Superhuman (with CEO Rahul Vohra)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cad7081c893eac9b

Right.
One take feels good.
Welcome to season four, episode ten.
the finale.
I've acquired.
the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs.
I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenpal. And we are your hosts.
Today we are covering superhuman.
The fastest email experience ever made.
This show was originally going to be a limited partner bonus show with superhuman CEO Rahul Vora on understanding his algorithmic approach to find product market fit.
But
We realized that superhuman was a perfect way to round out our trilogy on the modern productivity stack.
on the heels of our Zoom and Slack IPO episodes.
And we learned that the timing would be perfect with some big news that just dropped for superhuman. Indeed.
Well, they just raised their$33 million Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz on the heels of some very rapid growth, as you'll hear.
If you want to read more about the company after this episode, you can click the link in the show notes for the New York Times article that broke the news.
All right listeners.
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Now, without further ado,
Here is our conversation.
With superhuman CEO.
Rahu of our.
So welcome.
acquired L Ps to a very special episode of the L P show.
David and I are sitting here
in Superhuman World HQ on California Street in San Francisco. And uh we have with us an awesome guest, Raul Vora, CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to the show.
Absolutely. Thank you both for having me.
Yeah, you bet.
To give a little uh brief bio, so Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, the wildly popular, blazingly fast email app that is changing the way
a lot of us think about our relationship with our inbox. And before Superhuman, Raul was the CEO and co-founder of Reportive, selling that to LinkedIn in twenty twelve. So if you're noticing a pattern there, I think I definitely am. Raul is also an active angel investor and advisor to several startups, and we are lucky to have him with us today.
So
I already said welcome to the show, so I don't need to say that again, but welcome to the show. Thank you again
Are we right that this is your second office?
This technically is our fourth office. Fourth office, yes.
And you're about thirty people now here, it looks like? We are, yes.
It's uh nice and decked out in in superhumers.
It's like Yeah, we we do like our pinks and our purples and our blues.
Although we're sort of trying to keep the we just moved in vibe. We don't want to go too crazy here. Yeah.
It's awesome. The problem with early stage startup offices. Good problem to have. Yeah. Good problem to have. Let's talk for a minute before we get to superhuman, which we're going to spend most of the episode on. Uh can you tell us the quickly on reportive? How did how did you start it and and uh it was a very
Quick turnaround.
So reportive was basically started to satisfy
my own need, it was a a classic case of scratching my own itch.
I was at the University of Cambridge at the time, and
And I in fact had just dropped out of the PhD program. I'd started a PhD there in machine learning and computer vision. This was way before either of those things were cool or even feasible.
In any case, I dropped out'cause I realised that what I wanted to be was an entrepreneur.

but I didn't have an idea at the time that I wanted to pursue. So I network my way into the part of the university that helps staff and students create companies called Cambridge University Entrepreneurs.
And essentially what I would do is I would actually come to folks like yourself and

Angels, big tech companies.
And I would say hey.
Can I please have some money?
And they'd be like, Why?
And I'd say well.
I wanna give that money to staff and students at the University of Cambridge who are making companies. It's gonna be awesome, trust me.
And these folks will sort of rub their hands together and go, Cool.
How much equity do we get? And I would say
None whatsoever.
This is a charity that we're running here. Uh we're we're trying to help people learn how to build businesses. Um and by the way, we're gonna make some amazing businesses as well. And as we've covered multiple times on the show, Cambridge is actually a really great entrepreneurial hub. I mean, ARM came out of Cambridge, as did many other companies.
It's I mean it's crazy, uh um Cambridge Silicon Radio.
Let's see, who else? There was that company that
Qualcomm acquired.
Um I forgot the name. Well more. And more than companies too. Um my partner Riley at Wave was a grad student at Cambridge, uh as was our friend Nelson event, right? You know, plenty of Silicon Valley has come from.
Come from Cambridge in the UK. Yeah, that's that's a little bit of a should have given you money.
They did.
The point of the story is I was thrust into this
not for profit fundraising at a very young age.
Uh with no training in this field whatsoever.
And having grown up.
Learning how to program.
And being a a very competent programmer at the time, I was just wondering to myself, Well what tools
Would help me do this fundraising better.

And I imagined if in my email I could see what people look like.
where they were based, links to their recent tweets, links to their social profiles, then I would be able to authentically connect with that person and establish rapport
So much better.
Hence the idea behind reportive.
I couldn't find that product in the market, so in about six weeks I just sat down and built that first version.
And that was that was totally magical. I remember the first time I installed the uh the plugin was was it first for Gmail and then Chrome, or was it
Um what was the implementation of that?
It was
Uh in fact always a chrome
extension. Although before it was a Chrome extension, technically it was a Firefox extension. This was in two thousand and ten where people it's kind of hard to remember now, but people were still skeptical.
That chrome.
Yeah.
The taste makers at the time, we were all sitting in Firefox. So it started as a Firefox add on.
And later on it was a Chrome extension.
I do definitively remember that eye opening experience of you can type someone's email and and then like a second or two goes by and then boom, there's all this enrichment about them. And it's like now it's taken for granted because this idea has permeated into sort of other products throughout the years, but there's something really magical to it.
How did the
connection with LinkedIn happen. I mean we've also talked a bunch of on the show about the importance of email to LinkedIn and to LinkedIn's growth and onboarding. So I imagine you popped up on their radar screen pretty quickly. What was the relationship like?
We had a great relationship and ultimately it ended up in I guess a technical consummation they acquired us.
Initially, like many acquisitions, it started with a business development relationship.
And the way that that transpired was
We were
Consumers of an API at the time.
Provided by I don't know if you guys remember a company called Rackleaf.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Totally.
So Rap Leaf is one of those first companies
Uh no, so Rackleaf ended up
transmografying uh to some degree. They became LiveRamp. Uh and then they were acquired by Axiom
uh and have recently spun out as a large public company. I I think they're now worth
Um three billion dollars or more. So they're doing really well.
But back in the day, it was a relatively small startup called Rapleaf. Yet
Despite their small size.
They were the only company
And remember, this was back in two thousand and ten, to whom you could supply an email address.
And they would give you the full social context about that email. And today that's full contact, clear bit, those are the sort of providers that would be the comps today. Correct. Yeah. Now it's sort of and and there are others as well, and that now it's uh sort of a almost a commodity marketplace for that data. But back then it was this sort of
uh edgy, crazy new thing that you were able to do.
And so me being a opportunistic entrepreneur, I was like cool, let's take this API, let's package it up, which actually wasn't a crazy amount of work, and let's let's jam it into Gmail.
via the use of a browser extension.
So that's where the data came from. Now
You can imagine that LinkedIn were non too pleased about an upstart selling their data.
has always made it really hard to get mass quantities of data out of their API because they have a network effect. Indeed. And and we definitely didn't want or need mass quantities. And everything, by the way, that we were doing was for the benefit of LinkedIn's
hardest core members, which is ultimately why it was such a good relationship with them. Uh but they approached us at at one point and were like, hey, listen.
We really would prefer it if you were not buying our data off third parties. And I was like, cool. I would really prefer it if I had access to the API. Yeah. And so the only internal right now. We we both stated our preferences for a while until um
I think a few months later we realized that maybe an actual business development relationship would be the best thing.
Uh, which was truly remarkable because I think at that point
In fact, it never grew beyond us. There were only ever about twenty companies that had access to this
Secret LinkedIn API.
That's awesome. And that was that was probably right around
The time of their IPO, right?
This would have been
Halfway through twenty eleven. I don't recall exactly when they IPO'd, yeah. It would have been around that time.
It was either end of twenty eleven or like beginning of twenty twelve, I believe. Yeah. The chap I was dealing with is Adam Nash.
Uh w who went on to be the CO Well Thront and who's now in Dropbox. And he was super nice about it. So
I went in and he was like, Can you demo what you would do with a LinkedIn API?
And I showed him the workflows.

Is the copy helpful? Are we trying to deceive users? Clearly no. Are we stealing data? Absolutely not. Is it for the value of the LinkedIn member? Yes it is. He was like, Okay, great. You should be a partner.
I personally wanted to dive into that to sort of give context on how we got to where we are today. What I'd love to start to steer the conversation to is is the founding of superhuman. And David and I have previously talked a couple of times on on the LP show about things that companies do pre and post product market fit and definitions of it, but Rahol, you you at
superhuman have actually built metrics around it and and found sort of systematic and scientific ways to find product market fit. I'm teasing sort of our analysis section here later because I want folks to know that we're gonna dive into the the the founding of superhum right now, but where we got eventually is to a company that waited over two years to launch.
and really built something sort of amazing in a very sort of
both art and data driven way. And then we're gonna sort of dive in and tell that whole story. But talk to me about the initial idea for superhuman, where it came from, and how you convinced yourself that there's a business to be started selling a new email platform.
Right.
It
Isn't necessarily obvious from the outset. I do agree with that.
At LinkedIn I ran all of our email integrations. It was my responsibility, rather, to get
LinkedIn, LinkedIn profiles into other email clients. And so I became very familiar with how
professionals do that email. Uh and the TLDR is badly.
So I took a year off after I left, uh, and during that time I was looking for what I wanted to start next.
Due in part to the IPO and to the acquisition, I was very fortunate to be in a position where I didn't really have to work.
And so I focused on impact
You know, what was the biggest thing that I could possibly do?
And my mind kept going back
to a two thousand and twelve McKinsey study.
Well they showed that the average professional and there are one billion professionals in the world
The average professional spends three hours a day.
Reading
And writing, you know.
It's not hard at all to believe. A hundred percent, right? Like it's
Crazy. It's I mean it's it's just mind blowing. And and so during my year off, every single day I was doing the very simple math.
One billion professionals times three hours a day is three billion hours a day.
That go into email.
Yeah. And I couldn't find I couldn't think of anything bigger than that to do.
A market that big
And nobody have built a real business in it.
Correct. Because people were scared because Microsoft and Google between them had
systematically almost prevented startups entering this area. Exactly. And so it was during that time when I looked very closely at how people were feeling about Gmail
And
Bizarre, I saw this product get worse every single year.
I think because I was building on the Gmail.
I w it's not really a platform because I was building a Gmail browser extension. I I could
I had a front row seat to what was happening here.
So I saw the products becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine, still not working properly offline. And then on top of that, people were installing plugins.
Like ours, reported, but also Boomerang you'll remember, Mixmax, ClearBit, you name it, they had all sorts of streak and what have you.
Kind of guilt inducing.
For me because reportive was the first to to get to millions of users and I'm like
I am sorry, guys. I did not intend to be this story. I I know it's it it actually makes me sad. Well and like one of the you know rules I think we've talked about at various points on the show before
Like all rules in startups and vendor is meant to be broken, but you can't build a big company on the back of somebody else's platform. Like there are very, very few examples. And as long as Gmail and Microsoft are the platforms and you're just building plugins.
uh reported being the most successful among them, you're just gonna be a plug in.
I think that's true. Although I would like to see, for example, Gramelly be the exception to that rule. Uh I think at this point they're probably the highest valued
most successful plug in business and fingers crossed they actually
break the barrier and and and break out into their own thing. But you're right. Th there's a lot of existential crises around there. Yeah. Can I ask when you were thinking about what to start and you were fulven on that
Was your mind able to go to places that weren't email because you knew it like is it is it that you knew it so well that you felt that you
sort of were uniquely positioned and owed it to the world to fix that problem? Or was it more like
I tried to think of other stuff and email is where my head was.
So I did absolutely go to other ideas. I spent time in the summer of twenty fourteen researching any number of things I could do.
Uh and I got quite deep.
into what you would now call concierge health.
So an on demand doctor who might turn up and uh
sort you out with it with whatever ailment you might be feeling. Uh again, I I saw the potential for a very large amount of impact there.
But it's interesting that you
you mentioned this idea of owing it to the world. I very much
Felt like I did and still do.
I do believe that
There is
the perfect startup for every founder. The one
Where if you do it you have
An outsized
chance of success. The story arc is just perfect. And it's
It's kinda the start up where if you do
Everybody will cheer you on because they want you to succeed because it feels like it's you know, it should be destiny that this thing works. Yeah.
And that startup exists for most founders. And for me, I believe that it was superhuman. It was
The natural
Logical.
progressive evolution from reportive. It it is the thing that we always wanted to build anyway.
And was actually the solution to all the problems that we created whilst we were messing around at Reportive.
Well you just said it resonates so much'cause like
At the stage at
The seat stage that we invest in that way and the the PSL works out like
I have some version of that conversation like every week. You know like how so I'm just I'm just curious, w were there people who
helped you through that phase or was it like a journey you had to go on on yourself on your by yourself to realize like
Okay, like the destiny is superhuman.
There were definitely lots of people who helped me through that phase. We just mentioned Adam Nash earlier.
And I remember
When I left LinkedIn, he was CEO of Wellfront at that time.
And
I went to him and I said.
I have this idea.
For a new email experience. It's called Superhuman. Here's what it's gonna do. It's amazing. I'm gonna go and start it. He was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Are you gonna take any time off?
And I said, Yeah, I'm planning to take some time off. And he said, Well, how much time do you think you need? And I said, About three months, and he was like, Wrong. However much time you think you need
It's actually more like three times that. You probably need nine months off.
And in retrospect, he was completely right. I ended up taking about nine months off before
I felt.
comfortable settling into what was essentially the same business idea that I'd been working on for about four years.
Uh so during that time I I did explore lots of other ideas. I had a few mentors that I would
Constantly bounce.
Concepts of
But I just felt myself always coming back to this
This one idea because I
It's hard to explain. I I just I couldn't stay away from it. I think that's a good sign. When you can't stay away from an idea, it's it's a strong indication that you should probably go and do it.
Yeah, totally. No matter how bad the idea is. Resonates so much for you know, um certainly for me in Starting Wave, I assume for you and PSL hundred percent for
Kimberly and Glow like everything acquired, like yeah, totally. So cool to hear.
Okay, so superhuman.

So superhuman is the fastest email experience of all time.
Our users get through their inbox about twice as fast.
compared to in Gmail, they respond more quickly to the emails that matter, and many of them see inbox zero for the first time in years. So you can imagine that's pretty life changing. Tell me more useful. You've never said that before, I'm sure. I just wake up saying that every day.
Not to overly fanboy here, but um I can absolutely vouch for all of that. And it's uh especially in a day like today where I'm I'm down in San Francisco and traveling, literally feel like I have superpowers plowing through my email at the end of the day and um
You guys have built something amazing. So
Okay.
Uh during those uh either during the nine months or or at the end of it when you first started working on it and then into the

Th there are a couple of value props in there, but like w one of them is like fast, right? Did you land on that? Like how quick did you get to
That or or whatever like you in your mind is like the most specific value prop you needed to nail.
Speed was a value prop from very early on.
And I think
As I introspect this.
It came out of some of the frustrations developing reportive on Gmail.
Obviously Gmail at the time was my primary
Email.
Interface, I was the founder and CEO of a of that startup and I was doing a lot of email based work.
And so
I was
intimately familiar with how slow Gmail was and how slow it was getting and I had therefore this this hunch, this inkling that speed was going to be a very big deal.
But like with any hunch or inkling.
One does have to validate it.
So
In the first year of superhuman.
As we were primarily building, we threw up
A a landing page. It was a terrible landing page.
basic square space thing that took us all of two hours to put together.
And all you could do on this page was
Throw in your email address.
And when you threw in your email address, you got
An automatic email from me.
And in that email there were two questions.
Number one was what do you use for email today?
And number two.
was what were your pet peeves about it. And I had
Two hypotheses going in.
Hypothesis number one.
Was that for Gmail
People were upset.
about how slow it had got and how it wasn't working properly offline and how they had to use
Gmail plugins to make it do the things that they want it to do.
And then for third party email clients, people were upset about how buggy they were, how unstable they were, and how they don't sync properly.
All of which is still true today. So much head bobbing on this side of the time.
Oh boy. Yeah, I I feel for you.
So we had to validate that.
In that first year of superhuman I think that we had maybe
In the region of five thousand sign ups.
on that landing page, five thousand emails that went out, a thousand conversations that actually happened, therefore a thousand interviews that I did.
With early users.
Probably way more than most founders would actually do.
And
resoundingly those two hypotheses were confirmed.
People disliked.
Gmail.
for the speed and the lack of offline and the clutter and the plugins and people disliked third party
Email apps because of
The stability and the sink and the bugginess.
How did you drive traffic? Like how did you get top of funnel to get all of those responses on your landing page?
In the early days of a startup, I think
And this is what we did.
The best way to do it is to pick one or two events per year.
Where you can insert yourself into the cultural zeitgeist.
So for us, one such event was when Mailbox was being shut down.
And R I P
Yeah, sadness.
Right.
But it was the perfect narrative to say, Hey, I'm over here, come come look at our company.
And the trick when doing these is to think of
Interesting evergreen content.
So you guys are the perfect people to talk to about this, you know
More than anyone else, just how hard acquisitions are.
I currently have one of the most widely read articles on how to survive an acquisition and it was written in response to the mailbox shutdown. I think it's your only medium post, right?
It's probably my only medium post correct because uh I usually end up I mean the sort of second part to your question, I usually actually end up syndicating posts. You get far more reach that way.
Uh and so that post ended up on Medium, also was syndicated to qz.com. Uh and yes, it was about how do you survive an acquisition.
And we were able to insert it into the zeitgeist because relevant to our company some news event was happening.
And I think if we as founders think hard enough, there's probably one or two things a year where that's true.
And you only need one or two things a year. Now it's a pretty intense period, I think, to write that article probably took me about three days of not doing anything else.
And then another day of shopping it around. Mm-hmm.
So four days all in.
But those four days bought
I don't know, north of five thousand sign ups. And then those are the sign ups that you need to validate your initial idea. Yeah.
When you saw the news, the mailbox was being so like
How quickly did your mind go to
opportunity like I'm gonna I'm now gonna go take four days to do this. Like
Practically immediately.
Uh immediately I said to the team, this is something that we need to capitalize on and take advantage of. We have to make ourselves relevant.
We didn't actually do anything, and this is just often how startups go.
Uh until there was about a week to go. So the the last week was an extreme scramble.
I was like, remember that idea that we had a few months ago? Well like we need to do it right now.
Amazing. Yep. Startups.
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Before we get into kind of our discussion, I I I wanna
talk about a kind of a provocative question, uh uh have we reached the end of the era of the MVP or ship a crappy version? But before we get there
For the listeners who don't know, superhuman costs thirty dollars a month.
For an email client.
Like talk about a narrative violation. This is I think the last browser that tried to charge for you to use was like OmniWeb in, you know, the early two thousands. And I think
it would be absolute heresy today to to say, Oh, uh you know, it's it's not even a mail service. It's backed by Gmail. It's a it's an application through which to
interface with with Gmail, but boy is it great.
And
Oh my gosh, I pay thirty thirty dollars for it. How did you come to
a revenue model of we're just gonna ask people to pay. How did you pick a price point and how'd you validate it?
I think overall with pricing strategy you have to analyze what you're going up against.
And we were going up against
Free or nearly free. Mm-hmm.
Gmail and Microsoft are practically free if you are a consumer and if you're in the enterprise that's being paid
For you anyway, so you don't see or feel the cost.
The only way to win, and I think it's Reed Hoffman who popularized the following statement, is to be contrarian and right. I don't necessarily know how to be right, but I do know how to be contrarian.

And there's nothing more contrarian against a free product than to charge
As as much as seems reasonable, or maybe even more than seems reasonable. Yeah. But then to back it up with
The goods that actually make it worthwhile.
So before we tried to address pricing
We actually first addressed our positioning.
And we ran through a a series of questions. I'm I'm a car guy, so a lot of my analogy is to do with cars.
Uh and so for example we asked ourselves
Are we the Ford of Email?
No, not really.
Are we the Mercedes of Email?
Uh, not quite, but maybe we're getting there. Are we the Tesla of email? Okay, this is beginning to feel about right. And there's a classic
positioning game that you can do. It's a little bit of a Mad Libs exercise.
Well you say.
Four
A target customer.
Who has a
A need or an opportunity
My product.
is in this category.
And
This key benefit.
Unlike some other competitive product.
will create this primary differentiation from crossing the chasm.
Yeah, yeah. Uh I I believe Jeffrey Morgan Crossing the Chasm came up with that frame and then like uh it it's been used many times, but
Gotcha. So uh I'm I'm clearly not as widely read as you are. Well when you when you go to business school, you learn a lot of like uh useless trivia. So I actually found this piece of wisdom as as I find much of my wisdom uh off the first round review.
Uh uh journal, which which is incredible. And it was written by Ariel Jackson, who
who listeners may not know, but she was the product marketing manager at Google who launched Gmail. And I was like wow like okay, here we go. I have to meet her. Unfortunately we were a first round or are a first round investment and so that was very easy. And so I got to spend a lot of time with her working on our positioning.
Uh and I have it right here. So we came up with
For founders, CEOs, and managers.
of high growth technology companies.
Who feel like their work is mostly email.
Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made.
It's what Gmail could be if it were made today instead of twelve years ago.
Unlike Gmail.
Superhuman is meticulously crafted so that everything happens in a hundred milliseconds or less.
And we've since expanded beyond that very, very much. Very narrow. So great. That's what you have to do. You have to start with something that narrow. Is there a risk in starting with something that narrow that you're not going to be able to expand outside of it? Or
Um do you feel like if you can nail it for that core group, then you're always gonna be able to find more room around the edges.
Very much the latter. So I think we should come back to that point because I have a
Yeah, let's do it. I have a thing that I I should probably share with the listeners, but just to tie the positioning back into the pricing, because this is a very methodical exercise that we ran through. So step one is
understand the lay of the competitive environment. In our case we were going up against
uh two incumbents whose products are free or practically free.
Step two is come up with the positioning.
Like I just described.
And when you read our positioning, it's clear that superhuman is a premium tool for a premium market.
And step three
Is develop your pricing.
Now there are many, many ways to develop pricing, but one of the easiest ways
uh this will appeal to the business school guy I knew uh is the the Van Westendor pricing sensitivity meter. I I see head nods going on over here.
That sounds like a fancy name. Yeah. Uh it it's it's just some dude's name, I think.
Uh he was probably very smart, very clever, did a lot of pricing. Anyway, so he said
Ask your target users four questions.
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 superhum to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn't be very good? Number three,
At what price would you consider superhum to be starting to get expensive so that it isn't out of the question?
But you would have to give some thoughts 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
actually orient around the fourth question. The bargain for the money because there's some kind of network effect or a greenfield effect, or they're trying to take advantage of a first mover effect, or so on. So there's a land grab. They want to go get all the users, we may as well price as low as we can to to get'em all. Exactly. Which is why
most founders I know have the experience of a board meeting where your board members are like, Hey, you know what, maybe you should half the price. Maybe we should just like make this free and like give this away from the heavy T V C Wait, h have you done this to uh I've done
No charged. It's actually entirely the correct thing to do if you're building
in a new market or there is a land grab or a first mover advantage that you're trying to chase. However
Definitely not the case with email. Not the case with email, where there's uh a big incumbent and a uh the competitive products are great. Uh startups like superhuman should orient around the third question.
When does it feel expensive?
But you'd still buy it anyway. And that makes sense if you're building a premium product.
Now for us the median answer
To that third question.
was thirty dollars per month.
And that's how we picked the price. So we very methodically went through
Competitive landscape positioning.
And then pricing using this very simple pricing methodology. Mm-hmm. And were you using
People who had engaged with the
Survey that you were driving traffic to.
This was actually well before we started doing the service.
Uh so this is
When we were onboarding our first one hundred customers, uh I did all of these
Manually.
in the onboarding and these onboardings used to be much longer. They were one hours or one and a half hours.
I'd give them a demo of the product.
And then I'd look them in the eye.
And I'd be like, Hey.
This is the thing that you have to pay for.
Now they didn't know going into the demo. I mean they kind of knew, but like I was reminding them. It's like now son, I have some news for you.
And I would actually very sternly look them in the eye and say, Hey, this is the thing you have to pay for.
Can I ask you a few questions about how you feel on pricing? And they'd be like yes, and then I just I'd go into it and I'd I'd write down the numbers. Uh and after we'd done a hundred of these, the the answers were pretty clear.
That's awesome. That's amazing. And you haven't changed the pricing since?
Well actually the initial pricing was twenty nine dollars.
Per user per month.
We didn't think too hard about that. That was just like well, you know it
seems to be the right price at roughly the right order of magnitude. Uh and then I had a few conversations with
Some pricing experts who pointed out that if we are truly owning the premium experience in our category, then ending your price with a nine probably isn't the best thing to do. So we pretty quickly rounded it up to thirty dollars a month. Interesting.
That's fascinating. I never thought about that before. Especially'cause like Apple does, you know, twelve ninety nine for your iPhone or
You know, or is it I think it's twelve ninety nine. I know Walmart undercuts at like twelve ninety five. Um that's super interesting psychology. Wow. Y you said y you wanted to circle back on the
Positioning. Oh yeah. So let's dive in now to this this analysis section. So for listeners, I want to set the stage on sort of a timeline for this whole thing because
I do think it's it's kind of crazy how long it waited before seeing the light of day.
When did you break ground on designing superhuman? When was the first line of code? And when did you start rolling out to these first hundred users?
I first started sketching out the concept and the business model for superhuman in February of twenty fourteen. That's five years ago now. Wow.
Or more, rather.
And then it wasn't until nearly a year later, in January of twenty fifteen, when I started designing the product.
That's when I first put pen to paper.
Uh I wrote the landing page before I did anything else. All of the copy that you see on superhuman.com
is actually copy that was written
in January of twenty fifteen.
Uh and I created
Hundreds of detailed wireframes.
And the first line of code was not written until May the fourth in twenty fifteen. And just to get nerdy, like w uh how are you doing the wireframes? Is this in Sketch? Are you literally sketching it out? Is it uh what's your preferred methodology here?
It depends on how
Clearly I can see it in my head. Uh it will often start with a extremely sketchy sketch on paper. Uh and then once I can begin to see it, uh my my tool of choice is still balsamic, I'm kinda old school about this.
I can use it extremely fast, way faster than I am in Sketch. So that's what I did it in.
Mm.
It's your superhum of uh
of m prototyping technologies. Pretty much. Okay, so started sketching for a year, then did a year of design after that.
In the week after I left LinkedIn.
In in my
Gusto to get something done. I actually went out and pitched a bunch of VCs that same week. Before Adam Nash's advice to Yeah he he was like, Yo, yo, chill out, bro.
Which was great advice.
And so I had term sheets at that point. I could have raised money, but he suggested, as did many others who knew me, they were like, listen, you're really burnt out. Maybe you don't see it yet.
Uh, and I did go through this roller coaster of emotions in the following months as
as I was processing the burnout from from the last four years.
So let's say that there was like a few weeks in early twenty fourteen.
And then most of twenty fourteen was time of break time, yeah.
And then I really got going again around Q4 of twenty fourteen.
Uh and my advice to any listener who's going through the same thing or who shortly will be
Is don't
try and just jump straight into it. You you can't go from being a professional party animal like I was, uh into okay, I'm now gonna do twelve hour days again. It just doesn't work.
I went from not working to four hours a day, to five hours a day, to six hours a day, and I I slowly built that muscle memory back up.
And the first few things were things like let's buy superhuman.com, let's investigate trademarks.
Uh let's raise some seed capital. Were you pulling together a team at this point too?
I was trying to, but uh you know th that that is a a longer term thing. And and there are things you can do even when you
You don't have a team.
What I did in Q four was I bought superhuman dot com and I raised about
Uh seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
of seed capital. Mm-hmm. And then in in January I did the wireframes. Then in February uh I engaged with a design agency to make those wireframes into really beautiful
Mock ups, high fidelity mock ups. I think that's a little bit of a contrarian thing to bring in a design agency sort of that early in a in a startup rather than hiring a designer or
Um doing it in house.
It is.
Super expensive compared to hiring a designer. I I think I spent forty five thousand dollars.
on turning these wireframes into
High fidelity mock ups.
I do speaking of frameworks, I do have a framework on this which explains why I think it was the rational thing to do, uh in my case, if you want to hear that.
I think the the fundamental
job of a founder.
is to create momentum.
And in my mind I like to imagine this gigantic flywheel and it's made up of the most dense material in the universe.
And the job is to get this thing moving. Now most founders the first time
Uh are probably technical.
And the way that you get this flywheel moving.
is you make a thing, you launch a thing, and hopefully people like your thing and it starts moving by sheer force of user numbers. This was certainly how Reportive worked. It took me about six weeks
Yeah.
Tens of thousands of users.
in twenty four hours and it just kept on growing dramatically thereafter. Yeah.
Which is cool. So the flywheel just started moving by itself and at that point it's like okay, can I now hold on to this thing? Yeah.

When you are a second time founder and you're coming back at it again.
You get to do things in weird
strange orders, but it's still moving the flywheel. So for example,
The money that initial seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars that was raised in twenty fourteen for superhuman
was raised on the basis of primarily one slide.
Where I took a screenshot of Gmail.
And I just
red line out everything I didn't like.
I said I'm gonna make this pretty and fast.
And you'll believe me.
Because of what I did previously. Right.
There is no execution risk here.
Uh I know how to build a thing, I know how to hire the team, I know how to market the thing, this is what I'm gonna do. Yep.

And that seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars starts this flywheel.
So now I'm like cool.
A single founder, I've got this money in the bank.
I'm not paying myself, obviously, I don't need to do that. Or what else can I do to get this flywheel?
Well that domain name looks pretty juicy. Let's see if I can make that happen.
And and the guy who sold it to me w wasn't the most pleasant of individuals.
Uh never are. Never fun. He took a perverse
sense of enjoyment uh out of sending me abusive and insulting emails.
Uh but fortunately I didn't have to deal with this myself. I hired an expert broker to go after me. Oh man. And we ended up getting a very good deal.
But that's another example of how you can get this flywheel moving. Now you might think, as many people said at the time
Whoa, so
You just raise seven hundred and fifty K and you're gonna spend what was like, I don't know, twenty percent of it or something.
On buying a domain name? Yeah, right. That's crazy.
I don't know how you would feel about that as a seed investor. Yeah, I would be like uh we need to have a conversation. How about the dot co? So uh I think I did buy the dot co and then I let it lapse. So someone else probably has it now. In any case.
I thought about it long and hard.
And I realize that
In the grand scheme of things, this is gonna turn out to be no money whatsoever. Most importantly, this is a
Signal.
To the world that this flywheel is moving.
The the people I'm really signaling to at this point are potential co founders, number one, and potential investors, number two. Yeah.
And also it comes back to the market, too. Like if you were trying to
Create a new market.
It would be wholly irrelevant, right? But
You're trying to compete with established entrenched competitors and back to your positioning, like you are the you know, the Tesla, not the uh what was uh uh
Tesla before it was Tesla. What was the name of the company? Yeah, the E the uh E V one. Uh E V one. Yep, not the E V one. Which of course Raul's staring at us like we're crazy. Of course you wouldn't know because it wasn't the Tesla. Right, right, right. Before the Roadst the Roadster before the road before Elon Musk joined.
Tesla. Yeah. It was the E V one. Yeah, that is a pretty terrible name. Actually it was the T Zero. The T Zero, that's because it was like it was my mathematician, so it's like at times zero. That's kinda cool. Although it just reminds me of
Of a terminator.
Yeah, so in any case the flywheel, uh the the domain was another piece.
Uh then
The landing page, like a really
well crafted landing page where every single sentence had been iterated hundreds of times over. I'm I'm not even exaggerating, by the way. I spent
four to six weeks writing the copy for the landing page, and then another six weeks doing the wireframes, and then fifty thousand dollars.
to the design agency.
To create these beautiful designs.
These are all examples of how a single founder who
Once upon a time was technical. I I wouldn't claim to be particularly technical nowadays.
Can create.
I I did drop it. And then I instantly forgot everything that exactly.
Yeah.
It it's an example of how a single human being
can start the flywheel spinning and that helps both
With recruiting co founders as well as with raising investment.
Yeah.
All right listeners.
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I'm gonna catch us up on the timeline. So it's summer twenty seventeen. So we started in February twenty fifteen. So we're two and a half years in. It's a fourteen person team, still haven't shipped.
This is frickin' heresy for startups that are supposed to, you know, be embarrassed of your your first version. So Reid Hoffman, there's this famous sort of Reed Hoffman mindset. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. So could superhuman have done this and sort of put your
maybe your worst foot forward to get some signal and then sort of iterated, iterated, iterated, or did it have to be done in this way where you and a team went away for two and a half years and sort of created the magic uh internally?
I think it had to be done this way.
I noticed with almost every single other
email app, every single other productivity app, but they they went through the following motion. They would raise some seed money.
They would make a thing.
It wouldn't be a very good thing. Not because the teams weren't talented or well intentioned. Most people here are. But you're competing with Microsoft and Google.
Th that and and the domain is so inherently complex. Yep.
It it is a very, very difficult thing to build an email client that people actually want to use.
And it does take
More than two years.
I challenge anybody to do that faster.
I don't think it's possible. And the same is true, by the way, of a web browser or of a database or of a compiler.
Any sufficiently hard productivity tool will take many, many years to build.
Um but back to the Reed Hoffman quote, you know, I'm still embarrassed today.
By many aspects of superhuman, and I probably always will be.
So I think Reed is actually still correct. The nuance here, though, and I think this is the question that you might be asking.
Is how applicable is the advice
to superhuman. And I think his advice applies most

are creating new markets and especially
to startups that have network effects.
So for startups that are creating new markets, the alternative is
usually a terrible experience. I mean you guys will talk about this on Friday.
But remember trying to hail a cab in San Francisco before Uber existed.
Right. Well, you could have used Cabulus or uh taxi magic, but yes. Yes, as I had said. I remember standing in the rain, which of course made everything worse on the embarcadero for like thirty to forty minutes. Waiting for a taxi to arrive and they keep on whizzing by you. It was the worst. But exactly to your point, there was a moment in time
After
after iOS was open to third party developers, where the time had come and there were there were probably seven companies, legit companies that all got started and like then it was like you need to move you need to ship yesterday, you need to move as soon as as fast as possible, lock up all the supply and all the demand.
Exactly, because at that moment in time
Anything you release.
Even if, as Reed s says, it's embarrassing to you is going to be worth it for a critical mass of user. And that gives you a small advantage.
And when you have a network effect as all of these companies did, that small advantage.
is going to start compounding on itself. Mm-hmm.
Great for that kind of company. Yeah. But for a startup like Superhuman In an existing market. Exactly, where the alternative product is Gmail.
And without an explicit network effect built into it right now.
The bar is very different.
Reportive had a network effect.
Or at least you were building on other people's network effects. Maybe would be a more accurate way to put it. Were you intentional about
At least this first, you know, act of superhuman not.
Being a network effect business.
I don't actually think that reports have had a network effect. We we may be using the term in in a different way. Yeah. Uh so by a network effect I mean
Where the value of the products becomes more valuable the more people are using it. Different for example. You were building on the fact that like LinkedIn had that.
Uh and then you were using their data.
Yes.
I think it's always
Great if you can build in a network effect.
We believe that with superhum there are underlying network effects that will become apparent over time. And that'll the meantime.
We don't need one and the reason why we don't need one.
Is that we can solve
the marketing and the retention challenges in a different way. Mm-hmm.
Which we've been able to buy.
Making the products.
Very desirable.
Very viral.
And very sticky once you actually start using it. Yeah.

So you mentioned competing in an existing market
where the bar is already very high versus a land grab opportunity as a framework for
Can you sort of take your time and be very intentional and methodical and and frankly spend a good amount of money developing your first version of your product? Are there other sort of vectors on which to sort of decide whether you need to launch yesterday or you can take your time other than other than that market timing?
Yes, so I have another framework for you.
Excellent. Dave would be very excited. Yeah. I can see as we speak.
Uh I'm not going to claim credit for this one because it's not mine, but it is
Oh boy, it's right. So this one came to me from Shishir Mahotra.
Uh he is the founder and CEO of Coda.
Uh another great productivity tool.
And we were talking about our respective attitudes to launch.
And you know, sort of as as you've been alluding to, superhuman has at this point sort of famously held back from a public launch.
So too has Coda. And he was able to put into words what what I'd been
Feeling.
For a very long time.
And he said
A start up should only launch.
For one of three reasons.
Number one.
Either you need more users or customers to sell to.
Number two.
You need more capital to spend.
Or number three.
You need more candidates to hire.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
If you
Benchmarking well across all three. If you're attracting all the users you need to.
If you have
All the capital you could spend.
And if you have no trouble
Hiring. Yeah.
Then why would you launch? It's a relatively expensive, distracting
One time event.
That's gonna bring an influx of people into your product.
They'll find
A myriad of bugs because of course we're all startups, we don't have perfect products.
And you won't be able to fix them on a responsible time frame. So you'll just end up with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of disappointed people.
And I was like, Yes, that's exactly the problem. What he said. True. This is the problem that happens in productivity.
And so
Uh we just decided that that we wouldn't and you know, who knows, maybe we never will launch. Yeah, you're pre launched today, right?
I mean at at at this point it's it's like we we have a lot of users, we have a lot of revenue, we're growing very quickly.
Um are we pre launch? Who knows? I I I think we're just doing it in a very different fashion. Yeah.
And and the way that we actually model the company.
is is from my favorite Paul Graham essay, uh Startup Equals Growth. Yeah, you know the one. This is such a good essay, probably his best.

He basically says
The most important thing a startup needs to do is to grow.
And
Especially if you're a technology startup, you probably like to optimize things.
Uh and you like to optimize things on a short term basis.
So let's optimise short term growth rate.
Pick a weekly growth rate that you like. It might be two percent, it might be three percent, it might be four percent per week.
And just do it.
Do it every single week.
And you will be shocked.
Uh how fast you grow every month and every year. Mm-hmm.
And we've been running superhuman that way for the last two years.
Every single week.
We just pick a number of users that we will onboard the following week.
And that's how we grow. You have the like
Finest control knobs on that of
Any company I've ever heard of. Well, I mean you have a a a wait list of a hundred and eighty thousand people who are dying to use the product and can't, so it you just
choose every week how many of those people we're gonna let in. Is that about capture it?
That's more or less correct. Uh although I I would say that
The wait list is a relatively small
uh funnel into the product. The the fastest way in and one of the reasons why superhuman is so exciting is that each week seventy percent of our new users
are virally referred within products from the previous week.
Fascinating. So do you put a governor on
how many referrals can start the next week, or if you're referred is it
We will uh grant you in you know access no matter what.
There's still a qualification process. We we're pretty clear on
Who superhuman is good for and who it's not going to be good for. I got qualified out six months ago because I'm a primary iPad user.
Well there you go. This was before we had iPad shortcuts and now we do. I'm very excited to be now qualified back in. It's gonna be good.
So I'm gonna blatantly steal from your essay on first round review, which if you're listening to this and you're finding this interesting, you are just gonna be beside yourself reading this awesome piece that Rahu wrote on the the first round review. But you basically at Superhuman developed a way to measure product market fit and a four step process to get there.
Can you sort of talk about what that process is?
Sure. The context for this, or the motivation, was
We had to spend
A number of years.
to get the product to the point where people would actually
Pay for it.
That's not something that most teams want to go through. Most teams want to build a thing, launch the thing, make money, go, go, go. But it was very obvious to me.
as a member of our target market that we didn't have product market fit.
I didn't need to do the big splashy launch in order to convince myself to my own level of satisfaction.
that our product wasn't good enough. It was just obvious. And it was obvious because I couldn't personally switch away from Gmail to superhuman and if I couldn't, then why would anybody else?
Do you feel like you were uniquely equipped to be able to hold yourself to that bar'cause you were a second time founder?
Yes.
But only because founders were a core target market for who we were going after.
Because I had experienced the pain that we were trying to solve when I was running my last company.
I very clearly could see, oh, we haven't solved that pain. Not yet. And I could feel ourselves getting closer every single day. Mm-hmm.
But I had to find a way to explain this to the team. Mm-hmm.
You know, these uh
Hyper ambitious, super intelligent engineers and designers.
And people of all disciplines who'd poured their hearts and souls into the product. Right.
They needed a way to understand
Not only that we weren't ready.
But how not ready we were, or how close we were and the precise steps that we could do in order to get there.
So I went out and about I
read everything I could find and I started searching for definitions of product market fit.
And there's quite a few out there. So for example
Paul Graham would say it's when you made something people want.
I think that's a pretty good definition. Mm-hmm.
But I wanted something more actionable.
Uh and I think Sam Altman had a slightly different take.
Which is
It's when users love your product so much that they spontaneously tell other people to start using it without you even asking them to do that.
And that's a different take on it. So PG's take is around desire.
Sam's take is around
Uh distribution.
Or sort of net promotion.
But perhaps the best
definition I found or the most interesting at least.
Uh was
Mark Andreessen's and he had the most vivid definition. So he would say, and I I have it right here because
It's quite lengthy and detailed.
Number one, you can always feel it when product's market fit is not happening.
Customers aren't quite getting value, users are not growing quite that fast, word of mouth is not spreading, press reviews are kind of blah, and the sales cycle.
Takes too damn long.
But
You can always feel it.
When product market fit.
is happening. Customers are buying as fast as you can add servers, you're hiring sales and support as fast as you can
Reporters are constantly calling you about your hot new thing. Money is piling up in your checking account. Investors are staking out your house, and you start winning
Company of the year awards from Harvard Business School. My favorite is the part about staking out the house. Does actually happen.
Can confirm. Wild.
So
I can tell just by your reaction, whilst this
Is a vivid
an accurate definition, there is a challenge to using this in running the business.
Which is that it is a post-hoc definition. By the time investors are staking out your house or blowing up your phone.
You probably already have
Your last concern is achieving product market fit at that point. You're no longer interested in quantifying it.
Okay.
So I remember staring at this definition through tears in the summer of twenty seventeen, thinking, Oh no Oh boy, we don't have this and we are so, so far away from having this. But how do I explain that?
Did you have a board at this point?
Did we have a board at this point? David, why is that relevant? You know, when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.
You obviously had investors. Was there a group of people to whom you felt
beholden to
Explain this current state of the business too.

That's a good question. So uh as I cast my mind back, the answer is yes, of course, we did have a board. Uh we never did any board meetings, which is which is why I had to think about it. So our board uh formally at the time was uh Bill Trenchard from first round.
Uh who's been incredible to us.
Uh and informally I would speak basically every two or three days.
Uh with Ed Sim from both sides.
Uh there are New York based funds that does
really great enterprise investments. Uh and they they led your seed round, right? They yes, they actually wrote the first check in. Yeah. That first seven fifty was from them. Got it. And they wanted to write a million dollar check. I was like, no. I'll take two fifty at this cap.
Uh and then I went to went away and made some progress and I came back like I'll have another two fifty now, but it's at a hot more expensive price. And then the next two fifty was at an even more expensive. Hashtag second time founder.
Yeah. J ju just play the game, play it nicely, yeah. And everyone will will enjoy themselves.
Um
So yes, we did have a board.
But it wasn't really a thing that I was turning to them.
for help on So the Tears three guys were like yourself. Like not not just like less so like
yourself and like oh shoot now I gotta go
Explain to everybody where we are. Oh oh sure, yeah. Like explaining it to the board was the very least of my concerns. Yeah. Yeah. Because you know, th these are fo Ed I made money for in the past at Reporter of
Bill.
is a long-term investor. He just fundamentally believes in what we're doing. All of our other investors fundamentally believe in what we're doing.
If I went to them and I said, Hey, this is the direction I think we should go, they would always be like, Good, we believe in you. This this is why we invested in you.
It was
The team.
who are working on this day in, day out. I wanted to give them
A a path.
An an engine that could work.
And so
I found
A piece
of work by Sean Ellis uh who's famous for coining the term growth diagram. Exactly.

Um and and he he ran early growth at Dropbox, Logme, Eventbrite.
Uh and during
His days of king
Doing growth consultancy to start ups.
He found
A benchmarked.
Predictive way.
To measure product market fit. Mm-hmm.
You simply ask your users.
How would you feel?
If you could no longer use the product.
And you let them answer.
Either
I would be very disappointed.
I would be somewhat disappointed.
Or I would be not disappointed.
And you measure the percentage.
That's say very disappointed.
And what he found.
Is that
The companies
That struggled to grow.
almost always had less than forty percent very disappointed. And the companies that grew the most easily
Almost always had
More than forty percent.
Very disappointed.
If more than forty percent of your users would be very disappointed without your product, guess what?
You have to do it.
Initial product market fit.
Exactly. It's it's a stroke of genius. I'm I'm not gonna claim to invest it. He did it's
more predictive of success than net promoter score.
Uh it's benchmarked across
Hundreds of venture backed companies.
Uh, it's a really phenomenal metric.
And you know the most exciting thing about this metric
And the thing that we did at Superhuman
Is that you can use it to build
Your very own product market fit engine.
Hm you can use it to come up with a systematic
Methodology.
To numerically optimise product market fit.
Which sounds crazy, but it's true. You can actually build this thing.
Fascinating. So that is the measuring stick by which you can determine if the changes that you're making in the product
are bringing you closer to product market fit.
What then is the other side of that equation to actually govern how you should change the product to hopefully
get you closer when you measure that. Like how do you how do you figure out what the inputs need to be in your product changes?
So we have a a whole very lengthy article about this. I'll I'll give you the quick we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah.
But I would very much recommend reading the article'cause there's a ton of subtlety around how to do this correctly.
Uh so
It begins fundamentally with surveying your users.
For every user who comes into your product
And who then experiences the core benefits of your product.
That usually means
They've
Done the thing whatever it might be two or three times.
They've probably been there for about two weeks.
You send them a survey.
And in that survey.
You ask.
A number of questions. You ask four questions.
Uh, number one, how would you feel if you could no longer use
I'll I'll take superhum as an example. How would you feel if you can no longer use superhuman?
With the answers that I outlined.
Number two, what type of people
do you think would most benefit from superhuman?
Number three, what is the main benefit that you get from superhuman and number four
How can we improve superhuman for you?
Free text or or
Uh so the first one is a tri-state, like I described, and the other three yes, free state. Free text. And type form is is what we use. It's
Probably the easiest way to get this done.
Nice keyboard shortcuts. Great keyboard. That's actually why we chose it. That's like that's our primary at at Pioneer Square Labs. That's like all we use for validation now.
I wish everything had keyboard chalkers to just make
Everybody's lives so much better and faster.

How do you then use those four questions to guide you toward what features should we build or change?
So we then have a four step engine to systematically
Generate your roadmap.
And increased product market fit.
And the
Four steps that you go through.
Uh
Number one segment.
Number two, analyze.
Number three build.
And number four, repeat.
And it just occurs to me that this creates a nice acronym, which is SABER. Sabre. Segment, analyze, build and repeat.
So you got a saber.
Your users. That sounds quite violent, actually. This is getting cons so it's interesting because like you're an artisan. Like you are someone who I mean, you s you spent th three, four weeks writing copy on a landing page. Like you're an artisan.
And yet
What you're describing here
It's an algorithm to start a product market fit startup.
It sort of begs the question like
If you have
The right
sort of team who are capable of doing all of these functions, writing that survey, analyzing the results, you know, doing Saber. Will every startup idea end up at an end state of product market fit if you apply the correct algorithm to it?
I think that this greatly increases your chances.
But the sad and realistic answer to your question, I think, is obviously no. Um why? Well, let me give you three big reasons why. Number one, many startups will run out of money before they finish this process. Uh number two, many co founding teams will have disagreements and fall apart.
And number three, many teams will just get tired and go, You know what?
I can't do this anymore. And and those are the three fundamental reasons that
People will fail.
Even
Given the
the Saber Products Market Fit engine. Yeah, and it could be too, if you h start with a kernel of I an idea that is sufficiently bad for a sufficiently incorrect market, it could just take too long to ever iterate your way toward whatever the that
the ultimate correct end state is. Yes. I do have some rules of thumb around that. So
The first step of this
engine is to segment.
And uh we if you like, we can get into the deta you might do that. But if after that first segmentation
Step.
your very disappointed score, your product market fit score.
Is in the region.

My considered advice to you would be to suggest not doing that product. And I mean like in all you know, realistically we all have only so many years on this earth. Take the capital you've raised.
Take
The team that you have and do a brainstorm and try something else and
I'm sure your board will be supportive if you have the data to show that it's not really working. Yeah. But if you're in the fifteen to twenty five percent mark, uh, which is where we were after that original segmentation.
then I do believe you can actually iterate your way to success. Mm-hmm and it's
The challenge then becomes
Raise enough money and keep morale high enough for long enough so that you actually have the time to make it work.
I'm curious if you'd say this has to be the case. Uh, but in your case certainly is the case. You have this
engine.
is a mixing metaphors. The engine is the like transmission of the startup. But the true engine the startup is like your passion. Like this is your destiny, right? Like you were
through that nine month process, like there was no other company that you would start. And I would imagine that is
You know, and
many ways given you the
Perseverance, the drive.
to look at your fifteen to twenty per s twenty five percent, you know, score on that on that rubric and say
Okay, we're gonna make that better, you know, versus like
I think so.
I suspect I may
Just be
On the far end of persistence compared to most people.
We had a very interesting debate as a
um as an executive team over the last year about redefining our company values and
This idea of persistence.
kept coming up over and over again. I was like, you know what, got maybe we should have persistence as a value. Now ultimately it didn't end up becoming a company value, but
Um I do believe that even if it's not a company value, every single founder
Needs to exhibit
unnatural levels of persistence.
I think again, to to quote Paul Graham.
He talks about grimly determined founders.
And how
during the days when he was operating Y C he would see
These people come out of college and they're like they're super nice and bubbly.
And then like a year or two later they're just these sort of
grimly persistent people who will stop at nothing and
They've got the battle scars from running through brick walls over and over and over again.
And I do genuinely believe that if you're
A co founder, if you're a founder, especially if you're a CEO.
This is your job.
You have to run through the brick walls over and over and over and over again and
When it's time that
Other people might

Or backing out, you have to be the person to say nope.
We're gonna keep on going.
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. Yeah. Also resonates.
Okay. So we're gonna loop back to a previous question that that we sort of talked about to to end this this segment here. I'm gonna read it from my uh my Google Doc here, which is written much more eloquently than I phrased it earlier. So when you're building for a narrow segment of users who love you at the start.
How do you think about building for them?
without overfitting the product to them such that you can't serve the broader market later.
So I'm going to read the answer from my equivalently formatted Google Doc. It's not even my answer, but this is this is just something I believe so strongly because it seems so self evidently true to me. Uh and again it's gonna be a Paul Graham quotes. Oh uh is it about local maxima? It is, yes. Yes.
I'm gonna quote two different of his essays.
DJ Rahul.

So number one.
It's gonna be from startup ideas.
um where he talks about how you find startup ideas and and some good startup ideas incidentally and tangentially to this answer. One of them is just build Gmail but fast.
And and that was public on the web for about ten years before we started superhuman. So the idea was out there. That was one of P D's startup ideas? I'm pretty sure it's in the SA startup ideas. Wow.
He says, uh, and I'm gonna try and quote this from memory, he's like, Just build Gmail but fast. It's become so slow. There are sufficiently many people like me that and he has some insane price that would spend a thousand dollars a month on Gmail because it's literally all we do.
Yeah.
I mean, he should have started superhuman.
He wasn't grimly determined. He was not grimly determined.

Okay, so Startup Ideas. He says
Okay.
When a startup launches
There have to be at least some users who really need what they're making.
Not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently.
Usually this initial group of users is small
For the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built.
with the amount of effort that a startup usually puts into version one
It would probably already exist.
Which means
You have to compromise on one dimension. You can either build something that a large number of people want a small amount or
Or something that a small number of people want a large amount.
Choose the latter.
Not all ideas of that type are good start up ideas but
But nearly all good start up ideas.
Are of that type.
In other words.
What he's saying is don't worry too much.
about building for a narrow segment of users and therefore overfitting.
It's precisely what he's advising that you do.
And then you might say
Well
Doesn't that give you the problem?
of being boxed into a particular niche or a particular segment of the market.
And then to quote from
A different essay, one that we've already referenced, Startup Equals Growth.
He says,
In theory,
This sort of hill climbing could get a startup into trouble.
They could end up on a local maximum.
But in practice that never happens.
The maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated.
Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.
And to this I'll give two
Very classic examples.
Uh one of course is Airbnb, mm-hmm, where the idea of couch surfing is
is extremely adjacent to the idea of houses being hotels. Mm-hmm.
Uh and the other
Very timely is Uber.
Where the idea
of a luxury car that comes to your house with a chauffeur is adjacent to peer to peer driving. It's amazing. I mean literally every single one of the, you know, quote unquote A plus companies that we're gonna cover on this season of the IPOs the
A B B Pinterest.
Lift Hoover Slack stripe.
fits this definition. Uh like the the literature. Even striped. I mean I'm thinking about stripe now too, like the original market was startups that need to get their merch accounts faster and and implement them quickly. And it turns out everybody that needs better merchant accounts. So it's yeah, well
Put words in your mouth for email, like
Yeah.
the business people and executives who spend three hours a day on email.
They need like they like really desperately care about faster email, but everybody cares about really faster email, right? Like
Absolutely. And the good thing for us, it turns out that
Even that particular market
will lead to a multi billion dollar company. And so there is this potential to create a
enduring
uh franchise a company that could last for
Over a hundred years. Mm-hmm.
All right, well, we very much look forward to covering the superhuman IPO on the the main show next. I think the next acronym gonna be
Um, I don't know, well who who else is in your cohort that's gonna be all IPOing around the same time.
I'd love to see.
All the great productivity companies right now, Notion, Airtable. We're in a total renaissance. We are. We really are.
It's so.
Well, before we break, Raho, where can our
L Ps find you on the internet, and two, what is the best way for them to get access to superhuman.
Okay, so I am on Twitter at Raulvora, that's my name, R A H U L V O H R A
And of course.
at email.
at Rahul at superhuman dot com
And to get access by far
The best way is to get
A referral from an existing user.
Uh I would just recommend going to search.twitter.com and typing in superhuman and there is a high volume of tweets.
Uh there's a lot of very helpful superhum users out there. You can see which ones the most helpful users are just by who's jumping in on which threads giving out invites.
If you don't feel inclined to do that level of work, then you can sign up on the website, but that will be a fair bit slower.
All right.
What are you hiring for? I'm sure there are yeah lots of listeners who would love to come work here.
Well you mentioned that uh just before we started, your your primary audience is actually product managers.
uh right now and it turns out that I'm hiring for our very first product manager. Whoa. So this is a super exciting role. Uh you get to work with me for better or for worse.
Uh all day, every day.
on building the fastest email experience of all time, and I'm really thrilled to be hiring for this role.
uh I've carried product in the company for a number of years.
And it's a really fantastic opportunity for the right person. Terrible boss, but like great. I don't know. I I I think I rate okay. I think I rate okay. But yes, really great product. Really great product. Uh and in addition to that, engineers of all types, uh lead back end engineer, front end engineer.
Uh, if you're a phenomenal developer, we'd really love to speak with you.
Awesome. Well we rarely uh
Do L P shows I think with
early stage companies that are still early stage in quotes here, but I think we've we very intentionally and selectively reached out. And I think we think incredibly highly of superhuman. So LPs, um if you do feel so inclined that that that may be interesting for you, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Thank you. Awesome.
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Alright, well listeners.
If you aren't subscribed and you like what you hear, you totally should.
And also, if you were way too excited about this episode earlier to pause...
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Literally the perfect time.
you should totally click the link in the show notes.
Um or you should go to acquired.fm slash survey.
you should take the survey, and you could win a pair of second generation AirPods or one of ten acquired LP subscriptions.
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We will see you next time. Thank you, everyone. Later, David.