Jason Cohen — four-time founder, two-time unicorn (WP Engine), prolific investor — argues that when growth stalls, most teams reach for the wrong lever. They tune the bottom of the funnel ('let's flog AdWords') when the problem is upstream. His diagnostic is a strict-order sequence of five questions: fix the first one that's broken before touching anything else, because the order encodes which problem makes the others irrelevant.
Question 1: Are customers leaving? Logo churn is the worst problem because it's irreversible — once they're gone, nothing you do reaches them. It also correlates with negative reviews and word-of-mouth damage. Reaching the customer through the gauntlet (find you, not bounce, hit pricing, buy) was already improbable; if they then leave, that's a five-alarm fire.
Question 2: Are your prices wrong? Most products have prices that were guessed once and never revisited. Cohen's reliable observation: raise prices, signups usually don't change. Buyers at scale read $2/month or even $100/month as 'can't be good enough.'
Question 3: Is NRR (net revenue retention) covering the gap? If existing customers expand fast enough, churn at the edges matters less. NRR is the single number that tells you whether your installed base is itself a growth engine.
Question 4: Are your channels saturated? You can't rely on marketing forever. Adding one feature and pumping AdWords harder is not a strategy — it's a stall.
Question 5: Do you actually need to grow? 'If you're not growing, you're dying' is sometimes investor pressure, not gospel. Ask whether the right answer for your stage and shape is to optimize, not expand.
The whole framework is order-sensitive: solving question 4 while question 1 is broken just buys you faster customer churn.