Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra on the secret to product virality

Well, in my first one on one, I sat down with Elliot and I said, hey, I'm here to learn. Please teach me everything that you know about virality. And he said, okay, well, hate to burst your bubble, but there is no such thing as a truly viral product. I said, what do you mean? How do you explain Facebook? For that matter, how do you explain LinkedIn? And he said, what I mean is no app has sustained a viral factor of greater than 1 for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7. And he told me that lasted for perhaps a year. So one person was creating about 0.7 new users. And I double clicked again and I said, well, Elliot, what about the address book imports? This is one of the things that LinkedIn got famous or infamous for. You could import your address book and then it would spam, invite everyone who happens to be members of LinkedIn in your address book, and then eventually it would just invite everyone to LinkedIn. And he said, that's an amazing feature, but you have to remember not everyone is going to use it all the time. So even that feature had a lifetime viral factor of about 0.4, and that's considered good. So 0.4 is good for a viral feature. 0.6 is great. Something like 0.7 is absolutely incredible. You're in the stratosphere up with Facebook at that time. So I said, well, okay, all of these things by definition are going to peter out. There's going to be an asymptote. None of these viral mechanics keep on compounding, which actually makes sense. It would be a little absurd if things just kept on growing. What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure. That isn't a mechanic, that isn't in a feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product. And that really colored how I think about growth and virality since then. It has shaped so much of what we do at Superhuman and so much of how I think about growing brands.