How I Built $825M Email Revolution Called Superhuman | Rahul Vohra

Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman, shares insights on creating products that exceed user expectations, emphasizing the importance of setting high standards and continuous improvement. He recounts his journey from founding Reportive to selling it to LinkedIn and later establishing Superhuman, an AI-enhanced email service. Rahul highlights the significance of focusing on user feedback, particularly from those who would be very disappointed without the product, to achieve product-market fit. He outlines strategies for growth, including thought leadership, PR, and virality, and stresses the need for a deliberate approach to onboarding and maintaining user satisfaction.

• The secret to making a great product is to set a higher bar than even your users.
• Success is achieved not when users stop complaining, but when the product surpasses the creator's own high standards.
• An exceptional product will naturally attract attention and be shared among users.

"The secret to making a great product that users love and share with their friends is to have a higher bar than even your users."

• Emphasizes the importance of setting high standards in product development.

"It means work until people stop complaining, they stop giving you feedback, but also work until you pass your own bar."

• Highlights the dual goals of addressing user feedback and exceeding personal expectations.

"You'll create a thing that is so striking, that is so compelling, that is so worthy of attention that people can't help but tell each other about."

• The ultimate goal is to create a product that is inherently shareable due to its exceptional quality.

• Rahul, the founder and CEO of Superhuman, has a background in computer science and entrepreneurship.
• He previously founded Reportive, which was sold to LinkedIn.
• His experience includes networking and raising funds for startups.

"I was born in England where I grew up. Fortunately, I was able to start programming at the young age of 8 years old."

• Early exposure to programming set the foundation for his career.

"I then went to University in Cambridge where I studied computer science and then I started a PhD."

• Academic background in computer science.

"I then dropped out of that PhD, which I suppose is cliche, and then I started my last company Reportive."

• Dropped out to pursue entrepreneurial ventures.

"Reportive was the first Gmail extension to scale to millions of users. A few years later, I then sold that company to LinkedIn."

• Significant achievement with Reportive, leading to its acquisition by LinkedIn.

• Networking played a crucial role in Rahul's early career.
• He was involved in raising funds from angels, venture capital funds, and large technology companies.
• This experience was pivotal in his entrepreneurial journey.

"I networked my way into the part of the University of Cambridge that helps staff and students create companies."

• Networking helped him gain access to resources and opportunities.

"We would go to Angels, Venture Capital funds, large technology companies, and raise money from them so we could grant it to startups."

• Actively involved in fundraising efforts.

• In the early stages of Reportive, Rahul faced challenges in optimizing for user growth versus revenue growth.
• He learned the importance of being clear and intentional about business goals.
• Switching focus between user growth and revenue led to mediocre results in both areas.

"He asked us what our roadmap was, and I described the various things we were doing to grow users, the ways that we were planning to monetize, the features that we would sell."

• Initial lack of clarity in business goals.

"Be very clear what you're optimizing for. Be clear whether it's user growth or whether it's revenue growth."

• Advice from James Lindenbaum emphasized the need for clear goals.

"I would vacillate and flip every few months from optimizing for revenue and flop back to optimizing for user growth."

• Switching focus led to suboptimal results.

"It's almost always better to do one of the things excellently than both of the things mediocrely."

• Importance of focusing on one goal to achieve excellence.

• Superhuman was created to address the significant problem of email inefficiency.
• The development of the MVP took about 18 months.
• The initial focus was on creating a blazingly fast email client.

"When coming up with the idea for Superhuman, I wanted to find the biggest possible problem, and email is a way bigger problem than most people realize."

• Identifying a significant problem to solve.

"It took about 18 months to build our MVP product, about 18 months to get to that first paying customer."

• Timeline for developing the MVP and acquiring the first customer.

"The MVP was, let's say, a blazingly fast version of Gmail."

• Initial focus on speed as a key differentiator.

• Superhuman operates in a market dominated by incumbents like Gmail and Outlook.
• The product needed to offer something special beyond just basic functionality.
• Speed was the initial unique selling proposition.

"The email client industry is actually pretty interesting. Unlike many industries, it's mostly dominated by incumbents."

• Description of the market landscape.

"So you can't just come out with an email client that kind of works. It also has to do something really very special."

• Necessity of offering unique value.

"In the early days for us, that was speed. It was blazingly, shockingly fast."

• Speed as the key differentiator in the early stages.

"Imagine your Tesla."

• Metaphor to illustrate the desired user experience.

• Analogy of High-Performance Cars: The experience of using Superhuman is compared to driving a high-performance car, emphasizing the superiority and the reluctance to revert to ordinary alternatives.
• First User Experience: The initial user experience with Superhuman was marked by immediate positive feedback, indicating the product's speed and efficiency.

"What it feels like to smash that pedal to the metal and to feel this car accelerate to 60 mph in whatever it is 3 seconds or less, are you ever going to go back to having a regular car? And of course, they would say absolutely not. And I said, well, that's how it feels using Superhuman for the first time."

• Explanation: This quote highlights the transformative and exhilarating experience of using Superhuman, likening it to the thrill of driving a high-performance car.

"Our first onboarding was with Austin P. Smith, he's the founder of a calendar company called Hoe, and 2 minutes into the onboarding he had this big grin on his face and I remember thinking gosh I wonder what he's feeling so I asked him and he said to me Rahul this is really fast and at that point I knew we had something."

• Explanation: The quote underscores the immediate positive reaction from an early user, which validated the product's speed and potential success.

• Minimally Valuable Product: Emphasizes the importance of creating a product that offers significant value, especially when competing against established incumbents.
• Customer-Centric Updates: The approach involved updating the product based on customer feedback to address their needs and enhance satisfaction.

"If you're in an industry where the other products are genuinely startups, perhaps a minimally viable product is fine, but if you're in a startup where you're going up against incumbents and this is a strategy that actually has all kinds of hidden advantages, then you need a minimally valuable product."

• Explanation: This quote explains the necessity of a product that provides substantial value in competitive markets, rather than just being minimally viable.

"We updated our product as quickly as possible to reflect the needs of our customers. We deliberately onboarded only four to five new customers every week so that we had the bandwidth to fix the issues that they found."

• Explanation: The quote highlights the deliberate and paced onboarding process to ensure quality and address issues effectively.

• Measured Onboarding: The strategy of onboarding a limited number of customers weekly to manage feedback and improve the product.
• Avoiding Net Detractors: The importance of addressing bugs promptly to prevent customer churn and negative word-of-mouth.

"Imagine you've created a new email app or a new calendar app and then you launch, well you'll quickly and somewhat easily get tens of thousands of customers because the demand for these new applications is so high, but guess what, these tens of thousands of customers will quickly report thousands of bugs and your company will soon be overwhelmed."

• Explanation: This quote illustrates the potential pitfalls of rapid customer acquisition without adequate support and bug fixing.

"It's much much better to do what we did systematically and deliberately on board people on a measured pace every week, focus on fixing whatever problems they find and on making them exceptionally happy."

• Explanation: Emphasizes the benefits of a systematic and measured onboarding process to ensure customer satisfaction and long-term success.

• High Standards: Maintaining a higher standard than even the users to ensure exceptional product quality.
• Personalized Onboarding: The practice of one-to-one VIP onboarding to learn user behavior, identify bugs, and improve the product.

"The secret to making a great product that users love and share with their friends is to have a higher bar than even your users."

• Explanation: This quote stresses the importance of setting high standards to create a product that exceeds user expectations.

"In the early days of Superhuman, we were famous for doing one-to-one concierge VIP onboarding for all of our new customers. In fact, I did the first many hundreds of those myself."

• Explanation: Highlights the commitment to personalized onboarding to ensure a deep understanding of user needs and product improvement.

• Extended Development Phase: The prolonged period of development before launching to ensure product-market fit.
• Importance of Product-Market Fit: The critical role of achieving product-market fit for a successful launch and growth.

"Our journey to product-market fit was long but it ended up with something rather special. We started in the summer of 2015 like any other software company by writing code. In the summer of 2016, we were still writing code and in the summer of 2017 we were still writing code."

• Explanation: This quote reflects the extended development phase and the dedication to achieving product-market fit before launching.

"No matter how deeply and how intensely I felt this pressure, I couldn't just say that to the team. I couldn't just say that I did not believe that we had product-market fit, that a launch would go very badly. I needed a plan."

• Explanation: Emphasizes the importance of a strategic approach to achieving product-market fit rather than succumbing to pressure to launch prematurely.

• Predictive Metric: The use of a specific metric to gauge product-market fit based on user feedback.
• Superhuman Product-Market Fit Engine: The development of a systematic approach to achieving and measuring product-market fit.

"Simply ask your users how would you feel if you could no longer use the product and measure the percent that answer very disappointed. You're going to give them three options: very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, and not disappointed. Measure the percent that pick very disappointed."

• Explanation: This quote explains the metric used to measure product-market fit, which is based on users' potential disappointment if the product were no longer available.

"If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, you have early product-market fit. This metric is much more objective than a feeling, it predicts success better than net promoter score."

• Explanation: Highlights the threshold for product-market fit and the objectivity of this metric compared to other measures like net promoter score.

"We've written this up as the Superhuman product-market fit engine and anyone can use this. I've worked with hundreds of companies that have successfully used this."

• Explanation: Indicates that the methodology used by Superhuman to achieve product-market fit is documented and available for other companies to utilize.

• The product-market fit score is a metric used to determine how well a product meets the needs of its market.
• It serves two main purposes: indicating how close or far a product is from achieving product-market fit and helping to make progress toward achieving it.
• The ultimate goal is to increase the percentage of users who would be very disappointed without the product.

"The product-market fit score metric is most useful for two things: number one, letting you know how far or close you are to product-market fit and are you making progress, and number two, helping you actually get there."

• The score helps gauge progress and guides actions to achieve product-market fit.

• Changing the market is often easier and quicker than changing the product.
• By redefining the target market, companies can significantly improve their product-market fit score.

"You can actually change your market before you change your product, and that is significantly easier. In fact, you can do it in minutes."

• Changing the market can lead to quick improvements in product-market fit.

• Segment users based on their feedback to identify who loves the product.
• Analyze survey results focusing on job titles, roles, companies, or industries of users who would be very disappointed without the product.
• Discard feedback from users who are somewhat or not disappointed.

"You take all the users who've answered this survey, and you see who are the kind of people who love the product. To do that, you go through the survey results and look at the job titles or the roles or the companies or the industries of everyone who said they'd be very disappointed without your product."

• Focus on users who are very disappointed to refine the target market.

• After changing the market, the next step is to evolve the product to increase the product-market fit score.
• Focus on increasing the segment of users who would be very disappointed without the product.

"Now the question becomes, we've evolved the market, but how do we evolve our product to get to 40% and beyond? We can boil this question down to how do we increase the segment of users who would be very disappointed without our product."

• The goal is to refine the product to increase the number of very disappointed users.

• Avoid focusing on feedback from not disappointed users as they are unlikely to fall in love with the product even if their suggestions are implemented.
• Similarly, avoid overly rotating around very disappointed users as they already love the product.

"It can be very tempting to focus on the feedback from what the not disappointed users are saying, but this is a grave mistake because even if you build everything that they're asking for, they are so far away from falling in love with your product."

• Not disappointed users' feedback is less valuable as they are unlikely to become very disappointed users.

"It is also a mistake to overly rotate around what the very disappointed users are saying. They already love your product; if you build more of the things they're asking for, they're not going to fall in love with your product more."

• Very disappointed users' feedback should not be the sole focus.

• Use the main benefit of the product, as identified by very disappointed users, to segment somewhat disappointed users.
• This helps identify somewhat disappointed users who value the main benefit but have minor issues holding them back.

"You take the survey results of the people who love your products, those who would be very disappointed without it, and you analyze their answers to the question: what is the main benefit of this product for you?"

• Identifying the main benefit helps in segmenting somewhat disappointed users effectively.

• Ignore feedback from somewhat disappointed users for whom the main benefit does not resonate.
• Focus on somewhat disappointed users who value the main benefit and address their minor issues.

"Group number one will be the group for whom the main benefit does not resonate. Politely ignore their feedback because the main benefit doesn't resonate, so even if you built everything that they asked for, they still wouldn't fall in love with your product."

• Disregard feedback from users who do not value the main benefit.

"This is the somewhat disappointed users for whom the main benefit is the same as the very disappointed users. For these folks, they're fully aligned, but there is something very small that is holding them back from falling in love with your product."

• Focus on users who value the main benefit but have minor issues.

• Following the algorithm can lead to significant improvements in the product-market fit score.
• Avoid two common mistakes: overly focusing on very disappointed users or not disappointed users.

"By changing the market, we got from a very disappointed score, a product-market fit score of 20% to 32%, and then by following this algorithm, we rapidly increased the product-market fit score thereafter."

• The algorithm can significantly improve the product-market fit score.

"Do not overly rotate around what your very disappointed users want because although it's very important, if you only build the things they're asking for, you won't increase the set of people, the percentage of people who love your product."

• Avoid focusing solely on very disappointed users as it won't expand the user base.

• Focus on both highly satisfied users and somewhat disappointed users.
• Maintain what makes the product special while addressing the needs of less satisfied users.
• Example areas for improvement: mobile app, search functionality, handling attachments, integrations with CRMs, read receipts.

"It's really important to go into any planning cycle planning to spend half your time on what the very disappointed users love... and the other half of your time focused on what's holding that special subset of somewhat disappointed users behind."

• Balancing improvements for both satisfied and less satisfied users is crucial for maintaining and growing the product's appeal.

• Initial survey identified key areas of improvement.
• Addressing these areas converted somewhat satisfied users into enthusiastic promoters.
• Significant improvement in Product Market Fit (PMF) score over three quarters.

"When we initially did that products Market fit survey it was things like we didn't have a mobile app, we didn't have good enough search, we didn't properly handle attachments, we didn't have Integrations with CRMs, read receipts and so on."

• Identifying and addressing specific areas of improvement can significantly enhance user satisfaction and PMF.

"After we got from 20% to 32% by changing the market a quarter later we got to 48% a quarter after that we got to 56% a quarter after that we got to 60%."

• Systematic improvements can lead to substantial increases in PMF score over time.

• Two essential steps for success: create a desirable product and make people aware of their need for it.
• Importance of awareness and problem agitation.

"Make something people want and number two make people realize they want it."

• Success requires both a valuable product and effective communication of its value.

"You have to make people aware of your product... make people realize that the problem that they have is severe enough that they ought to pay for it."

• Awareness and problem recognition are critical for converting potential users into paying customers.

• Problem agitation: making users aware of the severity of their problem.
• Three-pronged approach: PR, thought leadership, and virality.

"We took a three-pronged approach to this: the first was injecting ourselves into the new cycle, so PR, the second was thought leadership, and the third was virality."

• A multi-faceted approach is effective in creating awareness and demand.

• Attach to relevant industry stories to gain visibility.
• Example: Writing an article on startup acquisition after Dropbox shut down Mailbox.

"Your industry will have something interesting going on at least one or two things a year and your job is to figure out how you can attach yourself to that story."

• Leveraging industry news can significantly boost visibility and engagement.

"I wrote my piece on how to avoid an acquisition failing and how to make it very successful... and that article alone drove tens of thousands of signups on our website."

• Thought leadership articles can drive substantial user engagement and signups.

• Establish authority by sharing valuable insights and frameworks.
• Example: Widely shared article on Product Market Fit.

"That piece on first round review is now the most widely shared and read entrepreneurship article I think of all time."

• Thought leadership content can become essential reading and significantly boost brand credibility.

• Utilize viral mechanisms to drive traffic and user growth.
• Example: Viral signature and invitation system.

"More than 30% of our site traffic still comes from the sent via superhuman viral signature and more than 30% of our new users still comes from our invitations and referrals."

• Viral features can be a powerful driver of continuous growth and user acquisition.

• Balancing user feedback and continuous innovation is key.
• Systematic improvements can significantly enhance PMF.
• Success hinges on creating valuable products and making users aware of their need for them.
• A multi-faceted approach to awareness, including PR, thought leadership, and virality, is essential for growth.