Jason Cohen

Reading Metronome’s Monetization Operating Model, I kept coming back to one idea: pricing has become product. Software now delivers outcomes, not access. Yet most companies still charge as if they’re selling seats or licenses. That disconnect creates friction: for customers, unpredictability; for companies, stalled growth. The paper’s argument is simple but sharp—monetization isn’t a late-stage decision. It’s strategic infrastructure. Pricing needs the same ownership and iteration as any feature. Treat it like a surface that customers touch, not a spreadsheet buried in finance. If value is continuous and dynamic, pricing must be as well. That means product, GTM, finance, and engineering working from one system of truth. How many of us still treat pricing as an afterthought—when it should be a growth engine? https://lnkd.in/gnH7WzYf #Monetization #ProductStrategy #AI

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More proof assets do not equal credibility. When proof is thin, don't make loud claims. Use a repeatable way to prove what you’re saying. The failure mode is simple. Startups makes claims without evidence and buyers can see the guess work As a PMM fix it with stacked proof One layer per core claim and standardizes it- claim → proof → measurement. Level 1: Mechanism proof Share screen flow, workflow diagram, demo steps that customers can relate to Level 2: Workflow proof Show steps removed, steps added, handoffs changed in the customer's process Level 3: Early signal proof Activation, time-to-first-value, usage frequency, retention trend, pilot completion. Level 4: Outcome proof Show potential win rate, conversion, cycle time, costs saved, revenue impact. Only if you can attribute it. Operating rule: Do not publish a claim above your highest proof level. If you don’t have outcomes, you still have options. Run a pilot to validate what is sticking and that can be the proof point Define the pilot user and workflow. Define one success metric tied to the workflow. Define one adoption metric tied to usage. Define the time window. Show what “good” looks like. At Awvent when we had no customer we applied this process with countless potential customer..refined it with every feedback...eventually landing our first customer ( always a sweet feeling) As early stages startup this is one way you stay credible while the product is still earning outcomes.

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🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

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Louisiana is a one-party state. Gerrymandered maps. Voter purges. Polling place closures. The people most hurt by the system are the ones most blocked from changing it. This is Jim Crow. Updated. Still running. The design hasn’t changed since 1890. Only the tools. Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Anti-vaccine bills. A resolution supporting the elimination of the Department of Education. Prison population up 2,000. Parole abolished. $1.3 billion for incarceration — from the same budget that funds schools. An immigration detention camp at Angola. Cancer Alley: cancer risk eleven times higher than government estimates. Trump’s EPA gutted the one rule that would have cut that risk by 96 percent. Landry called climate change a hoax and put a fossil fuel executive in charge of energy policy. Natural gas reclassified as “green energy” using a Koch-funded template. A $2.4 billion toll bridge was handed to a private company for fifty years. Cassidy — a doctor — calling it “reasonable” to cut 158,000 people off Medicaid when 69 percent of them already work. Dr. Isolde Butler at CrescentCare in New Orleans sees what happens next. Patients lose coverage, skip their blood pressure pills, and wind up in the emergency room with heart problems that didn’t have to happen. We pay for it anyway, just in the worst possible way. More prisons. Fewer schools. Poisoned air. Sold-off infrastructure. That’s the one-party state. And then there’s the corruption. Follow the money, and it leads right back here. People Who Think, a Republican ad firm in Louisiana, got $77 million in no-bid DHS contracts for Kristi Noem’s $220 million vanity ad campaign — the one where she sits on a horse at Mount Rushmore telling immigrants to leave. The firm’s head worked on Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial campaign with Noem’s chief advisor. The contracts bypassed competitive bidding by invoking a “national emergency.” Even Republican Senator John Kennedy called it out — and then, as usual, did nothing about it. That’s how it works. They name the corruption. They participate in it. Same party. Same money. Same silence when it counts. GEO Group — the largest private prison operator in America — reported a 700 percent profit increase last year. $254 million. Record-breaking. Their CEO called it “the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our company’s history.” In Louisiana, seven of nine ICE detention facilities are former state prisons and jails, repurposed to hold immigrants. Detainees work for a dollar a day. GEO charges them $11 for a tube of toothpaste. A federal judge found the company had enjoyed “unjust enrichment” through illegal labor exploitation. The Big Beautiful Bill gave ICE $45 billion to expand detention. Private prison companies donated over a million dollars to Trump and Republican campaigns. They got billions back. That’s the transaction. That’s the one-party state at the federal level, flowing directly into Louisiana.

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Norwegians call it “Helt Texas.” I call it business as usual in most growth-stage companies. Every growth-stage founder/ CEO hits the same wall. Fighting fires, working ad hoc, taking things as they come. It all comes to bite you in the butt as your company scales. Most growth-stage companies I know (50MNOK - 300MNOK) resist putting an operational model in place. They think they're staying scrappy and agile. But here's what actually happens as you grow: → Teams hold different views of what matters most  → Decisions get made in Slack threads and forgotten  → Good people leave because they don't know what's going on  → Customers experience the internal chaos as inconsistency This is what Norwegians would call "Helt Texas." (crazy) The best-run companies I've worked with all have the same thing in common. They use a simple system that keeps everyone aligned without constant ad-hoc coordination. The basic framework looks like this: • Weekly leadership meeting. Same day, same time. • Quarterly all-hands. 1x/ quarter • Regular team meetings that cascade information up and down. • Space for informal connection (yes, this matters too). It's not complicated, but you do have to do it. Everyone thinks that go-to-market means how you show up on the outside. I take a more holistic view - How you show up on the outside is a direct reflection of how you work on the inside. i.e. The company that operates in chaos will project chaos to the market. So how do you make that chaos a little more manageable? That's the topic of this week's newsletter: https://lnkd.in/eWNU2cFk

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Customization Is Cheaper Than Confusion Confused crews waste time. Generic tools kill buy-in. Every missed step costs you money. Custom workflows aren’t bells and whistles—they’re how teams align, move faster, and stop asking “how does this thing work?” Because clarity isn’t nice to have. It’s operational fuel.

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Sent this "stop wasting tokens" message to my team today. Point #3 made me chuckle, so I figured I’d share. My rules for AI code assist. 1. Create a product requirements document. You can even use the LLM to help you make the summary 2. Use TDD. Works great with an AI coder. Make sure they are testing the right functionality before they try to build it. 3. Write down your implementation guidelines, in detail.  How you want to implement it. Think of yourself as an architect working on a ticket and you're giving instructions to a total noob junior wannabe tech bro who takes everything literally and doesn't like to admit when they don't know something. 4. Direct the LLM to context that is relevant. and don't make it too large.  If you're in a monorepo or monolith codebase, that's a lot of tokens. Keep each piece of work small and manageable 5. Have it generate a development plan - this is one of the options in Antigravity and Zed - my tools of choice - probably also in Cline.  Tell it to think step-by-step and explain decisions. 6. Read it. Approve it. Step through the work. Don't thank it or say please. It's just wasted tokens. 7. if it starts getting out of hand. **stop**.  Revert. You cant use that slop anyway.  Better yet.  if it's wrong after 3 tries, stop, code it yourself, or reset the context and start over. it's not going to end well. disclaimer: this post was not generated by AI and intentionally contains mistakes and no f***king emojis

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In speaking with non-technical founders trying to get their products built, I am still shocked to see that most agencies are still bidding and trying to deliver the old way (using the same old cost structures). It is creating some big incongruences in the market. If you are looking to get your product built, you owe it to yourself to give Hechura a shot at the work.

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The best sign your team is moving fast? When other engineers start pointing it out publicly (unprompted). This type of speed doesn’t come from top down mandates (you can't fake it). It comes from a culture where everyone feels real ownership and obsesses over the customer experience. Speed is the only real moat startups have. And once you lose it, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That’s why we’re constantly watching for early signs of drag and doing everything we can to protect velocity. For us, that starts with who we hire. We’ve taken our time building the team, and set a very high bar for who we bring on. It's also a reason why 50% of our engineering team are former founders, who naturally bring that mindset to everything they do. That compounds week over week. And before you know it, people outside the company start noticing too.

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Several people know about this problem but nobody talks about how to solve it. I was asked one time to help fix this issue at a company. The fix lies in breaking the work down to a few critical steps. First, never just hand off work in its entirety and expect you'll get anything you can use. Regardless of how good or bad the team is, always ask, always, the offshore team to pseudo code their approach. They should explain which files they'll touch, which systems they'll touch, integrations, which areas or layers of the application, etc. I call this the first pass. Why is this important? This tells me they're thinking about the problem right and if there are any gaps in their understanding, or any pieces they're missing. After that, they'll do a second pass. That is stubbing out which functions or code will need to be added or modified, maybe even making the functions and service calls work but with mock data. This is the "prove it to me" moment. This second pass also helps me as a dev manager gauge how fast or slow the offshore team is working, giving me indications too if they're stuck somewhere. Only after this second pass, do I actually turn them loose to go execute and "deliver" the solution. Only now, because I did some diligence on my managerial end, I've got greater confidence that what I'll get will be something on par with what I'm expecting and can use. This partnership and collaborative arrangement also fosters trust and over time the offshore team will learn how your organization operates, critical thinking, and that nothing should ever be done in a vacuum or cowboy way. For more helpful tips like this, follow me. I'm paying it forward in 2026 and will be sharing gems most people aren't talk about with a focus on the solutions, not just problems.

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