This is a YouTube video titled "How Superhuman became memorable" containing a monologue or talk from May 9, 2025, discussing the strategic positioning of the Superhuman email product around speed as a unique selling point. The speaker explains the research and reasoning behind choosing speed as the brand's core value proposition to differentiate from incumbents like Gmail and Outlook.
Most well-known brands have stood for one clear thing, like they have a clear position. And so in order for Superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position. In the first year of Superhuman, therefore, I interviewed hundreds of potential customers about their experience with Gmail and with Outlook. Almost everybody said that email takes way too much time. But interestingly, many people also said that Gmail and Outlook were way too slow. and that was how I first thought that speed could be an interesting position for us. I then asked myself, is the position of speed unique? And is it available? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes, because almost no software was being sold or has ever been sold on the value proposition of speed. And I then asked, well, does speed reinforce our product strategy? And again, the answer was overwhelmingly yes. I knew that our competition was not going to be startups, it was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture. And then finally I did what I call the cocktail party test, which is to look at cocktail parties and to watch how people pitch your product to other people. And in our case, the pitches were simple. People would say, dude, you have to use it. It's really fucking fast. And that's it. That was the pitch. And that's how I knew that speed would be a really great position for us to start with.
