Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Let's talk about product market fit. You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people. And the question becomes, how do you listen to them? And then even of what they say, what do you pay attention to and what don't you? The trick here is, you're not doing what a lot of CEOs think they need to be doing with their time.

Starting point is 00:00:29 A lot of CEOs think they need to spend time on hiring or org building, and you intentionally, I will spend time on product and marketing design. So this is a technique that I call the switch lock. And it's borne out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do. But it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?

Starting point is 00:00:55 What's the most pivotal moment in your career, in your life? I learned the real secret behind virality. There is no such thing as a truly viral product. What then is the true secret? It is... Today, my guest is Rahul Vora. Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman and one of the most thoughtful and insightful and articulate founders that I've met.

Starting point is 00:01:22 As you'll see in our conversation, it's hard not to be captivated by Rahul's storytelling skills and also his really insightful takes on how to build great products and teams. This episode is for anyone who's looking to build their product taste, help their teams move faster, learn how to think better from first principles, and also learn about superhumans' very unique approach to building their company, including why they manually onboarded every single new user for years and why they decided to stop, why they ignored most of their customer feedback on their way to finding product market fit, and also how you

Starting point is 00:01:53 can use his approach to finding product market fit for your own company, also the power of game design and building great products, a very contrarian take on pricing strategy, what Rahul has learned about building scale products on top of AI and LLMs, and so much more. A huge thank you to Ed Sims, Conrad Irwin, Bell Trenchard and Garra for suggesting questions and topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

Starting point is 00:02:19 Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of superhuman that you can start using immediately. You also get a year free of Notion, Perplexity Pro, Granola, and Linearer. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Rahul Vora. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams.

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Starting point is 00:05:03 Rahul, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Hello, hello, and thank you for having me, Lenny. I have so many questions for you. We're going to have so much to talk about. I actually want to start with your time before Superhuman. When I was preparing for this chat, I actually asked you, what's the most pivotal moment in your career, in your life? And you told me that other than starting Superhuman, it was selling your previous company reported to LinkedIn. So let me just start there.

Starting point is 00:05:31 What was that experience like? What do people not know about this phase in your life and just why was it so pivotal? So for folks that don't know, reportive was my last company. It was the first Gmail extension to scale to millions of users. Basically on the right-hand side of Gmail, we would show you what people look like, where they work, links to their recent tweets, their LinkedIn profile, and everything else that they were doing online. So if you were hiring, marketing, selling in BD, super useful.

Starting point is 00:06:03 It turns out we somehow attracted most of LinkedIn's daily active users onto this one free app, and I then ultimately ended up selling that to LinkedIn. And that by far, as you said, was the most pivotal thing I'd done in my career prior to starting superhuman. Now, had I known that we'd amassed most of LinkedIn's active users onto one, app, I would have sold it for far more. But the actual pivotal moment was really who I got to work with, because I reported to LinkedIn's head of growth, Elliot Schmuckler, and he was responsible for scaling LinkedIn from 25 million members to when I joined north of 250 million members. And during

Starting point is 00:06:46 my first one-in-one, I learned the real secret behind virality. And big hint, it's not about viral mechanics. And overall, that acquisition experience gave me the times to figure out what was next and the resources to truly swing for the fences. Okay, well, I have to follow this threat that you put out there of what the secret is to morality. What did you learn there? Well, in my first one-on-one, I sat down with Elliot and I said, hey, I'm here to learn. Please teach me everything that you know about virality. And he said, okay, well, hate to burst your bubble, but there is no such thing as a truly viral product. I said, what do you mean? How do you explain Facebook, for that matter? How do you explain LinkedIn? And he said, what I mean is no app has sustained a viral factor of greater

Starting point is 00:07:40 than one for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7. And he told me that lasted for perhaps a year. So one person was creating about 0.7 new users. And I double-clicked again. I said, well, Elliot, what about the address book import? This is one of the things that LinkedIn got famous or infamous for. You could import your address book, and then it would spam slash invite everyone who happens to be members of LinkedIn in your address book, and then eventually it would just invite everyone to LinkedIn. And he said, that's an amazing feature, but you have to remember not everyone is going to use it all the time. So even that feature had a, lifetime viral factor of about 0.4. And that's considered good. So 0.4 is good for a viral feature.

Starting point is 00:08:31 0.6 is great. Something like 0.7 is absolutely incredible. You're in the stratosphere up with Facebook at that time. So I said, well, okay, all of these things by definition are going to peter out. There's going to be an asymptote. None of these viral mechanics keep on compounding, which actually makes sense. It would be a little absurd if things just kept on growing. What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic that isn't in a future. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product. And that really colored how I think about growth and virality. Since then, it has shaped so much of what we do at superhuman. And so much of what we do at superhuman and so

Starting point is 00:09:20 much of how I think about growing brands. Wow. You're such a great storyteller. I'm just like listening here, just captivated. What is he going to say next? That was, that was fascinating. I actually have a post that I'm going to link to that very much aligns with what you're talking about, which is titled, virality is a myth, mostly. And it's based, I forget, on this book where they do all this research on, like, actual viruses. And it turns out they're not actually spreading in this, like, exponential way. There's, like, one person that spreads it to a lot of people

Starting point is 00:09:49 and it keeps happening. And that's actually apparently what the data shows. And I'm curious if you found this same thing, which is when people think of an app is going viral, it's like one person with a massive platform sharing it and their audience adopts it. And it's like that's just one to many. And then it just happens a couple of times and it looks like it's going viral. But it's like a person to many people, not many people to many people. Thoughts on that.

Starting point is 00:10:14 Yeah, we've definitely found that there are whales to use the gaming terminology. that one person is going to be responsible for inviting 25, 50, 100 people. And they may have various motivations for doing that. In superhuman, as an individual subscriber, if you refer somebody else and they sign up, you both get a free month, which is a great incentive if you're paying out of pocket. So we have people who send many, many hundreds of invites,

Starting point is 00:10:44 and there are some people who essentially have free superhuman for life now due to how many people they've invited. But of course, that incentive doesn't necessarily work inside of a company or inside of a team where ultimately it's the company paying for the product. So you have to then come up with new motivations for those people. And that's where there really isn't any substitute to having a genuinely multiplayer or a genuinely collaborative product. That's one of the huge evolutions we've taken superhuman through over the last, probably about two years. early last year we launched what we call Superhuman 2.0. And the basic idea is we saw almost every single other app of note

Starting point is 00:11:24 become collaborative by default. Figma, Notion, Loom. These are all multiplayer or collaborative by default. Yet email, the one tool that we all use more than anything else, even more than things like Slack, was still firmly stuck in its single player origins. I want to come back to something that you mentioned that I kind of deflect, I kind of didn't come back to you. And I think is really core to what you just shared, which is word of mouth being so important.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Like people talk about all these varietal features and sharing contact books and all these things. And your point is that takes you to a place. But really what helps a consumerish product spread is word of mouth, people sharing with each other, which then the question is how do you do that? We're going to talk about a lot of things that you did to make superhuman something people want to share. But in the end, it's just like making something people want to share. That's like the definition almost. So then it's like what makes people want to share stuff. It's amazing.

Starting point is 00:12:19 It's helping them something that is remarkable. Well, it turns out you mentioned remarkableness. That is one of our core company values. And if you think about what a company has to do, it has to grow. How do things grow? Well, let's take Elliott's advice at face value. And I believe it's true. It's creating something that people share.

Starting point is 00:12:38 you mentioned one way of doing it, which is something that people want to share. There's actually another way, which is simply creating something remarkable. You use that word, and that is one of the core values of superhuman. So we have create delight, create something that is so joyful, that really truly brings people delight. We have deliver remarkable quality, something that is so striking, so compelling and worthy of attention that people can't but help tell others about it. And then we have built the extraordinary, which is a measure of the sort of efficacy or the innovativeness of what we want to build. So that's another trick, which is literally baking these raw ingredients for growth into your company values. I didn't know that was one of your values.

Starting point is 00:13:24 That makes so much sense. Okay. We're going to come back to that because I think that is there's so much to learn about how you think about product and how you think about building the company that builds the product. but I want to actually start here with how this conversation came to be. So the CEO of Product Hunt, Rijiv, tweeted months ago. He tweeted this, and we're going to show this if you're on YouTube. Superhuman's product velocity feels like it's kicked into another gear as of late. Does anyone else notice this?

Starting point is 00:13:54 And I saw that, I'm like, I completely have noticed this. It feels like there's just feature shipping left and right, AI, this, AI, this, feels like it's just like a new company. and I tagged you on the tweet. I'm like, hey, we're whole. It changed. And you answered with a few things. And I just made it clear there's a lot to learn about what you did. Because a lot of companies are in this phase, I think, of just like things are moving as fast as we want. We used to be so much faster. We used to ship all these features, and now we don't. And so I think this is a really cool, real case study illustrative example that we can analyze. So let me ask you this. What did you notice that told you something needed to change at Superhuman? And then what did you change? And then what did you change? that actually had the most impact on your ability to ship and move faster. I think what we noticed was this sentiment, and we felt it first ourselves, but we also started hearing it from the market, from our users, from our customers, that we'd slowed down.

Starting point is 00:14:51 And as a founder, as a CEO, that's the absolute last thing you want to hear. It's our job, after all, to speed things up. And when I ask people, what do they mean by slowing down? They didn't mean the product, of course. The product wasn't working any slower, but that the pace of delivery seemed to have slowed down. So I think to break this down, it's important to start by defining what we mean by a slowdown. There's the kind of slowdown that is unavoidable in certain spaces, and then there is the kind of slowdown that is quite avoidable.

Starting point is 00:15:22 We actually had both. So starting with unavoidable slowdown, you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories. solution deepening and market widening. Now, solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users, but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users, but not making the product itself any better. And there are some spaces, there are some markets,

Starting point is 00:15:53 there are some platforms where market widening is really fast and really easy, and there are some spaces, email is one of them, where market widening is really hard and really slow. When we started, we had a great deal of focus. We only supported Gmail. We were only on the web. And in those early years, we could pour every ounce of R&D energy, every engineering dollar, into solution deepening,

Starting point is 00:16:17 making the product better for existing users. And of course, users loved it. It's how we got to product market fit. It's how most startups do. But at a certain point, almost every company then has to start investing in widening the market. For example, the market of people who will use a new Gmail front end, but without a mobile app, does exist, but it is relatively small. And this is something that every new email startup is going to learn sooner or later. In order to keep on growing, you are going to have to need to add an iOS app and then a MacOS app, and then a Windows app, and then an Android app.

Starting point is 00:16:52 And then you'll soon want to support Office 365, but that's not one thing. That's actually three things, because you have to support Office 365 on desktop. and then on iOS and had on Android. And that's all much easier said than done. I think we at Superhuman now know things about these APIs that literally no other company knows and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. So fast forward to today,

Starting point is 00:17:15 and Superhuman now works wherever you do on every combination of Gmail, Outlook, Mac, Windows, Web, iOS, Android. And this actually turns out to be a really great technology moat. Almost no other email app can claim this. It's taken many years of intense investment. And I think we'll touch on this later, but it's one of the main reasons why we can sell into the enterprise because we now know everyone can use it. But this is the hard part. When you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it and it is worth it to get to the other side.

Starting point is 00:17:53 Then there's the kind of slowdown that is avoidable. And if I remember my answer, to Racheve's tweet, that was the kind I was talking about. And in that case, it was our management structure. Or who does what? When we hired our initial executive teams, I followed very conventional wisdom. I ended up with a set of VPs and eight, I think, direct reports, maybe even nine. And I thought that's what you were meant to do. That's how startups are meant to scale. But as anyone who's been there knows, eight direct reports is a lot. It's a lot of hiring. It's a lot goal setting, it's a lot of OKRs, it's a lot of accountability conversations, and fortunately, also it's a lot of firing. No CEO ever gets their executive team right on the first try.

Starting point is 00:18:39 So that time I had for the things that I think I can genuinely be world-class at, things like product and design and technology and marketing, that all began to rapidly disappear. And as a result, the organization began to slow down. Unfortunately, I was also tracking my time very closely. I had this crazy way. of tracking it. And at one point, I noticed I was spending six to seven percent of my week on these areas, these areas where I can truly be world-class. So I had two realizations. Number one, as CEO, once you get to a certain scale, and we would definitely at that scale, you can actually define what you want the role of the CEO to be at your company. And number two, the superhuman opportunity

Starting point is 00:19:23 deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two. And the amount of time that I spend on product design, technology, and marketing went up from six to seven percent to about 60 to 70 percent of my week. Just to mirror back a few things. One is people may feel like you are not shipping as much as you used to because you're actually building things they don't care about, which is support for office and all these things that they don't need, but the business needs to expand integrations with Microsoft and Android and all these things. I think that's such a good point

Starting point is 00:20:08 that like it looks like nothing's happening when there's a lot of good stuff happening for other users that aren't you. And then there's this point about people delegate and then they really like a leader of delegates, hires all these execs and then like, this is not what I wanted. Why have I done this? and things, and you think it's going to speed up, but it slows down. A couple threads here that are really interesting. One is this time tracking thing. I need to know what, how do you do this? The fact that you knew like 7 to 8% or whatever the number he said, like to that granularity,

Starting point is 00:20:38 have your time you're spending on things you wanted was that low. How do you do time tracking? Let's not go super far, but just what's your approach? So this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's borne out of the observation. that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. So how can we capture that?

Starting point is 00:21:06 And actually, how can create a system of work that isn't tethered to a calendar where you aren't at the behest of what some timetable says you do or you don't have to do? So I came up with the following idea. what if I just did whatever the heck I wanted? What if every single time I changed task, I just Slack DM'd my EA. But this also works in SlackBob, like you can just, just has to go somewhere. I Slack DM my EA and I said TS colon and then a few words for the task I was doing. Well, that would create certain changes. Instead of having to constantly look at the calendar and think, oh, should I stop this task, start that task? I can just do what I want. Like if,

Starting point is 00:21:56 if what I feel right now is, oh, boy, I really need to prepare for Lenny's podcast, I'll go ahead and do that. And if I get bored or distracted eight minutes in, which sometimes happens, because something else just bubbles up to the top of my mind, well, there's a reason that my body is bubbling it up to the top of my mind. I also practice transcendental meditation, so I'm very keen on the idea of being aware and listening to what's bubbling up. And it's okay for me to then go and attend to that thought, as opposed to start to expand my focus points to my discipline or willpower on the thing that I thought I was meant to be doing. All I'd have to do is I'd go back to Slack, TS, colon, dealing with this other thing. And by the way,

Starting point is 00:22:38 you should obviously turn up for your meetings. I'm not saying just like a blow through your meetings and not turn up for your one-on-ones. Definitely do those things. What I'm saying is do what feels right for as long as it feels right to do. Then at the end of the week, you can see where your time is going. And I realized at one point that I was spending only in those days like 5% of my time on recruiting, whereas perhaps I should be spending 20 or 30% or more of my time on recruiting. But the biggest thing was I saw I was only spending 6 to 7% of my time on product, on design, on technology and marketing. And these are things where I know I'm really good at them. I should either be teaching people how to do them or doing them or some combination of both. That's probably the best

Starting point is 00:23:22 thing for me. It keeps me really happy, very joyful. It keeps me sharp, but it's also scaling the organization. And so that's how we had that kind of an insight. Once you have this slack log, you can then graph it and chart it and see where your time is actually going. How cool. Clearly this is an app opportunity or like an agent opportunity where you're just telling this thing every time. It's essentially tracking context, which is, which we're always hearing, try to avoid context switches. Yeah, I think context switches are fine. I mean, there's definitely this idea that for every interruption you have, the brain does take roughly 21 minutes on average to recover, to get back to the efficacy before that you were disturbed. And it's a big deal,

Starting point is 00:24:05 of course, I'm building productivity software. We design superhuman to minimize the amount of distraction and disruption that's possible within the app. But if you're working on something, and at the back of your mind, something bubbles up. You have to attend to it in one way or the other. Sometimes I just frights it down and I have a... Actually, I don't have my notebook with me, but it's really big. I have like a gigantic, whatever twice the size of A4 is, I guess, A3 sketchbook. And I always have a 4-H pencil.

Starting point is 00:24:34 So whenever one of those thoughts comes up, I just scribble it down. Or I actually stop what I'm doing and I attend to that task. Because there's a reason it's bubbling up right now. I love that you know exactly the type of paper and pencil, 4H pencil, A3 paper. Very simple. Okay, this is going to be a theme. You mentioned meditation. You said you do TM.

Starting point is 00:24:55 So you do 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes. You do it that style or you do a longer session? I do about half an hour in the morning, including rest time. The physical rest component of it is very important to me. It's 20 minutes of the actual meditation, then 10 minutes of rest. And I do that in the morning as well as in the afternoon at around 3 p.m. And you just carve that out in calendar. you know, everyone knows Rahul at 3 o'clock. He's going to be out. Absolutely. And my EA knows,

Starting point is 00:25:20 they are the one who's organizing the calendar and making sure things happen when they need to happen. They also know that nothing can override this TM block. Without it, I genuinely start to fall apart. But with it, I'm able to access some very deep competencies that I didn't have before. I've been doing this now for about four or five years. And initially, I simply felt happier, occasionally even more euphoric, coming out of a really great meditation session. But over time, I found that my ability to focus was increasing. I could hold attention on something for much longer, but I also was able to become much more creative and much more expressive. These are well-known side effects, as it were, or intended effects for some people, of TM.

Starting point is 00:26:08 And interestingly about TM, if you compare it to other forms of meditation, they don't have quite the same impact across quite as many executive functions. So there's something particularly interesting that's going on with Transcendental Meditation as opposed to other forms that folks are still trying to unravel and figure out. If they're inspired, I know they want to check out this form of meditation, any advice on where they could go learn? Absolutely. A lot. But in summary, have a coach teach you. I had many false starts myself with meditation, trying the various apps, learning from books, none of it really worked for me. What worked was having one-on-one teaching from someone themselves who had been taught one-on-one, the yogic or the Raj

Starting point is 00:26:54 tradition of teaching. And this person in particular had also been a venture-backed founder multiple times over. And so they're very well aware of the kinds of stresses that I tend to be under, and all of his clients are mostly in technology as well. If you're in the Bay Area, this person's name is Laurent Valasek, and they run an institution called the Peak Leadership Institute. And this is all about how we can live a more integrated in whole life, integrating wellness practices like meditation, but for the purpose of unlocking peak performance in life and in business. Thank you for sharing that. That is very actionable. We're going to link to that in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:27:35 Okay. I'm going to try to bring us back on course. The other thing you mentioned that I think is really interesting is how. hiring a president. A lot of founders and leaders might be hearing this and be like going from eight reports and doing all these things I don't want to spending most of my time on the product and design and marketing. Amazing. What did this president take off your plate and what is their responsibility that allowed you to do the stuff you wanted to do? The biggest thing was taking off the operations and the management of the executive team and the rest of the company. So think of

Starting point is 00:28:08 the president role in Superhuman as an operationally extremely challenging and a very growthful role. Like it is, it's perfect for someone who wants to go on to be a CEO in their next role. And instead of hiring and firing that team, instead of managing and setting their goals, instead of the accountability conversations, someone else is now doing that. In addition, because that's not the only job, in addition, They're also a very strong thought partner when it comes to corporate strategy. When it comes to where do we take Act 1, our email product?

Starting point is 00:28:50 How far do we go down the multiplayer path? How aggressively should we lean into AI? What's a reasonable gross margin in a world with AI? Are we, from a financial perspective, okay, dipping now and then coming back later? When should we start building our second product? How do we think about our R&D strategy? Should we keep on hiring in the Bay Area? Or as we've done for many of our recent hires,

Starting point is 00:29:14 shall we continue hiring in Latin America? Should we consider other time zones as well? And so on and so on. I mean, I'm just randomly coming up with questions, but the list is truly endless. It is another way to think about it is, it's almost like a grown-up co-founder. The two people I co-founder the company with Comrade and Vivek,

Starting point is 00:29:36 They've long since gone from superhuman. We're now a 10-year-old organization, and I'm one of those rare founders that is persisting and thriving actually 10 years in. That said, the journey never gets easier. It gets different. And you still need that co-founding energy around you. And I have a handful of people in the organization who are in their roles providing that kind of energy, that kind of inputs, and who thrive off doing so. And the president role is definitely one of them. Incredibly interesting. There's so much there. One, just a couple things I'll share, and then I want to move on to a different topic. One is just, it's cool the solution to helping you move faster and do the work you want to do is org, design. That feels like a really doable thing. If you're finding you're not spending time on things you want to spend on time on and things aren't moving as fast as you want. It's essentially you can find people to take on things that you don't want and shift the way that

Starting point is 00:30:36 the org is structured and that could solve a lot of problems. That's what it did for you. And then I think it's also really interesting. There's this lesson here as a founder if you're just feeling like, I don't know, depleted or just like not, don't have the partner you want. You could bring someone on. That could be that person. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. There's so much there. That was much more of a rich area than I even expected. I want to zoom out a little bit and there's a couple themes that came up again and again when I talk to folks that you've worked with, investors, and superhuman. And the two themes are contrarian thinking in terms of building the company and strong attention to detail.

Starting point is 00:31:13 Let's spend a little time on attention to detail. And like I said, this is one of the things that came up again and again when I was asking people about you. So I have this quote from Ed Sims and maybe your first investor. Were they your first investor? Yeah, there's a bunch of people on Twitter are going to fight for that. But to record straight, Ed Sim did. actually write the first three checks into superhuman. First three checks. Like subsequent rounds. Well, yeah. I mean, quick sidebar on that. He runs both start benches alongside his partner, Elliot Durbin. And they have a particular interest in backing second time founders. But they'll also back first time founders. And they love application and infrastructure areas like superhumans. So we were like

Starting point is 00:31:58 the perfect investment. He also wrote a check from his previous fund, to a reportive, and I think I'd made him like 5x that money. Nothing to write home about, but definitely I'm going to back this guy again, right? And so I went to him and I said, hey, listen, I think this is going to sound crazy. I want to take on Gmail. He said, do you have a deck? I was like, yeah, here it is. Here's one slide.

Starting point is 00:32:19 Here it is. And there was a screenshot of Gmail with most of it scribbled out. I want to build that. And it's going to be amazing. So he said, cool. We're in. Can I wire you the money? And I said, no, I don't even have a bank account yet.

Starting point is 00:32:31 I come back two days later with a bank account. And he's like, cool, I want to wire you $750K. And I said, I don't even know what I'm going to do with that money. I'm not paying myself. I won't for a while. We don't have any employees. I can't think of anything I want to spend it on. Tell you what, I'll just take $250K.

Starting point is 00:32:50 It was like, what? No, yeah, I'll just take $250K. We start having the conversation around venture economics. I'm like, yeah, you know, it's fine. We'll figure it out. And then a few months back, I took an additional. the 250K. And a few months back, I took another 250K as I began inventing ways and finding channels to deploy capital properly. I love this story. I love all these stories you're sharing

Starting point is 00:33:13 I've never heard before. And by the way, it is awesome. We're talking about him coming on the podcast, maybe breaking our VC rule. So specifically the story he shared with me that is maybe an example of you in your attention. The detail is he said that you created your own font because existing fonts weren't good enough. Is that true? Kind of. The font that we use today is a modified version of Adele Sands. And the story there is I looked at all of the major font families. And honestly, none of them was what I would call truly excellent.

Starting point is 00:33:48 And that may sound like an odd thing to say. So let's, if you will, permit me to talk about typography and email from... So the first thing we did was we took our UI, and we looked. and we laid it out in about 15 different styles using examples of the major font families. We actually printed these out, and we left them on a desk in the middle of our office. Sometimes with design, you want to tune in to your immediate most visceral response, but sometimes you want to truly let a design marinate. And this was the latter.

Starting point is 00:34:24 So we let these designs marinate. We let these font choices percolate. And like I said, none of them was truly excellent. Number one, I was looking for a font that was in and of itself gorgeous. Number two, I was looking for a font that could also convey a message of any kind without overpowering the sentiment of that message. For example, does the font work when this is inviting you to a party? Many fonts, including almost all serif fonts, are actually too somber or too sober for that.

Starting point is 00:34:54 Or to pick another extreme, does the font work if it is a bit of a part? informing you of somebody's passing. Many fonts are just too jaunty for that. You wouldn't want that kind of message in comic sands, for example. And number three, I was optimizing for a font that made reading speed and comprehension really fast. And number four, I was looking for a fonts that made email addresses themselves look great. So I discarded all the 15 because they weren't good enough. And after searching high and low, I came across a font called Adele Sands, which is designed by a foundry called Type Together with TypeHithmetogether.com.

Starting point is 00:35:32 They have a whole bunch of lovely fonts. Go check them up. And if you go through my list, number one, Adel Sands is gorgeous. I think each character is a work of art. It's beautifully fond. Number two, Adele Sands is, I would say, upbeat. It's optimistic, yet it's serious enough to convey any kind of message. It has just the right amount of personality, yet not too much personality. Number three, Adelthians is also unusually narrow, and that actually fits email particularly well. One of my pet peeves with Gmail, which by default uses Ariel, is that the lines are as wide as your window. So if you're in a wide screen, then the lines get really arbitrarily long.

Starting point is 00:36:14 And the problem with really wide and really long lines is that they decrease reading speed, because by the time you've reached the end of one line, your eyes have lost track of the start of the next line. And REL itself has fairly wide characters, which further exacerbates that. So at Superhuman, if you've used the product, you know this, we fix the line length or the typographical measure to the optimal length for reading speed, which, depending on the font, is around 90 to 120 characters. And Adele Sands is quite narrow, so it actually lets us do this on quite small windows with a fairly dense line. So we get a lot of information on fairly small windows

Starting point is 00:36:54 without getting a very long typographical measure optimizing for reading speed and for comprehension. And then number four, finally, Adelth Sands has very unusual treatment of the at symbol

Starting point is 00:37:06 in an email address. It actually puts the base of the A in the at on the same baseline as the rest of the text. So for example, if your name has an A, my name does Rahul at Vora,

Starting point is 00:37:20 three A's or two A's and an at. they're all actually on the same baseline. It's a small thing, but it makes the email addresses look incredibly natural. If you look at that and then you actually look at email addresses laid out in other fonts, those other fonts look really clunky and awkward because the A is kind of shifted around and it just looks a bit silly in my opinion. Now Adele sounds as it perfect. So we then worked with a type designer on some of the specific details that there are some of the glyphs

Starting point is 00:37:47 which get a little pincerey, as it were. and what we use today is very close to retail at DELSAMS. And this was pre-launch, or this was after you'd already launched? We'd probably had about 10, 15 users appetite. So I think that's pretty contrarian, unique to be this focused on the font and the typeface before you even launched. This was like, is this even going to be a thing? Will anyone even care? And I think this has a lot about the way you think about product.

Starting point is 00:38:17 Oh, yeah. That, I mean, that thought never crossed my mind. I think we'll probably come to it later, but the idea that is this never going to be a thing, I think that's a dangerous thought. We can't start thinking that way because at what point do you stop second guessing yourself? Interesting. So you're like you were confident this was going to work. So because I am so confident it will work, I will make, I need to get this right.

Starting point is 00:38:43 There's also just, you know, this trap founders fall into of just spending too much time perfecting a thing that never works. and there's always advice. Launch early, launch off, and thoughts there. Just like, how do you find that balance? What's your advice there? How much to spend time ahead of launch really does depend on the markets and the structure, the nature of your business model? For example, let's say you're building a marketplace in a greenfield opportunity.

Starting point is 00:39:12 So imagine Lyft or Uber in their heyday. And there's a strong network effect, because the more. cars you have on your platform, the shorter waiting times are, therefore, people are going to preferentially use your app versus the other person's app. That's when there's no time to spare. That's when, you know, you probably shouldn't even be sleeping. You're going to hire the most aggressive, maniacal people possible. You're going to work 120-hour weeks because every marginal minute actually does matter. Every marginal minute in the market, growing compounding is going to make your next year even better.

Starting point is 00:39:50 That's actually not true of all startups, and it certainly isn't true of something like superhuman. Yes, working harder is always better, and we work tremendously hard at superhuman, but not to the point where it made sense to release something that didn't work. I'm reminded of a story of a founder that was in Ycom,

Starting point is 00:40:17 told me about their demo day experience. And they used mailbox, which some folks may remember, was also a startup, and Dropbox famously acquired them for about $100 million. And the reason that they were well known, apart from the acquisition, is they were the first to popularize swipe to archive or swipe to markdown, which of course is now standard in superhuman and every other app. So this founder was using mailbox and was having an amazing demo day, they're working in the room, they're meeting investors, they're pitching their photography app in this case. And he went home that night and went to his laptop, fired up mailbox and sent off a bunch of follow-up emails. He waited a day, didn't hear back. He waited

Starting point is 00:41:08 two days, didn't hear back. On the third morning, he figured something was up. So he fired up Gmail, went to a sent mail and you guessed it there were no sent mails there. So something had broken with mailbox. So he's cursing to himself, trying to remind himself everything's going to be okay, sent all the same emails from Gmail manually. And they all came through. But then one of the investors said, hey, by the way, you might want to check your email client

Starting point is 00:41:41 because I've been getting some of your emails twice. And then he goes back into Gmail. He sees that, yes, actually the original emails that were queued up in mailbox have now indeed been sent. And some of the investors, unfortunately, most of the investors, he actually pitched twice. Now, is this the end of the world? No, an investor can overlook that. Probably a good thing that you're trying new apps. But was it horrifying?

Starting point is 00:42:04 And was it really scary? Absolutely. And imagine this wasn't investors. Imagine this was a customer, someone who you were trying to convince that to buy your thing and that you knew what you were doing and you had attention to detail and you had everything just buttoned up and under control. Well, now you've lost face. Now you look foolish.

Starting point is 00:42:24 And that's why when you have a mission critical products like email where you are interfacing with customers, with candidates, with investors, it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a half-baked product. This is such an important nuance take on. There's always this debate, how much to focus on craft and user experience, how much to focus on time to launch and get it out and speed. And what I'm hearing here, which I completely agree with, is it depends on the market you're in and the criticality essentially of your product. So if it's email, it just needs to work and you need to get that right.

Starting point is 00:43:00 You need to spend all the time. You need to get that right. This reminds me of something else that one of your early investors shared with the Bill Trenchard from First Your Own Capital. he talked about how speed was the thing that you just dialed up as a lever to like 11. That's where you just, we will make this the focus. Speed, speed, speed. And I think maybe the lesson there is just you pick the thing that you think will most differentiate you, make you significantly better than what's out there.

Starting point is 00:43:27 So I guess just thoughts and just how to decide, how you decided speed was the thing you were going to obsess with and just, I don't know, advice for folks that are trying to decide where to dial up things to 11. Bill is right and I agree with him. You have to pick something. Knowing what to pick is the trick. And in the early days of superhuman, I read a book on positioning that really influenced my thinking. And it is, I believe, called positioning the battle for your mind. And it struck me how the most well-known brands have stud for one clear thing. Like they have a clear position. And so in order for superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear, position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy. In the first year of Superhuman, therefore, I interviewed hundreds of potential customers about their experience with Gmail and with Outlook, and predictably, almost everybody said that email takes way too much time. But interestingly, many people also said that Gmail and Outlook were way too slow. And that was how I first thought that speed could.

Starting point is 00:44:36 be an interesting position for us. I then asked myself, is the position of speed unique and is it available? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes, because almost no software was being sold or has ever been sold on the value proposition of speed. The last time I could remember anyone trying to do this was when Google launched Chrome, and obviously that went incredibly well for them. and you may remember they had slow motion videos where they were comparing Chrome render webpages and showing that was faster than an actual strike of lightning. No one had done it since then. And I then asked, well, does speed reinforce our product strategy?

Starting point is 00:45:20 And again, the answer was overwhelmingly yes. I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed. because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture. And then finally, I did what I call the cocktail party test, which is to look at cocktail parties and to watch how people pitch your product to other people. And in our case, the pitches were simple.

Starting point is 00:45:49 People would say, dude, you have to use it. It's really fucking fast. And that's it. That was the pitch. And that's how I knew that speed would be a really great position for us to start with. I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of One Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina. Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny.

Starting point is 00:46:10 What is the latest with One Schema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs. Yes, so we just launched One Schema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system, in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with.

Starting point is 00:46:43 We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like one schema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever? Absolutely, Lenny. heard so many four stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of ad records.

Starting point is 00:47:05 We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and One Schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect. I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. And if you want to learn more, head on over to OneSchema.co. That's one schema.co. The next area I want to spend time on,

Starting point is 00:47:34 and I imagine we'll have much insight, is some of the contrarian ways you approach building superhuman that a lot of companies never thought about doing that you did that worked out for you. So the first is manually onboarding every single new user. Sure, startups have done this. Like, you know, founders bring on some folks and then, like, cool, show it to them,

Starting point is 00:47:57 and then they stopped doing that, and then it's like self-service or sales teams. How far did you scale this manual onboarding phase of your company? Like, how many people did you have onboarding people? How many people did you manual onboard? Yeah. So for folks that don't know, in those early days, we insisted on one-to-one concierge onboarding,

Starting point is 00:48:18 and it was absolutely the right thing to do. You couldn't use superhuman unless you went through the onboarding experience. And now it's almost the reverse, almost every new superhuman customer goes through self-service. The onboarding experience is still there. But again, it is absolutely the right thing to do. To answer your question at peak, we had about 20 people doing manual onboarding. Okay, so it's not that many people.

Starting point is 00:48:41 That's really interesting because I always imagine it was like a massive team, but 20 people can do, can handle a lot, is the takeaway there. What was the scale, I guess, where you stopped manual onboarding just for folks that are like thinking about doing this and then went to stop? So I think the reason to stop is that there will always be certain personality types who do not want to go through a one-on-one onboarding. And at a certain point, those people will become very important. And you will need to be ready with a world-class self-service option. When we started building self-service, it seemed nearly impossible. In fact, it was terrifying because it's difficult to overstate how much.

Starting point is 00:49:24 much, the entire DNA of the company was built around this idea that we would onboard users manually. And after all, we did so much in our one-to-one onboardings, and there's only so much that software can do. Now, we did, after a lot of grind and persistence, eventually figure it out. And we have a world-class self-service experience today, but we did not at the time. So the flip side is, why would you even do this to begin with? Well, we found two things. Number one, the user metrics are excellent for things like engagement, retention, product market fit score, MPS, morality. For all of those metrics, I think you will significantly beat your industry benchmarks if you go to the effort of one-on-one onboarding

Starting point is 00:50:10 your early customers. And it becomes so powerful to have that early cohort of superfans when it comes to things like building a brand. And if folks remember that conversation from way up at the top, what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand. This is how you can kickstart a brand. And number two, in a world where you can easily and quickly raise funding, like for example, the zero interest rate phenomenon era, you can actually use dollars to avoid building a first-time user experience and all of the normal growth loops that you would then have to build. You would then instead focus all of your engineers on finding product market fit or in solution deepening or in market widening. But not,

Starting point is 00:50:55 for example, on a first-time user experience, not for example on activation because you have humans doing activation for you. And by contrast, I saw other companies often competing spend almost half their engineering dollars on those things, on self-service flows for products that ultimately did not find products market fit. So make sense to do if you really really, want to create that brand, which I think all consumerish companies need to do. And if there is a, you know, there is money falling off trees for whatever reason, which we did have for a period of time. Arguably, AI companies have that again today. So if you can weave this into your strategy, I think you should, but you should also know when to stop. Super interesting. So I guess some factors

Starting point is 00:51:41 to think about, because I want to ask you, when should people consider doing this if they're hearing this? And they're like, this is awesome. So many problems solved. If I just have to be, have somebody onboarding every new user. Everyone's activated. Amazing. So some of the variables you're sharing is, do you have cheap cash to invest in, say, like, it doesn't have to be 20 people, could be a few people to start. And then if there's like an LTV kind of ACV element of just like, are you going to make enough from a new customer? Imagine that's a variable. Is there anything else you think founders should think about? Absolutely. You don't want to lose money doing this. And we always made money doing onboarding, to be clear, it's just that at a certain point that the mass market,

Starting point is 00:52:24 whether it for us is enterprise or all of the prosumers in the world, you hit a top of funnel width. It needs to be wide enough where manually onboarding no longer makes sense. Awesome. Okay. Let's talk about product market fit. I know that everyone when they think of what they think, product market fit. You wrote this epic first round post that described the way you guys approach product market fit. We're not going to spend a lot of time on describing it because people can look it up. So let me just ask you this. Just what are, I don't know, a couple things that you think people still don't understand about finding product market fit, getting to product market fit, considering it's the most important thing you've got to figure out as a founder,

Starting point is 00:53:06 right? If you don't find something people want, nothing else matters. Anything there you want to share. The core ideas are still weird enough that I'll start there. which is number one, you can measure product market fit. Number two, you can optimize product market fit. Number three, you can systematically, even numerically, increase product market fit. And number four, you can even have an algorithm write your roadmap for you, and that is a roadmap that is guaranteed to increase product market fit.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Now, if that sounds crazy, I would be the first to admit. It doesn't seem like that should be true. but go check out that post. I think it is still the most widely shared post on first round review. It's called I think how superhuman built an engine to find products market fit or just Google the superhuman product market fit engine. And you'll see the algorithm laid out there fully explained and why it works. And I'd say the second thing is to get to products market fit, you have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people

Starting point is 00:54:23 intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people. It can't be everybody. And the question becomes, how do you listen to them? And then even of what they say, what do you pay attention to and what don't you? All of that's covered in the product's market fit engine. Okay, I got to follow this thought on algorithmically building your roadmap to increase product market fit. Talk about just what that, how one would do that. Well, I mean, that's really the meat of the engine.

Starting point is 00:54:59 So let's see if I can condense it here in a very easy to grok fashion. So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you can put a number on products market fit. And it turns out you can. Very simply, you're going to ask people, how would you feel if you can, if you can no longer use this product. You give them three responses. One of them is very disappointed. The other is somewhat disappointed, and either is not disappointed. Very disappointed means I'd be like devastated. I love this product or I need this product. And what Sean Ellis found, Sean Ellis, if you don't know him, is the guy who coined the term growth hacker and he instrumented, benchmarked this initial

Starting point is 00:55:39 question. What he found is that the companies that struggled to grow, almost always had less than 40% very disappointed, whereas the companies grew the fastest, almost always had more than 40% very disappointed. And this question, this metric, is way more predictive of success than something, for example, like net promoter score. Okay, so far so easy. How do we make this number go up? Well, you want more people to be very disappointed without your product.

Starting point is 00:56:14 And the trick here is not to act too much on the feedback that the very disappointed people are giving you because they already love your product. Also not to act at all really on the feedback that the not disappointed people are giving you because they're so far from loving your products that they are essentially a lost cause. But to focus on the segment of the somewhat disappointed people, they kind of love your product. But something, and I would wager something small, is holding them back. So you then divide them into two camps, the camp for whom the main benefit of your product resonates and the camp for whom it doesn't. And what do I mean by that? Well, you go back to the people who really love your product and you basically ask them why. What is it about my products that you really love? In the early days of superhuman, it would have been speed and keyboard shortcuts and the overall

Starting point is 00:57:01 design aesthetic as well as the time that we were saving you. You then go back to the somewhat disappointed users. And in the superhuman example, I would simply ask, wait, do you like superhuman? human because of its speed or for something else. And if it's something else, well, and this is hard to do, but politely disregard those people and their feedback. Because even if you built everything that they asked for, they're still pulling you in a different direction. And the thing that they like the most from your product isn't actually what the people who en masse love it the most for is. So you have then articulated the subsegment of the subsegment that it makes sense to pay attention to, and there's another question in the engine to figure out what

Starting point is 00:57:46 they don't like about the product. Now you have a list of things people love, you have a list of things people don't love, and you can work down that list to make the product market fit score go up. And basically at the start of every planning cycle, I advise spending half your time doubling down on what people really love, and half your time systematically overcoming the objections of the somewhat disappointed users, but specifically those for who. whom the main benefit resonates. That was an excellent summary. I know I said we wouldn't spend a ton of time here, but I'm really glad we did. That was really helpful. Let me ask you this. I know you used this initially in the early days. Are you still operating this way in some form? We don't run the engine

Starting point is 00:58:25 as is for superhuman as a whole. There are enough subcomponents of superhuman now that are almost individual products. For example, Superhuman for sales, our multiplayer collaboration features, how we think about the enterprise, AI is its whole thing. But we do sometimes run it on those individual pieces. For example, we'll ask a salesperson, the product market fit engine as it relates to superhuman for sales. And as we think about starting new products, we would absolutely deploy the product market fit engine. Awesome. And the way you ask this question is an in-product interstitial sort of survey pop-up thing? You can do it however you want. The way Sean initially benchmarked the number was via email surveys. I think email surveys work just fine. The key thing

Starting point is 00:59:14 is, and this applies to any survey methodology, if you're going to change the method of surveying, all of your old numbers are invalidated. So it's just a new baseline going forward. Got it. And we had Sean on the podcast, and he describes this method in detail. So folks want to explore the Sean Ellis test. Listen to that podcast. We'll link to it. Okay. Next topic that I'm excited to get your take on is game design versus gamification. This is one of the more unique ways you think about designing product. And when people hear you talk about this, they think it's like, oh, gamification, making things like games, oh, Zinga, Farmville, I don't want to do that. We actually have a really different perspective on how to make why you need to think about game design as you design products.

Starting point is 00:59:55 Talk about your insights there. Yeah. Well, I strongly believe that we should make business software like we make games, because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends. They fall in love with them. It's another way I actually are backing into where we open this conversation, which is you're making a brand, you're giving reason for word of mouth. It's actually an altogether different kind of products development. So how do we do this? Well, as you said, it's not gamification. That doesn't work. Game design works. The game design is not gamification. It's not, for example, simply taking your product and adding points, levels, trophies, or badges. And to understand why gamification does not work,

Starting point is 01:00:43 we actually have to start with human motivation. And there's a very interesting study from Stanford, I think, that demonstrates the difference perfectly. In the 1970s, these Stanford researchers recruited children who were aged three to four years old. And all of these kids were generally pre-interested in drawing. Some kids were told they would get a reward, a certificate, with a gold seal and a ribbon. And some kids were not told about any reward, and they did not even expect one or didn't know of one. Now, each child was then invited into a separate room to draw for six minutes, and afterwards they would either get the reward or not. And over the next few days, the children were observed to see how much they would continue to draw by themselves. So the children

Starting point is 01:01:29 with no reward, they spent 17% of their time drawing. But the children who expected a reward, sadly, they only spent 8% of their time drawing. The very presence of a reward halved their motivation. So what's happening? What's happening here is researchers differentiate intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, we do things because they are inherently interesting and satisfying. And with extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards and to achieve external goals. And that's the problem with rewards, is they just massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's why gamification doesn't work.

Starting point is 01:02:11 And when gamification does work, it's because the underlying experience was already designed like a game. What makes something, I guess, like a game? I know superhuman is really good at this of just like your inbox zero quest that you're on. I guess, just to make that a little more real, what is game design? What does that mean to you? Like, what makes it feel like a game? Well, many of me folks don't know this, but before I was a founder, you can probably tell. I was actually a professionally a game designer.

Starting point is 01:02:39 And as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, what we need to do is draw upon the arts and the science of psychology, mathematics, storytelling, interaction design. And at superhuman, we've identified five key areas that we really care. about goals, emotions, toys, controls, and flow. And across these, we've identified many principles of game design. And one example principle would be make fun toys and then combine those into games. So a question I like to ask is, are toys the same as games? They do seem different. For example, we play with toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy. But football is a game. But football is a

Starting point is 01:03:26 game. And as it turns out, the best games are constructed out of toys. Why? Because then they are fun on both levels, the toy and the game itself. So for example, in Superhuman, one of our favorite toys is the time auto-completer. If you use Superhuman, this is the thing that appears when you hit H, when you snooze or set reminders on emails. You can type whatever you want. It can be gibberish, and it does its best to understand you. For example, if you type in 2D, that becomes two days, 3H is three hours, one M.O. is one month. And the time auto-complete it is fun because it indulges your playful exploration. In onboardings, it wasn't long before I saw people asking, what can it do? Where does it break? How does it work? What happens if I keep on typing in a series of tens? Well, it turns out that's October the 10th at 10.10pm.

Starting point is 01:04:19 Or how about the series of twos? Well, that's February the 2nd, 2020. at 2pm. And then you start trying more complex inputs like in a fortnight and a day, and that works, which is a pleasant surprise. And it's not long before you find more pleasant surprises like time zone math happens without you thinking about it. You can just type in 8am in in Tokyo and it turns out that's 8 p.m. Eastern time and you no longer have to do the time zone math. And then most people were really delighted to find out that if you really want, you can snooze emails until never, i.e. you can literally type. and never and the email will never come back.

Starting point is 01:04:55 And I had like a little shrug emoji at the same time. So, you know, is this toy going to win awards? Nope. But is it fun? Actually, surprisingly, yes. So what I would encourage people to do is think about the features of their product. Do those features indulge playful exploration? Are they fun, even without a goal?

Starting point is 01:05:17 And do they elicit moments of pleasant surprise? If so, you have a toy. And you can combine that with other toys and actually start to build a game. If people were to listen to this segment of the podcast, they would never guess we're talking about B2B software and email, which I love. Let's talk about pricing strategy in your approach to pricing. Another very contrarian approach that you guys took where you charge $30 a month for email. That was free that people don't need to pay for anywhere. And it's worked.

Starting point is 01:05:49 And now a lot of companies are thinking of it this way. you've even raised your prices recently? What have you learned about pricing strategy that you think might be helpful to folks? I always say the same thing when it comes to pricing, which is before you figure out pricing, you must first figure out positioning. And superhuman is the best email tool on the market. We fortunately have the metrics to show this. One of the cool things about selling an email tool is you can compare the 30 days prior to using superhuman to the 30 days after or the year before to the year after. And we do that, obviously. We're able to show that people get through their email twice as fast with Superhuman, that they respond one to two days faster,

Starting point is 01:06:32 and that they say four hours or more every single week. Because of that, we're very confident in saying that Superhuman is the best email tool on the market and that we're building it for high-performing teams and high-performing individuals. In other words, we serve the high-end of the market. Once you understand your positioning, you can then move on to pricing. And one of the best books on this is a book called Monetizing Innovation by Madavan Ramanjam, and Madavan covers a lot of ways to develop pricing. We used one of the easiest methods, which is the Van Westendork Price Sensitivity Visa. And in the early years, we asked, I think it was around 100 of our earliest users, the following four questions.

Starting point is 01:07:15 Number one, at what price would you consider superhuman to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it. Number two, at what price would you consider superhuman to be priced so low that you'd be worried about its quality and you wouldn't buy it? At number three, what price would you consider superhuman to be starting to get expensive so that it's not out of the question, but you'd have to give some thought to buying it? And number four, at what price would you consider superhuman to be a bargain, a great buy for the money? Now, most startups orient around price point number four. This is especially true for greenfield opportunities, marketplaces. You've got to set the transaction value around price point four,

Starting point is 01:07:58 basically when you want as many people to sign up as is humanly possible at the top of the funnel. But the price point that supports our best in class, best in category position is absolutely the third one. It starts to feel expensive. But then you sit down and you think about the time that you spend an email, the ROI, and you still buy it anyway. And it turns out that the median answer for the third question was $30 per month, and that's how we picked our price. And once we picked our price, we then do a quick gut check on market size. You know, for example, we're a venture-scale company, but at the time, the question that we had to ask is, could we grow into a billion-dollar valuation? Well, let's assume that at that point, our

Starting point is 01:08:42 valuation is 10 times our ARR, so our ARR would have to be $100 million. Well, that would be 300,000 subscribers at $30 per month. And that is conservatively assuming no other ways to increase ARPU. You mentioned price increase. You can also go at market. You can sell new products and so on. We asked ourselves, without those tricks, do we think we can get to hundreds of thousands of subscribers? And we answered emphatically, yes. And so we went ahead with that price. Okay, there's a couple more things I want to chat about in the time that we have, and then I know you have to run. One is around AI and the work you guys are doing there. I know that's been a big unlock and then two, the stuff you're doing in the enterprise.

Starting point is 01:09:24 And then if we have time, there's a question I want to ask that I think is a really interesting way you guys operate. So let's talk about AI first. It feels like there's this like being in the right place at the right time. It feels like you guys are like we've been building this for a while and then AI just unlocked another stage in what you're able to do with email. I guess just talk about what you've done and how you think about AI integrating into what you're doing, how it's enabled you to kind of take off again. It's true that sometimes startups boil down to being in the right place at the right time. And we actually had a massive AI launch recently about two weeks ago.

Starting point is 01:10:03 But even before then, we had multiple flagship AI features. Our first AI feature was right with AI, jot down a few words, and will turn them into a fully written email. We actually match the voice and tone in the emails you've already sent. So unlike co-pilot, unlike Gemini, unlike basically every other email app, the email sounds like you. And this AI feature is way more popular than I expected it to be. On average today, users are using it 37 times per week. Number two, our next AI feature was auto-summerized, which shows a one-line summary above every conversation.

Starting point is 01:10:39 and as new emails arrive, it updates instantly. Again, unlike co-pilot and Gemini, it's pre-computed. One of the things we do is we go above and beyond to make these features really premium and feel amazing. The next AI feature after that was instant reply. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit and then send. And sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. And I can share, because we just finished this analysis, that over 2024, the percentage of emails

Starting point is 01:11:13 that are AI written and sent with Superhuman has grown four times, just in one year. Then if I remember correctly, the feature after that was Ask AI. Email, of course, is this treasure trove of critical information, things like project statuses, customer communication, meeting updates, deal execution, and so much more. And for over 40 years, we've had to rely on what we hilariously call search. You have to remember senders, guess keywords, scan subject lines, and now you can just ask, where is the Q1 offsite? Or what are my flight details?

Starting point is 01:11:49 Or what is the top five most positive customer responses to the Ask AI launch? A task, by the way, which previously used to take me 20 or 30 minutes to read through all the emails and then create that report now happening in less than five seconds. And recently, we, like I said, announced our biggest evolution yet, and superhuman AI is constantly helping you. It's organizing your inbox. It's also making sure you never drop the ball. So we have things that we call auto labels.

Starting point is 01:12:23 You can now write a short prompt like job applications or requests to review work. And you can then immediately see when emails match that prompt, when people apply for a job or they ask you to review work. With auto reminders, if your email needs a response, superhuman will now automatically set a reminder. You don't have to remember to do that, and you'll never drop the ball again. All you need to do is hit send. With auto drafts, superhuman will now automatically draft your follow-up emails for you, and will soon be drafting replies to basically every email that needs a response. And finally, with what we call workflows, you can now turn email into repeatable automated workflows.

Starting point is 01:13:08 For example, I often get emails from people who are interested in working at superhuman, and I would normally reply to that candidate, and I would let them know that the team will take a look. I'll then forward to the original message, including any resume or any letter, to our head of people in operations and ask her to reach out if interested. with workflows, I can now automate this entire process. And you can imagine sort of creating a little flowchart of what has to happen. Not only does that save a huge amount of time, with workflows you don't even have to be in your inbox. In fact, you don't even have to be working.

Starting point is 01:13:47 You could be on vacation while superhuman AI is working for you. This sounds like product market fit to me. This all sounds wonderful. Like, it just makes sense. This is the stuff we've been promised. Underwater cities and flying cars and then just email that just works magically and replies for us and all these things. So I love all these things you're doing. For folks that are building with AI, I'm curious to just, what's maybe been the biggest surprise, either good or bad, building so deeply on top of AI models that you think might be helpful for folks to just like watch out for this or, hey, check this out.

Starting point is 01:14:24 I think for me the biggest surprise has been how unpredictable the user love has been in terms of what they love and what they don't love. For example, write with AI. This sounds like a commodity feature. And on all surface level it is. Every email app, every writing surface has a write with AI feature in. I would wager hours is the best app emails. And surprisingly, that's what we do. But the surprising thing was just how much. much people love it and how often it gets used. 37 times per user per week is still mind-blowing to me. I had not expected that. So that's the most surprising thing. And on the flip side, there were certain AI features where I did expect a ton of usage, but we didn't quite get the usage that we were perhaps hoping for.

Starting point is 01:15:20 And hopefully I'm not AI Kramer, but basically everything I thought would work out well, people use it less than they thought they did, and everything I was like, I don't know, but let's build the thing. People love that. So, interesting. Maybe I should just create an anti-meet to do AI road mapping. That's in a simple agent right there. Whatever Rojole says, do the opposite. Yeah. Okay, another, maybe a last topic, I know that you guys are starting to move into the enterprise. When people think of superhuman, they think of just, you know, it's like consumery, it's like for people. And you guys are doing a lot of work to make it a B2B enterprise product.

Starting point is 01:15:55 Four founders maybe that are starting to think about this, transitioning from PLG to sales-led and V-E-V-Enterprisie. What have you learned about just what it takes to get to that point? And just what does that sales motion look like for you guys? In some ways, it's very like selling to prosumers, except these users are not coming from Gmail where prosumers would normally come from. They're coming from Outlook. And Outlook users had very different expectations to Gmail users. For example, Outlook users expect their email app to also be a fully featured calendar app,

Starting point is 01:16:32 whereas Gmail users are happy with those two things being entirely different. So as a result, we've invested in calendar very heavily and we continue to do so. And there's only so much I can say that, but it's pretty exciting. Outlook users are also used to certain safeguards, like, If you've used Outlook in an Enterprise, warnings when a recipient is external to your domain or what Outlook users might know as sensitivity labels. And as a result, we've built support for external recipient indicators and sensitivity labels. But in some ways, it's very different to selling to prosumers because there are other

Starting point is 01:17:13 stakeholders involved. For example, we've built support for Enterprise Mobile Management by implementing Microsoft Inchune. We recently sold one of the big three strategy consulting firms, which is super exciting. I can't say which one, but they love superhuman and they have thousands of people internally using superhuman. And this is after a year, they've been piloting for a year and then accelerating over the last few months. We only just got them the mobile app, believe it or not, because at an enterprise like that, there are significant controls on what a allowed compliant mobile app can and cannot do.

Starting point is 01:17:59 For example, IT needs to be able to control which apps can save attachments or which apps you can copy and paste text into from email. And for many enterprises, those controls are super important. Wow. Okay. So it sounds like essentially just building all these features that large companies need is kind of the road you're on right now. Exactly, and there's two stakeholders. There's the users, which are actually quite different because their Outlook users, and Calendar is one of the main ways that manifests. And there's a whole bunch of other stakeholders.

Starting point is 01:18:30 IT is one of them, but there are others as well. For example, companies this large have workplace management groups who want to see analytics of how people are working, how they can make their teams more efficient. And so it truly is a multi-threaded sale with multiple stakeholders. We had a linear on the podcast. The head of product from Linear on the podcast, Non, and he actually, I don't know if you heard that episode, but he talks about how they decide what to prioritize. The thing they never build is middle managers needing to track how their reports are doing and things like that. So that's an interesting opportunity for you guys maybe to cut stuff.

Starting point is 01:19:06 I don't know. Anyway, I want to end on one more nugget. Okay, I'm glad we have time for this. So you're sure that you have this system internally of superhuman for making decisions. you call it single decisive reason. SDR. What is that? SDR is a thinking tool that I picked up from Reid Hoffman during my time at LinkedIn. And the idea here is that for important decisions,

Starting point is 01:19:32 you should be able to identify one, one reason, that on its own supports the decision. And it's based on the observation that all too often we rely on a collection of weak reasons to justify decisions. And it's very, very easy to do this. Imagine you're contemplating a decision. You write a list of the pros and the cons. There are three pros, but let's say there are 10 or 15 cons. The sheer number of cons, the efforts of thinking them through the time it took to write them down is going to affect you, consciously or worse, subconsciously. And this is especially true I've seen in group settings, which just in general are a little bit more risk-averse and a little bit more consensus-driven.

Starting point is 01:20:16 So whenever anyone is making a decision, and they bring that decision to me, and they say, well, we want to do this because of X, Y, Z, and there are multiple reasons. I'd ask them, what's the SDR? What's the single decisive reason? If they can't yet isolate it, that tells me they haven't yet figured out why they want to make the decision. It doesn't mean the decision is wrong. It just means that they haven't figured out the singular reason.

Starting point is 01:20:42 and why we should do the thing. They can then go through their list of reasons and ask, is this alone enough to support this decision? Meaning if this was true and all the other things were not true, would I still do it? And sometimes we still do, but actually sometimes we don't. And we realize that a collection of weak reasons alone

Starting point is 01:21:01 means that, for example, the outcome is less likely than we thought it was or it was hiding a really strong reason on the other side of the decision. That is very cool. So this is just when you're, when someone comes to you with a decision, the way you use this idea is you ask them, what's the single decisive reason? Pretty much. Yeah. And what they can't do, I mean, obviously this happens. People are

Starting point is 01:21:25 human and natural. They'll usually start mentioning three or four things and that's fine. And then I will say, okay, but if only one of those was true and you're still advocating for this decision, what is it? And I think that's, that's just a bar for a good decision. Why is that so important? Because you've found that just like a bunch of low-quality reasons just don't add up to a good reason to do something. Multiple reasons, which is ironic. But that's my SDR for why SDR's work, which is yes. Multiple low-quality reasons rarely add up to a high-quality reason to do something.

Starting point is 01:22:04 But there are also other things as well, which is any decision you take has an opportunity cost. any feature you build is another feature that you didn't build. And if we're going to build this for a collection of weak reasons, whereas we could build that for one strong reason, I'd much rather build that for one strong reason. Now, this is all other things being equal, and these things often end up being quite complicated, but you can apply SDR all the way down.

Starting point is 01:22:27 I mean, you just did that to me. What's my SDR per SDR? There we go. Rahul, is there anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to cover? Is there any last piece of wisdom you want to leave listeners, with before we let you go? I feel good. So I think we covered a lot.

Starting point is 01:22:47 Thank you for asking amazing questions. This is really fun. This was incredible. Okay, so let me just ask you this then. Where can folks find you online? Where can they check out superhuman? What should they know? Before they try it out?

Starting point is 01:22:59 And then just how can listeners be useful to you? If you want to find me online, I'm generally on X. That is X.com slash Rahul-V-V-O-H-O-H-O-H-E-O-H. R-A and my DMs are open. So for your fee to ping me, if you're going to do that, I would suggest also emailing me. That's Rahul at superhuman.com. And hopefully I'll see your message soon. If you haven't tried Superhuman, then gosh, what are you doing? This is my call to you to do so, because your time is worth more than whatever you think it might be. So go download Superhuman, give it a shot, invite your team. The metrics are real. I know they see.

Starting point is 01:23:39 sound like the kind of metrics that startups make up, but getting through your email twice as fast, responding one to two days sooner, saving four hours or more every single week. They're all real. Actually, speaking of which, the consulting firm I mentioned earlier, because they're so into data and into analysis, they wanted to corroborate those numbers for themselves. And so they did. They ran their own internal case study on superhuman, and they were like, yeah, you're saving our partners, 3.3 hours per person per week. And there's only one other tool that we've bought that does that, which is chat GPT. So thank you. We love superhuman. We're rolling it up. If that sounds interesting to you or your company, please do give it a shot.

Starting point is 01:24:25 That is super cool. Reflecting back on what I imagine this conversation would look like, a lot of contrarian thinking and attention to detail, I think that's exactly what it was. Ruhul, you're awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

Starting point is 01:24:57 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO)

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