Price Your SaaS Products Like A PRO! | Expert Tips From Superhuman's Founding Team (Ep# 53)

Gaurav, thank you so much for being on our podcast. You are a founder, you're a growth leader, you're a startup growth advisor. You studied econ in college, which I'm interested to learn about. You cut your teeth as a consultant for Oliver Wyman. You then joined Superhuman as part of the founding team. I have been a Superhuman customer since I think 2018, so I'm really familiar with what you all have built and think it's incredible. Um, but you wore a bunch of hats at the company. You were head of growth, you were head of product and marketing, you were head of analytics, and you were head of growth again. You're wrapping up what I think is almost 10 years at the company, and you're moving into advising. You're going to be focused on B2B SaaS companies, PLG B2C companies. We can talk about that. But tell us the journey in your own words and how we got to now. What were the big steps along the way?

Yeah, mate, I think you covered all the big steps. No, first of all, thanks for having me on the pod. Super excited to be here. Appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, I think my career steps at a meta level have been one of following Following what brings me joy, first and foremost. Where do I have innate first principles enjoyment from the work that I'm doing? I think when you enjoy the work you're doing, you do just 10x better work. And so every single step has been kind of leaning in that direction. As you mentioned, I cut my teeth in management consulting and the thing I enjoyed about that was, A, the people I was working with are absolutely brilliant. Every single person who I had the pleasure of working alongside was incredible. And B, it was just so much diversity and breadth of learning. You learn an incredible amount in such a short space of time, way more so than you would at any one particular job because you're constantly shuffling every 3 to 6 months in different companies. I wanted to lean more into tech. I wanted to lean more into building a product that was actually used and touched by real end users. A lot of the products we built in consulting were used by the businesses we advised, right? But there was only 50 to 100 end users. I wanted to build something much bigger than that. And so Superhuman really scratched that itch for me. Now, when I'm thinking about advising and what my next steps look like, again, there's that diversity and that breath, but there's also meeting and connecting with just like literally hundreds and hundreds of amazing people making the world a better place. And being able to help those people on their journey brings me a lot of innate joy. I also am like, you know, I'm a nerd. I like to spot patterns. I like to spot trends. I also like connecting people to other people. And so it feels a little bit like a video game. There's like all these different side quests, opportunities, things you can do to kind of just add value to the community around you. I'm like Link running around Kakariko Village, completing little, you know, postman quests and just helping everyone. And it's just a lot of fun. So will I be doing this next step forever? And like, absolutely not. Like, you know, these things last a certain time and then you lean into something else. But I'm really excited about the next steps.

Very cool. Go back to college. You studied econ and, you know, I think econ is fascinating, but econ also has the reputation of abysmal science. So what led you to econ?

Love the abysmal science. Yeah. Well, in the UK, well, first of all, there's this somewhat archaic system of what university degree you're quote unquote allowed to study based on your A-levels. So my A-levels were maths, further maths, econ, and biology. And so I pretty much was picking between those three in terms of a university course. You can branch out into other things like computer science and maybe engineering. And frankly, if I could go back, I may have done computer science. It might have been more hands-on useful. But I was like, you know what, option value. Option value is really useful. Econ is a kind of degree that just gives you the chance to do basically anything afterwards. And then secondly, diversity. In my degree, I studied everything from geopolitics and the history of how countries have come to be, very kind of right-brain creative essays, reading literature, all the way through to game theory, which I absolutely love in terms of strategy and how people think. And then matrix multiplication, just straight up math. I'm code switching. I normally would say maths. With LLMs and how deep learning works and stuff, it's pretty cool that I had the university experience to truly understand some of the underlying concepts that power this tech wave that we're experiencing right now. I can kind of watch the YouTube video that deeply explains how these things work. And I'm like, yeah, I get that. I can kind of picture it or visualize it at a at a more fundamental level. I think that diversity is really valuable. And so I don't regret or rue any of the sort of time that I spent doing it. I'd say my one complaint is that I do think courses that give you more of a hands-on skill set are very useful. So CS for programming is very useful. I picked up those skills on the job anyway. So whatever.

To what extent, when you were in school and maybe even just in a couple of years afterward, were you aware, like looking back on yourself at that time, were you aware of the moment in time you were living through from a technology perspective?

I was fairly aware, is what I would say. No, I mean, less flippantly, I actually interned at a really cool company when I was a freshman. Not many people do freshman internships, like maybe 1% of folks bother in their first year. Interned at a company called Redgate Software, which makes productivity tools for database engineers. This was like back in the late 2000s. And back then, you know, the idea of a data scientist didn't exist. Analytics engineers, data engineers didn't exist. It was all like DBAs, right? Database admins. But anyway, they needed productivity tooling. You know, I have two databases that need to constantly be in sync. How do I sync those databases? Like we're talking the schemas and also the contents. I'm writing a lot of SQL. How do I write that SQL 10 times faster? So Redgate made all those tools. And at least for me, the eye-opener was when I, when I interned at Redgate and I, and I did like a basically what would be now known as like an internal PM, like a tooling PM or a RevOps, sales ops kind of a role. Like I built internal tools to make the sales team make more money, which was incredible because I just like got to, you know, span 3 or 4 or 5 different disciplines really fast and learn SQL. Because it's sort of being exposed to the world of SQL and data that really opened my eyes. Like from that internship onwards, I was like constantly evaluating the world through this lens of like data and what SQL database probably powered whatever interface or system I was working with. I would look at the train times in my local town and I'd be like, oh, I bet there's a SQL database somewhere that's powering this. And that for me was the eye-opener of like, okay, data, right? Data is really cool and powerful and useful, which then led to being very technical in a consulting capacity, which then led to learning how to code, which then led to being a really hands-on growth individual as opposed to just someone who deals in strategy and tactics. I can actually build stuff and visualize and analyze stuff. Myself. And then that snowballs into, I guess, where I am today in terms of being a very sort of analytical growth practitioner.

Take us into Superhuman. It seems like at least chronologically, this is like the most formative and influential part of your career, the longest part of your career.

Certainly the longest. Yeah. Formative, I would say, was consulting though.

Consulting. Yeah.

In terms of learning rigor and my core skill set. Well, I don't know, the foundations of my skill set, I would say. But yeah, certainly the longest and definitely the most formative in terms of understanding starting startups, understanding tech, everything to do with selling software, scaling companies.

Well, before we go to Superhuman, then take us into Oliver Wyman a little bit more. So rigor is a major takeaway and an output. But if you had to kind of synthesize the key things that you took away from that experience, how do you synthesize them at this point?

Okay, so when you're in consulting, when you're a client paying for strategy consultants, you're paying top dollar. I think the day rate, the charge rate was like, and maybe this is, I mean, this is less than what consult, you know, I charge in terms of advising or what have you. But this is— I was 21, right? Like, I'm just like a kid, and they're charging like $2K a day for me. I'm like, what the heck? I'm like 21. I don't know anything, right? So obviously I don't make that money in strategy consulting. It's like, that's the partner's fees, and then it gets distributed across the firm and so on and so forth. I just get a salary. But the pressure's on when you're a strategy consultant. Like, you have to deliver value. You have to figure it out really fast. So there was kind of like that constant pressure to be doing incredibly valuable work and to look for leverage and scale and automation. But then also to just find and solve really hard problems. Like if you were solving like small problem over here, but you identified like bigger, more important problem over here, you should go and like talk to the clients about that, tackle it, try and solve it. I mean, that's what the partners engagement managers did is like they kind of moved from problem to problem, found them the highest leverage touchpoint. So if I synthesize what I learned, it's like Find the highest point of leverage in the business. Don't be constrained to just one area. Notice where the biggest issue is, where if you spent a couple of days or a couple of weeks on it, you could have a massive impact on the trajectory of things. The rigor and the correctness or the exactitude of your solution is also incredibly important. Many strategy firms just deliver kind of wishy-washy recommendations in a deck. We were building real tools and software that people had to trust. And so it had to produce recommendations that were absolutely correct and inspectable and code that worked and products that wouldn't fall over for critical business decisions. There was also an element of just quality of what we did and double-checking everything, dotting your i's, crossing your t's. So I definitely learned quality and rigor. In terms of like more what I was doing hands-on. I think the third thing, and I'll probably draw a line under three, is I don't know if this is true of all consulting firms, although Iman's really good about developing people. Like it's really good about giving people feedback. Like you're getting input from your manager every 6 weeks. You're getting a formal review practically every 3 months. You know, most people get a review once a year in tech. And so I really learned both on the receiving end and also on the giving end how to like grow people. And I consistently saw at Superhuman, the people I worked with generally kind of grew the fastest inside of the company. They had the fastest trajectories, their careers accelerated. I think it's just about that feedback loop of hearing what you could be doing better and then leaning into that and then getting the support and guidance to do it.

Was there anybody at Oliver Wyman that kind of clearly picked up on the fact that you wanted to go build?

Yes, there was. And I'm eternally grateful to him. He's a very amazing human being. His name is Ethan and he joined the company maybe, I think it was like 7 or 8 years before I did. Brilliant guy. Harvard grad, just joined as a consultant and was doing the thing. And then at a certain point in time, he realized he didn't really want to be a strategy consultant anymore. It was too much pressure. The culture wasn't his vibe. He noticed this problem, which was that no one knew anything technical at Oliver Wyman. This was like mid-2000s, right? And he was like, screw it. I'm just going to go basically be the systems IT guy. And people were just like, okay, go do that. And so he went and did that as like an individual contributor and built like a platform for case teams to sort of work on where he managed the infra, the servers and the databases that case teams relied on to do their work. So we moved from spreadsheets to SQL databases. And then in doing so, we moved from tens of thousands of rows of data to billions of rows of data. So we were going into the world's biggest grocery stores and being like, give us billions of data, rows of data, and we'll figure out which promos are making you money and where you should make cuts. It was super cool, right? These companies were like, you can just do that? And we were like, yeah, thanks. How do you do that? Well, there's this guy, Ethan, who runs all this infrastructure. Don't worry about it. It's fine.

We have a guy. We have a guy.

We literally have a guy. And so he called it the central team. It was literally the central team that supported all these distributed project teams. And then he started hiring into the central team internally. He kind of poached and recruited technical people, got that team to maybe 4 to 6, 10 over 2, 3, 4 years. About 4 years and maybe 5 years into that journey, he picked up on the fact that I was like one of these incredibly technical people. You know, I come into the consulting firm with my Redgate SQL experience. I'm building software. I think actually how it happened was I was hitting his servers with too much load because of my queries, right? Like I'm just, you know, my I/O, my data transactions are just way bigger than anybody else's. And then over a certain, you know, timeframe, he sort of like pulled me into the fold of like, hey, do you want to join this team? Which went through several like name iterations. That eventually became Labs and is now Digital. Although I'm in Digital, it's like one of the biggest practices in terms of revenue. And he was like, do you want to be part of this thing? And we, you know, we run like a startup. We're like 10 people in this company of thousands and we build software and like we're supporting all these case teams. We're building like reusable product components for our case teams. And I was like, hell yeah, that sounds awesome. So he really like sponsored my transition out of strategy and into like tech. We're still client-facing. We're still, you know, doing the strategy stuff. We're also building. He also advocated for me to move to San Francisco from the London office. And then I was with that team from 10 to 15 people all the way through to close to 100. And now that team is hundreds of people, if not more. And every strategy consultant does this. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, they all have a digital team. They're all doing data science, ML, productizing their thoughts. But we were relatively far ahead of the curve. In fact, many of the Labs people kind of, we all shuffle around to different firms, like went to those other firms to kind of start those practices and build them out, et cetera. But yeah, I think it's really important to have that mentor or that figure who can kind of pick up on your, I guess, your skill, your talent, your interests, and kind of help you go the places you want to go.

How did the move to Superhuman happen?

Yeah, so people might know that the CEO at Superhuman, Rahul, is in fact my brother. We share the same last name and parents. Hence brothers. Yes, hence brothers. Brothers in the actual and fullness of the word. You know, just like, oh yeah, we're brothers, you know, actual. In any case, part of why I wanted to move to San Francisco was because he moved 5 or 6 years prior with his first company, Reportive, which went through YC. He exited to LinkedIn in 2010. And so I saw that firsthand. I was like, wow, that's a cool journey, right? I saw this thing go from nothing, literally a couple lines of code, an idea over a weekend, to a startup that all of a sudden was going through Y Combinator and then had this amazing exit within like 18 months, 24 months. I was like, wow. So moving to SF was partly, well, he was here and I had other family here too, and it would be cool to be in the same city. There was no specific design to work together. We moved on literally January 1st, 2015. And I think it was only like January 20th by the time he and I were sitting down and he was pitching me on the idea of Superhuman that he'd been thinking about for 6 months or so. And he showed me the pitch deck. It was like pre-seed, you know, balsamic mockups of what he wanted Superhuman to be. And he was saying, look, I'd like you to join the founding team. I think you'd add a lot of value. You know, you'd bring all this expertise around analytical rigor, product thinking. You know, you understand email back to front because you're a management consultant that does like email all day long. And so again, for me, this was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to work on something that would be loved and used and touched by so many people. And so yeah, that was like a serendipitous timing, but not the specific design of me moving to SF. It just happened to be that as soon as I got here, this thing came up and it's like, this is cool, let's do this.

My younger brother worked with my first company for 5 years and I thought it was wonderful. Was there ever any trepidation of working with a sibling or did it just feel very natural and exciting?

It felt very natural and exciting. I think it helps that I have cousins who had been co-founders of a startup. That started a few years earlier than Superhuman. And so we could look at that as a very close version or an example of a company that's already doing it and feel good about it. But, you know, there are other, many other companies that also have done the same and done really well. You know, the Collison brothers at Stripe being like one of the best examples, but there's so many others, right? I think it was just very exciting. There was just like one, there was one component that needed to be set in place, which was like, how do we deal with performance? Ahead of time, particularly for other people early stage at Superhuman. They wanted to know that there was some thought that had gone into this topic such that if I was not doing my job well, right, that wouldn't fall to other people to awkwardly have to step in or somehow deal with. Rahul would take ownership of this. And so we did talk about that briefly upfront. But then I sort of saw that through another lens, which is like, how do I make sure I'm never in that scenario? And so that's my cue to whatever work or form, like, 20% better than everyone else. So that's just never even a question. So it was a little bit of that. We just had to set up the basic guardrails of, okay, if he's going to all this trouble to set this company up and he's the CEO, the buck does sort of stop with him. But I think it was an amazing experience and I would encourage or recommend other people thinking about it to give it a shot because I think it can work out just far better than you might expect.

I remember early Superhuman as just this remarkably ambitious and well-articulated vision. For a problem that, you know, even as a user at that time, like, I didn't find myself super aware of. Like, it was like the vision opened my eyes to the problem that I had. And where I'm trying to go to with this question is, when did you start to really believe rationally in the business rather than irrationally in the business?

Great question. I think, you know, my irrational belief definitely came first and then the rational came in after. I appreciate the framing here. I think I remember a pretty distinct moment, which was about 2 years in. And I remember sitting down in a coffee shop in San Francisco with my wife. And I was kind of sharing how things were going. And I was like, it's really happening. This is starting to take off. The stuff I'm seeing, the things people are saying, the things our customers are saying, and the fact that they're all paying customers, right? They're all paying us $30 a month, $360 a year. This is a real serious business here. This isn't some toy. And it was that moment of starting to like, you know, tickle up against product-market fit. We weren't quite there yet. We still had a lot of building to do. There were so many platforms we didn't yet support and so on. But we started to get that feeling that the market was like pulling it out of our hands. In fact, ripping it out of our hands as fast as we could build it. And that feeling coming especially from the highest expectation customers was a really powerful one to observe. Coming from a period where you're just building, you're just fixing bugs, prioritizing building features, dreaming of a future where people actually care. And then you get to that moment, you're like, wow, okay, now it's real. And now the numbers are going up.

How long before, between we're just building, but how long between you joining the company and that conversation with your wife? Do you remember?

It was about 2 years.

Yeah.

Maybe 18 months to 2 years. I mean, it was a very long build to get going. To build something that's that high quality with that broad of a surface area. I think with most products is you can find a small niche that solves the simplest version of the problem, usually within a couple of months to a year, right? Email products have an enormous surface area because the incumbents, Gmail and Microsoft in particular, have been around for decades. And so they've just had decades worth of feature. They've accrued all these features that people come to expect. And so took a while to get that first, like, complete feature set. Also with the quality and the, I guess, the reliability that we needed to have. We saw lots of other startups build email products and get to market faster than we did, but then subsequently flop because they released widely. Maybe they attracted hundreds of thousands of users, but those users encountered deal breaker bugs. Like I sent an email and it never sent. I sent an email and it sent 3 times. Or, "I was writing a draft and it just disappeared and there's no way to retrieve it." These are all things that our competitors encountered and we saw the bug complaint on Twitter. We could read it there. It was out in the open. I'm like, "Well, if they've got one person complaining about this, they probably have thousands of people experiencing it." I mean, we experienced it too, but we fixed it as soon as it came up. And it's the kind of thing that happens when you're building an email client. So getting the security and the reliability there, getting the trustworthiness, and then also this insanely broad surface area. It was like the first step. And then subsequent platforms, going from Mac to Windows, iPhone to Android, Google to Microsoft support, those were all way faster once you've got the basic framework in place.

So you built and ran growth at different moments in the company's journey. I mean, it sounds like you were thinking about and building growth well before there was product market fit during a build phase. And then you ended up, the last couple of years you've been running growth where the company has been scaling and well into its journey with product market fit. Can we talk a little bit about how you approached building a growth function in those different time periods for the company?

Yeah. So the first, you know, when you're an IC and you're, if you're the growth person in like a 5-person team, like you're an IC and you're doing a bunch of like legwork and also strategy, right? Like you're thinking maybe you spend an hour or two a day doing strategy, like what's our price? What's our go-to-market? So how's our competitive landscape evolving? So you're doing a lot of what would normally fall under like a PM or a PMM. Or candidly, it's like, you know, just founder-level stuff, right? And then you have 7 to 10 hours of just legwork. Like you have customers to onboard, support tickets to answer, demand gen things to do, brand marketing or top of funnel, you know, campaigns. You don't call them campaigns when you're a 5-person team, but it's at a bigger, in a bigger company, it's what you would call a campaign. So you've got all this legwork to do. And so that was the first like incarnation was like, do everything related to customers. And which ultimately helps us grow. At a certain point, you stop having time in the day to do those things, and you need to start prioritizing. So the first step of prioritization is which of these things is most important. And my advice to someone who's super early in a company in those roles is to focus on the bottom of the funnel first. Unless, caveat, you're in a competitive ecosystem where you just need to land grab users and share of mind, and if you don't, someone else will. This is pretty true of many companies these days with like AI, you know, for X. They just want to go out and grab the users. So it's like figure out monetization, figure out retention kind of later. It's a precarious position to be in, but it's kind of what you have to do if you have stiff competition from a lot of other upstarts. In our case, and I think in most cases, you know, the fallback of Gmail and Microsoft is always there. And so retention is really the name of the game. Like you have to have solid bottom of funnel mechanics before you go hard on top of funnel. So I like to encourage folks if they're not in this competitive, you know, dynamic landscape to make sure that they are retaining their customers the way they want to be retaining them. And they're doing everything necessary to make sure they don't have a leaky funnel. That usually means creating incredible experiences, both in the product and outside. As a growth person, I did a bunch of in-app work, right? Like I built features in Superhuman and shipped them myself. Everything from the keyboard shortcuts you see when you hit question mark to all the tooltips you see when you hover over icons, like I built those. But I did out-of-product work too. Like I did all of our onboardings. I systematized the way that we handled customer support, all of our bug and feature triage, and then how that flows into product management on the backend. All of that was kind of growth, early stage. And then once those things were in place, I built the first version of the support team to handle that very bottom of the funnel. I then moved to the onboarding team, built the first version of that as well, both doing the onboarding myself and crafting that hands-on experience. Scaling that team. And then it was like, okay, we have the support team, we have the onboarding team. What's next up the funnel? Okay, it's acquisition. So I built our first acquisition team, which then turned into the marketing team. Collectively, that group of people was about 35. You know, it's like 60% of the company at one point was growth, but it was like this weird kind of motley collection of everything go-to-market. And at a certain point, you know, I was like, okay, this is great, but it's not what I want to do, right? Like leading this group of people is not where I'm deriving the most joy. And I don't think it's the highest point of leverage anymore. And so after, like, that was like a 4-year run, what I just described. After that was done, I handed those teams over to other leaders. We hired in, you know, a head of marketing, a head of customer support was split out into its own thing. And what was, what still needed to be done was analytics and growth product and how that fed the overall machine. So then the next chapter, right, like the next, I guess, of the journey was getting into more of that. Technical growth, i.e., how do you measure and evaluate the success of things across every lever that the business is pulling? And then obviously, like, product growth is like a fairly well-understood concept these days. It wasn't, you know, 10 years ago, but now it pretty much is. How do you make changes in the product that drive massive amounts of growth? Whether those are big strategic things like, you know, the entire core thesis of the product or small optimizations and tactical things that accrue growth gains over time. And so those were the areas I sort of moved into once that initial funnel was sort of stood up.

Maybe the way I would play back some of what you're describing is you did what you learned to do from Oliver Wyman, which was identify where the leverage was and then follow the leverage.

100%.

In the early days, it was at the bottom of the funnel. Later on, it was at the top of the funnel.

Yeah. And then it was just like higher order strategic things that kind of break the funnel and create a new one. I always saw my role as a growth person as answering the question, what do we need in order to grow? All right, simple. It's like, don't overcomplicate things. And there was like a 9-month period where what we needed in order to grow was more engineers. So I literally spent like best part of a year hiring engineers for our earliest team. And I applied all my growth thinking and my ability to do growth to recruiting. And I had like a very, very sophisticated engineering hiring funnel. And that's what it takes. Early stages, you've got to do what you need to do in order for the company to grow.

I ran growth briefly for a Series C company, and the way I like— what was to me very interesting about that company is they had never had a growth function, and bringing in a growth function was in some ways controversial. It was like, what is this growth thing? And does it report to sales? Does it report to product? It hadn't been there from the beginning. And I often tried to articulate what we were there to do as we're here to understand, A, how the company grows, but we should understand that extremely quickly, then we should be able to identify constraints on that growth. And once we've understood the most important constraints, we should just go remove those constraints as methodically as we can. Does that— is that a resonant kind of definition in your mind as you kind of think about other growth practitioners who are thinking about how to influence successfully across their companies?

I really like the idea of constraints to growth and like methodically removing those in some logical order that makes sense, right? And this is that idea of Working from the bottom of the funnel up, a thing that's getting in the way of growth could be really bad retention. You fix that, get it to a level where it flattens off or even increases. Then you don't have enough, or you don't have strong enough activation. So that's, you need to work on that first mile. Then top of funnel, you need to start getting more demand in. That's a very classical way of thinking about things. What's interesting is after a certain point, you've tuned all of those sections of the funnel. You've hit industry benchmarks on your retention, activation, maybe even your top of funnel, or you might hit some saturation point at the top of funnel. And then growth evolves. It kind of like metastasizes almost into like a different thing. It's like, it's no longer about that. It's like, let's take 20 steps back, folks, and talk about product strategy. Why are we even here? What is happening in the market today with our customers, with technology? Like, what can we do that's different? And that, you know, from there you will have really interesting conversations. Some people might view that more as the realm of core product or just like product leadership or what the CEO needs to be thinking about. But I argue that growth needs to be in those conversations because you have to have a lens on, well, how is this thing that we might be taking a massive bet on going to drive growth? So that could be like, hey, we're going to build a second product, right? We're going to stack that on top of our first product. Or it could be we sell to consumers, we need to sell to businesses, we need to evolve our B2C company into a B2B company with PL, product-led sales. Bridging the gap from product-led growth to enterprise. Or it could be something else, right? Like, we need to start charging usage-based and evolve our product more towards something that scales with our customers. You know, there's any number of directions that you could take. I think the most useful growth people think at that level, and they help the company make these big leaps. And then you sort of like, you know, pick a path, and then you dive in for another year or two to do what you described, which is getting rid of the barriers to that new model's growth.

You've come out of this 10 years at this very successful, very well-known software company. You've obviously been a practitioner on the mechanics of growth. You've come from a background in consulting where there's a lot of breadth and a lot of interest and intellectual stimulation from the breadth. It feels like you could go in so many directions, like you could go be an investor, you could go be an operating partner, you could go be a founder. You've chosen to go start a growth advisory. Why have you chosen that path?

Well, there's one element which is like leaning in where the momentum is, right? I noticed 2 years ago I was getting a ton of inbound asking for my thoughts and help with certain topics. Hey, I need— I really liked the onboarding at Superhuman. Can we chat with you for an hour about onboarding? How did you guys get the virality going? Or like, you know, waitlist. Should we do a waitlist? You know, tell me everything strategic and tactical about that. And so all these topics kept coming up and I'm like, okay, well, yes, we can chat and I will chat. And I'm, you know, I love helping founders, but I noticed there was more of an ongoing and a deeper need by the company. Like the founder is amazing at products and doesn't know the first thing necessarily about growth or marketing. Okay, cool. Like, that's a— we could be a powerful combination together. So I've actually been advising companies for the last 2 years. I'm kind of on the side of my work at Superhuman. I found it to be incredibly rewarding because you see companies go from kind of not knowing what they're doing to growing really successfully, you know, making— hitting all their milestones, hitting all their like revenue or growth goals and then beating them and then being— getting to profitable, right? And like not needing to raise that next round. Like what a dream for a founder to hit that moment where they're like, I'm no longer— this company is now in my control. I can do what I want with it. And to be part of that journey is very rewarding. So I'm leaning into where that momentum is. That being said, I'm always open to interesting opportunities. I mean, if something cool comes along, I'll give it a go. But what I do think is that advising allows me to experience and see a lot of different companies, explore breadth, and then learn more as well. And then from there, I think I would be a more useful operator investor, any number of other roles that I could play with a bit more of that breadth, having done advising for however long I intend to do it.

Curious to hear you describe how rinse and repeat a growth advisory service is. Maybe another way to kind of put the question is, are there several very consistently high leverage areas that kind of again and again are where you're going to spend your time, or do you find it to be more company specific?

So I think the bit I'll answer that in the inverse order. The company-specific stuff is just how different the team you're working with can be from company to company. Like really understanding the people, usually it's the founder and CEO you're working with. And where are they in terms of their strengths, their skills, their understanding? Why are they a 10x founder and where are they a 10x founder? And then, okay, where are the blind spots they may have, the gaps that they need your help with? That to me is like the bit that changes so wildly from company to company. Or two companies on the surface could look very similar and the people running them could be completely different. It's really fun. I love that part of it. And I really like to get to the point where I'm like, you know, there's that genuine and deep trust with me and that person or whoever those people are. Okay. But the bits that are the same, right? Growth strategy, one. It's like, how does it, like you said, how does this company grow? There are usually some pretty well-defined, predefined concepts. Componentry around the product, you know, how does this product feel good? Why do you, you know, how does it make an impact? How does it solve problems for its customers? Like those bits are all fairly similar. Two would be like their marketing or growth strategy. How do they reach more people? And I see the same themes and patterns emerge in terms of how you construct a good channel strategy, how you go and execute on that. And how do you put that into like a repeatable operational practice inside of the company? And I help a lot with those. And then three, this comes up so much, is like once you've figured all the strategy stuff out, how do you build the right team to go and run this thing? And hiring is something that most companies suck at. And so that's where I end up probably, you know, 80% at least of the companies I work with transition at some point in the first 6 to 12 months to a lot of hiring conversations. We need this head of growth, we need this head of marketing, we need the head of sales, and that head of sales needs to have like 10 people, you know, within 6 to 8 months running the sales engine. And then I'm helping them hire those leaders, hire those ICs, like bring the right talent in. And then once they're in, making sure they're all working efficiently and, you know, productively with each other. So there's a lot of, I guess, repeatability in terms of some of that. Obviously, if the business is one shape or another, the subject matter changes. But if you dial the altitude up 2 or 3 clicks, you start to see some of those commonalities, which helps because then I can be incredibly useful quickly pattern matching for the company. But also there is always some strange nuance or oddity that makes a company different. And that stuff's also really fun to figure out too.

I have 2 questions. Have you found that the advisory work is most successful when the company has achieve some modicum of product market fit, or can it be just as successful in the search for product market fit? My second question is, in the evaluation of a founder's strengths and blind spots, how do you do that evaluation? Is it a perceptiveness that you developed over time around people, or have you found a way to systematize that discovery so that it's very fast?

That's a great question. I think it's more of the former. It's like a perceptiveness, having worked with so many different people. But now you put the idea in my head that I'm sure I'm going to be thinking about, you know, back as I'm falling asleep of like, how could I systematize learning? I mean, I've systematized learning about businesses, right? Like I ask every company that wants to chat to fill out like a 15-question Typeform that gives me the lowdown on their company, which saves time in that first conversation enormously. But I wonder if I could toss in 4 questions that's just like, tell me about yourself. Why are you a good founder? What are your strengths? That's an interesting idea. So yeah, I think it's more of a perceptiveness kind of getting to know them. And observing them operate over the first month or two. The first question, what was your first question?

It was around the growth advisory's relevance to companies when they are pre-product market fit searching or when they have found some modicum of product market fit.

It's way easier when they've found product market fit. And the reason is that a founder's primary job pre-product market fit is to find product market fit. And so you should, if you don't have product market fit, be cycling as rapidly as you can through different product directions, different customer problems. And figuring out where you can kind of meet the customer's needs to a point where you have a product that has product-market fit. And if you're doing that correctly as a founder, you're probably cycling through a dozen ideas a week. You're finding one and then really giving it a full swing for as long as it takes to be successful. As an advisor, it's very hard to be in gear with that. Like you come in, maybe you chat once a week. It's hard to be in gear with a founder if they've gone through 12 different ideas in that last time. Timeframe. It's possible, and some of the clients I've worked with have been pre-product market fit, and I've kind of helped them think through how to get to product market fit based on the early signal that they've seen. But that really requires like an incredibly strong connection with the advisor and the founder. Usually I think the founder just needs to navigate that idea maze on their own a bit. And I don't say they have to be at product market fit. I think approaching is also totally fine, kind of on the way to knocking it out, because there comes a point where you have the idea, you've stopped cycling on what you're doing, but now you've got some amount of time of tuning and iterating to get to it. And around that time, I think there are some incredibly important growth foundations to put in place so as to not mess up the next part, which is scaling, right? It's like your pricing model and how you speak about yourself, how your brand lands in the market. Those are things, strategic things, I think you want to get right pre-product market fit. That makes growth a lot easier or could make it a lot harder. So around then, I've seen success with working with founders when it's like, okay, there's a line of sight to product market fit.

Makes sense. One subject matter that is obviously near and dear to this podcast's heart is pricing, and pricing is very much an important part of the journey to product market fit. I imagine you have learned much about pricing, and so I'm curious to— maybe I'm curious to kind of start with this question, and the founders are very, very good at many things, and early stage operators are very good at many things. It feels that potentially pricing is one of those things that maybe they're not as intuitively gifted with. And I wonder if you agree with that or if you disagree with it.

100%. Founders suck at pricing mostly.

So why is that? Why do founders suck at pricing?

I think founders are good at picking the initial price for their product or service. And that's like the first version of solving the problem, which is like, okay, what are we doing? We are, we're in, you know, a luxury category solving this problem. So let's look at the competition, discuss willingness to pay, and then pick a price. But it doesn't end there. And you have to think about most companies have some variation in their product and different price points to meet different customers' needs. And because as a founder, or really as anyone just in the world of tech, as a consumer, as an end user, because when you buy a product, you pretty much pick one of those predefined paths, you don't really think about the entire experience or the entire kind of offering that you were just presented with. Unlike being a user of a product where you can go and explore every nook and cranny of the product, you can kind of click every single part of that experience and, you know, understand end-to-end how this product is constructed. Very few people pause on the pricing screen and take time to click every single part of it and think from the mindset of a freemium user all the way through to an enterprise buyer, evaluate how that thing was designed to capture the right people into the right buckets and to move those people up from bucket to bucket. Very few people take the time to think that stuff through, because why would you? You know, it's not part of your buyers' journey to pause and look around. And so I think as a result, founders don't have a lot of that intuitive sense of how to do pricing and packaging more thoroughly beyond just picking that initial price point. And then I think there's a sort of second piece, which is the time dimension. How do you evolve that thing over time? And how do you keep making changes to it like it's part of your product? Because it is part of your product. And how do you make those changes in such a way that's useful for the customer and also useful for the business? Again, very Very few founders do this well. It's therefore, I think, a massive opportunity for service professionals, advisors, and also companies and products to help founders with that because it's such a massive lever on the success of a business.

Are there any takeaways from Superhuman's journey with pricing that you think are worth talking about here?

I think thing number one is we charged right out of the gate, which many companies don't do. Again, we had the competitive landscape of an existing free incumbent, and by charging out of the gate, that really forced us to have a much higher bar than the incumbents and the competition. If you're in like a land grab and you, you know, you just need to go get everyone, having like some free offering is a perfectly fine thing to do, or a free trial, whatever, you know, you just like get as many logos, get as many eyeballs as possible. But if you're trying to build something that is high quality and there's a pretty, you know, viable alternative to your products, I really recommend charging out of the gate and making sure that that price point then kind of forces your team internally to build something great and that you're then talking to customers from the get-go about the value that you're bringing.

You know, that lesson is a fascinating one because, you know, one sort of well-known way to go compete is to go counter-position on price. But often what startups are doing when they're counter-positioning on price is they're underpricing the incumbent or they're undercharging the competition. Whereas you were charging far more than most people had ever conceived of paying for the product.

Yeah. And I don't necessarily think every single By no means should every company do that. It's circumstantial based on the competitive landscape. Underpricing relative to the competition, I think is fine if your product is fairly similar, right? Like maybe you're a more nimble startup building a very similar product to a well-understood existing product that charges. In many ways, I suppose we counter-positioned against the lower quality big free incumbent. But I do think that is an underrated approach, an underrated strategy.

It feels both underrated and more rare. I feel like you see it far less.

Yeah, I think so. I am curious to see where things shake out with the current wave of AI for X companies with respect to pricing, because I'm looking at certain categories and seeing all sorts of interesting dynamics play out where the product that's giving it away for free and just burning a deeper hole in their pocket to support their user base is maybe growing the fastest and maybe even in revenue because they have share of mind, right? They're the brand name that everyone thinks about in a certain category. AI call recording is sort of my pet case study on this topic, where there's so many call recorder startups, and it's very interesting to see how the pricing that they're each picking is affecting their growth and their reach. But yeah, I think, you know, let— go on.

Are you seeing most of them price for land grab and adoption, or are you seeing some of them say, that's not the right way, we need to think about it differently?

What I'm seeing is those that are pricing for land grab are kind of pulling ahead of the pack. They're getting more brand recognition, raw number of users. And because the product is somewhat commoditized at a certain level, it's kind of easy to build that core product, then go and land grab a bunch of users and then figure out what to do next. The ones that are sort of charging from the get-go, I think, are having a harder time because of the way the competitive dice are loaded.

I want to use this word specifically, and it's misconceptions. Are there any misconceptions about pricing that you think are prevalent? Across early stage operators and founders.

Maybe there's a misconception that like, and this goes back to what I was saying about pricing from the get-go that, you know, charging your customers is somehow bad. You have to have a free trial. You have to have freemium. Like you, you know, it's kind of embarrassing to ask a customer to pay if you're like not feature complete or you have some bugs. It's like none of these things are true. It's completely okay to charge from day one. You know, this is a joke, right? But I launched my Substack last week and I had a paid plan from day one. And guess what? I got a bunch of people pay me. Yeah.

Right.

And it's kind of great signal for me to have. You know, my personal ARR is, I wouldn't have personal ARR if I didn't have the paid tier. Now, obviously I'm gonna build it out and develop into it and do all the things I just said about iterating it over time. But I do think it's like a common misconception to, you know, to not do that from the start. And to kind of really lean into the high end of the value that you're adding. Versus getting locked into sort of a race to the bottom on price.

The closing question I like to ask in this podcast is always the same, and it's, is there a moment in your career that you look at and you think to yourself, that is the key moment? It is the real inflection in my professional story.

No, I think it was— I'm a big believer, 1% better every day, 37 times better at the end of the year, that kind of thing. I'm a big believer in small and incremental improvements every single day to what you're doing.

Looking like a true growth leader.

100%. Yeah, yeah. Except, I mean, I, you know, I said earlier that you have to take 10 steps back every now and then and make a giant swing. That might be your 10% swing, actually. But there's certainly been impactful days, impactful bits of feedback I've heard, right? Like career growth moments, learning opportunities. But I really do think investing in oneself every single day is the most repeatable way to grow one's career, rather than assuming or relying on any specific moonshot or lucky moments. And you can certainly engineer lucky moments by surrounding yourself by the right people, being in the right place at the right time, et cetera. And those can have really big trajectory changes for your course. Those can have some big—

Sorry, I interrupted.

No worries. Those can have some big swings for your direction. But there's a lot that one can do just to engineer that 1% improvement each day for oneself.

I needed a very resonant answer, and you're one of the few people who has not cited a moment. In this center. I've done 50 of these now.

It's amazing.

Where can people reach out to you and learn more about what you're building?

Yeah, totally. Well, if you want a better email experience, go check out superhuman.com. But if you want to connect with me, you can check out my LinkedIn, @jubohra, check out my Twitter, @goravohra1, my Substack, which is substack.goravohra.com, or my website, goravohra.com.

It's been so much fun, Gaurav. Thank you so much for doing it.

Yeah, likewise. Thank you for having me.