About Jason Cohen
Jason Cohen is an American software entrepreneur, investor and writer from Austin, Texas. He is the founder of WP Engine, the WordPress hosting company, and the author of A Smart Bear, a long-running blog of essays on startups, bootstrapping, product strategy and company growth. He describes himself as a four-time founder over 25 years whose companies produced two exits and two unicorns, one bootstrapped and one venture-funded.
Before WP Engine, Cohen co-founded IT Watchdogs, a maker of server-room climate and power monitors that was sold in 2004. He then bootstrapped Smart Bear Software for about seven years, building tools for peer code review, and sold it in 2007. While there he wrote a book on code review and led what he calls the largest study of its kind, covering 2,500 code reviews at Cisco.
He founded WP Engine in 2010; Wikipedia also lists Ben Metcalfe as a co-founder. The company began bootstrapped and later raised large venture rounds; in 2013 Heather Brunner became CEO and Cohen moved to the role of chief technology officer. By his account WP Engine grew to about 1,200 employees and 200,000 customers. Since 2009 he has also been an investor and mentor at Capital Factory, Austin's startup incubator, and has backed companies including Stack Overflow and SpareFoot.
Cohen has been publishing his essays for about 18 years, first as A Smart Bear and now at longform.asmartbear.com, which he says reaches about 60,000 newsletter subscribers. His best-known pieces include "Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead," which proposes Simple, Lovable and Complete first products, and a long guide to reaching product/market fit drawn from WP Engine's early years. His book Hidden Multipliers is about growing a company with its existing budget and team, and he hosts Smart Bear Live, a podcast in which he works through real founders' business problems with them.
What Jason Cohen is known for
- Founding WP Engine
- The A Smart Bear blog on startups and bootstrapping
- The SLC (Simple, Lovable, Complete) alternative to the MVP
- Founding and selling Smart Bear Software
- Hidden Multipliers and the Smart Bear Live podcast
Works by Jason Cohen
1 essay to practice
More notable works
An eight-step process, drawn from WP Engine's early years, for getting from an idea to product/market fit.
His reflection on selling Smart Bear in 2007 and what founders should weigh in that decision.
Explains why startups fail even after finding a real problem and building a product that solves it.
Shows that even fast-growing companies did not grow exponentially and offers a better model of growth.
Introduces a metric that predicts where recurring revenue will plateau based on churn and new revenue.
His collected long-form articles on building companies, bootstrapped and funded.
His book on growing a company using the budget and team it already has.
Jason Cohen’s writing style
Data-Driven Narrative: Cohen's writing style is characterized by his strong emphasis on using data and metrics to support his arguments. He frequently incorporates real-world examples and statistics to illustrate his points.
Personal Experience Integration: He skillfully weaves his personal experiences as a founder and entrepreneur into broader business lessons, making abstract concepts more concrete and actionable.
Practical Framework Construction: His posts often build frameworks for decision-making, breaking down complex business challenges into manageable components. This structured approach helps readers apply his insights to their own situations.
Clear and Direct Communication: Cohen maintains a conversational yet professional tone, avoiding unnecessary jargon while still addressing complex topics thoroughly.
- Contrarian headlines
- Titles like "Your customers hate MVPs" and "The myth of exponential hypergrowth" challenge an accepted idea in a single line, and the essay then earns the claim.
- Coined frameworks and acronyms
- He packages ideas into memorable labels, such as SLC for Simple, Lovable, Complete, or the Max MRR metric, so readers can carry them into meetings.
- Concrete company examples
- Arguments lean on named cases, from Google Docs and Slack to Southwest Airlines, and on his own experience at Smart Bear and WP Engine.
- Fair to the other side
- He usually states the case for the idea he is criticizing first, as when he lists what MVPs get right before explaining why customers dislike them.
- Long, structured essays with humor
- Many pieces run several thousand words with headings, lists and diagrams, but they are lightened by jokes and cartoons.
How to write like Jason Cohen
Pick a piece of conventional startup wisdom you have tested in practice and found wanting, and put your disagreement in the title. Then give the conventional view its due: list what it gets right before you show where it fails. Cohen's essays persuade because they are fair to the idea they replace.
Back every claim with a specific company or a number from your own experience, and give your alternative a short name or acronym that readers can repeat. Organize longer pieces with clear headings and lists so operators can skim and come back, and keep the voice informal and occasionally funny. End with something a founder could do on Monday.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of Jason Cohen’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about Jason Cohen
- Who is Jason Cohen (WP Engine founder)?
- Jason Cohen is an Austin-based entrepreneur who founded WP Engine, the WordPress hosting company, in 2010. Before that he bootstrapped and sold Smart Bear Software, a maker of code review tools, and co-founded IT Watchdogs. He is also an investor and mentor at Capital Factory, and he writes the A Smart Bear blog.
- What is Jason Cohen's blog?
- Cohen's blog is A Smart Bear, now published at longform.asmartbear.com. It collects long-form essays from about two decades of building companies, on topics such as product/market fit, pricing, positioning, growth metrics and founder decision-making, and it is also sent as a newsletter. He also hosts the podcast Smart Bear Live.
- What is an SLC?
- SLC stands for Simple, Lovable, Complete, Cohen's alternative to the minimum viable product. He argues that customers dislike MVPs because they are unfinished, so a first version should instead be small and simple but complete in what it does, and good enough that people want to use it as-is.
- What is Jason Cohen's writing style?
- Cohen writes long, practical, informal essays for founders. He opens with a contrarian claim, fairly lays out the conventional view, then argues for his alternative with named company examples and his own experience. He coins frameworks and acronyms, organizes pieces with headings and lists, and uses humor and cartoons to keep long pieces readable.