#1254 Rahul Vohra on 7 Email Hacks To Be More Productive

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Rahul Vohra is the CEO and founder of Superhuman, the fastest way to do email. I use the product every single day, and Rahul was nice enough to come to the Build Summit in New York City that we hosted for 700 founders, and he showed you all the tips, tricks, and hacks on how to do email better so you can be a more productive founder. In this conversation, Rahul understands and explains exactly what email's supposed to be doing, how you can do it better, how you can do it faster, and why he built Superhuman's product the way that he did. I always enjoy talking to Rahul, and I hope that you guys enjoyed this conversation as well. Here is my episode with Rahul Vohra.

Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

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Rahul is the CEO of Superhuman, which I think I may be one of the top power users of.

So you are.

We're going to talk about, uh, how the hell can we all do email better. But before we get to that, I thought a great place to start was just like, why is following a talk on communications, email as a mechanism, so important to startup founders?

Yeah. Well, I hope I have a good amount of ventral display going on with this jacket.

Don't look at me, dude.

So I get this question a lot. Is it worth getting great at email? What difference does it make? And I'll answer the question about email, but I think this is also true generally. Sam Altman, for example, a few years ago wrote a program. To compare the response times of the very best founders, those who are running billion-dollar companies, with bad founders, those who were struggling and who would eventually go on to fail. It's probably no surprise that the bad founders took days to reply to emails, whereas the best founders, well, they replied in mere minutes. Now, you might think that's just about impressing an investor, But as startups, and we just heard we're always on, that's also true when it comes to responsiveness. Everything that we do sets the bar for the organization. Almost nothing will happen faster than we do it. So if ever you're sitting down thinking, gosh, I just wish the team would do more or move faster, we have to do more, we have to move faster. Now, the magic is when you do that, when you respond to Twitter faster, when you respond to Slack faster, when you respond to email faster, your entire team will do it too.

Let's talk about some of the tips and tricks that you specifically use with email. You're probably one of the most productive people I know on email. You built an entire company around this idea. How do you think about just triaging an inbox and making sure that you are responsive and quick and kind of timely and don't let things drop through the cracks?

Yeah, boy, well, I have 6 tips or tricks. I want this to be as useful as possible. So I'll rattle these off quickly. The first one is don't label or file your emails. I see people wasting a tremendous amount of time on this. It turns out that it's faster to archive and then search than it is to pre-file your emails and go to the folder or label and then scan through it. So just that one alone will save you an hour a week. Second one, Use keyboard shortcuts. Never touch the mouse. This may sound obvious, but even in this room, it will shock you how many people are still doing things the slow way on the mouse. Let's say you work a normal 8-hour day. If you switch to keyboard shortcuts, you will save 134 hours over the course of a year. That's 17 workdays every single year. So that's shortcuts. Number 3, I would say, is, well, I've seen inboxes as many as you can imagine, with hundreds, thousands, even millions of emails in those inboxes. But why are we keeping these emails lying around? It's out of a misplaced sense of guilt that we might one day reply to them. But are you really going to reply to an email that's older than a month, or that's older than a week? I mean, the answer is no. And I happen to know some of the most productive people in the world, And guess what? They don't even try. So pick your personal email use-by date. Most of our customers pick 1 week, and archive everything older than that. If that sounds terrifying, I'm sympathetic to it. You can say, you know, don't archive the starred email, get yourself a bit more control, but it's crucial. This will put you within a stone's throw of Inbox Zero. Next one I would say is think about how you're organizing your inbox. So there's roughly 2 ways. You can treat your inbox as an infinite list, and it's the unread emails that are the things to do. Or you can archive emails when they're done and treat the entire inbox itself as the to-do list. In the "mark as unread" case, you end up having to meticulously maintain that status. And we've all done this, but just to make it real, let's say you receive an email, and despite yourself, it looks really interesting. You open it, you're like, okay, cool, mark as unread. But then you're like, huh, there was one more thing I wanted to check. So you open it again. Now you have to mark it as unread again. If you switch to the other method, you can avoid this archaic ritual. Just open the email as many times as you want. When it's done, archive it. Not only is that faster because it takes you from N+1 actions where N is the number of times you mark it as unread, to just one action, it's also far less stressful because it makes your inbox very uncluttered. Fifth thing I would say is follow-up reminders. I know you use this a lot. So when you send an email, everyone in this room, we're sending very important emails. We're trying to close candidates, we're trying to close meetings, we're trying to close deals. But what do you do if the person doesn't reply back? Do you try and keep this all in your head like some kind of Rain Man? Do you painstakingly copy it to a to-do list? One is inefficient, the other is ineffective. So what you do is when you send an email, just set a reminder for it to come back if the person doesn't reply in, let's say, 2 days. And that way you can stay on top of dozens, if not hundreds, of conversations. And then the last thing Boy, we don't just deal with email volume. We deal with email variety. In a normal inbox, you have urgent messages hiding behind Google Docs notifications. You have FYIs obscuring critical time-sensitive opportunities. You have calendar notifications pushing things below the fold. So if you were to process your inbox top to bottom, which, by the way, is what most productivity consultants would recommend that you do, you'll be switching gears. And that switching of gears, that's context switch overhead. And it turns out that every time we switch topic, it takes our brain about 20 minutes to recover. I see some nodding. We've all experienced this. And get back to full efficacy. So the solution, of course, is to use an email client, really only Superhuman does this properly, that can split your inbox into coherent streams that you can process independently.

So I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out. I was telling someone today, I think I get 1,500 emails a day. About half of those I can delete, another half of the half, so 25%, I need to respond to, and about 25% probably just need to read and don't need to respond to. How does Superhuman as a product actually help here? And one of the things for me is I used to have tens of thousands of unread emails and just said, fuck it, like, I'm not getting to them. Good luck. If you ain't hear from me in a week, like, just email me again. Now, much better, much more responsive. And so talk about just building the product and constantly shipping new updates and really trying to figure out like, how do you build a solution for the founders for this?

I think it starts with the observation that responsiveness really matters. Time saved really matters. And what are we solving backwards from? So slight aside, you know, being as we're all founders, building a company is really, really hard, right? Most days suck. Something has gone wrong. Shit's hit the fan. Something's on fire. That's a normal day. Every now and then stuff goes well. And I had one of these moments actually just a month or two ago. We did an analysis on 10,000 Superhuman users, their 30 days prior to using the product versus their 30 days afterwards. And we were able to see that they are responding to emails twice as fast by rate because you can actually, even before you're using the product, we can look at the email headers. And that they were responding to emails 8 to 12 hours faster. And that's not by accident. That was by design. So we knew that those were two numbers that we wanted to drive, and we worked back from that. So a good example would be, we talked about the split inbox feature. So in this case where you have half the emails you don't even need to see, and then of those, there are further streams. What you would do in the product is you turn on a feature called Important Other. And so that would separate out all marketing emails or promotional emails or automatic updates, e-commerce emails into a bucket called Other. And you'd have Important, which is just person-to-person. Now, so far so good. This isn't dramatically different from Gmail or Outlook. But how do you start splitting out the rest? Well, what I do is I split out my Google Docs. I split out my Notion notifications. I split out my— Figma notifications. I have a special split inbox that is all of the customer satisfaction surveys that are coming through Typeform. And then finally, I split out internal team emails versus external emails. So I have a very simple but massively effective structure to how I go through my email. First of all, I go to Google Docs, Notion, Figma. For me, unblocking the engineering and product teams, hypercritical, right? See, first thing I said, how fast we move is how fast our companies move. Then I go to the internal team email split. Same deal. I want to get back to those really quickly. Then I go back to the customer satisfaction split. This is a little bit more when you're a scaled company, but staying in touch with what customers are thinking starts to become the problem. So we have to build solutions to that. Then only finally do I do external email. So, there's a very specific flow.

Talk about the software kind of process that you guys follow. It seems like, I know you talk to a ton of customers, you're getting insights there, and you guys are shipping these updates in a pretty quick way. How do you build that culture internally to make sure that you're focused on actually solving the customer's problem versus doing a whole bunch of other things you guys could be building?

I mean, the same way that you build a company to achieve anything, which is you make it cultural. So, this is literally in the DNA of the company. I remember when I onboarded you, this was over Zoom. And I mean, I've done probably nearly 1,000 of these at this point. And there are people in the organization for whom this is their job. They've done many thousands of onboardings. And Hopefully it wasn't too obvious, but I was taking copious notes as we went. What you think about the product, how your Gmail workflow was, what kind of volumes of email were you getting, what bugs did you see that you probably didn't notice because, you know, as founders, we see way more bugs than our users do. And every single time we've onboarded a person, that was the process. So that then goes into a actually basically a custom CRM that we built in Airtable to hold all of that information. Whenever anybody emails the company customer support, and we get in the region of 2,000 to 2,500 emails a week, all of those emails are tagged and triaged and broken down. So we built a custom integration inside of Superhuman. We can select the bit of text, click a button, and it adds a row to a feedback table in the database that records who said it, when they said it, what the email address is, and it gets tagged against a feature or a bug that it's relating to. The upshot of that is when it comes time to build a new feature, let's say I want to build calendar scheduling, we get to save about 3 months of research that a company would normally do at the start of that. So what we do is we go to this Airtable, we pivot it around features, we say, okay, calendar scheduling, and I can see the verbatims of thousands of customers who've asked for that thing. So we can then build the thing based on 1,000 interviews that have already happened over the preceding years, ship the thing. And the really cool thing is when it ships, we can now close the loop because we have thousands of open conversations. It takes manual work, but we do it because it's totally worth it. We go back to every single customer and say, hey, you know that thing that you asked for? 4 years ago or whenever it was, we shipped it. Go ahead, give it a try. Tell us how it feels. This blows people away every time.

What's the reaction to that?

Oh my God. It's people like, how are you tracking this? Which is why I know the answer, because I've explained it so many times.

Now, when you look at the team that you're building, where are you finding the talent and how do you think about the current environment versus maybe just 2 or 3 years ago when it seemed like everyone wanted to work at startups, startups were flush with cash, it was everyone's going to get rich quickly. It's a little bit tougher now. Talk a little bit about the hiring process.

I actually think it's way better now. So we've seen two major changes over the course of the last few years. We're a San Francisco-based company, and before COVID we were, I think, about 50 people and everyone was in the Bay Area. So nobody lived more than probably 50 miles away from the office. Obviously, that changed immediately overnight. There was no way that we'd be able to continue to scale in that way. And so we made the decision to hire across the American time zones. So today we hire in Canada, in North America, and in Mexico. And we found amazing levels of engineering talent in Canada and also in Mexico. That's part of how we've been able to scale in addition to the rest of America. Had we not made that choice, I think it would have been very difficult to maintain the caliber of person that we have. The second thing that's changed is, yeah, I mean, this industry is going through a tough time. Many companies are going to struggle to grow into their valuations. There will be down rounds, there'll be all kinds of nasty things coming down the pipe. And this may sound weird, but in a way, that's a good thing. I think the tourists have left. The people that are founding companies today, they remind me of the caliber of founder from 2010, 2011. They're special people. The people in this room, these are special people. And also, the people that we hire, they're no longer mercenaries. They're missionaries. The number of conversations you hear, or the— I mean, it's always going to happen, right? A savvy person is going to want to talk about compensation and equity and trajectory and valuation and all of that. Those are still supremely important conversations, and you should have amazing answers to those. But the amount of interview time that goes into that versus the mission compared to just 2 years ago, that has dramatically changed. And I think that's the type of person who wants to work in a startup today.

Before we finish up, I want to bring it back to productivity. Obviously, email is a huge one. What else are you doing for productivity to make sure that you're either saving time or you're getting more value out of the time that you are spending working on Superhuman?

Yeah, for me, the biggest change that I've made over the last few years has been finally adopting and sticking to a meditation practice. So I had many false starts over the years, and I realized just that, just looking at the way I've successfully learned habits in the past, I'm the kind of person who responds extremely well to coaching. And it turns out you can get a coach for whatever you want. So I found the best meditation coach in the Bay Area. I can intro anyone if they like. His name is Laurent Vallausec. He runs the Peak Leadership Institute. And what I really liked about this guy is he has a very compelling meditation practice that's rooted in transcendental meditation. There's a spiritual aspect to it as well, which you can dive into if you want to, but you don't have to. That's optional. Before that, he was also a venture-backed founder twice. And so there's a little bit of executive coaching to his practice, to his coaching. And I always feel like he knows what I'm going through, both when things are going well and also when times are hard. So he taught me Transcendental Meditation. It was pretty intense. The first few days, it was several hours per day, and then we sort of tapered off. And now we meet up once every month or so just to sort of keep my skill level topped up. But this has been nothing short of life-changing. I now do this for an hour a day. So half an hour when I wake up, it's the very first thing I do. I don't even let myself get out of bed. I sit upright, I do the meditation, and half an hour again in the afternoon. And I found that not only am I way happier, That was the first thing I noticed. I'm way more creative and I'm much more able to focus for long periods of time. So it's really hard to think of anything else that can achieve that kind of result.

When you think of Superhuman currently, what's the pitch to customers in terms of if they use the product, what do they get out of it? And the reason I ask that is Gmail's free and it's really, really hard to compete with something that's free. So when you have a paid product, it's got to be so exponentially more valuable. I pay you every month and I think you got me for life. But how do you think about making it that much better? Like, what is it doing that Gmail can't so that people can understand?

Yeah, I mean, just starting with general startup advice, and I look for this as an investor, invest in over 100 companies. I actually love it when startups compete with incumbents, because incumbents are just so busy with the business of being an incumbent. I met a Gmail product manager a week ago, and they had the most depressing story. In 9 months, all that they've been able to ship is moving one radio button. In 9 months. Can you imagine that? And this is a well-run company. So it's actually a sound strategy to pick an incumbent, to pick a product that billions of people use. But then you need to do something very specific. You need to segment the market. You know, we're not the first company to have created an email product that you pay for, but I think we're the first company in the space to really break out and to not just create a product that people pay for, but that they do at a very large scale. And the way that we were able to do that was by completely changing the positioning. The core value proposition of Superhuman is speed. And I remember when I was pitching— this is 2017— to the 12 of us who were in the company at that time, hey folks, I think our core value prop should be speed. People looked at me like I'd lost my mind. But I'd also just invented the product-market fit engine, which you may have come across. It's an algorithmic way to get to product-market fit. And I was like, this is what the data shows. If we do this, I guarantee you, and I can mathematically prove it, we'll get to product-market fit, assuming you believe in the metric. So that's where we started. And the positioning was key because it then led to the— realization that if you're the kind of person who receives not tens of emails a day, but hundreds that you have to do something about, that you've been historically ignored, that no one has ever built this product for you. In fact, no one's ever built products for you in general. And this was the idea that we've had the consumerization of the enterprise, but what about the prosumerization of the enterprise? So we started there, and that was really the initial core user base for Superhuman. I mean, since then it's expanded a lot. The fastest growing part of the business is our teams business. So we have a bunch of people at your company. I see a bunch of teams here, or founders representing teams, I should say, that use Superhuman together. And I mean, that's sort of how startups scale is you start with a very specific persona, then you have to get very deliberate about either the personas or the industries or the markets that you're adding after that. And so we're now on that journey.

Where can we send people to find out more about Superhuman?

Well, superhuman.com. Pretty easy.

I appreciate you coming. This has been fantastic. I'm a big fan of the product, and I think that anyone here who's trying to improve email, highly, highly suggest it. So Rahul Vohra, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.