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How I Built $825M Email Revolution Called Superhuman | Rahul Vohra

Superhuman's CEO, Rahul, reveals his thrilling journey of growing his startup into a company valued at $825M.

Rahul Vohraguest

Jul 27, 202424mWatch on YouTube

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

Rahul's Background and the Origins of Rapportive
Rahul opens with the idea of holding a higher bar than your users, then introduces himself and Superhuman. He traces his path from England and Cambridge to dropping out of a PhD, working with startups, and building Rapportive.
- •Superhuman is AI email for teams, with customers like Netflix, Notion and Spotify
- •He started programming at eight and studied computer science at Cambridge
- •He dropped out of his PhD and worked in the part of Cambridge that helps staff and students create companies
- •He imagined an email tool showing contact details to help him sell, which became Rapportive
- •Rapportive was the first Gmail extension to reach millions of users and was sold to LinkedIn
Advice From Heroku's CEO: Be Clear What You're Optimizing For
Rahul recounts walking through the rain in San Francisco to meet James Lindenbaum of Heroku. The advice was to be very clear whether you are optimizing for user growth or revenue. Rahul admits he kept flip-flopping and wishes he had listened.
- •Rapportive was one of Heroku's largest customers
- •James advised choosing between user growth and revenue growth based on what the next round requires
- •Rahul thought the advice was obvious but kept switching focus every few months
- •Doing two things mediocrely is worse than doing one excellently
Minimally Valuable vs. Minimally Viable Product
Rahul explains why he chose email as a big problem and how the MVP took about 18 months to build. Against entrenched incumbents like Gmail and Outlook, he argues founders should build a minimally valuable product, which for Superhuman meant speed.
- •The MVP was a blazingly fast version of Gmail and took about 18 months to reach the first paying customer
- •The email client market is dominated by incumbents such as Gmail and Outlook
- •An email client that merely works is not enough; it must do something special
- •He pitched investors with a Tesla acceleration analogy
- •Against incumbents, aim for a minimally valuable product rather than a minimally viable one
Winning the First 100 Customers with Measured Onboarding
Rahul describes getting the first 100 customers through word of mouth and investor networks. He explains why Superhuman onboarded only four to five new customers a week and why a mass launch can create net detractors.
- •Almost all of the first 100 customers came via word of mouth and investor networks, and most are still customers
- •The first onboarding was with the founder of Howie, who said the product was really fast
- •Only four to five customers were onboarded each week to leave bandwidth for fixing issues
- •Launching to tens of thousands at once overwhelms a company with bugs and creates detractors
- •Joy from a robust product becomes the flywheel for virality
Concierge VIP Onboarding
Rahul explains the one-to-one concierge onboardings Superhuman became famous for, many of which he did himself. He gives three reasons for doing them.
- •He traveled to offices with a gift and sat with users for an hour or two
- •The sessions showed how people did email in Gmail and taught them to go twice as fast
- •They revealed how people handle email today
- •They surfaced bugs to fix on time
- •They helped focus engineering, product and design spending
The Pressure to Launch and Discovering the Sean Ellis Test
Rahul describes two years of writing code without launching and the pressure he felt compared with Rapportive. He needed a plan, found Sean Ellis's leading indicator, and explains the 'very disappointed' survey and its 40% benchmark.
- •Superhuman was still writing code in 2015, 2016 and 2017 without launching
- •Rahul needed a credible plan to tell the team a launch would go badly without product-market fit
- •Sean Ellis ran early growth at Dropbox, LogMeIn and Eventbrite and coined 'growth hacker'
- •The survey asks how users would feel if they could no longer use the product
- •Above 40% very disappointed indicates early product-market fit, which Rahul says is more objective and predicts success better than NPS
Step One: Segmenting Your Market
Rahul introduces the Superhuman Product-Market Fit Engine and explains that changing your market is easier than changing your product. By focusing on the roles and industries of very disappointed users, Superhuman went from 20% to 32%.
- •The score shows how close you are and, more importantly, helps you get there
- •You can change your market in minutes, before changing your product
- •Segment by job titles, roles, companies and industries of very disappointed users
- •Discard many somewhat and not disappointed users outside that profile
- •Superhuman's score rose from 20% to 32% just by redefining the market
Whom to Listen To and What to Build
Rahul explains how to decide whose feedback to act on. Ignore not-disappointed users, don't over-rotate on very disappointed users, and use the main benefit to split somewhat disappointed users. Go all in on those who share that benefit.
- •Feedback from not-disappointed users is a grave mistake to follow
- •Building more for already-loving users won't make more people fall in love
- •Identify the main benefit stated by very disappointed users, which for Superhuman was speed, shortcuts and design
- •Blindly following somewhat disappointed users yields a muddied, incoherent product
- •Politely ignore those for whom the main benefit doesn't resonate and build everything for those for whom it does
Splitting the Roadmap and Superhuman's Results
Rahul describes the two team failure modes and recommends spending half of planning time on what users love and half on what holds back the aligned somewhat disappointed users. He shares how Superhuman's score climbed from 20% to 60% in three quarters.
- •Vision-driven teams tend to over-rotate on what very disappointed users want
- •Over-rotating on somewhat disappointed users risks a competitor leapfrogging your special thing
- •Spend half of planning on the main benefit and half on what holds back the subset
- •Early blockers included no mobile app, weak search, attachments, CRM integrations and read receipts
- •The score went 32%, 48%, 56%, then 60% across quarters
Two Pieces of Advice: Make Something People Want, and Make Them Realize It
Rahul summarizes his founder advice in two points, quoting Paul Graham for the first. He explains making people realize they want it as making them aware of a problem and convinced it's severe enough to pay for, using email as the example of problem agitation.
- •Number one is to make something people want
- •Number two is to make people realize they want it
- •People must be aware of the problem and see it as severe enough to pay for
- •Roughly a billion professionals spend three hours a day on email, which many take for granted as what work is
- •Problem agitation means questioning that assumption
Creating Awareness: PR, Thought Leadership and Virality
Rahul describes Superhuman's three-pronged approach to problem awareness. He explains attaching to industry news, citing the Dropbox-Mailbox acquisition article that drove tens of thousands of waitlist signups, then thought leadership and virality.
- •Attach yourself to a newsworthy industry story before you can afford PR or ads
- •After Dropbox acquired Mailbox, he wrote a two-day piece on making acquisitions succeed, syndicated on qz.com and elsewhere
- •The article drove tens of thousands of signups to a waitlist
- •The product-market fit article is described as the most widely shared entrepreneurship piece on First Round Review
- •Over 30% of site traffic and new users still come from the viral signature and referrals

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