9 resources from A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen) we point founders to, and the questions each answers.
✍️ Essay
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Why we picked it
This is the clearest honest look at why a services arm quietly starves your product: Jason Cohen (who bootstrapped WP Engine) shows the real math, that a billable person costs roughly double their nominal rate, so consulting rarely throws off the surplus you imagined for product work. He then lays out the five actual levers (scale, charge more, bill more, build a product, use subcontractors) and is blunt that building a product almost never works without deliberate, funded focus. Treat it as a starting point for deciding how much services you can carry before the product stops moving, not a promise that the mix is easy.
The true cost of a billable person is about double the nominal rate, so consulting margins are thinner than they look and leave less to reinvest in product.
Funding a product out of services only works if you carve out protected, funded time for it. Treating product as spare-capacity work means it never ships.
Charging more and using subcontractors protect cash better than hiring a bigger bench, which just deepens the services dependence.
Why we picked it
This is the piece written for exactly your situation: no audience, no network, no obvious way to reach the people you need. Cohen lays out concrete channels to find strangers who fit your customer, from communities to cold outreach, when you are starting from zero. It removes the most common excuse, that you cannot find anyone to talk to.
Why we picked it
Cohen bootstrapped two companies past a hundred million in revenue, and he is blunt that a typical launch converts around one percent of traffic, so a burst of attention rarely becomes real customers. He shows why founders hide in features and launches because sales feels hard and out of their control. A sobering counterweight if a launch feels like the easy answer.
Why we picked it
Cohen argues the MVP framing pushes founders to ship something too broken to love, and offers an alternative: make it Simple, Lovable, and Complete instead. It sharpens the cut so you remove scope without removing quality on the one thing you decide to keep. A useful corrective to "just ship anything."
Why we picked it
Cohen, who built WP Engine into a unicorn, shows how he validated it by getting real people to commit real money before building. His bar is not people saying the idea sounds good, it is people who will hand over cash. This is the discipline that makes the no-code versus custom code debate mostly irrelevant early on.
Why we picked it
Jason Cohen bootstrapped WP Engine and shares a simple test for whether a problem is real: when you talk to people, do their answers converge on the same pain, solution, and price, or scatter in every direction. Divergence means you are hearing politeness. It is a clear, honest lens for the problems on your running list.
Why we picked it
A working set of prompts that push your thinking to extremes to shake loose non-obvious ideas. When your list feels stale or you keep circling the same few thoughts, these questions are a reliable way to manufacture new candidates rather than wait for them. Cohen built two companies to unicorn scale, so the prompts come from practice.
Why we picked it
Cohen, who built two large companies, argues for taking a small slice of a big, growing pie rather than owning a niche that cannot expand. He explains why a large validated market gives you room to grow, existing budgets, and the option to change your mind, and why a truly capped niche is dangerous. It is a grounded counterweight that helps you tell an expandable niche from a dead-end one.
Why we picked it
Cohen goes straight at the founder self-deception in the question: a room full of enthusiastic yeses is not validation unless people commit money or a concrete next step. He is blunt about the gap between what founders tell themselves and what actually happened in the room, which matches the silence-after-the-call problem exactly. A good essay to reread whenever you feel tempted to call a friendly meeting a win.
