Because to me a lot of AI simply doesn't work. It just full stop doesn't work. But then sometimes it does and it's magical and if someone gets there and you don't, yeah, that's really really bad. You know, that's not good.
AI is coming for SaaS. Will you survive it? Will I? I don't know. Let's find out. Welcome to this new Indie Board session episode with my guest Jason Cohen. Jason, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.
So, I've been a reader of your blog for almost a decade. And you publish on a blog called The Smart Bear. But you have founded multiple very successful companies. So can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Sure. The latest company is called WP Engine and now it's about 16, 17 years old. We started bootstrapping but then raised money. First a small amount and then a lot. But then we were also growing a lot. We always raised an amount of money that was proportional to how big we were. So it was a lot but it was the correct amount. And today we have 200,000 customers and 1,200 employees and we're profitable and growing, which is kind of amazing still, I guess, nowadays. Then before that, Smart Bear, which is why I'm known as a Smart Bear online, where the blog comes from, that was fully bootstrapped. I sold that in 2007 and left in 2009.
Okay. And Smart Bear was a software bootstrap company for a dev tool product, right?
It was for software developers to review each other's work. Nowadays, people do that all the time with GitHub. It's just a normal thing. Everyone does it. It's free. But when I started it in 2002, very few people did it and there were no tools. There was nothing free. So it was a big revelation to say, 'Oh, look, we can integrate with version control.' All these things you now take for granted didn't exist. So we invented that.
Cool. And so the good thing is that you've seen the bootstrap world, you've seen the venture world and on your blog you mostly talk for bootstrap founders actually. Recently I did an episode of a podcast with Robert from a company called Perspective, like an 8-figure SaaS business, and he told something that I was thinking walking to the studio today. He said today if you are in a SaaS business and your company is not in chaos, you might not make it, you might not survive, because you need to kind of make sure you can be safe, safer at least, get a chance on the other side. You have the privilege to have been involved with obviously very large companies like Smart Bear is still a decent sized company today with WP Engine too. What's your thought on that? Do you feel that people need to scramble and get moving or what's your thought on the current times?
Well, I wouldn't use those words, but I understand the idea is that you should have urgency in this new technology which certainly is changing how we do every part of the business. So, urgency, yes. Experimentation, yes. Chaos sounds like a bad thing to create for a company. Also, I think while in the long run it's obvious that AI will transform how we work just like email transformed how we communicate and the internet transformed that. So in the long run obviously so. In the short run it's not so clear to me how urgent and how chaotic it needs to be. What I see is every time I log into Claude Code, which is every day, it says there's a new update and there is and they've done stuff. Sometimes it's minor things to the UX or the CLI. But sometimes it's something enormous and major, something that may not even exist in a month or it may be the next new thing. Nobody knows. So in a world where every single day in even just one piece of software, of course, an important and large piece of software, but still, you could just wait a month and it'll be pretty different. So, how chaotic do you need to make it today given that it's just going to be different in just a month or a day? So, I think that's a bad attitude. And I think that people are like, if you're not doing everything now in AI, then you're going to die. Well, actually, the way we're doing AI now is nothing like what we did six months ago, which is not like six months before that, which is not like a year before that. I don't see the pace slowing down in AI. If anything, it's accelerating. So, that means we don't know what AI is going to be like in six or 12 months. So, what are you being all chaotic about? So, I think if you're... I know I'm latching on to those words, but I do think people are causing chaos by overreacting. To me, the correct... of course I understand. Well, if someone says, 'I don't need to think about AI at all.' That's a person that needs to be shaken up. And I understand if you have to swing the pendulum too far the other way to just get them to a middle ground. I get that. So, if that's the rhetoric that's needed, fine. But if we're going to talk about what's actually a good idea, then let's set the extreme rhetoric aside. Obviously, you can't ignore AI because then everyone who doesn't ignore it will be moving five times faster than you. And also creating features that you don't have that customers actually want. Maybe not today because to me a lot of AI simply doesn't work. It just full stop doesn't work. Most of the tools I have that say it's AI and then it doesn't really work and I don't use it. So I don't believe you that like oh we'll just put an AI and it'll work because usually it doesn't but then sometimes it does and it's magical and if someone gets there and you don't, yeah, that's really really bad, you know, that's not good. Look at Anthropic right now, they have now eclipsed OpenAI and they're growing faster because Claude Code. Did anyone predict that Anthropic would be bigger than OpenAI in terms of revenue or users even six months ago? I don't... I mean okay a few people, I told you, okay fine, most of us didn't think that, right? So yes, sometimes... so to me you should be getting into AI not because this is how it's going to be from now on. It's not but because if you don't start now then when and how far behind will you be? Not in one tool or one technique but just in the whole new mindset of what it is to think about prompting instead of doing and then skills instead of prompting and then agents instead of just skills and then agent coordination instead of just... and whatever. Like these concepts are a little bit more stable like the notion of a skill is slightly more stable and again the details of a particular agent collaboration are not important, they will, those are changing but if you still think that what AI is is what happens when you go to OpenAI and just chat with it, then you are really really behind indeed. I wouldn't say chaos I would say you're missing the boat and what you're doing is seeing that chat and going AI is pretty dumb and you're right the LLMs are pretty dumb in the format of the non-contextual one-shot chat. I agree. It's sometimes magical but largely dumb and not good. And if that's what you think AI is still, you are in fact missing the train and that is bad. Let's not cause chaos though. Let's decide to pick, you name it, Claude Code I think right now is a good choice. But you could pick pretty much anything else as long as it's structured and has skills and you're going to iterate and do that stuff. Even now you can do at least five or 10 times better. And by better, I mean accurate, but also productivity than in chat. That's probably where you should be with urgency but not chaos because anything that was true 10 or 20 years ago and still is even now, that's a deep truth that's really worth knowing. Even if the way we approach it, attack it, use it might be very different with AI. Maybe it's not, but let's suppose it is. Okay. But it's still a deep truth we want to attack just using the tool of AI. Well, okay. That's good to know. Other ideas might just be irrelevant. Okay. Well, that was a good idea at the time. Maybe, maybe not even that. But now, who cares? But things that are still true, but we would do it differently. Now, that's a deep truth that AI doesn't displace that truth.
Yeah. I mean what and so I think that what you're saying intersects well with one question that I wanted to ask you is that in the last few years you've denounced a little bit the growth at all cost mantra in the SaaS world and when you look at it today it hits for many SaaS founders a wall. And this reminded me of your article about Max MR and asking myself is the problem the fact that now they've reached their Max MR and that's why the growth has stalled or is it because something else has happened. So maybe before we dive into that question can you remind the audience what the Max MR concept is?
Sure. But first of all like when something happens to everyone across the world simultaneously in every industry. That's not because everyone just happened to hit their own little metric that they computed. That's because there's a secular shift in the world. Obviously, that's what AI is. So, I think there shouldn't be any doubt why everyone's growth is slowing right now. So, that should be obvious. However, what you're talking about is also very true. This is again something that's true anyway despite AI. And it's not that some founders hit it. 100% hit it because it's just math. And the issue is that in a recurring revenue business, what happens is marketing only grows as fast as you can find marketing channels to spend in. And even then, the channels top out really fast. Like you unlock AdWords, there's only so many searches, only so many words, only so many things with ROIs that work. And yes, of course, you're going to optimize and eke out a little bit more, but there is a pretty clear ceiling on what you can get out of there. And then you're gonna get, you know, X sales per month or whatever, right? And that's what that channel can do. Okay. Plus or minus a little bit, but that's it. And you can say that about every channel. And most channels won't work for you. Companies don't usually say the way we succeeded is we had 20 channels each trickling in some stuff. Like that's not how it works. Only a few will really work for any company. And so what happens is you get those and so marketing is chunking in this certain amount every month. And marketing does not care how big your company is. If you have a thousand customers and let's say AdWords is tossing in 100 customers a month, okay, if once you get 2,000 customers, AdWords is still chunking in 100 customers a month. And now you have 3,000 customers, AdWords is still chunking in 100 customers a month. AdWords doesn't care how big you are, right? However, cancellation is not like that. We talk about cancellation in percentages. 5% per month cancel we say. Why do we say that? Well, obviously there's some percentage of our customer base where now's the day. Now, I'm simplifying because really you would want to do cohort analysis, but let's not get into all that. That's what you should do, but let's just keep it simple. So, at a thousand customers, 5% cancelling per month is 50 customers a month leave. So, AdWords puts in 100. 50 leave. You're still growing by 100 customers. Good for you. But what happens to 2,000 customers? If the size of your business is 2,000, AdWords still chunks in 100. What's 5% of 2,000? 100. Oh, so you pull in 100 and then 100 leave. You're not growing. You've stopped growing. So I call it the growth ceiling. It happens to everyone because it's just math. Marketing does the one thing. Cancellation is a percentage. In fact, it's exponential. It's as big as you. That's what exponential means. So uh-oh. So how would you get above 2,000? Well, here's the answer. If nothing changes, if it's just the status quo, you will never ever have more than 2,000 customers. I'm obviously rounding off and everything, right? Ever. Now, wait, that's a big thing to like, wait, hold on. The status quo because I thought marketing's chunking stuff in. So, if I don't do anything, I'll just grow slowly, right? No, you'll grow slower and slower as cancellations eat into what's going on until cancellations win. You stop growing in this little example at 2,000. So you can compute what this number is. What is the number of customers that if nothing changes, if marketing is doing marketing things like it is today and of course something can change, that's the point but like alright if nothing changes in marketing and nothing changes in my cancellation rate when will I stop growing what is the maximum I could ever be in this case okay well if AdWords is 100 and cancellation is 5% somehow the answer is 2,000 and the equation is actually really simple and I have an article on this but it's easy it's just this new customers per month divided by the cancellation rate. So, it's 100 divided by 0.05 in this little example. That's 2,000. So, of course, everyone can and should do this with their own company and even chart it over time because every month your new and cancels rate could be different, right? So, of course, it'll bounce around if you're smaller. If you're larger, maybe it's a little more stable. You should probably do it in cohorts or segments. Okay, fine. But anyway, what I love about this is first of all, it's very visceral. Oh crap, this is it. It can't be better than this. That's a very strong feeling. The other thing I like about it is it circumvents the usual debate. I say 5% is not good enough. You're like, 'Yes, it is because my industry and customers and you don't understand.' Then I'm like, 'Yeah, but you know, I know lots of companies who also sell to consumers and their cancellation is 2% per month.' So, you're wrong. Your cancellation rate is just high. Or maybe you've picked a market segment that's crappy and so you are capped because that's what you did. You're in control of that, aren't you? So arguing is 5% okay, is 4.5% okay? What percent is okay? Instead of arguing about that, which is so abstract, it's much better to say you're never going to have more than 2,000 customers. You good with that? Would you like to move the cancellation rate down a little so that you can dramatically increase that number? Probably because also cancellations means they don't want it. Doesn't that bother you that people looked at all your stuff and decided they didn't want it? It would bother me. It does bother me. So, like there's an emotional component. Don't you want to find out why they saw all of your stuff and believed in your promise and then left anyway? Don't you want to know why? And then also financially, you need to know why.
Of course. One of your articles that you wrote two years ago, you mentioned that the AI wave was different than previous waves than the mobile wave, internet era wave because in some way I could summarize that by saying that the big companies are not asleep at the wheel.
I mean obviously a lot has changed in two years with AI. I mean you mentioned even in three months like who would have bet that Claude or Anthropic would be much bigger, growing much faster than OpenAI. What do you think, what do you take of what you said two years ago and how would you nuance that today?
Yeah. Well, I think most of it is still correct, but not all. And I'll tell you the part that big companies aren't asleep at the wheel is true. Now, that doesn't mean they're successful at making AI that works. They're not. But who's spending a ton and who's at the forefront of AI? It's people like HubSpot and Salesforce. Google's trying. I mean, these are the incumbents doing AI. So, that part is... Microsoft. Microsoft. So, they are not asleep at the wheel, right? Microsoft did miss the internet age. Right. And they missed mobile, too. They're not missing AI. Now, how much are they succeeding? And what about the money? Okay, but just it's different in the way that I said in that article. Does that mean you can't be a startup? Of course you can. Of course you can. But the way it works is different than usual. In the mobile revolution, if you were early to mobile as a startup, Microsoft wasn't competing with you. And if they tried, it was really bad and they weren't, and so there was a certain kind of way that you could try to get enough market share to exist. Nowadays it's quite different. That's with AI that is not the case that you can just... so there are breakout startups obviously but it's not true that you can just discount the big guys. That is not the case. You have to fight, you know, if you're making a web chat client you do have to fight against Intercom and HubSpot and Salesforce like yeah those are actual competitors and some are better than others but you know yours isn't that good either actually because AI doesn't work normally even for the startups. I'm in some forums and I would say every week someone complains I'm using Whisper Flow but it suddenly didn't work anymore. And other people say it works fine for me. Well I use Aqua Voice. Well that worked great for me. Yeah but for me it stopped working the other day. In other words this stuff is amazing and also none of it's really working well yet. And this conversation happens all the time. These are startups that are doing great work. I use them too by the way. I'm a paying customer of these. So you know I'm a fan. I'm just saying also it doesn't work a lot. Like that's just where we're at. So the big companies are having trouble but the startups aren't doing great in terms of the products really working well. So here we are. So that part of the article I think is very true. One thing I think isn't true is I emphasized in the article that if you have data that's an advantage because you can train things on it and so that is an incumbent advantage because the incumbents are the ones with data. They've got all this customer data and product usage data and I don't know whatever other data that you might have and a new startup has no data. So how does a new startup train on stuff? But that turned out to be I think fairly wrong. Maybe there are certain areas where it's right but in the main that turns out to be wrong because I think one person with an amazing set of LLM skills, I mean literal skills, you know, MD, right, they can just do amazing things. They don't need data. So I feel like sure there's probably some applications where you do need data. Okay. All right. Then it's maybe quote-unquote correct for that. But that's not what I said. I didn't qualify it like that. So that was I was wrong about that. And you don't really need data for most things.
So you think that even bootstrap founders have a shot today the same way they had when you got started for your previous companies.
Well, they don't have to think it. You can just look at bootstrap companies who are being successful. Most aren't but most VC funded companies also are not being successful and most of the AI companies will fail for sure. Of course there's too much money going into AI. Of course it can't all work out. We all know like all this money's coming in the industry can't be that big. It's a net loss. It's net negative EV and a company is always net negative EV. Every founder that starts a company is doing something that's a net negative EV because a company probably won't work. All of us doing companies, including me. Yeah. We're doing something where you cannot take things like probability and expected value and apply it because then the answer is never start a company. And that's not the answer. It's well only if... you feel compelled to. You maybe have an idea, you just need to. This is who you are. You just have to try. These are good reasons because actually the rational reasons are you shouldn't do it. So of course most of the bootstrap companies will fail and the VCs will fail and most of all of it will fail and yeah that's true but it's kind of not that useful. I guess what I do find it useful. What I do is I say ah why do they why is this failure the usual state and to me the answer is because so many things have to go right or right enough not like super right but right enough for the whole venture to succeed. You have to be able the product has to work well enough you have to be able to build it and maintain it. You have to find customers. It has to be cheap enough. Enough of them have to come in and actually convert and keep paying and actually find value in it and with the competition and like there's so many things that have to go right enough. And so if you did assign probabilities, which again I don't believe that I don't believe they're probably but if you did, even if you gave a 70% chance to everyone that you can do it, which is too high, right? But if you did, if once you multiply that by that many things, it's still probably not going to happen, right? So, so the reason why that mental model while not literally true, although maybe somewhat true, it's like it's close enough to true that it helps you think through like, well, what aspects of my business are fairly or would that number be fairly good? Like, I'm an engineer. I can probably make it work. Okay, fine. With AI, I'm not so sure, but okay, let's give it to you anyway. What are the areas that for you are weak or unknown just for you? And so those... So, you'll probably die there. That's probably why you're going to fail. Could you do something about that? Maybe you have to learn something. Maybe you need a co-founder with a complimentary set of skills so that together you're covering this a little bit better. Maybe you could test something earlier to find out so that you're not wasting so much time before you realize it's actually a bad idea. Spending two months to find out it's a bad idea is better than spending 12 months to find out it's a bad idea. So there's things to do once you see that there's things to act on to do something about that. But just in the main, yeah, it probably won't work, but like that's so what? So either go get a job at Dell and don't do this or dig into why is that and what's peculiar about me and my situation? What could I do about that? That's the only interesting question to me.
And so to double click on this, you mentioned one of the themes or the concept that you outlined in your blog is a concept of an uncopyable, like you want something that people can't copy or won't copy. In I was thinking about it and WP Engine is in a very... is a hosting business so it's a very competitive market. And even Smart Bear when you sold it, GitHub had already started. So, is there a big market with lots of money that is not competitive?
Oh, sure. No, no, but that's a serious question because if not, then it's like, right, that's what a big market's like and there's a lot of money and so the question as always is so how are you different? Are you different enough that people care and want to pay for that? But that's always the question everywhere.
It's true. But if you think about for example with AI where people can build so quickly, where skills and these MD files can change your UI or UX in seconds or minutes versus before with much... it took much longer. Like how do you think about building an uncopyable business?
Exactly the same. It was always been possible to copy any feature in any UI. Always been. Yeah, it's just easier and cheaper now. And I don't want to say just that's not fair. It's so much easier and cheaper now that that's really really true. But it's always been true. What software hasn't been copied by some other... What successful software doesn't have clones before AI? They all did. So, does AI accelerate that? Absolutely. But if you're talking strategically like the success of the whole company on a multi-year time frame. Yeah. Then the fact that AI can do something faster is kind of not that relevant. You can go faster so can they. Okay. That's the same, right? Like you also took six months instead of one month to build this. Okay. And so someone else takes one month instead of six months to build it, right? But you're both on the new timeline. So if you're both accelerated, then the same rules apply. Now I do agree that there is something about absolute time that's different. If it took me 6 months and it takes you 3 months versus it took me 3 months and it took you two weeks. I agree that that's different. I do agree that that's different. But in the broad sense of markets are busy, markets are full. The markets where there's no money being spent are bad markets where it's hard to do anything. Yeah. And markets where lots of money is being spent is busy. It's busy in terms of many competitors and also they're all doing marketing and I would agree that with AI everything's faster there's more marketing it's more noisy there's also an interesting thing of people will put out so much marketing even if it's just mediocre it's just that much harder to get seen even if that company goes out of business there's always companies coming in and going out of business but meanwhile they're flooding the market with marketing that you have to compete with anyway. So I do agree that it's harder because there's like more noise. It's also easier because you can build faster, too. So, the fact that you have to be unique in some way, I say unique, I don't even believe that, special in some way, that other people care about enough to pay for is still true. Like, there's just nothing wrong with that statement. Now, how is that going to come about now? Yeah. Like, it maybe used to be that some kind of special code would work, although again, it really wasn't. Like thinking about I've been doing this for 25 years. I don't remember a single moment where anything I did was uncopyable from a code perspective. We didn't do anything ever that you couldn't copy. And so for example for WP Engine the core insight was obviously not the technical... I mean you had a strong technology foundation but in a way I guess the core insight was the customer service that you provided to these customers or the... So WP Engine is a great example where it's not one unique thing. Yeah. If you're seeking one unique thing that no one did you won't find it. Sure. And it's nice when you have one unique thing, but that's more platitudes said by people who aren't operators, right? That's not how it is. Occasionally, occasionally. And that's cool. If it is, awesome. I love it. Typically, it's more we have a certain set of strengths and a certain set of weaknesses. That set is unique. That complete set is unique. No one's copied our weaknesses for example, right? And so, if although we have these weaknesses, if those weaknesses enable our strengths to be even stronger, because they're actually trade-offs is what they are, right? If we've traded off and we've traded off into a stronger strength, then we're special in a certain way, a certain shape, and our competitors are special in other shapes or they haven't done this and so they're just sort of a blah shape and they don't have a story to tell. Anyway, some customers will like our shape better than other shapes and some won't. And that's what it is. But as long as we have a special shape of all these things together. So we weren't just fast. We overinvested in things like the very fastest CPUs, the very fastest memory, this incredible amount of attention to all parts of the stack and all this. Is it uncopyable? No. You can do all of those same things, but almost no one would because it costs money. Especially not the shared hosts, big shared hosts where it costs $2 a month to have a site. They can't afford that. They could physically do that, but they won't because it doesn't match their business model. Doesn't really match their clientele who actually doesn't really need that. Yeah. So, it's not that nobody could copy it. They could, but it doesn't make sense for them in their set of trade-offs to do so. But for us, it was like, well, but our whole thing is we're the most expensive, but also the best. We had better make good on being the best. And that's also service, as you say, cuz guess what? Good service is also expensive because it's people. Well, now it's AI. Okay. Now, that might be different. Fair enough. But then yeah, good service means people who are capable and available. Well, that's expensive, right? So, we charge more do more. Could other people decide to make a super duper group of tech support people and have an expensive plan that does it? Yes, anyone could decide to do that, but it's very hard and then at scale it's extremely hard to do that well at scale. But we invested in that and did do that because it was part of our super special things. But that means we have weaknesses like our prices were higher than everybody else. Yeah. Okay. So you can copy our strengths but are you going to copy our weaknesses or is that not work for your customers? Another thing was we said look you we want to make it you bring your site to us and it's so fast so much faster you're like what the heck's going on? That's how much faster we want. What number is that? We have numbers but it's actually not even important. I want you to go oh my god what kind of magic is this? And then it's like see that's fast enough. Whatever that is, that's good, right? Well, there are certain plugins, certain code for WordPress that is slow and there's really nothing to do about it because the algorithms are just bad. Yeah. So, we disallowed those plugins. That's a massive weakness. If you have a website, you depend on this plugin, it won't work here. That's an incredible weakness. You don't want my business. I want it, but no. So when we hold fast to these weaknesses, high price, don't support everything, you know, but because we hold fast to that therefore we can in fact be the fastest and make good on those promises and so every company has of course weaknesses and strengths and your job is
The important thing is that those weaknesses are feeding and enabling the strengths, not just weak. And then you have a special set. To me, that's a strategy.
You have a framework for personal fulfillment about joy, skill, and need. I'm curious, as you've been using Claude Code every day, as part of a joy you had maybe earlier has become a skill in your code MD files. How have things changed for you in your day-to-day interactions?
I feel conflicted because it is fun to learn new technology and again, the magic is magic, which is joyful and useful. So when that happens it's fun, and even the part where I have to figure out how to cajole it and figure out how to change those files and iterate, it's an engineering problem and that is fun for me.
So that aspect can be fun, but I also find that at the end of a day I feel drained, not happy, not full of energy, and I feel bad, which is not how I felt when I used to just code all day. I felt energized, like I didn't want to stop. I still feel the I don't want to stop, but it's more like a Twitter-style dopamine hit of like, 'But wait, I have this one more, I had three windows and that one just finished.' You know, is it that kind of bad kind of don't want to stop instead of a good kind?
And having talked to people about it, I find lots of people feel the same. It's thrilling to make stuff either quicker or things that they couldn't have done before. It's thrilling, but you feel drained and bad after, like you've doom-scrolled. I think the context switching is part of that. You know, it is faster still if you just use one thread. It's still faster than you do it yourself probably. Not for all things actually. There are types of things where that is not faster. You should just open the file and change the number, like, get it. Come on. Have you forgotten everything? You know, but there's other things where even a single thread you're three times faster, like prototyping a brand new project or something. Just so much crap you just have to scaffold and off and blah blah blah, and that's all the stupid libraries and just set up the... and oh my god, it's so much faster than you doing that. And besides, that was never the fun part. So, hooray, it did it for me, you know.
So, clearly it depends on context. But it's when you have even just two things at once, maybe three, but certainly two, it really starts to accelerate because you're ping-ponging and it's not perfect. You're not keeping both at perfect capacity. There's never waiting, but you are getting more done than single-threaded, right? And you know, more than three, I don't know that you can keep it in mind. Even three can be hard for me to remember what all is going on unless it's really distinct threads of thought. But the context switching of that, while effective in terms of productivity, is super draining. It's not fun in the moment. It kind of feels fun again because of the dopamine thing. 'Oh, it's done.' You know, but God, I did so... I got so much done today, which is totally true. But I think it hurts us. Now, is it just the context switching? Is it the fact that we're managing and orchestrating instead of building? But you are kind of building because it's your idea. Like, does it really matter whether you're nailing the nails in? And the answer is, I think for some people they never liked nailing the nails in, and so yes, being able to describe a house and it appears is fun for them. But there's a lot of people, me included, where the craft of building was the fulfilling part. I just love that. I mean, one of the reasons I even did WP Engine is because I love optimization, code optimization problems. I used to just read like every implementation of say cosine and sine that any library made. Oh look, they did this other thing where they rounded the other way or they used this other table, or oh look, with Go you can compute sine and cosine simultaneously more efficiently than one at a time, and often you need that like when doing an angly thing. And so oh look, they actually for them cosine is just doing the cosine together and picking off the cosine one because if you need both it's just as fast. That's so cool. I never thought of that. I love that. So I don't do that anymore. So, the part of it that I love, not the only part, but part of it that I loved is gone. That sucks. And then context switching and management of things that sometimes are magical, but sometimes they're stupid and you get real mad at it. I told you not to do that. Yeah. I'm so sorry. You're right. I know I'm right. But you would say that even if I wasn't right, but okay. Which is patronizing and that's annoying, too. Yeah. So, actually, it's a terrible relationship interaction and you're context switching and you're not crafting. So for some people that's removing a lot of the joy even if they're very efficient at being productive. So I don't know, I'm not an expert in this. This is just my experience in talking to a few people.
So what's your... how do you deal with it personally? Like, do you sometimes just go back to VS Code or your IDE and code yourself?
I'm in the IDE anyway because I'll kind of do a little of each, right? Sometimes I'll even use AI to do stuff like, 'Hey, where is it in the code where this happens?' And then it shows me, like, 'Great, I'll take it from here.' But that was actually nice because I couldn't remember and find it, you know, takes a little longer. Like, that was actually kind of helpful, you know. And again, like, I find it fun to make skills in things that are not code, or I have just enough code to give it tools so that I can, you know, that's pretty fun. Like even just in personal life and doing stuff, that can be pretty fun. But there's no stakes and there's no timeline, it's just fun, so that feels more like playing, so it's okay, right? I, no, I would never want to go back to coding the regular way, especially knowing like this could just go really fast. It just doesn't feel worth it anymore. And that's really sad. And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't do that. Humanity shouldn't do that, that it's bad. I'm not saying any of those things. I'm not getting a value judgment on it at all. I'm saying I wouldn't do it. I'm just saying we can also acknowledge at the same time it's sad when a craft is lost. There's certain craft in audio design that's lost. There's certain things in photos that's lost. Okay, not completely lost. Some people do. I know. But okay, but it's largely lost. And is that better for society that we all have a phone, a camera in our pocket that's better than almost any camera that ever existed? Yes, I'm for it. You know, like, I don't think we should stop the technology at all. That's not what I'm saying. But we can also lament it's sad when humanity loses a craft. Just like it's sad when we lose a species. Yeah. Does that mean we should never do anything? No, but we can still be sad when we lose a species, right? I mean, we can do both. We can say both are true. I think both are true.
And so, as a builder, where did you find... where do you find your new bliss now in this world?
Well, I'm writing a book. It's called Hidden Multipliers, and you can get it at hiddenmultipliers.com. Look at this sales pitch. Amazing. It's about how you can grow because, of course, everyone's... maybe not. And so it's a bunch of ways to jumpstart growth with your current budget and team. So there, I did the big pitch. I had my indulgence. Now we have to get back. Anyway, so I'm writing the book and that's the answer. In fact, because if it's my ideas and my writing and my everything, that's why people would buy the book. If AI wrote the book, you wouldn't want to buy it. The only reason you'd ever buy this book is because you're listening to this now and you're like, 'This seems pretty good.' So if you have 300 pages worth of specific things that help me grow, I want to at least... yeah, maybe I can find something for me. That's the only reason. And then also I have my own writing style because I've been writing for 20 years. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't. I do not write the way marketers write or the way they tell you to write like a fifth grader. Really short sentences. That's all you do. Like really short paragraphs. I don't do any of that. My sentences go on and on and then there's a semicolon and we're still going. I mean, I don't want to write poorly, but I'm just not going to write like for a fifth grader and they're not going to insult my reader's intelligence. And so for some people, they want to be more simple and just give me a worksheet to fill out. And I'm not, again, I'm not going to do that. I don't think that's reality and just not my style. But for people that want long form that's been really thoughtfully written and not written by AI and ideas that form a cohesive structure and narrative and hopefully with little booms and fun turns that make it fun to read and not just the information, if that sounds fun, well, that's what I did. And so that takes up a lot of time. It's very slow writing. All my articles take dozens of hours because I mean, it just... it's hard.
So and this book is actually not only for software businesses. It can apply across a spectrum.
It's not only for software. It's not only for SaaS. However, I take my own advice and one of my own pieces of advice for software or for books is that you have to have your absolutely perfect customer in mind. Of course, in software, we call this the ICP, the ideal customer. So, you have that in mind and everything you do has to be for them. Now, the truth is, because you were so specific and clear there, a wide swath of other people, and you might say a bullseye, are also interested. Not all of them are interested because they're not the bullseye, but a percentage are and there's way more of them. And so in total, most people who read the book will not be my ICP. Most people that buy your software are not your perfect customer. Nevertheless, that's your north star. That's your vision. That's your strategy. That's what you're working for. It's focus. It helps you make decisions. It makes everything clear on the homepage. It's very important to do that. Okay. So, I'm just saying all that just because that's useful for everyone in all cases. And I have two chapters in the book, by the way, briefly making the case I just made with an example that's very fun, and then spending the whole time saying, well, how do I find my ICP? How do I know which customer profile is ideal for me? How do I go about really articulating that so that I can go do everything you just said? So that's in the book. Anyway, so I have to do the same. So my ICP is a bootstrap founder with 2 million in ARR in a SaaS business where growth has slowed, maybe stopped, and they don't know what to do. And by not know what to do, I don't mean they have no ideas. I just mean they're like, 'Well, I can't keep doing what I've been doing, obviously, and I have a list of things I could do, but I'm not really sure how to choose. And maybe the best thing I could do might not be on that list either. And even if it is, I don't know which of the 10.' So, I'm just stuck in that sense. I'll do work tomorrow. I'm not, you know, but like in a strategic or higher level sense, I'm stuck on how to undo this or get growing. That's who I've written it for. So, do you have to have a software or SaaS business? You do not. I could even point to certain chapters like I just said where that applies to every business and even books. Hooray. But I can point to other chapters like there's some stuff about retention, or if it's not a SaaS business, that doesn't mean anything. So you could skip that whole chapter. So that one doesn't apply. So, I would say the further away you're on the bullseye, some applies, some doesn't, of course, because I wrote it for one very specific person.
And I assume that it's a set of principles that are almost independent of the times, meaning that the fact that now it's not as much SEO, GEO or whatever.
