Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder)

Let's talk about product market fit.

You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do, is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people, and the question becomes how do you listen to them? And then even of what they say, what do you pay attention to and what don't you? The trick here is...

You're not doing what a lot of CEOs think they need to be doing with their time. A lot of CEOs think they need to spend time on hiring or org building, and you intentionally, "I will spend time on product and marketing design."

So this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's borne out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? So I came up with the following idea: What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?

What's the most pivotal moment in your career, in your life?

I learned the real secret behind virality. There is no such thing as a truly viral product. What then is the true secret? It is...

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Rahul Vohra. Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, and one of the most thoughtful and insightful and articulate founders that I've met. As you'll see in our conversation, it's hard not to be captivated by Rahul's storytelling skills, and also his really insightful takes on how to build great products and teams. This episode is for anyone who's looking to build their product taste, help their teams move faster, learn how to think better from first principles, and also learn about Superhuman's very unique approach to building their company, including why they manually onboarded every single new user for years and why they decided to stop, why they ignored most of their customer feedback on their way to finding product market fit, and also how you can use his approach to finding product market fit for your own company. Also the power of game design in building great products, a very contrarian take on pricing strategy, what Rahul has learned about building scaled products on top of AI and LLMs, and so much more. A huge thank you to Ed Sims, Conrad Erwin, Belle Trenchard, and Gaurav Vohra for suggesting questions and topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Superhuman that you can start using immediately. You also get a year free of Notion, Perplexity Pro, Granola, and Linear. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com With that, I bring you Rahul Vohra. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund. Full disclosure: real estate investing is boring. Prediction markets are exciting, meme coins are a thrill ride, even the stock market can swing wildly on a headline. Hello, DeepZeke. But with real estate investing, there's no drama or adrenaline or excuses to refresh your portfolio every few minutes. Just bland and boring stuff like diversification and dividends. So you won't be surprised to learn that the Fundrise flagship real estate fund is a complete snoozefest. The fund holds $1.1 billion worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come. See? Boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes, and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com/lenny. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise flagship fund before investing. Find this information and more in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship. This is a paid ad. Rahul, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.