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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Rahul Vohra Explains Superhuman's Product-Market Fit Engine and Growth Playbook
- Vohra says Superhuman launched an MVP after about 18 months, aimed at beating incumbents like Gmail with a minimally valuable product built around blazing speed.
- The first 100 customers came mostly through word of mouth and investor networks, with only four to five new customers onboarded weekly and hands-on concierge onboarding so bugs could be fixed fast.
- Superhuman used Sean Ellis's 'very disappointed' survey and a segmenting algorithm to raise its product-market fit score from 20% to 60% in three quarters.
- Vohra sums up his founder advice as 'make something people want' and 'make people realize they want it', using PR, thought leadership, and virality to agitate the problem.
- He opens with the lesson from Heroku's James Lindenbaum to be clear about what you're optimizing for, admitting he flip-flopped between revenue and user growth at Rapportive.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasBe clear about what you're optimizing for
Vohra recalls that James Lindenbaum advised choosing between user growth and revenue growth, and that flipping between them risked doing both mediocrely instead of one excellently.
Against incumbents, build a minimally valuable product
Because most people already use Gmail or Outlook, Vohra says an email client must do something very special, which for Superhuman was speed, rather than just being minimally viable.
Onboard slowly to avoid creating detractors
Superhuman took on only four to five new customers a week so it could fix their issues, since a flood of users reporting thousands of bugs would churn and become net detractors.
Measure product-market fit with the 'very disappointed' score
Following Sean Ellis, Vohra says that if over 40% of users would be very disappointed without the product, you have early product-market fit, which he finds more objective than a feeling and more predictive than NPS.
Change your market before changing your product
By focusing only on the types of users who loved Superhuman, the score rose from 20% to 32% in minutes without any product changes.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe secret to making a great product that users love and share with their friends is to have a higher bar than even your users.
— Rahul Vohra
I think a lot of founders go for minimally viable products when, in fact, they should go for minimally valuable products.
— Rahul Vohra
If you just blindly act on the feedback from the somewhat disappointed users, you'll end up with a muddied product that lacks coherence and lacks vision.
— Rahul Vohra
Go all in on these people. Build everything that they're asking for. Fall in love with those people because when you do, they'll fall in love with your product.
— Rahul Vohra
Focus on fixing whatever problems they find and on making them exceptionally happy. That's the way to building a robust product that creates joy over time, and that joy is ultimately the flywheel for virality and explosive growth.
— Rahul Vohra
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SPEAKERS
Rahul Vohra
guestFounder and CEO of Superhuman, focused on building a high-quality email product and driving product-market fit and growth.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
