342: Superhuman: The Power of Data-Driven Product Market Fit - with Rahul Vohra

Foreign.

Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast.

I'm your host Omar Khan and this.

Is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode I talked to Rahul Vora, the founder and CEO of Superhuman, a blazingly fast email experience that helps you save three hours or more every week.

In 2014, Rahul set out on a.

Mission to create the fastest email experience. He had sold his previous company, Rapportive, a gmail plugin to LinkedIn a couple of years earlier and he'd watched as Gmail continued to become slower and more cluttered over the years.

So Rahul decided it was time to change that.

But he didn't start building a product right away.

Instead, he spent the first year doing.

Talking to potential customers, doing interviews, writing website copy and talking to potential investors.

A year later he finally put together.

A team and started building the product. But progress was slow. After two years of coding, the product still wasn't ready.

Rahul felt immense pressure to launch, but deep down he believed the launch would go badly because they didn't have product market fit yet. Fast forward to today.

Superhuman has raised over $125 million in.

VC funding and is now a team.

Of around 120 people.

In this episode you'll learn a simple.

Two question email strategy that Rahul used to efficiently gather data from potential customers and validate his product idea. The Product Market Fit Engine.

A methodology for measuring your product market.

Fit and systematically improving that metric. We talk about how Rahul used that same methodology with Superhuman to drive almost a 3x improvement in their product market fit score. We also talk about how Rahul initially.

Did all user onboarding and would spend.

Up to 2 hours per user to.

Complete the onboarding process.

And we also discuss how Rahul's background as a game designer has influenced how.

They design the product and why you should be doing the same. So I hope you enjoy it.

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Rahul, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Well, this is less of a favorite quote and more of a mantra. Something I came up with in my early 20s, which was the realization that all I really want to do is make beautiful things that make people smile.

Love it. Love it. If there's anybody out there who doesn't hasn't heard of Superhuman, just tell us, what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. And our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before. They reply to their important emails sooner and save three hours or more every single week. And many of them actually see Inbox zero for the first time in years. In terms of who it's for, this question is actually so important, we create a Persona for it and we call this Persona Nicole. So Nicole is a hard working professional. She deals with many people, including lots of other Nicoles. Thank you. For example, they might be an executive, a founder, an investor, or a manager, but these are just examples. They could equally be a journalist or a amazing podcast host. The point is, Nicole works long hours and often into the weekend. They consider themselves very busy and they wish they had more time. Now they're productive. They're also self aware enough to realize they could be better and they spend a lot of their day in email. Most importantly, Nicole considers it part of their job to be responsive and actually takes pride in being so because being unresponsive could lead to what we call the three sins of email blocking their team, damaging their reputation or missing opportunities. Now, generally, Nicole has a growth mindset. They may keep up to date with technology, they may be interested in new products. However, she may have a fixed mindset about email. Whilst open to new technology, she might be skeptical that a new email client could help her do email faster. So from the get go, we always knew that we had to earn Nicole's attention with data, with social proof, and with influencers. We have a few others, like effective Elliot, customer facing Christie, assistant Alex. You'll notice the alliteration, but Nicole is our core demographic.

That is an incredibly detailed description of your customer and I know it's taken some time to develop those Personas and hopefully today we can cover the process and how you got there. Before we do that, can you give us a sense of the size of the business today? I know you're not going to tell me about revenue, but what can you tell us in terms of where Superhuman.

Is today as a private company? And as you probably guessed, we don't disclose user metrics. We also don't disclose revenue metrics. But what I can share to give a sense of scale is that we are around 120 people and that we've raised north of $125 million in venture financing. And then in terms of the impact we're having, because for me, that's always how I measure it. Our users have sent north of 200 million emails. They've used billions of keyboard shortcuts and have collectively between them, saves tens of millions of hours.

Before you started Superhuman, you founded a little company called Rapportive, which you ended up selling to LinkedIn, I hear for around 15 million. I don't know if you ever confirmed that or not, so I think most people are familiar with that. And I remember installing the Gmail plugin many years ago and, and that was pretty cool to have this information, right? You know, contacts next inside my inbox. But there's more to your story in terms of where your entrepreneurial journey started and I want to talk a little bit more about that because there are probably people out there who haven't heard as much about that part of your story. And I think it starts with game design, which ironically, is something that I've heard you talk about a lot lately. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I know you started off as a game designer, but before you even were working, were you building games as a kid?

Yes, I was one of those kids that built games. Paper and pencil mazes, little role playing games. Even at the age of six, I remember my father coming home and me excitedly being ready with a pencil and paper maze game for him to do. It was also the reason why I taught myself how to program, how to code. It was because I wanted to make my own video games. And what I've said in the past, this may be what you're referring to, is, and what relatively few people know, is that before I was a founder, I was actually a professional game designer. And this has greatly influenced how we build products. At Superhuman, we don't build products like they are traditional software. We design our products to work and feel like games. Because when your product feels like a game, people don't just use it, they play it. They find it fun. They tell their friends, they fall in love with it. Game design turns out to be an altogether different kind of product development.

I started out building games as a kid, probably, as I mentioned, I'm probably a little older than you, but I got myself a Sinclair ZX81. I don't know if you remember those. And I used to copy code out of magazines and built this blocky Donkey Kong game with like 16k of RAM. And I thought it was absolutely the best thing in the world. And was shocked when I realized years later that people would actually pay you to write code. And there was a career in doing that. What was your journey like? You became a professional game designer. And then how did that lead to what you're doing today?

So the game design did not lead directly to what I'm doing today, but it did greatly influence how we build what we build at Superhuman and why we build it in the way we do. I think part of the secret is behind why the product is so effective and so delightful to use is because it's genuinely fun. And that is the heritage of the game design. But before I even was a game designer, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I recall knowing this at around the age of 13 or 14 years old. It was very clear to me. And anyone who knew me at the time would also have known that I knew this because I was sharing it. That I was going to one day be a founder. And so for me, this tangent almost into game design was indulging a passion. It was really fun, perhaps one of the most fun jobs I've ever had, and it was incredibly insightful, taught me a ton of skills, but it wasn't a direct step on the path to becoming a founder. And so once I'd done my stint as a game designer, I then went back to what it was I already knew I was going to do, which was to start increasingly bigger and better companies.

So before you started Rapportiv, there was also another product that you built and sold called Mojo. And I don't know if many people know about that, but was that your kind of first step into entrepreneurship? And I know you said you knew early on that you wanted to be a founder. How did you know so early? The Mojo thing was that kind of like the first step to getting there?

Great question. How does one know whether you should be a founder? I mean, I just knew. It's kind of in the blood. I had this urge and this desire to create. I think I'm a natural salesperson. I really enjoy vibing with other people and telling them about what we're doing and how it's going to entertain the hell out of them or change their lives or save them. Three hours or more every single week really depends what the thing is. And I was just kind of doing this as a kid naturally. And I think that for me is a pretty strong sign that starting a company was a sensible path, or as sensible as very not sensible path can be. Now you need more than that. Of course, you can't just have an urge to create and be good at creating and selling. You also have to have grit. You need to have potential assistants. There's a whole bunch of other personality traits that go into being a successful founder. But the long and short of it is I just knew as a teenager that that was how I was wired and that was what I was going to do. In terms of Mojo, it was by a long way, not my first entrepreneurial endeavor, but it was the first that we raised money for. So I was around 21, 22 years old, I want to say. And this took place in Cambridge in England. I had just left what I was doing at the university, which was also pretty interesting. I was running Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. I then joined a friend of mine to co found this company, Mojo, and actually in that scenario, he was the CEO and I was the cto. Ever since, I've always taken the CEO role. So for mojo, we raised a very small amount of angel funding, probably around $50,000. But when you're two basically students living in a town like Cambridge, that goes a really, really long way. And we learned a tremendous amount. We ran the company, we grew it, we ended up selling the products to Cancer Research uk, which is the largest cancer charity, one of the largest in the world. But the National Ordinance Survey, they are the organization that actually creates maps and all of the use cases that you might imagine. Maps are useful for the word ordinances, in the name of the organization, of course. And so we were helping both of those companies run their business creation processes based on the products that we'd made. Ultimately, it wasn't a particularly successful company. We were unable to get it to scale. It ended up becoming more of a consultancy than a product company. And so at about two years in, we decided to move on to our next things.

So, mojo, rapportive, once you, you sold that to LinkedIn, you spent a couple of years at LinkedIn, I think, or a short time at LinkedIn. Let's talk about Superhuman now. So just briefly, like, where did the idea come from for Superhuman? And I'd love to hear that, and then really would love to dive into your first framework in terms of the product market fit engine. You have so many frameworks. It's the clarity that I love. Right. Because I think my brain works in a similar way and I want to try and distill some of those down so people listening to this can at least get a sense of some of these ideas and we can send them off to sort of deep dive and learn more. But first, just let's start by, like, where did the idea for Superhuman come from?

The idea for Superhuman came directly from my previous company, Rapportive, which for those that don't know, it was quite a while ago. Now we built the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. When people emailed you, we showed you what they looked like, where they worked, their recent tweets, links to their social profiles, and we grew rapidly. And about two years in, we were acquired by LinkedIn. Now, during those four years, the two years of rapportive and the two years at LinkedIn, I developed a very intimate view of email. I could see Gmail becoming worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more cpu, slowing down, your machine still not working properly offline. And on top of this, people were installing plugins like ours reported, but also Boomerang, Mixmax, Clearbit, Yesware, you name it. They had It. Now, each plugin took these problems of clutter, memory, CPU performance offline and made all of them dramatically worse. So I decided it is time for change. I imagined an email experience that is blazingly fast, where search is instantaneous, where every interaction takes place in 100 milliseconds or less. An email experience where you never actually had to touch the mouse, where you could do everything from the keyboard and fly through your inbox. An email experience that also just worked offline so you could be productive anywhere. And an email experience that had the best Gmail plugins but built in natively and which was still somehow, despite all of this, subtle, minimal and visually gorgeous. And so with that, we built Superhuman. Now, in terms of validating the idea, and you mentioned products market fit. In that first year, I did hundreds of interviews, multiple people every single day. And it was around two or three years later that we amped it up to the next level with our product market fit engine.

You had some money in the bank when you started Superhuman. Did you spend the first year just doing the interviews or how soon did you start building the product?

That is a great question. And this is different to my prior company, Rapportive. It's also different to what normally happens. So for Rapportiv, I sat down and I remember writing the first line of code. It was January 10, 2010. And by myself, about six weeks later, I'd finished creating the first version of the product. And about four weeks after that point had again by myself launched it and had acquired, I think, 30, 40,000 users over the course of the first few days.

Wow.

So that is the classic hacker in a room, just sits down, writes some code, and sometimes luck strikes. This was probably attempt number six or seven for me. So definitely luck is a huge component here. Or maybe I was just incrementally getting better over time, but sometimes you just get lucky. Now, Superhuman was very, very different. Superhuman is a classically hard endeavor. There isn't any engineer that I don't know that hasn't had the idea. I wonder what it would be like to build my own email client that then starts and realizes, oh, wow, this is hard. Like, this is really, really big. So to build something like an email client, you need a very big team. You need tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And you need a lot of patience. In many ways, it's actually perfect for a second time founder, someone who's able to come into it with easy, even just a little bit of money from a previous exit because they now have that personal Runway that Patience to last the length of the journey and also the track record and the credibility to raise the tens of millions more that is required and to actually recruit the team that you will need to pull it off. So to answer your question, was I creating product in that first year of thinking about Superhuman? The answer is no. I was doing everything actually, other than creating products. I was, like you said, talking to users, I was doing interviews. But I was also preemptively raising money. I raised about a million dollars before even bringing anyone else into the company. On the basis of a slide deck and my credibility, I acquired superhuman.com which was a journey all by itself and involved dealing with some rather tricky people. I wrote the copy for the landing page, which is substantially the same copy that we still have to this day. I created wireframes, the first few designs for Superhuman, and they don't even look anything remotely like that today. But the very first ideas were being put to paper and that was the first year of Superhuman.

So that's actually a great list you went through. I often hear new founders saying, I'm not technical, I can't code, I can't get started. I need to build a product. And you can code. And you spent a year doing all these other things that you just listed out instead of building the product. So I think, if anything, there's a good lesson there. Of all the things that you could should be doing to get started, what did you learn from that year of doing interviews that, number one, gave you enough confidence to move forward with building a product? And two, what, if any, new insights did you get from those conversations that made that year of doing interviews worthwhile?

There is a way of doing these, by the way, which I realized we haven't touched on, that anyone can do that makes doing them way, way easier. The vast majority of these were asynchronous email interviews. The way I did them was we had a landing page and it was not great, but it had maybe a four sentence pitch about the product and you could sign up on the landing page. If you signed up, you got an automated email from me. It looks like it was handwritten. There were no images, there were no backgrounds and I had actually written it, but it was sent out automatically and it said something along the lines of, thank you so much for signing up for Superhuman. I can't wait to get this product that we're building into your hands. I have two quick questions to help us build the best possible products. Number one, what do you use for email today? And number two, what do you hate about it. Obviously, not everybody would reply, but a lot of people would because these are the people who are so high intense that they've gone out of their way to find a janky startup's landing page and actually sign up for something. So there's a clear need that you can assume that they have. Now the question is, what is it? So some people would reply, and then here's the trick. You gotta be really, really fast. And I used to burn this inbox down every single day. You reply back and you essentially just keep asking, why? And they'll reply, and then you reply and they'll reply. And the little game I used to play with myself is, how long can I keep this conversation going? There was a set of things I was definitely attempting to learn at the time. For example, for people to stay on top of a lot of conversations. Before Superhuman, the main thing that people would use was Boomerang. Gmail didn't have a native snooze feature at that point. And so I would be asking things like, what is your most common snooze time? Is it two days or is it three days? How would you rank? Remind me if no reply vs send later? Do you use remind me if no reply or remind me regardless which one's more important to you? And I'd keep on asking these questions until eventually the user, potential user, would run out of patience with me. And it's like five or six emails in, but I would have learned a tremendous amount. And this is so efficient that you can do 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 of these every single day. And in fact, we scaled this to the point where it wasn't necessarily me doing all of them. My brother had joined the organization as an early founding member to help grow the company. And he said, okay, Rahul, what do I do? And I said, you first job is to take over this inbox. We'd already done hundreds of interviews by that point, but to keep on doing them, let's keep on learning, keep on engaging these customers so that we continually validate our idea. This was all before the products Market Fit engine, which, as you know, is an entirely different way of validating business ideas.

That's really interesting. A lot of founders, I mean, I think the obvious thing is you want to try and figure out, do they have this problem? Would they buy my product? Would they pay for it? And some of the questions that you were asking were like, so detailed, like, how long do you snooze an email for? Were you getting feedback in terms of validating Will people will buy the product or were you getting feedback in terms of how to build a great product?

I learned two things. The first questions remember were very, very vague. What do you use and what do you hate about it? And what I learned in response to that is that the vast majority of people use Gmail, not some third party email client. Now you could say that, that's obvious. But then it gets more interesting. The people who use Gmail really didn't like it. It wasn't like when Gmail came out in 20. Gosh, when was it? 2002? 3, 4? I think it was when it was so popular and so exciting that people were trading invites on ebay and they were going for $400 plus plus. That era had long since passed and people were saying things like, well, at least it's not Outlook or I can't say I love it. But the most resounding consistent piece of feedback was it's way too slow and it takes way too much time. There were other things like the drafts don't sync properly, I can't believe it still doesn't work properly offline, or I have to bog it down with all of these Bridges browser extensions. But the most consistent piece of feedback was takes way too much time and it's way too slow. And then for the people who were using third party email clients, again a minority but still very useful feedback, we learned that they take too long to sync and they're highly buggy as well as thirdly, they consume way too much CPU resource. And anyone who uses Superhuman will know that. We've taken all of these things to try and create with the best of our ability and the resources that we have, the perfect product to address all of it. It's blazingly fast, it just works offline. It is designed to not consume crazy amounts of CPU when it syncs. It doesn't pull everything down to your device, but just the things that are needed in order to make it once again feel blazingly fast. You don't need a whole bunch of browser extensions to make it do the things that a professional would need it to do. And we have set a remarkably high level of quality when it comes to what it means to be an email client, especially compared to other third party email applications. So it was validating the core value proposition of hey, we're going to get you through your inbox twice as fast as before and you're going to save three hours or more every single week. But then you're right, it was also pretty quickly moving on to how do we do that? Like, how do we build the best email client for you?

So that was kind of the year one that you went through. Year two. You start building the product. And I think it was, I want to get to this product market fit engine. So I think it was 2017 that you were trying to kind of figure out what does product market Fit look like, how do we get there? And which led you to this, this figuring out this, this, I guess, this framework. Can you kind of help us understand what was going through your head? What were some of the problems that you were dealing with at the time that led you to eventually getting to this, this, this idea of this engine?

I think in order to make the most sense of this story, it's probably worth starting with what Product Market Fit even is. And what it is is the number one reason why startups succeed. And the lack of it, sadly, is also the number one reason why startups fail. So back then, it was really tough to find a crystal clear definition of product market fit. And as you know, that's one of the things that I've worked on. But back then, folks like Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, would say it's when you made something that people want, or Sam Altman would say it's when users spontaneously tell other people to use your product. But I think it's Marc Andreessen, who I'm now very fortunate to work with. He actually sits on our board. From Andreessen Horowitz, who has the most vivid definition, he would say you can always feel it when product market fit is not happening. Customers aren't quite getting value, users aren't great growing that fast, Word of mouth is not spreading, the press will use a kind of blur, and the sales cycle takes too damn long. But you can always feel it when product market Fit is happening. Customers are buying as fast as you can, Add servers, you're hiring sales and support as fast as you can. Reporters are constantly calling you about your hot new thing, investors are staking out your house, and money is piling up in your checking account. And that's a very vivid definition. And that is the one that I was thinking about and staring at in the summer of 2017. You see, the problem is it seemed so subjective, so unactionable. What do you do if, by this definition, you don't have products market Fit? So let's put this in the context of years in the summer of 2015, depending on how you count it, we started much like any other company by writing code. And in the summer of 2016, we were still coding. And in the summer of 2017, we were still coding. So as you might imagine, I felt this incredible intense pressure to launch both from the team, but also from within myself. Because after all, my last company, Rapportiv, had launched, scaled and been acquired in less time. And yet here we were two years in and we still had not launched. But deep down inside, I knew that no matter how intensely I felt pressure that a launch would go very badly. I did not believe we had products market fit. It wouldn't be the Marc Andreessen story.

Why did you think that you've spent so much time, invested so much time in year one talking to customers, getting this information. You spent a couple of years building the product. I know you talked about the definition being subjective, but it sounds like you were doing all the right things. So why did you feel that way?

It's one of those things. It's very similar to your question. How did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? I just knew it. It was obvious to me that the thing that we had was good and had flashes of brilliance, but that it didn't yet meet the bar of an email client that people could switch to and then further meet the even higher bar of something that was special enough that people would stick with it. And although I knew all of that, I couldn't just say the things I am just saying to you now, to the team, these are folks who had poured their hearts and souls into the product. They would say, well, Rahul, how do you really know? Isn't the standard advice to be embarrassed about your product? Shouldn't we just launch this and see? And that's the thing that most startups do, they just launch it and see. But if you're following along, the correct counter is most startups also fail. So just because most startups do it doesn't mean it's the thing that we're going to do. Which is why to bring it full circle, I set out looking for this way to define products market fit, for a metric to measure products market fit and then ultimately for a methodology to systematically increase it, which is what I ended up coming up with. Part discovery, part invention. And we call it the product market fit engine.

How did you come up with it? I know you did a lot of research. I know some of the ideas you got from meeting with Sean Ellis. It sounds like there was almost like this research project going on trying to figure out how to do this. Was there one or two particular places that you went to to to get this, or was this just a process you had to go through to figure this out?

This was the kind of research or reading that I was just doing through the course of being a founder. You know, I'd read Paul Graham's essays, I'd read Andreessen's essays. Sean Ellis is all over the Internet and it's easy to find stuff that they write. And it's interesting. As a founder, I have a professional interest, you might call it, in how all of this stuff works. But it is perhaps Sean Ellis who was the beginning of this trail. And for those that don't know him, he ran growth in the early days of Dropbox and LogMeIn and Eventbrite and many other amazing companies, perhaps most famous for coining the term growth hacker. Now, what Shaun found is a leading indicator of products market fit, one that is actually benchmarked and predictive. You simply ask your users, how would you feel if you could no longer use the product? And you measure the percent that answer very disappointed as opposed to somewhat disappointed or not disappointed. Here's the key thing. After benchmarking hundreds of startups, Sean found that the companies that struggle to grow almost always get less than 40% very disappointed. And the companies that grew the most easily, well, they almost always got more than 40% disappointed. So in other words, if more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, you have initial product market fit. Now, there's a lot more that the engine does. It actually shows you how to optimize that, how to increase it. It can even produce a roadmap that's essentially mathematically guaranteed to take you there. Which may sound absurd, I realize, but if you take a look at the process, you'll see how it works.

We'll provide some resources so people can go and if they're interested to understand this in depth. But in the next five or 10 minutes, I'd love to at least give people a distillation of those four steps. I think that kind of make up the engine so people can walk away with just at least a high level understanding of what this means and how they may be able to use it. Does that sound good?

Sure, that sounds good. So there are four steps or five steps, depending on which version of this engine that you're using. The first one is to survey. So there is a set of four questions that we email to every user. The one that I mentioned, how would you feel if you can no longer use the product? But then three other very important. What type of people do you think would most benefit from the product? What is the main benefit that you receive from the product and how can we improve the product? The product for you, you're going to get a whole bunch of data back and then you want to segment. The thing that you're trying to understand here is who are the people who really love your product? And this is so important to do in the early days because if you're an early stage startup, you're going to have a whole wide spread of people and a lot probably of early adopters who, whilst they're enthusiastic, probably aren't very representative of the kind of customer that you ought to be going after. So you end up segmenting, you're looking for pockets of those responses where people really, really love your products. And in the course of doing this, you'll actually develop what I call the highest expectation customer. This is where that Nicole example from earlier in the episode came from, actually. It was from this exercise. And what you're then able to do is simply by choosing to ignore certain segments and focus on others, increase the metric, increase the percentage of people who would be very disappointed without your product. Once you've done that, you then go step three, which is to analyze. And there are really two things that we're trying to understand here, which is number one, why do people love our products? And number two, what holds people back from loving our products? And there's a whole bunch of analysis you can do here. It's rather fast, it doesn't take that long these days. It's very easy with some of the tools available online. And I believe now there are actually startups that exist that have taken this whole process and turned it into a product. You can now do the products market fit engine with products, which is pretty cool to see. But that brings you onto step four, which is to implement at this point, you understand why users love your product. This is what we call the core benefit for Superhuman. That'll be things like speed, keyboard shortcuts, time saved, aesthetics. And you also actually understand what's holding people back from loving your product. Now there's a very important nuance here, which is, you know, most companies will just go and talk to their users and their users will complain loudly and then they'll start to build those things. But the problem is if you do that, you, you often end up with a insipid, almost confused product that isn't for anybody in particular, because it's sort of driven by the people that you happen to have as early users. Whereas if you follow this algorithm, you end up specifically building for the people who almost love your products, but not quite, and for whom the main benefit resonates, such that if you build the things that are holding them back and you know that they'll go into the very disappointed camp, in other words, you know that they'll become your perfect type of user, the kind of person who loves your product for the reason that they ought to, and they'd be very disappointed without it. And that brings me then to the final step, which is track. You know this framework will work, but there are no silver bullets. And I recommend tracking this product market fit score and running the process regularly. We we track it every week, we roll it up to every month, we roll it up to every quarter, we look at it longitudinally over years. And it's a process that we've been running at Superhuman since then to this very day.

Thanks for sharing that. I'd like to understand how did those five steps apply to you and Superhuman? The survey was that just a simple kind of email type question or more in depth. And then the segment is interesting because in the early days you don't have many customers. Anybody who comes along you'd love to sell to them. And trying to segment early on can feel scary. What did that survey look like?

The survey itself was mechanically very simple. It was a Typeform survey and we sent the link out via email to our users. Now, if you look at Sean Ellis's early writings on the subject, and if you care about the 40% benchmark, remember he is the one who figured that number out. You have to do it in the way that he did it. And his biggest piece of advice on how to survey is only do so once the user has experienced the core value proposition of of your product. If, for example, it was Uber, it might be after they've completed the first ride, or if it was Airbnb, it might be after your first stay as a tenant or your first guest as a host. In the case of Superhuman, we decided it was once you've had about two weeks with the product and you've sent more than 20 emails, we felt like that would have given you enough time to experience at least some of the things that truly make Superhuman magical and special. So once you hit that threshold, we sent you an automated email and the email contained a link to a Typeform survey. And then those Typeform surveys ended up getting emailed to an internal mailing list that then went of course, to everyone in the company at the time. And that's a mailing list I'm still subscribed to to this day. It's a very, very important mailing list. So that's how we did the survey. I think your other question was around segmenting.

I mean, I guess it's a little bit different for you. You know, you've already had a couple of exits, a successful exit, you've raised some money, so maybe it's a little less scary for you to do that as opposed to maybe a founder who is bootstrapping or doesn't have those types of resources. And I think for me it was like understanding how we can convince even those people that segmenting like this is a good thing to do, provided you have enough of a Runway to make this work.

So the good news is it doesn't eat into your Runway. You don't have to fire any customers. We certainly didn't. For context, when we did our first survey, our product market fit score was only 22%. Now that may sound terrible, but for me it was exactly what I needed. I had data in hand, the reason why launching would be a terrible idea. And I went back to the team and I said, hey, look, this is what the results are. This is no longer a question of belief or one person's opinion against another's. This is quite simply what the data says. Now, segmenting is actually the fastest thing you can do. If you look at your data and you said these aren't ideal users, but these are ideal users and let's pretend the non ideal users don't exist, what does our product market fit score then go to? Well, in our case it jumped by 10% from 22 to 32% and that took five minutes. So for anyone who's thinking this sounds scary, well, I would submit to you there is no faster way to increase this metric. You don't have to stop selling to those people who aren't in your ideal segment. But what it really is is an eye opening clarification for who to go after next. And the answer is more of those people who are in that segment that's doing really, really well. Zooming all the way out. When people think about product market fit, when founders especially think about it, they really only think about it from the perspective of product. Well, I don't have products market fit, therefore I must change the product. And that is a logical fallacy. You can also just as easily, in fact more easily change the market and it's way faster. And I would do it even if I were bootstrapped and not venture backed.

That's a great answer. The 22% to 32% I think is a very concrete case for, for segmenting to increase your product market fit score. There's only so much we can cover. We'll include some links in the show notes and I know you even created a coda doc with a bunch of resources and guides to kind of going through this. So we'll include that as well if you think is relevant. What happened next? We don't have a huge amount of time. I'd love to sort of figure out what happened next from once you went through that process. And I want to make sure we also cover some of the gamification principles or ideas that you've implemented into Superhuman, because I think that is also a pretty unique way to think about building products that I think would be useful to share with people.

In terms of what happened next. Like I mentioned, we were 22% on that metric when we first did our survey. And by the summer of 2017, which was a few months later, we were 33%. That was after we'd figured out what the re segmentation was. After a quarter we were 47%. A quarter after that we were 56% and a quarter after that we were 58%. So in other words, 58% of our users at that time would have been very disappointed without Superhuman. And here's when people sometimes get a little bit misled. This isn't a one and done process. This is a forever process. Because as you widen your market as you inevitably want to, for example, move beyond selling to founders, to selling to other types of people, maybe folks who work with founders, well, those people are slightly, maybe even very different. And you're going to have to keep on working on this product market fit score and ultimately your product market fit. So this number is going to go up and down. And the more you widen the markets, the more down it will go. But the more you work on it, the more up it will then return. We've been able to keep this pretty consistently at 50, 55% or above over time.

How did you drive it? The improvements quarter by quarter. What were you changing?

Well, so this is where the promise of the products market fit engine automatically writes itself. This is step four, which is implement. By this point you already know why users love your products. You already have a sense of, of what holds users back. So to increase the score, I think the answer is fairly obvious. And here's what I always spend half your time doubling down on what users love. In our case, that was even more speed, even more shortcuts. Even more ways to be more efficient, even better aesthetics. But just as importantly, spend half your time systematically addressing what holds users back. There's a very specific set of users that we're addressing. Not all of them, but specifically the ones who are on the edge for whom the main benefit resonates. Here's the thing. If we only double down on what users love, which is what vision driven teams tend to do, you simply won't increase your product market fit score. By definition, you're building for people who already love you. You're not going to make the people who are on the fence love you. It's just going to further strengthen with the set of people who you've already sold. But if you only address objections now, this is what data driven teams tend to do, then a competitor will eventually overtake you by doing the thing that you do special. Even better. And a great example of this is Slack versus every single chat client that came before it. But if you spend half your time doubling down on what the folks who love you love about the product, and half your time systematically overcoming the objections of the people who are on the fence and but for whom the main benefit resonates, you now in a sense have an optimal roadmap. And the cool thing is it actually automatically writes itself.

Yeah. So you were basically getting these insights quarter by quarter, identifying these are the things that if we had, would get these people on the fence to also become customers and start using the product. And it was that constant focus. As you said, it's not a one and done thing. Constantly doing that was how you increase that score. I know we're almost out of time here, and I don't want to kind of rush this process, but I'd love to kind of get some takeaways from you in terms of the game design principles. And maybe you could kind of just walk us through that and share some, some examples of how you're using that in Superhuman.

This is a very meaty topic indeed. So I'll just give it the lightest brush that I think is feasible in the time that we have. First of all, I would point folks to a talk that I did for the Andreessen Horowitz Summit one year, and I believe it's called game design, not gamification. And therein is possibly the most important point, which is true game design. The thing I submit you actually need to do is not about points, levels, trophies, badges, it is about legitimately making your product feel like a game, actually making it fun and rewarding. To the point where it's almost playable to the point where people will tell others about it. There are many principles that I cover. I believe 12 or maybe 13, depending on how you slice it in that talk. And those principles are across a number of different areas. Areas like goals. Does your game have a goal and what makes a good goal? Emotions. Are you being crystal clear on what emotions you want to drive and which you want to avoid? What emotions do your competitive products create? Controls. Are they robust? Do they respond quickly? Can you break it by driving it too fast? The next one I would say is. And then the final one actually in this case is flow. Does your product put people into a state of flow? I think we all intuitively know what that means, but what many of us might not know is it's been intensively studied by academia. We know what flow is. We know what the conditions are to create it. And by studying these, if you are a product designer, you can quite literally make your products significantly more effective at putting people in flow. Now, you do all of these things well, you have the start of a decent game.

I think there was something else that you had shared from that was this idea of, does it encourage your users to kind of have this playful exploration and pleasantly surprise them? And I think that is beautiful because I know as a user, when I use products and I wanted to do something and I don't know how I try something because I don't know better, and it actually works. That's the takeaway for me, a surprising moment. I mean, for example, I had an email from Avery, your assistant, saying, hey, Rahul's running late. I was replying to her while she was sending me an email, and when I looked at the thread, it was still nicely organized, whereas I would typically, you know, in the past, I would have done that, and things would have kind of got messed up. And so that was a nice example. And I don't want to be sound like a superhuman fanboy, although I probably am these days, but I was one of those people on the edge for a long time. I was like $30 a month to access Gmail. Why would I want to do that? And I really resisted, and I don't know why until eventually I gave up and, you know, got on the onboarding call and haven't. Haven't looked back. It's like the first time you. You drive a car with power steering. Well, everything is power steering these days. But, you know, back in the day, first time you drive something with power steering, you can never go back to a regular car. Right. So that's kind of how my, my personal experience has been.

It's funny you should mention that because when I was doing the initial fundraising pitches for Superhuman, well, here in Silicon Valley, investors famously love their Teslas. I would say to them, you know, now what it's like to pedal to the metal, accelerate an electric car. Are you ever going back to a gasoline car? And that was the jaw dropping moment for them. They were like, okay, I get this now. Once you've tried it, you're not going back.

So the other thing that, that strikes me about you is, I mean, we're both British, we both grew up in England. You're a very. I see this situation where on the one hand, you're a very thoughtful guy. We didn't get a chance to talk about onboarding, but in the early days, you were personally doing onboarding and spending up to like 2 hours per user to complete that onboarding process. I read somewhere that when you were raising your Series C round, you know, you wanted to go and have these meetings and it took a lot longer than it would have if, you know, you could have, maybe other people would have done it differently. And so it's interesting that on the one hand, you're building a product which is about do things twice as fast, save time, productivity, and on the other hand, you're willing to spend long amounts of time on things when you feel like they're important. And I don't know what the answer from that is or how I could take that away and say, this is the thing to do fast. This is the thing to invest my time in. But is there a way you think about that? Because it just struck me as an interesting kind of situation.

I don't do things that quickly. And I think anyone who knows me would tell you that my zone of genius, as it were, which is a phrase that we use inside of Superhuman, is doing things excellently. And if I don't know how to do something excellently, I will slow down and either teach myself how to do it or try and work with people who can. There are pros and cons to this approach, of course. The pros are that for a industry like we're in and for a product like ours, it aligns very naturally with the goal of producing something that is delightful and which has truly a remarkable level of quality. The cons are things take time. And what that means is, for me, as an entrepreneur and as a founder, I have to surround myself with people for whom their zones of genius is execution, is operation, is is actually day to day running a company and you want folks like me doing the design, maybe thinking up the experiences, setting the bar for what good actually is, but you almost always want other folks actually driving it day to day in order to hit the results and reach those bars.

Great answer. Let's move on to the Lightning Round. I think we should wrap up. I wish before we do that I said I wish we had another couple of hours because I've got like thousands of notes here that I wanted to talk to you about. But I think we did a reasonable job to cover the main points that you and I had talked about getting to. So anyway, let's wrap up. Let's get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you talking about taking time to do things. Let's jump into it. What's one of the best pieces of business advice that you've received?

This was from Reid Hoffman when I was leaving LinkedIn. He said to me, it's always blood, sweat and tears when you start a company, so set your ambitions as high as possible.

What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

I would recommend the Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. It's the best introduction to the topic and if you want to learn about things like goals and emotions and controls and tools, toys and flow as well as a whole bunch of others, it is covered in there. Great for a newbie.

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

There are many. If I had to choose, I would say grit.

What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit other than Superhuman?

Outside of Superhuman, it would be transcendental meditation. I found it has greatly increased my capacity to focus, get into flow, stay in flow, and also be creative.

What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

I would build a library or an SDK that does blazingly fast, completely offline autocorrect in the browser, so in JavaScript, so that in any application, whether it's Windows, macOS, whatever, any web app, you can type super fast and the mistakes are fixed as you go.

That's a very specific idea. I always get vague ideas. Ideas you've definitely clearly thought about that one. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that people don't know?

Well, I think we covered it during the podcast, but generally what most people don't know and assume that I couldn't possibly have time for is that I am an avid gamer. As we talked about I was a professional game designer before I became a founder and playing games is still a huge part of my life to this day.

And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

I play and run a lot of tabletop role playing games, so this would be like Dungeons and Dragons, but also quite a few niche games as well. And I find it's a way for me to practice a whole slew of skills, whether that's game design, storytelling, or narrative outside of work. And it helps make me a better CEO.

That's awesome. My son is so into Dungeons and Dragons, I still haven't figured out how to play it. I did buy, I don't know if you've heard of it, Castle Ravenloft, which is kind of like a board game version of D and D. And that's my mission this year, is to learn how to play that. So we'll see how that goes. Rahul, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. I know you're a busy guy, so I appreciate you taking the time to do this. As I said, would love to have spent another two or three hours talking with you, but I appreciate the time. I think you shared a ton of really useful insights. Hopefully, if nothing else, we wetted people's appetites. To go and learn more about some of these frameworks and ideas. We'll include links to as many of those as we covered here in the show notes, hopefully all of them. Other than that, if people want to check out Superhuman, go to superhuman.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Either by email, rahuluperhuman.com or on Twitter. My DMs are open so you can just send me a direct message.

How many emails do you get in a day?

Many, many thousands. One? About every six seconds.

But Superhuman comes to the rescue.

Helps me stay on top of it all.

Love it. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. As I said, you guys have made some incredible progress in the last few years and you said to me we haven't won yet. So I look forward to the coming years and seeing how you continue to evolve and where the product goes. As I said, I'm enjoying using it. It is making my life much easier as well. So thank you so much and good luck with the future of Superhuman. Appreciate the time.

Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me. Bye bye.

My pleasure.

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