. Someone else could also be expensive and good, but that can't stop us from being expensive and good. And I can't stop our reputation for being sort of first and best in that category. So in that sense...

So again, like I guess I go back to what Jordan says. Are these useful things to say? If you have a social media channel, no one else can stop you from having a good one. And so even if they have a good one, you can probably still do really well. On AdWords, it's not true. You can have a really good AdWord, but if 10 other people are better, then you're just not shown or it's too expensive to have good ROI or whatever, right? So, in that sense, AdWords is heavily competitive. Social media, while competitive, and even if a big company with lots of money and customers, they sort of can't stop you from having a better social media channel than that other company. The big company can overwhelm you in AdWords actually. Not... they won't necessarily like it's a fight. It's just that you can't... it's not like they can't, they could. Whereas with social media, there's kind of nothing the big entrenched, mature, rich company can do to stop you from having a good social media presence. So, in that sense, you have this unassailable advantage. And to me, that's this idea of a moat is that you have this unassailable position. Now, just the social media channel, I wouldn't call that a moat. I'm just making a simpler example. So, in business, it might be something like... everyone says network effects. Okay. Yes. Because if someone else comes up with a better tool, they just can't stop the network effects. They can compete on features and try to steal people and maybe they will. But what they can't do is lower the value of your network effects. Right. They can't do anything. They can't launch a feature that... for that particular. So therefore the network effect is a moat. So in that sense is distribution a moat? Well, if you just run AdWords, then distribution is not a moat for you because you're doing things that are replicable. See, that's another thing. You think of it as being can someone copy you? That's not what a moat is, right? Like if you have a network effect because you're a social media app, the next social media app also has a network effect. Of course, they can copy that. It's not even the point. In fact, part of the definition of a moat probably is that even if they copy it, it's still a moat for you. Yep. Didn't help. So in that sense like a lot of distribution is not a moat in that other people can in fact outdo you and beat you. Yeah. But if your distribution is good enough then it can become a moat that can't be defeated. If you have a YouTube channel with a million subscribers literally that does seem like this kind of like... forever is a big word but let's say long-term advantage that no one can wrest from you. Everyone's just going to god damn it, no matter what they do here you have it. So I think distribution could be a moat if... so like another way would be once QuickBooks got the CPAs to use QuickBooks now that's the distribution moat to getting to customers because the CPA will tell their clients oh use this because then it plugs into my thing. That sales system that's indirect through the CPA that is a moat because no matter what you do on the outside to sell directly those clients it doesn't matter if their CPA says no use. That is a distribution moat for sure. So again, so I would say some distribution if executed in a certain way can become a moat but just saying distribution is a moat like I agree with Jordan like I don't even know what that means.

To me it's the very public personalities of the two founders. If you never had the 37signals blog that went alongside Basecamp, no one would use Basecamp.