Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra on how you decide which customers to listen to

So most companies will find when they do the survey, their very disappointed score will be in the region of 15 to 25%, let's say. Yeah, they're not disappointed segments. These are the people who really don't care about your product. Probably another 15 to 20%. And the largest percentage of the pie, maybe half of all respondents, are only going to be somewhat disappointed.

Yeah.

Now what most startups do, and this is so dangerous, is, is that they just start acting on the feedback from that someone. Somewhat disappointed crowd.

Yeah.

And this will lead to a muddled, unclear, incoherent product. So how do you know who to listen to? Well, you take the answers to the question, what is the main benefit of the product to you. Limit it to only the people who said they'd be very disappointed without your product. Summarize that into one singular main benefit. And for superhuman, it's speed. You get through your email twice as fast and then you use that main benefit to segment the somewhat disappointed slice.

Got it. So you're kind of taking that. And now the people that are kind of further down where they're saying they're kind of maybes, they're on the fence, you. But they, they do resonate with the speed. So they love the speed, but they're still on the fence. Then you can go and find out why they're on the fence.

Exactly. Because there'll be two types of people in that segment. There'll be the people for whom speed is the thing.

Yeah.

But something, and probably something small, is holding them back from falling in love with the products. And then there'll be people for whom speed isn't the thing. Perhaps it's offline, but something is holding them back. Well, here's the thing. If you build the things that are holding them back, if they don't actually resonate with the main benefit of your product, they'll never fall in love with it, no matter what you do. So in a world where you're drowning in feedback and most startups are drowning in feedback, you have to filter it down to the stuff that's going to increase the number of people that fall in love with your product.