Jason Cohen Wowed the Hackers: Returns to Growth Hacker TV

He’s back! Our Founder and CTO Jason Cohen, a.k.a. A Smart Bear, has made history as the first guest to make a second appearance on Growth Hacker TV.

Once again, we’ve got an unlocked link of the interview for you to check out.

During their first Growth Hacker TV interview, Jason and host Bronson Taylor talked about the “first scaling problem”—does anybody want what you’re selling? Or to put it another way, how do you acquire new users?

This time, they discussed the “second scaling problem.” Once you have acquired those new users, how do you scale your infrastructure as a business to meet that increased demand?

Rare Events Become Regular

Bronson asked Jason about one of his recent quotes:

Scale causes rare events to become regular.

WP Engine now has 1,500 servers. On average, a server fails once every 4 years. With 1,500 servers, we have about 4 years worth of days. This means that every day, something catastrophic is likely to happen.

Scaling Humans is Hard Too!

The other thing that can be hard to scale is humans. So some businesses can scale without adding people—like Instagram for example—and that’s great for them, but the exception to the rule.

Even if you’ve got a great culture and everyone is on the same page, it’s simply harder for a big group to work together and communicate. It takes a lot of work to make it happen.

The Third Scaling Problem?…

Bronson asked Jason about the “third scaling problem,” and whether you encounter that when you have saturated the market. Jason noted that two things can happen at that point in time:

1. There aren’t as many customers available.
2. Customers are more expensive to acquire.

It’s likely that you’ll run up against customers becoming more expensive to acquire before you run out of available customers.

What does happen though is that marketing channels run out. For example, you’ll begin to tap out what is efficient in AdWords. More people will start bidding, and the channels will degrade over time.

It’s therefore important to keep finding more and more marketing channels.

Double Down on What Works (And Other Great Tips)

During their second Growth Hacker TV interview, Jason and Bronson discussed a few other topics, including:

• Raising money – “You should always raise more money than you think you need.”
• Personal habits – “You need tackle the things you are slow at, rather than getting faster at the things you are already fast at, to get the wins.”
• Best advice for startups trying to grow – “Double down on what’s working, rather than finding something new.”

Want to hear more great entrepreneurial advice from Jason? Check out his personal blog—A Smart Bear.