How to Build a World Class Brand by Solving Everyday Problems

All right, everyone. Super excited to bring you Raul Vora, who is the founder and CEO at Superhuman, which is, well, we'll call it one of the best email tools that I've ever used before, because it just makes people a lot more productive. It's a lot faster and it's drummed up a lot of interest, a lot of fanfare in the last couple of years or so. Raul, super excited to have you here. How's it going?

Going great. Thank you for having me. It's on the first part. So initially it was for customer discovery. In fact, initially, I did all of those calls. They were actually in-person meetings. They took about 2 hours each. I would turn up, I would give a demo of Superhuman, I would do a pricing sensitivity analysis in the call itself, run people through what we call a Van Westendorp pricing sensitivity questionnaire. We would then do the onboarding. I would then insist on watching them do their email for north of half an hour. And the reason why I did that is inevitably people would run into bugs. And we just have this philosophy inside of Supium that it kind of doesn't make sense for multiple people to report the same bug over and over again. And so in those early days, when I'd pick up those 10 bugs, I would take them back to the team and insist that we fix them before we onboard next week's cohort of users. Because otherwise, what's the point? Next week's users are going to report the same bugs, and we won't learn about the level of bugs that lies beyond or underneath. And that is truly the secret to how you build a high-quality product. Now, when we were doing that, what we noticed is the secret— and I learned this at LinkedIn— behind any successful mass-market consumer internet company is it's always word of mouth all the way. If you don't have word of mouth, there's no amount of paid acquisition that will save you.

Also, in the back of my mind too, I'm like, okay, if you want one of the premier venture firms to pay attention, I think I'm also looking at, okay, why did they put in so much money into Superhuman? Obviously, it's a very large total addressable market. I think there's a lot of things to consider, like if you want to have one of these amazing people on your board, I just named one thing, so your TAM, but what are some other things you think might get people's attention if they wanted to swing for the fences, go build something big?

Yeah, good question. So There are a number of things, and it's really hard to generalize because every venture fund is a little bit different in terms of what it is that they look for. With Andreessen Horowitz, my sense is that they were looking for, and are looking for, obviously a really big TAM. They're not looking for just billion-dollar outcomes, they're looking for multi-billion-dollar outcomes. And I think one of the mistakes that people make— excuse me, that founders make is— Raising your seed round is easy. These days, you don't even have to have a product, just a good track record, and the conception of a good product is enough to raise a good seed round. Similarly, raising your Series A is fairly easy. You just— and for folks on audio, I'm using air quotes— you just have to tell a billion-dollar story. Where folks trying to raise a Series B or a Series C often trip up is, especially if you want to raise from a tier 1 fund like Andreessen Horowitz, A billion-dollar story isn't actually big enough. You should be telling a multi-billion-dollar story. You should be telling a compelling step-by-step playbook for how the company gets to a $10 billion-plus outcome. And that's what we did for Superhuman. We have a very natural path to being a $10 billion-plus story, which starts off in email, but then it becomes a general productivity vision. And that is the narrative that our Series B pitch deck and, you know, that's the narrative we're running today. That is the vision of the company. So that plus a technical founder who's in the weeds in the product, who— we're talking about myself, of course— who loves product, who loves marketing, who loves design, and who has a track record in the space that I've built a product that achieved almost a cult-like status with Reportive. previously. We have an exceptional team, a very technically talented team that knows how to build hard things that other people can't build. And one of the most important, we have a product that people love. Superhuman, it sort of creates this visceral, to use your word, reaction from our customers, which is— I mean, it just borders— it starts on delight and it borders on love. And if That question that I've now tremendously popularized, which is, how would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman? I mean, the answer is most people are like, I would be very disappointed if you took this away. It really gets to it.

It's got to be like 90% for you guys, right?

It's really high. So the threshold that I advise people to aim for is 40% plus. And actually, if it's 90% plus, I would go so far as to say you're probably not expanding your market fast enough. That is too high. If it's 90% plus, you should be testing new personas. You should be growing more aggressively. In a sense, get that number down because you're probably leaving growth on the table.

That's great. Well, you know, the other thing I wanted to talk about too, because you've— you came from a gaming background, you talked about game design. So you can see there's a lot of gamification. Like, I, I just remember when I was using Superhuman, there's a lot of like, oh, I feel good. There's like these dopamine hits going on, right? So So talk to us about what game design means, and maybe if you can share some resources around how people can actually improve at it, that'd be helpful.

Sure. Okay, so this is a deep topic. We could talk about this for hours. I'll give you the quick summary. My big thesis on this is that most people, when they start to get to grips with this, unless they have a background in game design— and I happened to work professionally as a game designer before— I became a founder, is that they end up practicing gamification— points, levels, trophies, badges. Guess what? Gamification does not work. Folks who've been in technology for 10 years plus will remember that it was a big deal about 10 years ago, and now barely anyone talks about it. Why? Because it kind of fizzled out. It turns out to be a gimmick. Now, the thing that does work is actually true game design. And at Superhuman, we build software like it's a game. If you think about a game, nobody needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. No one's saying, you know, that this is what a game has to be. What a game inspires are feelings of fun and joy and happiness and delight. And so that's the way that we build software at Superhuman. How do we work towards those emotions?

Anyway, Rahul, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

Of course, I'm open on email, rahul@superhuman.com, and my DMs on Twitter are also open. That's Rahul Vohra, my first name, my last name. Uh, once again, if folks want to skip the line and get onto Superhuman, just send me a note and we'll take care of that right away. Perfect.

Rahul, thanks so much for doing this.

All right, take care, buddy.

Bye.