Superhuman's Playbook to Build 10X Products with Rahul Vohra, Superhuman

I would say build something that people not only want or need, but that they love. Build your software like it's a game. Most companies don't do this. Most software companies worry about what users want or need. But nobody needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. And when you make a game, you don't worry about what users want or what they need. You obsess over how they feel. When your product is 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.

I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey what's up innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself, on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more, this episode is brought to you by Boast AI. Each year, the US And Canadian governments give out billions of dollars in R and D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses like yours. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money can take up to 16 months. Boast AI gets you access to research and development tax credits and innovation funding opportunities without the headache and red tape. Join thousands of North American companies leveraging Boast AI software to maximize cashback. Check out B O A S T AI. This episode is also brought to you by Launch Academy, an international tech hub that provides mentorship, resources, network and the environment for entrepreneurs to launch, fund and grow their startups. Since 2012, Launch Academy has incubated over 6,000 entrepreneurs, of which 300 have grown their startups past Seed and Series A and have collectively raised over $1.2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch Academy's programs, check out launchacademy.ca My journey with Traction.

Actually started with Rahul's previous company, and I'm super, super, super excited to have him on the show. One of the best product minds I know on the Give us a brief intro to Superhuman.

Absolutely. Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. Our customers get through their inbox twice as fast as before. Reply to their important emails sooner, and many of them see Inbox zero for the first time in years.

Definitely. And I see a lot of my friends, especially outside the Bay Area, begging for invites. Hey, do you have an invite to Superhuman? Can I Get an invite. Is it still invite only?

It is still invite only, although we're very rapidly working through the wait list. So we have a wait list of about 320,000 people. It is still the case that the fastest way to get on board onto Superhuman is to get a referral from somebody you know. But if you don't know somebody using it, that's fine. Signing up on the website as well will work just as well, and we'll get there as rapidly as we can.

So is it true what I'm hearing from a lot of my friends using Superhuman, that they're getting to Inbox Zero faster? How true is that?

Oh, absolutely. So we just wrapped up an analysis. 36% of our customers hit inbox zero in the onboarding itself, and over 50% of customers inbox zero within four hours starting to use the product.

Wow. I'm curious. Why did you decide to start working on Superhuman? You did report it. You could have done a whole bunch of ideas. You have great product mind, great talent. What made you pick Superhuman?

And to understand the answer, we have to wind the clock back by about 10 years, back to the report of days. So for folks that don't remember, this was 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 and links to their social profiles. We grew rapidly, and two years later, we were acquired by LinkedIn. And during those four years, 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, and still not working offline. On top of this, people were installing plugins like ours, Rapportive, but also Boomerang, Mixmax, Clearbit, you name it, they had it. And each plugin took these problems of clutter, memory, CPU performance offline and made all of them dramatically worse. So we decided it was time for change. We imagined an email experience that is blazingly fast, where searches are instantaneous, where every interaction takes place in 100 milliseconds or less. An email experience where you never had to touch the mouse, where you could do everything from the keyboard and fly through your inbox. An experience that just worked offline so you could be productive from anywhere. And an experience that had the best Gmail plugins built in natively and yet was still somehow subtle, minimal, and visually gorgeous. And so with that, we built Superhuman.

Did you ever even consider anything else.

After report of I did, yeah. I briefly considered going into investing. And once I shared with my friends and with my colleagues that I was about to leave LinkedIn, a number of venture funds in Silicon Valley reached out and asked if I would be interested in joining. And I was very interested. But I realized I was even more excited to get back to being a founder and back to building.

Awesome. So tell us a bit about the early days, because you've been working on Superhuman pretty much since you left LinkedIn. How did you go about early customer development? Who were the first few folks who were like, crazy to buy from a raw, crazy startup like you saying, I'm gonna eliminate.

Right. So what I always say is that you have to get out there and you have to talk to your prospective customers. And we did this at the scale that even today people find surprising. So in that first year, we interviewed over 1,000 potential customers. And it may seem hard because on average, that's three people per day if you did it every single day. But there is a trick to doing this efficiently. So the first thing you need to do is create a landing page. Doesn't have to be fancy. For us, it was just a simple squarespace page, I believe a paragraph or two about what we wanted to do, and most critically, a little box where people could sign up, they could leave that email address. Then you have to insert yourself into the news cycle. And no matter what you're doing, there's almost always something important and interesting happening that year that you can insert yourself into. For us, it was the shutdown of Mailbox. Mailbox was this once lauded email application acquired by Dropbox. And it went from nowhere to fame to bust in a real fast cycle. And it was about to be shut down by Dropbox. And I knew that this was going to create a news cycle, so we inserted ourself into that news cycle by writing a piece of evergreen content. I wrote an article on how to survive an M and A transaction as a founder. 15 tips and tricks for surviving well in your new company. A piece of evergreen content that would stand the test of time, but also extremely relevant to the Mailbox news cycle, as this app was about to be sunset. And I had previously started and sold an email app now that then drove tens of thousands of people to read the article. Tens of thousands of people to our landing page. We acquired over 10,000 signups that way. And for every person who signed up, we sent an automatic email. An email from me, in which I asked two questions. Number one, what do you use for your email today? And number two, what are your Pet peeves about it. What do you love and what do you hate? And obviously a certain percentage of those people would reply and then I would reply to those emails. And the trick here is to engage. I would play a little game with myself, how long can I keep the conversation going? And then at a certain point, usually five or six emails in, it will naturally peter out. And that way you can start to scale interviews with your potential customer base. And eventually I had somebody else on my team, my head of growth, do this with me. And between the two of us, we interviewed over 1,000 people in our first year that way. Wow.

And that was all inbound, Was it a combination of inbound and outbound?

That was entirely inbound. The trick here is to create a scenario where you will get 1,000 people come to you in your first year.

And were you not worried that, you know, you don't have a product going, just have an idea, you insert yourself into a news cycle and you somehow linked to your email to get people to contact you. You weren't worried about like getting press when, when you're that premature or any advice around that?

Well, I don't really consider this press. And this is the difference between, for example, a launch article, which is an article that you might run in TechCrunch. It will be entirely dedicated to your company and just producing amazing useful content for the community. So the M and A article obviously mentioned Superhuman. It was a sentence early on at the top of the article and a call to action to sign up at the end of the article. But the vast majority of it was simply, look, here's a piece of useful content. It's extremely timely. This is top of mind for many people in our community right now because we've had this famous app be acquired and be sunset a short year later. And so what I would say is just focus on creating useful content. And that way it doesn't matter that your product doesn't yet exist. People expect high quality things to take time.

Definitely. Let's dive a little bit into those early interviews. What were some of the questions that you were asking? Because essentially a lot of people say talk to customers, but then I guess if you talk to customers and ask what customers want, you would build a faster horse and not build a car. But you haven't done that. You haven't replicated Gmail. You've built something completely different. So what are some tips in that interviewing process that you can get?

Yeah, so first of all, I would say that you're very unlikely to get the inspiration for the car from your user base. This is typically something that you will have to have felt yourself as a founder and as an entrepreneur. And I myself had felt the pain of Gmail becoming more cluttered, slower, not working properly, offline, all of the browser extensions like Reporter and everything else just glommed on top and making it slow. I had felt that pain myself. Then what you need to do is validate it with customers. And there's a very big difference between validating something you believe to be true and trying to get your idea from your customers. Step number one is have a vision that you can then validate it. And for us, the vision was we're going to build the fastest email experience in the world. Now, how do you validate it? I always started with two quick questions. What are you using for email today? And what do you hate and what do you love about it? And invariably people would tell me, okay, we're using Gmail or using some third party email application like Airmail, for example. And then when people tell you the answers to those questions, you simply play the chain of follow up. The way that I do it is by just keep the conversation going. How long can you keep the conversation going? And there are simple tricks to doing that. For example, you would say, okay, I'm using Gmail, and on top of that I use Boomerang. And I would say, well, I'm curious, what are your favorite features in Boomerang? And you might say, well, I like the ability to set reminders, schedule emails, and its ability to rate the writing in my email. And then I would say, well, permit me if I may ask, which of those things do you truly consider to be a must have? And you would probably say, I consider the reminders to be a must have, the scheduling sort of in the middle, and honestly the writing assessments, I'd probably be fine without, and so on. Now if you do that a thousand times, you're going to develop an incredibly rich and detailed understanding of what it is people actually want and what they need, what do they enjoy and what do they find frustrating? And what we found was that people kind of don't like Gmail anymore, that the days of people saying I love Gmail have long since gone. And unanimously, people were frustrated or disappointed by it. And they didn't like the fact that it was slow, they didn't like the fact that it wouldn't work offline, and they didn't like the fact that when you added third party functionality, it made the whole thing even more cluttered. And for third Party email clients. What we found was people didn't like the fact that when you first add email accounts to them at that time especially, they go slow. They didn't like the fact that syncing was generally unreliable and they didn't like the fact that they were buggy. And so you can see how we were able to take these and our initial vision to build the fastest email experience of all time and to combine them into one coherent whole.

Definitely, you've been at it for a few years. At what point did you say, wow, this could be a thing? Were there any sort of milestones along the way? Maybe it was within that first year when you spoke to a thousand people, but were there any sort of milest along the way where you said, pass, fail, I'm going to drop this or I'm going to go all in. How should founders think about that?

Well, first of all, I would say that do not think about it as pass fail. Do not think about it as go no go. In practice, it takes a really long time to build a high quality product. We had a rough goal to get to our first paying customers in about 18 to 24 months. But I try not to ask go no go because it almost encourages failure. Instead, I would rather set ambitious goals and then simply ask thou, how do we achieve this? Now, there were multiple moments where I thought, wow, we really had something. And I think every founder has multiple of these per year. And this is to offset the many, many lows that happen every single year as well. One of those moments was after that first year of interviewing, after the first 1,000 interviews, where I felt, oh my gosh, the first 1,000 people that we've spoken to have validated the vision that we have. Another was when I felt the first glimmers of speed, that first prototype where it started to feel faster than Gmail and in a way that felt special, almost kind of sent a shiver down my spine. Another would be when our Products Market fit score hit the high 50s and stayed there. For those who don't know, I'm referring to the product Market Fit engine that I wrote about last year. And another would be when, and this was actually just last summer, when in the space of one week, we were on the front page of the New York Times and had a write up in the Economist. Had you told me a few years ago that that's what would happen for Superhuman, I wouldn't even have believed you. And all of these felt like wow moments. So today, instead of setting ambitious deadlines, and this is something I would advise for most startups, simply set the ambition and the quality of your product or your service, of your solution, and then ask how, because it will take as long as it takes.

Let's go into the launch phase.

Okay, so I've seen a lot of companies, especially in our space, which I would broadly define as of the productivity, get this wrong. I no longer believe in the traditional launch. Let's say you built a new email client, or a new task manager, or a new calendar app. The surface area for these products is absolutely massive, bigger than almost any domain you could think of. What that means is you also get a massive surface area for bugs as well as massive variability in how users want to use your product. Now, most companies would launch their app because the demand for these products is so high, they would quickly get tens of thousands of users. But guess what? These users will find thousands of bugs and the company would quickly get overwhelmed. They would not be able to fix the issues fast enough. And so these users will become disappointed, churn out of the product, and then they would tell everybody about their experience. This is the very definition of a net detractor. So in my experience, it's significantly better to do what we do onboard customers at a measured pace and each week, and that way you have the bandwidth to find any issues that they may encounter and you can focus on making them exceptionally happy. So for founders considering onboarding, I would do it in four discrete phases. Number one, can the founder onboard and does it result in great metrics? Number two, can somebody other than the founder onboard and still generate great metrics? Number three, can you build a great full stack growth team? And number four, can you build a dedicated team of onboarding specialists, dive into.

A little bit more detail in terms of what each phase look like for you, like maybe with a couple examples?

Absolutely. Okay, so let's take phase one first. In phase one, the founder takes the lead, and in this phase, one of the founders, the product founder, which is ideally also the CEO, should do the onboardings. The goal of this phase is to test whether the company is ready to start doing onboardings. The assumption is that of all the people in the company, the product founder should be able to do them best. After all, they hold the most integrated view and they should have a wide range of skills across sales, active listening and user experience design. So I did the first several hundred onboardings for Superhuman myself. And in this phase, I would not be concerned with how long the onboardings take. In fact, I would often take up to two hours. Now, for me, each Onboarding had six parts. First, I would start by giving a demo of Superhuman and sharing all of the things that make it magical and delightful. Second, I would then remind the person that Superhuman is a paid product. And I would quickly measure price sensitivity using our methodology for doing that. And for those that don't know about it, we use the Van Westendorp methodology. It's one of the quickest and easiest ways to figure out pricing. Third, I would then ask the person how they do that email, and I would take a note of all the Superhuman features that I would want to show them. Fourth, I would then show them how to get through that email in Superhuman, but twice as fast as they were doing before. And fifth, I would insist that they do their email with me for about half an hour. Now, this part is crucial because every single time I would find five to 10 bugs, I would then take these bugs back to the team and insist that we fix them for next week. Imagine if we did not fix these bugs the week after, those exact same issues would be reported and we would not learn anything new. But if we did fix the bugs, then the week after we would be able to learn about the next set of issues. And then number six, finally, I always love to give the person a gift to thank them for their time. I'd often leave a bottle of whiskey, a special wine, or some other thoughtful gift. Now, during phase one, you should be collecting data on how these users are doing, what is their engagement, their attention, their product market fit score, their nps, their virality. And we found for all these metrics, we were beating industry benchmarks to the point where we were category lead. So I ramped to five or six onboardings like this per week. Now, if after you've done around 200 onboardings, you have great metrics, then you know that onboarding could work for your company. And at that point, you're ready to move to phase two.

What did phase two look like? What were some of the steps you did there? How long did that last?

Well, the point of phase two is to figure out whether another senior member of the team who is not a founder, can take the lead. In our case, I asked our head of growth to do the onboardings. Now, the secondary goal of this phase is to iterate the onboarding experience towards something that can scale. And in our case, we were able to get the onboardings from two hours down to one hour. And without impacting any of the metrics, they all remained category leading. Our head of growth, he ramped 20 onboardings like this per week from about four or five that I were doing. Now, if after you've done another 200 onboardings and you still have great metrics, then you know that onboarding works for your company even when it is not you doing them. And at that point, I would say you're ready to move to phase three.

Awesome. And I guess phase three is where you're scaling that approach. Tell us more about phase three.

It's all about building a full stack growth team. Full stack means that everyone on the growth team does a little bit of everything. Demand generation, lead, qualification, customer support, and of course, course onboardings. Now, the primary goal of this phase is to show that someone else can do these onboardings and still generate great metrics. And we hired three growth generalists in this phase. They got the onboardings from one hour to 45 minutes, once again, without impacting any of the metrics. Now, in this phase, I would expect the growth generalists to each be doing around 20 onboardings per week. And if after a few months you still have great metrics, then you know that onboarding works for your company even when it is done by new employees at some scale. And at that point, you're finally ready to move on to phase four.

Before we dive into phase four, you talked a lot about metrics, and it seems like the growth team you build is entirely focused on product focused, customer focused, growth team. What sort of metrics were interesting to you? What sort of metrics did you look at each phase?

So there are some top level ones and then we can drill into details on each of them. You have things like activation. We actually call our activation rates internally, our delight rates. And we define it as have you primarily switched over to Superhuman? And the way that we define it is pretty simple. In your second week of using the product, do you send 90% or more of your email from Superhuman? And note that we're not measuring time in product. We're not measuring triage actions. We're trying to hone in on the moment of value generation, which we consider to be sending emails. Because you send emails twice as fast with Superhuman. I mean, your whole email experience is twice as fast. But that's really where we wanted to laser in on capturing value. Now beyond that, you have a whole slew of other metrics. You have things like churn or equally retention. You have things like net promoter score. You have things like virality. You have things like the product market fit score. And for each of these, there are industry benchmarks. Take for example, churn. Now, it does Highly depend on your industry. For a single player subscription tool like Superhuman healthily, you want to be having anywhere between 2 and 4% churn month to month. If on the other hand, you have an enterprise collaborative SaaS tool, then you want to have what's known as negative churn. You want your accounts to be expanding by about net 1 to 2% per month. Take for example, Virality. For a tool like ours. You want each person to be referring a new person so a customer turns into a new customer on a life cycle of six months or less. Take Net Promoter Score. You want your net Promoter score to be 50 or 60 plus. Take the products Market Fit score, which I've wrote extensively about. You want that to be 40 or more. And you want each of these metrics to be sustained over time.

Definitely. So moving into the final phase, then, what was the one key metric you talked about? A whole bunch of metrics. But between phase three and the final phase, what was that one big metric that you were looking out for?

It depends what you think is changing. So for us, we had brought in a set of new onboarding specialists. There were about five or six people at that time. And the thing that was therefore changing the most was the onboarding itself. And so the thing that we ended up lasering on the most was what we call the delight rates. This is also our measure of activation. And so we lasered in on that. Did our delight rate go down? If so, by how much and how quickly can you make it recover? And it's always natural that when you onboard new salespeople or new onboarding people, they're in this process of training. So it is going to go down just a little bit before it comes back. That's one that we focused on more than anything else.

And they often say, right, I mean, you got to get a user in and get them to that wow moment immediately. And if they don't, I guess, activate or onboard within a certain amount of time, then they're effectively get dormant. And it's probably harder to convert a dormant user than a new one. What was I guess a leading indicator for you to say this user is going to be a retained user?

Simply, are they using Superhuman to send their emails? And because emails, every email client you send stamps it with the header, that's sort of an indicator of the clients that you use to send it. This is a super easy metric to track. It was very easy for us to measure not just dollar retention, but actually retention of engagement. And that's the leading indicator of everything else. And you can measure it on a daily basis, you can measure it on a weekly basis, you can measure it on a monthly basis. We found that the two week mark had what is known as the predictive quality. If we were able to do well there, then we believe that the customer will retain. But what we actually do in the run up to that is we look at the number on a daily basis and we reach out to folks who look like maybe they need a little bit of help. It looks like you didn't quite fully switch over to Superhuman. Well, that's okay. We know that there's a learning process and it's a habit change, so it's harder for some folks. But, well, we're perfectly happy to get back on the line to do another video call and to maybe walk through some of the things that didn't quite land the first time. Maybe you need help with figuring out a new workflow. And so we'll do all of these things. And this is all in part of what we call white glove service. We really want to deliver sort of a five star experience here. We'll do all of these things to make sure people feel fully taken care of and we maximizes the chance that they retain.

Were there some key elements that said if we hit these wow moments or these elements, if the user goes through them, they're more likely to hit the two week mark and more likely to stick around for two weeks? Because there's also that thing where you say if the user goes through it for two weeks, then they become a retained user. But what are those first steps to say even if they're going in that direction versus completely drop off?

And honestly, it's something we're still figuring out to this day. Last year we did a cross correlation of features used within the onboarding compared to how retained those people ended up being over time. And it's pretty interesting. Sometimes it's not the things that you use every day, but the things that you find delightful that retain people. So for folks who don't know, we have this really time saving feature and depending on how much you use, it really depends on the type of email you get. But we have this command in Superhuman called Instant Intro. It's a keyboard shortcut. It's a superhuman command that in one keystroke lets you do three things simultaneously. Reply all, move the sender to BCC and then say thank you sender. Moving you to bcc. Now, for those of us who are in the kind of work that Lloyd or I are in, that is a Daily occurrence. You're doing that in and out every single day. In fact, Lloyd, I would imagine you do it even more than I do because you run these events. But if you're a founder, if you're someone raising money, even if you're investing, I also play the other side of the table as well. As an angel investor, this is just a thing that you do a lot of moving someone to bcc. Now, we found a really high correlation between people who played with this in the onboarding and then people who went on to become super happy users of Superhuman. It might not be something that they did every day, but talking to the onboarding specialists, we know that this is just one of those features. It brings a smile, it creates delight, it manufactures joy. People laugh when they first see it. They're like, oh my God, this is amazing. How did it take so long for someone to build something like this? And it's those things that we found had the highest correlation with retention.

Awesome. No, that is fantastic. So get your user to a wow moment during the onboarding process or two. Wow moment or two or three maybe. And that is an indicator that they'll stick around and they'll be retained. That's great learning. Do you still do the white glove onboarding process?

Absolutely. We onboard every single customer to Superhuman.

And how long is that onboarding process today?

At this point, we've got it down to about 30 minutes. And we have a wonderful team of onboarding specialists that do it. They're experts not just in email, but also in productivity. They go through an extensive training program when they join Superhuman. It takes in the region of eight to 10 weeks to get through this program. They then get certified as a Superhuman onboarding specialist master. Essentially, they know Superhuman inside out. They knew email inside out. They know productivity inside out by that point. And it's a key part of what it means to become a Superhuman customer. Every single one of our customers feels like we have a friend at the company because they actually do.

A follow up question to that. Given it's a 30, $40 product a month, how long do you see yourself doing this? Is this, is this sort of sustainable? Or maybe you've nailed it down where it is sustainable?

I believe it is sustainable. I think this is one of the. For me, one of the most exciting things as an entrepreneur is coming up discovering, inventing, if you will. Depends how large your ego is. Things that people just couldn't believe to be true. For example, the products market fit engine. The idea that you can systematically engineer your way towards Product market fit. It's controversial, but it's true. We have the math to show it's true. It worked for us. It's worked for so many companies that I have worked with as an investor and as an advisor to the point now that there's a whole company taking that methodology and turning it into a product. So if folks want to run the products market fit engine for themselves, they absolutely can do so. Check out viable fit. Viable Fit is the domain. That's an example. Another example would be building software like it's a game. This has been such a controversial countervailing idea that we've had, but it's so powerful. And another example is onboarding, the idea that you can take $30 a month product and you can onboard people onto that one to one. Historically that was considered impossible. You shouldn't have been able to do it. But it turns out that the unit economics do work. If you can create enough inbound, if you can onboard enough people per week, if the activation rates are high enough, if the retention is good enough, if then onboarding does actually turn out to be highly unit economic. On previous podcasts I've shared some mathematics that show we can get to $100 million of annual recurring revenue solely through onboarding with just 70 onboarding specialists. Now you compare that to the size of any enterprise sales team at any other company and you'll see that it's a highly efficient go to market strategy.

Definitely. And you have draw some correlations with enterprise as well because the reason why they're able to sign is because they've got this white glove in the sales process, right? And the salesperson signs them. But there's no white glove in the onboarding. And I often find and I've seen other products and even if you look at the IPO market and all the highly valued SaaS products, one thing is very common between all of them is they have phenomenal. Now it may be self service and this is a new way to think about onboarding for self service SaaS companies.

You mentioned self service, which I think is pretty interesting and for us it's somewhat philosophical but also somewhat a R&D dollar allocation decision. Self service, a truly good one, is really, really hard to build and superhuman happens to be a very complex product with a huge surface area in an extremely complicated domain, namely email. So for every engineering hour that we have spare of which we have none because they're all allocated and in use, we have to ask the question, should we put this towards building a self service feature or should we put this towards actually making the product better and without fail, 100% of the time, I've always asked that question and answered put it towards making the products better. And so we still have to make the onboarding successful and to do that for that reason, we've taken the page, just like you've said, out of very large enterprise software companies who put a tremendous amount of effort into this. And we've said, well, okay, we're just going to do that for our more prosumer style company where it's sold individually, where it's bought individually, and where it's $30 a month subscription. And what this actually does is it frees up those engineering hours so we can make our products better faster than the competition, or to put it another way, more efficiently. When folks hear that the engineering team at Superhuman is about 12 people, they're always shocked. They always assume that, oh, we thought you had 30, 40, 50 engineers working on this because of how the product is and how it's engineered and how it feels. But no, we actually just have a dozen engineers working on it. And that's in large part because we haven't had to engineer self service and because we have the team of onboarding specialists who take care of that side of things.

Definitely. And it also probably surfaces up bugs and problems and issues on an ongoing basis that you can add into the backlog for the engineering team versus waiting for feedback from self service which users may find it or may not surface it and just live with it for long, right?

Absolutely.

How do you prioritize issues that surface up in the product during onboardings? How do you prioritize that into the backlog?

Well, like I mentioned, we built our very own products market fit engine. And the engine gives us a way to define products market fit and a metric to measure products market fit. And the engine even automatically generates our roadmap for us. A roadmap that is guaranteed to increase product market fit. And it starts by asking your users this, how would you feel if you could no longer use the product and measure the percent who answer, very disappointed. And if more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you have initial products market fit. And even if you are less than 40%, you can use the engine to systematically increase this number. Now, there's a complex and deep methodology behind that. About a year ago I wrote it up on first round review. For folks watching today, or maybe you're watching this recorded later, just Google for Superhuman products market fit and you'll Find it. Now, with that, you'll then get a whole bunch of feedback and the question becomes, how do you manage the roadmap? Now we have a pretty nuanced perspective on roadmap management. In my experience, startups tend towards one of two extremes. Some teams, especially those which are driven by vision, tend to constantly double down on what users love. Whereas some teams, especially those which are driven by data, tend to systematically address user issues. Now, in practice, I believe that you need to keep vision and data in very careful balance. If you only double down on what users love, then you will never grow beyond your initial niche. If you only address user issues, then your competition will likely overtake you. Each quarter, we plan to spend 50% of our time doubling down on vision and about 50% of our time addressing user issues. And so then the question becomes this, how do you prioritize within each stream now that you have both doubling down on vision? Look, this is an art. This is where you get to exercise what you call product instinct. Talk to your users, lean into your intuition, and figure out the most impactful ways to give people more of what they crave. Addressing user feedback is much more straightforward. We use a very simple cost impact analysis, which is we label each potential project as low, medium or high cost, and similarly each as low, medium or high impact. We then picked the highest, lowest hanging fruit. Also the highest doesn't make any sense. The lowest hanging fruit and the highest impact projects, those which are both low cost as well, high impact to build. And so now we have two streams that take up 50% of our time each, and we're using intuition to prioritize one and cost impact to prioritize the other.

Let's dive into game design, because that is fascinating to me how you think about game design and break it down into the key factors that every product can turn into a game.

Absolutely it can. Honestly, I've been obsessed with this question my entire life. As a kid, I learned how to code just so I can make games. And before I was a founder, those who know me will know I worked professionally as a game designer and as a founder, I've gone deep into the principles of game design. And as it turns out, there's no unifying theory of game design. To create games, we need to draw upon the art and science of psychology, mathematics, storytelling and interaction design. And at Superhuman, we've identified five key factors to consider. Goals, emotions, toys, controls and flow. And across these, we've identified many principles of game design. And one example principle I could go into for the Webinar is toys make fun toys and then combine them into games. So a question that I like to ask all the time, and bear with me, this is a little bit of a philosophical question, but are toys the same as games? They do seem different because we play with toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy, but football is a game. And as it turns out, the best games are built with toys. Why? Because then they are fun on both levels. The level of the toy and of the game itself. Now, in Superhuman, a favorite toy is the time autocompleter, the thing that you use to snooze emails. You press a shortcut, you type whatever you want. It can be gibberish and it does its best to understand you. For example, 2D becomes 2 days, 3H becomes 3 hours, 1MO becomes 1 month. The time autocompleter is fun because it indulges playful exploration. What can it do? Where does it break? How does it work? It's not long before people start typing in things like this. I wonder what happens if I keep typing 10. Well, it turns out that that's October 10th at 10:10pm Just imagine 10, 10, 10, 10 10. Well, how about the sequence of twos, 2, 2, 2, 2. Well, that's February 2nd, 2020 at 2:00pm and then you start trying more complex inputs, like in a fortnight and a day. And it's not long before you find pleasant surprises. For example, time zone math happens without you even thinking about it. 8am in Tokyo is 8pm Eastern. And then most people are delighted to find out that if you really want, you can snooze emails until never. You can literally type in the word never and the email will never come back. And so for people watching or listening today, I would say consider the features of your own product. Do they indulge in playful exploration? Are they fun even without a goal? And do they create moments of pleasant surprise? Each of these things are aspects of game design. If so, congratulations, because you have a toy and you're on the way to building a great game.

You have this massive wait list of 300,000 people and already a massive growing customer base. Do you at all segment your customer base and decide who we should give access to first, how we should onboard them? How do you give out that access? How do you decide who is the right audience to serve first?

Well, number one, referrals get priority. Number two, we onboard folks who we think will be successful with the product. And actually more accurately, it's the contra positive, we don't onboard folks who we think would not be successful. For example, we don't yet have an Android app. And so if you came to me and said, hey, I really want to use Superhuman, by the way, my phone is Android, I would say, okay, that's awesome, I can't wait to onboard you. But let's just wait a year because we're still in the process of building them now. Many people have actually switched to iPhone as a result of this, which I find truly phenomenal. That people would be willing to change the phone that they use in order to use Superhuman. I think that's testament to us having chosen a truly painful pain point for our customers that they're willing to change the operating system of their phone in order to use our products. But that's an example of where we wouldn't onboard somebody if the phone that you use is not something that we yet support. Because we don't want you to have half the Superhuman experience, we want you to have the full blown, complete superhuman experience.

Definitely. I thought maybe there were other thoughts there, like maybe demographic or like professional profession, whatever. You're purely looking at it from how super, for lack of a better word, how much of a super email user is this person and what devices they have? Let's dive into how did you come up with $30 a month? Email is 5 bucks, 12 bucks for Gmail and there's a lot of free options. Why 30 bucks? I'm convinced. I want to pay for it. I'm going to beg you to give me access, but I'm convinced just from this talk. How did you come up with 30?

And by the way, folks who are listening, if you do want access, fortunately you have direct access to me today. Ping me@rahuluperhuman.com I'll refer you in. So long as there's no disqualifying things like choice of phone or weird hardware, then I'd love to get folks on the product. Okay, back to pricing. Now, before you figure out pricing, the most important thing is to figure out positioning. And we started with this amazing article by Arielle Jackson. It's called positioning. Your startup is vital. Here's how to mail it. You can Google for it right now and she advises using a formula like the following. For a target customer who has a need or opportunity, your product is in a product category that has some key benefits. And unlike all competitors, this is the primary differentiation. And it's a little bit of a Mad Libs game. You fill in the blanks and I would highly encourage everyone to do the same. For their products. Now she gives the example of Harley Davidson, the only motorcycle manufacturer that makes big loud motorcycles for macho guys and macho wannabes, mostly in the United States who want to join a gang of cowboys in an era of decreasing personal freedom. Probably doesn't appeal, I would guess, to people on this stream. But I think we all know people in our lives who maybe would identify as the target for the ideal positioning of Harley Davidson. And the trick is to come up with this statement for yourself. So we thought about this hard for Superhuman and we met up with Arielle, who, by the way, she's incredible. She's awesome. We did a lot of further reading with her and in particular the book positioning the battle for your mind was very helpful. So we asked ourselves, are we the Ford of email? No. Are we the Mercedes of email? Not quite. Are we the Tesla of email? Yeah, I think that's beginning to get there. And in 2015 we came up with this positioning for founders, CEOs and managers of high growth technology companies who feel like their work is mostly email. Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made as to what Gmail could be if it were made today instead of 15 years ago. Unlike Gmail, Superhuman is meticulously crafted so that everything happens in 100 milliseconds or less. And of course, we've since expanded beyond that very tightly defined target at that point. Now, when you hear that positioning, it's clear that Superhuman is a premium tool for a premium market. And now you can figure out pricing. And by the way, the best book on this topic is Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujan. And in the book, Madhavan advocates by developing pricing along products in a way that supports the positioning. Now, there are lots of ways to develop pricing and we use one of the easiest methods. I mentioned it earlier, it's the Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter. And in 2015, we asked 100 of our earliest users the following questions. Number one, at what price would you consider Superhuman to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? Number two, at what price would you consider super Human to be priced so low that you would feel the quality could not be very good? Number three, at what price would you consider Superhuman to be starting to get expensive? So it wouldn't be out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it? Number four, at what price would you consider Superhuman to be a bargain? A great buy for the money. Now, for most startup companies, they orient around question number four. At what price would you consider the product to be a bargain, a great buy for the money. Because most startup companies are taking market risk. The risk of is there a market for this product? We on the other hand are trying or it's not market risk. The market clearly exists for what we're building. It's segmenting risk. What we're saying is can we segment out a premium niche in this gigantic market, this trillion dollar markets that already exists. And so we're building a premium tool. And the price point that supports premium tooling is the third one. At what price would you consider this product to be starting to get expensive? So that it's not out of the question, but you would have to think about it, but you would still buy it at the end of the day. And the median answer for that third question for us was $29 per month. We then spoke to some pricing experts who observed that when prices end in nine, it singles value, not quality. So we rounded up to $30 per month and that's how we picked our price. Now finally, once you pick your price, just do a quick gut check on market size. For example, we're a venture backed company, so the question that we have to ask is how do we grow into a billion dollar valuation? Now let's assume at that point our valuation is 10x our run rate. So our err is $100 million. That would be 300,000 subscribers at $30 a month. And that is conservatively assuming no other ways to increase average revenue per user. So no new products or going up market. And we asked ourselves, do we think that we can get to hundreds of thousands of subscribers? We answered emphatically yes. And then we went ahead with the price.

Any parting advice, any last minute thing that you want to share that you wish you did more of or you wish you did less of.

I would say build something that people not only want or need, but that they love. Build your software like it's a game. Most companies don't do this. Most software companies worry about what users want or need. But nobody needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. And when you make a game, you don't worry about what users want or what they need. You obsess over how they feel. When your product is 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. So game design is an altogether different kind of product development and one that's especially powerful in times like these, when people are just, you know, a little bit more depressed. Where we've got a lot going on in our personal lives. We're fearful for the health and the safety of our loved ones and our friends and our family and our colleagues. And that that little trick of just building something that people play instead of use is something that we could all be doing more of.

Fantastic gold in every sentence you've shared today. Thank you everyone for joining us. I need some traction. You need some traction.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the resources mentioned in today's episode at. Boast AI that's B o a s t a I forward slash blog.