Jason Cohen
Founder of WP Engine, the managed WordPress hosting company, and of SmartBear Software, a developer tools company he started in 2003 and sold in 2007.
“The price determines the market that you're in. … The middle market before looked at you and said, '$10 product, that can't possibly be good enough for us.' … But now that it's $50, $100, or $500, now that company goes, 'right, that's what I would expect for the kind of software that would have the quality and support that we need.' They weren't even considering you before.”
Startups For the Rest of Us · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
Rob Walling asked how raising SmartBear's price from about $35 to $1,300 a seat could have increased unit sales. Jason Cohen explains that a low price screens out the bigger buyers who assume a cheap product can't meet their needs.
Transcript
one shot, but yes. Over time. And
unit sales like went up. So it feels like that kind of breaks everything I know about econ, right? But talk us through, well, you know, first define like what SmartBear is and then talk us through how that, how that possibly worked. Yeah,
…make less money overall. But almost for sure, you started out with prices too low. And even if you want to justify that by saying it was a V1, which I don't always accept that excuse, but okay, even if we say so. All right, two years later, it's not a V1, right? So what you doing? What's happening here, right? So first of all, you may just need to charge for what it is. The second thing is the price determines the market that you're in. So the reason that often when you have like a $10 a month product and you raise it to 50 and sales go up, which happens all the time in the book, I have set many examples right there, but you can just go to Twitter and see many examples or read some of Rob's books if you'll see many examples of you raise the price and sales go up. And the reason is you are correct that when you raise the price…
And then on the flip side, you have an example at WP Engine, how you lowered your entry price and was at, was it maybe $49 to $29? How does that? So should they lower? Should they raise? What's your experience there?
Yeah, exactly. And it just goes to show there's no such thing as universal advice. And I always joke that no matter what the advice is, I can make a two by two. And already I'm laughing because I make fun of people that make two by twos because like what the consultants do, right? And let me guess…
And I want to bounce to another multiplier. There's a chapter where you talk about a product going basically from 5K a month up to 40K a month, just based on words and positioning. So same tool, two different pitches. One is cut your ad spend in half. And the other one is double your leads at the…
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