This Week in Startups - Product | Scaling Your Startup S2 E5 with Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra & Fitbod’s Jesse Venticique | E1214

Episode Date: May 15, 2021

This episode reveals the product strategies of two of Jason's high-performing portfolio companies, Superhuman & Fitbod. First, Superhuman's Founder & CEO Rahul Vohra shares his 7 principles for improving products with game design (01:40), then Fitbod's CO-founder and Product Head Jesse Venticique describes how to optimize your product hook (20:08), and to wrap up, Jason brings the two together for a Q&A session (36:44). Pod Notes: http://bit.ly/e1214tnotes

Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. We've got an amazing show for you. Two products I was lucky enough to invest in, Superhuman and FitBod, have mastered the art of making elegant products that delight users. And today, two of the founders, Raul and Jesse, are going to give you their secrets. And they're going to pay it forward and get your pen and paper. And you're going to want to watch this episode at least twice, probably three times. You're going to want to get your team. You're going to order in some Uber Eats or get a Zoom call going. And you're going to want to share this episode with your entire team and start a dialogue internally about how to make great product. Because at the end of the day, great product wins every single time. Stick with us.

Season two of scaling your startup is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash your startup to post your first job for free. That's LinkedIn.com slash Y-O-U-R-S-T-A-R-T-R-T-U-P. Terms and conditions apply. Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-I-P-O-O-P-O-P-O-P-O-P-O-P-O-T-O-O-D-com slash twist. And NetSweet, don't let old software and spreadsheet. slow you down anymore. Upgrade to NetSuite, the world's number one cloud business system. Schedule your free product tour right now at NetSuite.com slash twist.

First up, my good friend, and somebody I've been lucky enough to invest in twice, Raul from Superhuman. Take it away, Raul. Awesome. Thank you, Jason. Hello, everybody. Like he said, my name's Rahul. I'm the founder and CEO of Superhuman, where we build the fastest email experience in the world.

our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before, reply to their important email sooner, and see inbox zero for the first time in years. Now, superhuman is productivity software, but I'm really a gamer at heart, and I'm going to share how effective it can be to apply game design to business software. Now, today, our business software feels like work.

We have to check our email, submit expense reports, enter data in our CRM, But what if we could make software feel less like work and more like play? Well, with game design, we can. And I will shortly share what game design is, but first, let me share what it isn't. Game design is not gamification. It is not simply taking your product and adding points, levels, trophies, or badges. Now, ten years ago, gamification was a big deal.

But it didn't work. And to understand why, we have to understand human motion. In the 1970s, researchers from Stanford recruited children aged about three to four years old. Now, all of these kids were generally interested in drawing. Some kids were told they would get a reward, a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon. Some kids were not told about any reward, and so they did not expect one or even know of one. And each child was invited into a separate room to draw for six minutes, and then afterwards they would either get the reward or not. over the next few days the children were observed to see how much they would continue to draw by themselves.

The children with no reward spent around 17% of their time drawing. But the children who expected a reward, well, they only spent 8% of their time drawing. The reward had halved their motivation. So what's happening here? Well, researchers differentiate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, we do things because they are inherently interesting and satisfying. Whereas with extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards and achieve external goals. And that's the problem with rewards.

They massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And this is why gamification does not work. When gamification does work, it is because the underlying experience was always already a game. So how do we design a game? Well, I have been obsessed with this question my entire life. As a kid, I learned how to code just so I could make games. Before I was a founder, I worked as a game designer,

and as a founder, I've gone deep into the principles of game design. And as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, we need to draw upon the art and science of psychology, mathematics, storytelling and interaction design. Here are five factors to consider. For each factor, I'll show you how we use it's superhuman and how you can use it on your own products. First up, goals.

Now, games need goals. In fact, goals are a defining feature of games, but we can't just have any old goals. We need good goals. And for a game, good goals are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. Now, in Superhuman, we set a very concrete goal, get to inbox zero. Good goals must also be achievable. This is one of the main reasons why we onboard users. For each new user, we do a live concierge onboarding. This is a 30-minute one-to-one video

call with one of our wonderful onboarding specialists. We teach faster workflows to get to inbox zero. We teach powerful shortcuts so you never have to touch them else. And if you're very far away, we wipe the slate clean so that you're within a stone's throw of inbox zero, thus making the goal more achievable. And finally, the goal should be rewarding, for when you hit inbox zero, you feel triumph over your email, a previously rare and incredibly rewarding feeling.

Now, most business software does not have clear goals. If there are goals, they are often unachievable and unrewarding. This is our first principle of game design. If you want to build software like it's a game, then create goals that are concrete, achievable, and rewarding. Emotions The best games create strong emotions because strong emotions are the foundations of our very memory. We must therefore be able to analyze emotion, and to do that, we need vocabulary. Now, there are many models of human emotion.

The most famous is Plutjik's wheel. Opposite emotions are across from each other. example, joy is the opposite of grief. You can blend adjacent emotions to create more complex feelings. For example, when you combine joy and anticipation, you get optimism. When you combine joy and trust, you get love. But as game designers, we need much richer vocabulary than academia provides. The emotions we are aiming for are much more nuanced. This is the most useful model that I have found by the Honto Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. It contains the subtleties that we as game designers need to think about.

At superhuman, we care deeply about joy. We design for enthusiasm and excitement. Our users come to us super excited. We're designed for optimism and hopefulness. Our users want superhuman to improve their lives. We design for pride and triumph. When you hit inbox zero, especially if it's the first time in years, you rightly feel like you accomplish something special.

And when you do hit inbox hero, we show you stunning and gorgeous imagery. We do this to widen the emotional repertoire beyond joy into love and surprise. We pick images that are peaceful and tranquil that create a sense of longing and sentimentality that even amaze and inspire a sense of awe. You can also use the wheel to find emotions to remove. Users often come to us with very negative feelings about their email. They can feel helpless, anxious, annoyed, guilty, even powerless. And this brings us to our second principle of game design.

Design for nuanced emotion. Precisely which emotions do you want? Which do you want to avoid? Use the wheel as your guide. Now controls can be one of the main reasons why a game succeeds. the Wii moat, the Wii sold more than 100 million units, and every controller since then has incorporated motion. But games require much more robust controls than we make for business software. Imagine you're playing a game like Street Fighter or Smash Bros. It would be incredibly frustrating if some

inputs were dropped and your character flopped around and then died. And yet that is how business software works today. Let's say I want to email my co-founder Conrad. In Gmail, the shortcut to compose an email is C, so I type C and then Conrad. If I do this fast in Gmail, I end up with two drafts and I'm sending an email to Rad. In Superhuman, we had to build our own keyboard handler to ensure that we never lose keystrokes. And just in case you think I'm picking on Gmail, this kind of error is status quo for business software. Pick any tool, drive it hard. You'll see just what I showed you.

Principle number three, create rapid and robust controls. Small businesses have always shown the ability to adapt, innovate, and survive even more so this past year. I've seen it across my portfolio. Another way you can adapt is by growing and finding the right people to help scale your business. LinkedIn jobs will solve your hiring problems. How do I know this? because it solved my hiring problems. I needed to add at least five people in the past three or four months because things are going gangbusters for me. Boom. All five positions filled. Thanks to LinkedIn

jobs. Hiring is a huge burden for all founders. But if you're not great at hiring, your company will stall. Hiring is critical. Right now you can get a free job listing by going to linkton.com slash your startup. Y-O-U-R startup. LinkedIn.com slash your startup will get your first job posting for free. Why should you use LinkedIn? It's fairly obvious. Everybody is on LinkedIn on a global basis. 740 million professionals are on LinkedIn right now. You can fill out targeted screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified

candidates with the experience skills and motivation that you need. They are really good at matching the people with the soft and hard skills you need and getting just really highly qualified people to apply for your job quickly. They have beautiful management tools so you can easily review, rate, and hone any your top candidates and get them through your workflow. So once again, get a free job listing right now. Thanks to our friends at LinkedIn. LinkedIn.com slash your startup. Terms and conditions, of course, apply because they're giving you something for free. LinkedIn.com slash your startup. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Question. Are toys the same as games? They do seem

difference. We play with toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy, but football is a toy, but football as a game. And as it turns out, the best games are built with toys. Why? Because then they are fun on both levels, the toy and the game itself. In Superhuman, a favorite toy is the time autocompleader, which you use to snooze emails. You type whatever you want, it can even be jibberish, and it does its best to understand you. For example, 2D becomes two days, 3H becomes three hours, one MO becomes one month. The time autocomplete it is fun because it indulges playful exploration. What can it do? Where does it break? How does it work? It's not long in onboardings before people start doing this. Hmm. I wonder what happens if I keep on typing 10. Well, it turns out that's October the 10th

at 10.10pm. Or what happens if I put PM in the middle? Well, it turns out that still work. Or how about a sequence of twos? Well, that's February the 2nd at 2pm. And then you start trying more complex inputs. How about in a fortnight and a day? It's not long before you find pleasant surprises. For example, time zone math happens without you ever having to think about it.

8 a.m. in Tokyo is 8 p.m. Eastern. And then most people are delighted to find out that if you really want, you can snooze emails, well, until never. And this brings us on to our fourth principle of game design. Make fun toys and combine them into games. In fact, consider features of your own product. Do they indulge playful exploration? Are they fun even without a goal?

And do they create moments of pleasant surprise? If so, then congratulations, because you have a toy and you're on the way to building a great game. The previous four factors are critical to game design, but perhaps the least understood is Flow. Indeed, Flow is so important that we will both define it, as well as describe how to create it. Flow is an intense and focused concentration on the present.

It is so absorbing that we don't think about the future or worry about the past. It is so demanding that we don't care what other. think about us, it is so easy that we always know what to do next. It is so powerful that it quite literally alters our subjective experience of time. Time can either flash by in an instant or stretch out forever. And it is so rewarding that an activity can become intrinsically motivating, which as we know from before is the most powerful and effective form of motivation. In short, flow is incredible. But how do we create it? Well, these are the conditions for flow. Number one, we must always know what to do next. Number two, we must always know how to do it. Number three,

we must be free from distractions. Number four, we must get clear and immediate feedback. And number five, and this one's the hardest of all. We must feel a balance between challenge and skill, and the relationship between challenge and skill, can be summarized by this graph, the so-called experience fluctuation model. If an activity is too hard, we feel anxious. But if an activity is too easy, we feel relaxed or worse, bored. So how do we create flow in superhuman? Well, let's take these conditions one by one, number one, knowing what to do next. Now, we can make product decisions that make this dramatically easier for our users. In Gmail, let's see what happens when I archive this email.

I'm now back on the inbox. I now have to decide what to do next, and I have to do this every single time. This quite literally destroys flow. In Superhuman, let's see what happens when we archive the same email. I automatically advance to the next one. I don't have to take any decisions at all. This creates flow. Number two, knowing how to do it.

Early on in the history of the company, we saw that users would sometimes forget our keyboard shortcuts. They knew what they wanted to do, but they did not know how to do it. So we built Superhuman Command. Just hit Command K and then type in what you want to do. It will do it for you and teach you the shortcut the next time. Number three, freedom from distractions. In superhuman, you can't see the inbox at the same time as a conversation.

And so, very deliberately, you can't see what is next or indeed any new email. You can design your interface like this to reduce distraction and to create flow. Number four, clear and immediate feedback. When you archive a conversation, we immediately show you the next one. Now, we have invested hugely in doing so as immediately as possible. Initially, we set out to do this in 100 milliseconds or less. We now have a new renderer that is three times as fast and can do this in less than 32 milliseconds. And number five, high perceived challenges and high perceived skill.

Let's get back to that experience fluctuation model. For most people, Gmail is that. this left slice. Some people feel bored or apathetic. Their skill level is low to medium, but really that email doesn't actually matter that much. Some people feel worry. Their skill is low to medium, but that email really does matter. Many people, though, feel anxiety. Their skill is low to medium, but that email is super important and they are failing at it. This is how most users come to us. Superhuman massively increases the skill level for almost everybody. But what if your email wasn't that challenging or you were already skilled in the first place?

If we don't do anything else, you still would not be in flow. Well then, and this will sound crazy, we deliberately increase the challenge level. We give you a challenging goal. Hit inbox without ever touching your mouse. This once again balances challenge with skill and results in flow. So, principle number five, users should always know what to do and how to do it. Number six, give clear feedback immediately and with no distraction. And number seven, balance high perceived skill with high perceived challenge. And counterintuitively, this may mean making the goals of your

product, harder to achieve. These are our seven principles of game design. If you follow these, your users will be intrinsically motivated. They will use your products not because they have to, but because your product is inherently satisfying. With these seven principles, you can make products that are delightful, amazing, magical, and which fundamentally are actually games. Now, I know you might have a number of questions, and I absolutely love talking about the stuff.

So if you do, you can contact me here, Rahul at superhuman.com or on Twitter, Rahal Bora. My DMs are open. And just to preempt about half of those questions, which is, how can one get superhuman? We are still running the wait list. We have north of 400,000 people on it. But for folks in the twist community, we are making it possible to skip the line. just sign up over at superhuman.com slash twist and we'll get you onboarded with priority. And with that, that's a wrap.

Thank you for listening. Great job, Raoul. Next up is Jesse from FitBod. All right. Thanks, Jason. And hello, everybody. I am Jesse Ventasinkwe, the co-founder and product head at FitBod. And today, I'm going to describe how FitBod's product hook sits at the foundation of our conversion

retention and referral strategy. So a product hook is a simple behavior that is repeated over and over again in a product. It's that atomic unit that I believe fits a product with a market and really enables product-led growth. I think most consumer companies have this. A few obvious canonical examples is Google Search or, say, like, handling a ride with Uber. FitBod's product design was inspired. by the author NIR IAL and his 2013 book Hooked,

which outlines a framework for habit creation. And NIR describes four phases in his framework, the trigger, action, investment, and reward. The trigger is simply the customer need or problem that motivates someone to act. And FitBod's trigger is the psychological need for certainty about how to exercise effectively. And more simply, it's, I don't know what to do

do in the weight room or I've been doing the same exercises over and over again, I'm in a plateau. That next step is the action phase, which is the behavior taken in response to the trigger. And the action phase for FitBod involves just simply launching the app, where we will immediately show you your next optimal workout. These are exercises, reps, and weight that are leveled to your capability, focusing on the right muscles, and using your available equipment. It's basically a checklist of incremental achievable goals and provide certainty about what to do. Next is the investment phase. So FitBod customers contribute their effort with working out and their time and their data

and their money into the product, which not only increases the switching costs, but critically helps us personalize the service for the next go-around of the product hook. And I'll describe how we do that a bit later. And lastly, is the reward phase where we make the effort. visible in these post-workout summaries and achievements. And there also is a little bit of reward of the hunt where we show you your next workout right after you finish one. And our customers love this kind of slot machine effect of finding out what's next.

Okay, so now I want to talk about how we optimize our conversion, retention, and referral around this hook. And starting with conversion. A major inflection point for our business happened in 2007. when we switched from a Freemian model to a fully paid service. Freemium was great in that it maximized weekly active users in the conversion funnel. All these users were able to work out for free, albeit without these paid features that would further customize their workout.

However, Freemium did offer some challenges. So imagine there's 100% of product value. And by splitting the value into these two tiers, free and paid, the free tier wasn't as great as it could be and the paid tier wasn't as valuable as it could be. So we saw like a lot of cross-grades happening between these two tiers. And even more, we knew that these free tier users did not have the most compelling personalization features, which were behind this paywall and that weakened the product hook for these people. Making the call to transition to fully paid service with a free trial was tough.

I mean, we were trading off all these active users in the conversion funnel for hopefully better retention and more revenue. And, you know, I'll note that consumer SaaS like really wasn't a big thing at that time beyond like Netflix and especially for this like utility product like ours. But yeah, as I mentioned after this switch, our conversion percent subscriber retention and revenue just started to really shoot upwards and take off. And, you know, I believe it's because 100% of that product value was experienced in that conversion funnel in the free trial. And then customers are paying for 100% of the app value. Also, when transitioning to this model, we had to pick a trial. And we tested two options. The first option was the typical time trial, you know, requires a credit card up front to try a workout.

And option two, we conceived, is an activity. trial that is composed of three free workouts, you know, no credit card required to start. And the goal of the activity trial was to maximize downloads trying and repeating that product hook. And there's also this kind of this tuning phase in FitBot over around three workouts until we have it dialed in. And you can notice here on the screen, I have a screenshot of our paywall in the activity trial. And we, you know, upsell the use. user right in that reward phase right after each workout. So we AB tested these two models and with a time trial, of course, we saw way fewer downloads try a workout. And the activity trial did end up

performing better in terms of revenue. Another bonus of the activity trial is for non-converters. This trial model leaves this warmed up cohort of people to retarget. And even more, we can offer more free workouts or more like poles of the product hook to these non-converters, which we do. You know, we've kind of effectively set the currency of FitBod to be the literal product hook and not some period of time that you can access it. You know, our core design and tech innovation is this positioning of like a single workout, right? It's your next best one. There's only one in there effectively. And the trial model aligns so neatly and coherently with the product, you know, in my opinion, it's a thing of beauty.

It's time for our crowds deal of the week. Right now, you can join our crowd's investment in LaunchPAD. According to the deal memo, LaunchPed, Autonomous, Manufacturing, Incorporating 3D Printing, to efficiently combine multiple materials into complex products. Sounds really revolutionary and very interesting. Most interesting to me, Launchpad is backed by Idealab, the startup incubator, co-founded by famed VC Bill Gross, who has been on this very podcast, is a great guy. super genius. Idealab, if you remember, has launched over 150 companies ranging from robotics to

clean tech. You can get in early on launchpad and other unique opportunities at our crowd.com slash twist. I recently wet my beak, place a small bet on a company called Zyabra, a company that uses AI to uncover disinformation and expose fake news on social media. That's an important mission. That's why I placed the bet. Speaking of wetting your beak, did you know that our crowd investors were able to get in on some of the best IPO. of 2019 and 2020, they benefited from companies IPOing like Beyond Meat and Lemonade. And some of Our Crowd's companies have been acquired by buyers, including Intel, Nike, Microsoft, Oracle, and Uber. With Our Crowd, accredited investors can invest directly and most importantly, easily in

startups early before they IPO or get bought. The investment professionals at Our Crowd have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Again, the R-Crow account is free. Just go to O-U-R-C-R-O-D.com slash twist. Okay, and then just a note about app onboarding. You know, onboarding is that initial flow to set up an account, and there's common advice out there to minimize the number of screens in onboarding so that the user can experience the product value as fast as possible.

You know, our goal with onboarding is to set the user up with the most personalized initial workout, and we do that by collecting information about them and build a profile. And so we've added steps to onboarding and not reduced to land that person in the most compelling action phase possible. Again, optimizing that product hook. So to summarize conversion, our business model, onboarding, and trial period all maximize the first impression of the product hook and sets the user up to specifically repeat it. Okay, moving on to retention. Three points here. The first one is that our product at hook gets better at solving the core need as it's used more.

You know, I think as you find in a lot of great consumer companies. And as I mentioned, there's this tuning phase in those first three workouts where we better understand your theoretical strength. But we also read in signals from secondary behavior to improve the experience. So, you know, any manual change to a workout, so just add, delete, replace is interpreted as user preference, as well as any adjustments to our rep or weight recommendation. The frequency of workouts logged will personalize our muscle recovery algorithm. And we do explicitly ask our customers the rate the difficulty of certain recommendations. Quick aside, there's also a data flywheel effect happening here. where our recommendations get better as we collect more fine-grained fitness data from all users.

Okay, next, our new features typically leverage the product hook. So a couple examples. The first with different workout formats. Our data science team is inventing and improving our capability formulas for different workout formats, strength, body weight, tiny intervals, mobility. Another winner feature is that you can talk. target individual muscle groups say to focus on or avoid a problematic area. And if a piece of equipment is taken, you can replace an exercise.

And the algorithm will offer up the next best alternatives that are customized for you. And again, these features are all solving that state of uncertainty for the customer. And as I showed before, we make these reward phases visible with personal records and weekly workout streaks. Okay. last point about retention is that we think it's critical to keep the product hook accessible and not crowded out by the complexity of other features. So people come to us for that single workout recommendation and then they try the 10 other value add features after that, not in the

other direction. And here's a different example with Uber. So what I have pictured here is the older Uber interface. And I thought it was such a great example of, an action that immediately solves that need to get somewhere. And so if you recall, you launched the app and you immediately see a map with a pin pointing out your location with a big button saying pick me up and the time to arrival. And I think it's just such a great experience to kind of relieve that state of pain of needing to get somewhere. And I have the kind of current app open and screenshot it up here. And, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily find that same relief.

And one could argue it's a bit of difficulty and complexity added to the interface. Okay, moving on to referrals. So our most successful referral features, as you might guess, leverage the product hook and also facilitate a real-world use case. A couple examples. The first one here, of course, you can share a workout in FitBod, and there are a few use cases. people like to share compelling workouts with friends or do a workout together or even like say

an influencer can share a workout with an audience. And a new download who downloaded FitBod via that link will see that workout when loaded. And we also offer a little magic here where the recipients exercises are the same, but the reps and weight are changed to be personalized to the recipient's capability, making that workout achievable. Another example is equipment profile. So a customer can specify the equipment at a gym and get a corresponding workout. These equipment profiles can be shared. And so say a FitBod user at Equinox Market Street has set up this profile, they can share this profile with, say, a new friend who joined the gym.

And when that person downloads FitBod via this link, they get a workout that's tailored to that gym equipment. So again, a great action phase for that new gym goer. And of course, our customers can offer a guest pass to a friend, offering them three free workouts to tune FitBod to you. And, you know, it's not a 30-day trial. It's specifically three poles of that product hook. And again, to reiterate, you know, the trial experience, the retention experience, the referral experience is all very tightly coupled together. And just a note about word of mouth, I believe we have strong word of mouth. 83% of our active subscribers in a recent survey said they have referred.

heard and 25% of our new subscribers say a friend did refer them. You know, word of mouth is hard to measure. So we we pop up this, how did you hear about a survey after conversion to help with that. All right. So my final kind of high level thought about product-led growth. So I think of startups as this iterated game of increasing sophistication. each department, product, marketing, hiring, legal is all the same in terms of an iterated game. And there's always that next iteration, which will hopefully get you to be more sophisticated and increase the value of the company.

Regarding products, I think putting in effort in those early iterations, kind of your best possible whack at it, we'll set the foundation for that next iteration. And so, you know, product-led growth, I believe, is enabled by this focus on quality. And in the early days, if you're able to do this, I believe it compounds. And I believe it did for us. Great. So with that, I mentioned that, you know, Near I all on his book was a big influence. David Sacks has also been talking about the product hook for like 10 years.

And I just included like two pieces of recent content. And he has been an inspiration. And yeah, so my name is Jess. Vena Sinkwe, you can reach me at Twitter at JVenti or shoot me an email at jessie at fitbod. We're hiring across the board. Thank you all. Are you still running your business on outdated software? You know the ones I'm talking about.

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specifically for those ready to graduate from all this outdated software. Head to netsuite.com slash twist for the special financing program right now. Once again, that's N-E-S-U-I-T-E dot com slash twist. All right, great job, Raul, great job, Jesse. Thanks for doing that. And it's great to be in business with both of you and watching your company's surge and delight users. This is just absolutely mind-blowing.

I'm very curious what you thought of each other's presentations. But before we get to that, I'll let you think about questions you might have for each other because that's one of the great things when you get founders together is they really inspire each other and just listening to the talk, just making me think about how products are designed and flow states was great. But I want to have something very pragmatic. I'm curious in each of your organizations, how do you find the right cadence for releasing new features?

Maybe Raul, you could start. Sure. Gosh, so much has been said about this. I've also written a fair amount about this. generally we run the superhuman product market fit engine, which I've actually talked about at Twist and at the launch live events previously. The TLDR in case you haven't come across this is

one can actually design an algorithm that will systematically increase a numerical measure of products market fit. And the fascinating thing about this algorithm is it actually outputs a roadmap that is essentially, all but guaranteed to do that. And it can even tell you what order in which to do things. The other lens that we also use is a lens from, I think, someone all three of us know rather well David Sachs, who is credited with this idea of big rocks, pebbles, and sand. So if you imagine your engineering or your EPD capacity in any given month or quarter, you can think of it as a jar.

And big rocks are the really meaty features. Maybe they even take longer than a quarter or the entire platforms, pebbles of the small stuff, and then sands of the tiny little bits. The question is, how do you fill the jar best? If you just start with a whole bunch of sand, you'll never fit in a rock. And similarly, if you put in a whole bunch of petals, then once again, it's inefficient. And so the, as you scale, and for reference, superhuman is now about 70 people. This is only just becoming a problem for us. As you scale, one of the challenges is, okay, well, we're no longer doing one thing at a time, how do we pick which two things or which three things to do simultaneously? Yeah.

And that's where you take a jar, you put in rocks, fit some pebbles around it, and then pack the rest of the space with sand. Got it. So you're filling up the jar that way. And for people who haven't seen this great talk, it's episode 993 of This Week in Startups. You know this week in Startups.com or just search for this week in startups, episode 993, and we'll take it to YouTube or to iTunes. Jesse, how do you figure out the cadence for releasing these?

Because there is sometimes CEOs or board members who want to see feature, feature, feature, things come out, they're sloppy. There also seems to be this challenge where as a user, you could only absorb so much information at a time and get used to it. It's one of the things I love about my Tesla is, you know, they'll send you a little update and it's like Spotify's in here. They send you another update. Okay, we added back.

And another update, oh, we updated self-driving. And it's not like there's 50 things at once. It kind of feels like they do two to four. And maybe half are refinements. Maybe that would be, you know, like polishing a rock, you know, self-driving a big rock. So maybe they polish it a little bit. And then a little, little, you know, pebbles and sand. So how do you think about that pressure to ship versus shipping right?

Sure. So certainly I think our customers, and most others, you know, do expect new features as, you know, part of their payments for your service. So they are expecting new features. You know, at FitBod, we were heavily influenced by this book called 40X, the four disciplines of execution. And in that book, they make a distinction between lag measures and lead measures. And often startup metrics are lagging, you know, retention, conversion percentage. It's all kind of describing what's happened in the past.

And so a lead measure, alternatively, is a actionable step that you or any employee can take that is a proxy for that lag measure that should theoretically influence it. So basically for these lead measures, we ask our, you know, I guess the company sets these high-level OKRs that are lagging and asked our executive team at each vertical and even individual employees to develop these lead measures for their work. And so I think on in terms of shipping new features, you know, a good lead measure would be performing, you know, five usability tests.

in a given month with beta testers. And, you know, just simply taking those actions would theoretically help us move those lag measures. So something you can do right now as opposed to something you can examine in the past. So instead of doing history, here's some action you can take some process that would maybe move those metrics forward. The example would be in my world as an investor. well, if I meet five more companies, you know, that might improve returns because one of them could turn into FitPod or into Superhuman, hopefully, either of those two great companies, which have done very well for us. Well, how do you think about weird features, things that are unexpected, things that are revolutionary, maybe challenging for users in the same way, you know, I'm Henry Ford. I might butcher the quote said, hey, if people would just want a faster horse if I asked them what they wanted or Steve Jobs saying like nobody would have ever asked for an iPad because they just didn't understand it. How do you think about weird, strange, super innovative, unexpected things for Aul?

You know, it's funny. I'm laughing because it's superhuman. It's almost literally the other way around. No one asked for faster email, but I believe they wanted it. Yes. ultimately I try and split our roadmap planning process into two different halves. There are some teams that lean way too much into vision and almost 100% of what they build is coming out to the founder's mind or the head of products, ideas or what may be or perhaps actually even worse, it might even be consensus vision, which is never the best. And then other teams are the exact opposite. They are almost entirely data-driven and just revolving around what their users may want. And I think for reasons which are probably obvious, neither of those extremes are good. And so what we try and do with superhuman is spend half our time doubling down on what we know our users love. And we run the products market potential to figure that out.

So in our case, it's things like speed and keyboard shortcuts and focus. and the other half of our time quite systematically addressing all the objections that people have. Now, there are some quarters where we may want to do a little bit more of one or the other, and that's a good debate to have at the leadership level. But I like to enter every quarter

with a roughly 50-50 split. How do you think about weird, strange, groundbreaking ideas and, you know, taking risk, Jesse, at FitBod? Sure. Well, I think we've developed a strong intuition around our specific customer, and I think it's important to kind of keep doubling down there. And there are, I think, many innovative ways that you can kind of continually serve that person. Yeah.

I mean, what I'm hearing from both of you is study your customers and do more of the same, which for certain categories of founders, can get bored with making the product 5% better every three weeks or, you know, 2% faster every month. But these things do compound and grow. On a leadership basis, Roel, how do you keep people from, how do you keep people staying focused as opposed to getting sort of ADD, ADHD, distracted? Or do you not have that problem? Yeah, don't really have that problem.

Don't hire ADHD. Product managers. You hire people with focus. Yeah. Yeah. We should probably not use the medical term. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, hire people who can focus. Yeah. And as a leader, I think the way that we do that is by making sure that there is a company goal. We have good numerical goals for the end of the year. We have a strong strategy for the end of the year. We have three strategic pillars that underlie that. I literally repeat it. it probably ad nor Zayem. I bet you any single employee of superhuman could just immediately

rattle off what our three core pillars are for the year. And I think all of this is important because it helps any person, whether they are a leader in the organization or somebody who's just joined, let's say, as an engineer, understand how their work connects to the thing that we're trying to drive. Amazing. Jesse, any thoughts on that in terms of people who are easily distracted by the shiny new object slash idea versus the laser-like focus it does take to, you know, compete in today's environment, which, let's face it, we're all in a competition for attention from these, you know, very valuable customers. Yeah, similar idea here where at FitBod and on the product team, you know, we do have

three core pillars that, you know, relate directly to the mission. It's a great backstop for testing ideas. Another great backstop are company values, which are often, you know, brought up in debates that are, you know, could be ambiguous or could have good points on either side. Yeah. To me, values and mission really are helpful here, you know, as we've grown, launched to, I think, 18 people now from when I invested in your companies. It was like me and Ashley and Jackie, three of us. You know, the mission has always been to support founders and inspire innovation. And, you know, through a podcast like this, it pretty much passes the lens, right?

We're supporting founders and hopefully inspiring them to innovate within their company's final question for you each. It's really hard to take something you worked on and take it out of a product, especially, you know, this sort of sunken, what are they called the, a sunken cost fallacy. You know, you spend three months on this. You fell in love with this idea. and nobody uses the feature. And now you've got code in there

and you've got a section of your help and then it breaks. Have you, you know, in years, I think you're both in the same four or five year range in terms of your product development, if I'm right, have you started to rip stuff out or deprecate?

And how do you handle that rule? The short answer is no, but it is about time. I actually just had this conversation with our product lead last week. My, I haven't tried this, so I don't know how well or not it would work. But I think what I'm going to try is every quarter, I'm just going to ask her, what is one thing that you think we should remove?

And you have to pick one thing. And, you know, I might say, actually, I'm just going to use founder Fiat and say, we're not going to remove that. But you should always have a triaged, totally ordered list of things to remove. See, this is a very good idea, I think, because people are going to be, they, they are not going to want to answer this. If you're the chef and you made that menu and you say, you know, take an out which appetize, take one appert, if you had to get rid of one appetizer, one entree, and one dessert, which one would it be? As opposed to what should we take off the menu? It's not as

difficult. It's easy to filibuster on that one. Jesse, you have any thoughts? Yeah, certainly adding new features adds complexity in terms of programming and code. Everything's very intertwined. And it's true also with the design with all these features. You know, a new design is going to have to accommodate and think about all these corner cases. And, you know, when you have enough scale, like, users start to get trapped in these corner cases and start to write in. You kind of get a little overwhelmed. One interesting exercise recently, our Android app started several years after the iOS app. And so, you know, with the Android, we have the kind of ability and hindsight to cherry pick the best features and actually also. And actually

also do the second iteration in Android. It's basically like you're remaking the movie. This is like the director's cut. You know, it's like the Zach Snyder cut of FitBod. And, oh, you're doing the same thing right now. I don't want to steal any thunder. But I'm assuming Android's going to come at some point. Yeah, sometime next year, as well as 0365.

So we're just like Jesse said, we're able to take all those learnings and do it better. All right. Listen, gentlemen, it's so great to be in business with you. And I'm so proud of the leadership. I see how to both of you and how these companies have grown. It's really been a privilege to be friends with you and in business with both of you, in the case where all of us, two companies together and an LP and your fund. So congratulations on all the great success.

And I hope you guys, have you ever met before? Actually, we overlapped at LinkedIn. You know, we never worked together, but, man, that was probably like 2012 or something. Yeah, I was there from March 2012 to about February 2014. team. If only we could talk about the secret LinkedIn project for reportive. We could never talk about it, Kenwin. It's buried in some NDA. At some points, the statute of limitations will catch in. I always felt like, wow, that was like the greatest idea. But it's so great to see you make superhuman just so super and FitBod. People are so addicted. And I really do appreciate you

taking time out. I know you're both prepared for this. It means a lot to me. for you to support the audience and to give back to the next generation of founders. And if you would like more information on the scaling series, it's very simple, go to this week in startups.com slash scale and you're going to see everything. And we're making really great notes for these. So we have podcast notes that you can go check out

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