YouSaid · the spoken record

Rahul Vohra

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-03-23
most recent: 2025-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Into data and into analysis, they wanted to corroborate those numbers for themselves. And so they did. They ran their own internal case study on superhuman and they were like, yeah, you're saving our partners 3.3 hours per person per week. And there's only one other tool that we bought that does that, which is ChatGPT. So thank you. We love superhuman. We're rolling it up. If that sounds interesting to you or your company, please do give it a shot.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to find me online? I'm generally on X, that is X.comvora R-A-H-U-L-V-O-H-R-A, and my DMs are open. So feel free to ping me. If you want to do that, I would suggest also emailing me. That's Rahul at superhuman.com. And hopefully I'll see your message soon. If you haven't tried Superhuman, then gosh, what are you doing? This is my call to you to do so. because your time is worth more than whatever you think it might be so go download superhuman and give it a shot invite your team the metrics are real i know they sound like the the kind of metrics that startups make up but getting through your email twice as fast responding once two days sooner saving four hours or more every single week they're all real actually speaking of which the consulting firm i mentioned earlier because they're so”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multiple reasons, which is ironic. But that's my SDR for why SDRs work, which is yes. Multiple low quality reasons rarely add up to a high quality reason to do something. But there are also other things as well, which is any decision you take has an opportunity cost. Any feature you build has another feature that you didn't build. And if we're going to build this for a collection of weak reasons, whereas we could build that for one strong reason, I'd much rather build that for one strong reason. Now, this is all other things being equal in these things often end up being quite complicated, but you can apply SDR all the way down. I mean, you just did that to me. What's my SDR per SDR?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much, yeah. And what they can't do, I mean, obviously this happens, people are human and natural. They'll usually start mentioning three or four things, and that's fine. And then I will say, okay, but if only one of those was true and you're still advocating for this decision, what is it? And I think that's just a bar for a good decision.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever anyone is making a decision. They bring that decision to me and they say, Well, we want to do this because of XYZ. And there are multiple reasons. I ask them, what's the SDR? What's the single decisive reason? If they can't yet isolate it, that tells me they haven't yet figured out why they want to make the decision. It doesn't mean the decision is wrong. It just means that they haven't figured out the singular reason why we should do the thing. They can then go through their list of reasons and ask, is this alone enough to support this decision? Meaning if this was true and all the other things were not true, would I still do it? And sometimes we still do, but actually sometimes we don't. And we realize that a collection of weak reasons alone means that, for example, the outcome is less likely than we thought it was, or it was hiding a really strong reason on the other side of the decision.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“STR is a thinking tool that I picked up from Reed Hoffman during my time at LinkedIn. And the idea here is that for important decisions, you should be able to identify one, one reason that on its own supports the decision. And it's based on the observation that all too often we rely on a collection of weak reasons to justify decisions. And it's very, very easy to do this. Imagine you're contemplating a decision. You write a list of the pros and the cons. There are three pros, but let's say there are 10 or 15 cons. The sheer number of cons, the effort of thinking them through the time it took to write them down is going to affect you. Consciously, or worse, subconsciously. And this is especially true I've seen in group settings, which just in general are a little bit more risk-averse and a little bit more consensus driven.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And there's two stakeholders there's the users, which are actually quite different because they're outlook users and Calendar is one of the main ways that manifests. And there's a whole bunch of other stakeholders. IT is one of them, but there are others as well. For example, companies this large have workplace management groups who want to see analytics of how people are working, how they can make their teams more efficient. And so it truly is a multi-threaded sale with multiple stakeholders.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We only just got them the mobile app, believe it or not, because at an enterprise like that, there are significant controls on what a allowed compliant mobile app can and cannot do. For example, IT needs to be able to control which apps can save attachments or which apps you can copy and paste text into from email. And for many enterprises, those controls are super important.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Afflick uses are also used to certain safeguards. Like if you've used Outlook in an enterprise, warnings when a recipient is external to your domain or what Outlook users might know as sensitivity labels. And as a result, we've built support for external recipient indicators and sensitivity labels. But in some ways, it's very different to selling to prosumers because there are other stakeholders involved. For example, we've built support for enterprise mobile management by implementing Microsoft Inchume. We recently sold one of the big three strategy consulting firms, which is super exciting. I can't say which one, but they love superhuman and they have thousands of people internally using superhuman. And this is after they've been piloting for a year and then accelerating over the last few months.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways it's very like selling to prosumers, except these users are not coming from Gmail where prosumers would normally come from. They're coming from Outlook. And Outlook users have very different expectations to Gmail users. For example, Outlook users expect their email app to also be a fully featured calendar app. Whereas Gmail users are happy with those two things being entirely different. So as a result, we've invested in calendar very heavily and we continue to do so. And there's only so much I can say that, but it's pretty exciting.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had not expected that. So that's the most surprising thing. And on the flip side, there were certain AI features where I did expect a ton of usage, but we didn't quite get the usage that we were perhaps hoping for. And hopefully I'm not AI Kramer, but basically everything I thought would work out well. People use it less than I thought they did. And everything where I was like, I don't know.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for me, the biggest surprise has been how unpredictable the user love has been in terms of what they love and what they don't love. For example, write with AI. This sounds like a commodity feature, and on surface level it is, every email app, every writing surface has a write with AI feature in, I would wager hours is the best app emails. And surprisingly, that's what we do But the surprising thing was just how much people love it and how often it gets used. 37 times per user per week is still mind-blowing to me.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are interested in working at superhuman, and I would normally reply to that candidate and I would let them know that the team will take a look. I'll then forward the original message, including any resume or any letter to our head of people and operations and ask her to reach out if interested. With workflows, I can now automate this entire process. And you can imagine sort of creating a little flowchart of what has to happen. Not only does that save a huge amount of time With workflows, you don't even have to be in your inbox. In fact, you don't even have to be working. You could be on vacation while superhuman AI is working for you.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's organizing your inbox. It's also making sure you never drop the ball. So we have things that we call auto-labels. You can now write a short prompt like job applications or requests to review work. And you can then immediately see when emails match that prompt, when people apply for a job, or they ask you to review work with auto reminders if your email needs a response. Superhuman will now automatically set a reminder. You don't have to remember to do that. Then you'll never drop the ball again. All you need to do is hit send. With auto drafts, superhuman will now automatically draft your follow up emails for you and will soon be drafting replies to basically every email that needs a response. And finally, with what we call workflows, you can now turn email into repeatable automated workflows. For example, I often get emails from”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, if I remember correctly, the feature after that was ask AI email, of course, is this treasure trove of critical information, things like project statuses, customer communication, meeting updates, deal execution, and so much more. And for over 40 years, we've had to rely on what we hilariously call search. You have to remember senders, guess keywords, scan subject lines, and now you can just ask, where is the Q1 offsite? Or what are my flight details? What is the top five most positive customer responses to the Ask AI launch, a task, by the way, which previously used to take me 20 or 30 minutes to read through all the emails and then create that report now happening in less than five seconds? And recently, we, like I said, announced our biggest evolution yet, and superhuman AI is constantly helping you.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make these features really premium and feel amazing. The next AI feature after that was instant reply. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit and then send. And sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. And I can share, because we just finished this analysis, that over 2024, the percentage of emails that are AI written and sent with superhuman has grown four times just in one year.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True that sometimes startups boil down to being in the right place at the right time. And we actually had a massive AI launch recently, about two weeks ago. But even before then, we had multiple flagship AI features. Our first AI feature was right with AI, jot down a few words, and we'll turn them into a fully written email. We actually match the voice and tone in the emails you've already sent. So unlike copilots, unlike Gemini, unlike basically every other email app, the email sounds like you. And this AI feature is way more popular than I expected it to be on average today. Users are using it 37 times per week. Number two, our next AI feature was Auto Summarize, which shows a one-line summary above every conversation. And as new emails arrive, it updates instantly. Again, unlike copilot and Gemini, it's pre-computed. One of the things we do is we go above and beyond.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We asked ourselves without those tricks, do we think we can get to hundreds of thousands of subscribers? And we answered emphatically yes. And so we went ahead with that price.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the price point that supports our best in class, best in category position is actually the third one. It starts to feel expensive, but then you sit down and you think about the time that you spend an email, the ROI, and you still buy it anyway. And it turns out that the median answer for the third question was $30 per month, and that's how we picked our price. And once we picked our price, we then do a quick gut check on market size. For example, we're a venture scale company, but at the time the question that we had to ask is, could we grow into a billion dollar valuation? Well, let's assume that at that point our evaluation is 10 times our ARR. So our ARR would have to be $100 million. Well, that would be $300,000 at $30 per month. And that is conservatively assuming no other ways to increase ARPU. You mentioned price increase. You can also go at market. You can sell new products and so on.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the money Now, most startups orient around price point number four. This is especially true for greenfield opportunities, marketplaces. You've got to set the transaction value around price point four. Basically, when you want...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you understand your positioning, you can then move on to pricing. And one of the best books on this is a book called Monetizing Innovation by Madhavan Ramanujam. And Madhavan covers a lot of ways to develop pricing. We used one of the easiest methods, which is the Van Westerndorp price sensitivity visa. And in the early years, we asked, I think it was around 100 of our earliest users the following four 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 superhuman to be priced so low that you'd be worried about its quality and you wouldn't buy it? At number three, what price would you consider superhuman to be starting to get expensive so that it's not out of the question, but you'd have to give some thought to buying it. And then before, at what price would you consider superhuman to be a bargain?”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always say the same thing when it comes to pricing, which is before you figure out pricing, you must first figure out positioning. And Superhuman is the best email tool on the market. We fortunately have the metrics to show this. One of the cool things about selling an email tool is you can compare the 30 days prior to using Superhuman to the 30 days after, or the year before to the year after. And we do that, obviously. We're able to show that people get through their email twice as fast with Superhuman, that they respond one to two days faster, and that they say four hours or more every single week. Because of that, we're very confident in saying that superhuman is the best email tool on the market and that we're building it for high performing teams and high-performing individuals. In other words, we serve the high end of the market.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goal, and do they elicit moments of pleasant surprise? If so, you have a toy and you can combine that with other toys and actually start to build a gate.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second 2022 at 2 p.m. And then you start trying more complex inputs, like in a fortnight and a day, and that works, which is a pleasant surprise. And it's not long before you find more pleasant surprises like time zone math happens without you thinking about it. You can just type in 8 a.m. in Tokyo, and it turns out that's 8 p.m. Eastern time, and you no longer have to do the time zone math. And then most people were really delighted to find out that if you really want, you can snooze emails until never. You can literally type in never and the email will never come back. And it had like a little shrug emoji at the same time. So, you know, is this toy going to win awards? Nope. But is it fun actually surprisingly yes? So what I would encourage people to do is think about the features of their product. Do those features indulge playful exploration? Are they fun, even without...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as it turns out, the best gains are constructed out of toys. Why? Because then they are fun on both levels the toy and the game itself. So for example, in superhuman, one of our favorite toys is The Time Autocompleter if you use Superhuman, this is the thing that appears when you hit H, when you snooze or set reminders on emails. You can type whatever you want. It can be gibberish, and it does its best to understand you. For example, if you type in 2D, that becomes 2Ds, 3H is three hours, 1MO is one month. And the time autocomplete is fun because it indulges your playful exploration. In onboardings, it wasn't long before I saw people asking, what can it do? Where does it break? How does it work? What happens if I keep on typing in a series of tens? Well, it turns out that's October the 10th at 10, 10 p.m. Or how about the series of 2s? Well, that's February.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, many folks don't know this, but before I was a founder, you can probably tell I was actually a professionally game designer. And as it turns out, there is no unifying theory of game design. To create games, what we need to do is draw upon the arts and the science of psychology, mathematics, storytelling, interaction design. And at Superhuman, we've identified five key areas that we really care about, goals, emotions, toys, controls, and flow. And across these, we've identified many principles of game design. And one example principle would be make fun toys and then combine those into games. So a question I like to ask is, are toys the same as games? They do seem different. For example, we play with toys, but we play games. A ball is a toy. But football is a game.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The children who expected a reward, sadly, they only spent eight percent of their time drawing. The very presence of a reward halved their motivation. So what's happening? What's happening here is researchers differentiate intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation with intrinsic motivation we do things because they are inherently interesting and satisfying. And with extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards and to achieve external goals. And that's the problem with rewards is they just massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's why gamification doesn't work. And when gamification does work, it's because the underlying experience was already designed like a game.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1970s, these Stanford researchers recruited children who were aged three to four years old. And all of these kids were generally pre-interested in drawing. Some kids were told they would get a reward, a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon. And some kids were not told about any reward and they did not even expect one or didn't know of one. Now, each child was then invited into a separate room to draw for six minutes, and afterwards they would either get the reward or not. And over the next few days, the children were observed to see how much they would continue to draw by themselves. So the children with no reward, they spent seventeen percent of their time drawing.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I strongly believe that we should make business software like we make games because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends, they fall in love with them. It's another way actually of backing into where we opened this conversation, which is you're making a brand, you're giving reason for word of mouth. It's actually an altogether different kind of product development. So how do we do this? As you said, it's not gamification. That doesn't work. Game design works, but game design is not gamification. It's not, for example, simply taking your product and adding points, levels, trophies, or badges. And to understand why gamification does not work, we actually have to start with human motivation. And there's a very interesting study from Stanford, I think, that demonstrates the difference perfectly.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do it however you want the way Sean initially benchmarked the number was via email surveys. I think email surveys work just fine. The key thing is, and this applies to any survey methodology, if you're going to change the method of surveying all of your old numbers are invalidated. So it's just a new baseline going forwards.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't run the engine as is for superhuman as a whole. There are enough subcomponents of superhuman now that are almost individual products, for example, superhuman for sales, our multiplayer collaboration features, how we think about the enterprise. AI is its whole thing. But we do sometimes run it on those individual pieces. For example, we'll ask a salesperson the product's market fit engine as it relates to superhuman for sales. And as we think about starting new products, we would absolutely deploy the product market fit engine.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have then articulated the subsegment of the subsegment that it makes sense to pay attention to. And there's another question in the engine to figure out what they don't like about the product. Now you have a list of things people love. You have a list of things people don't love. And you can work down that list to make the product market fit score go up. And basically at the start of every planning cycle, I advise spending half your time doubling down on what people really love and half your time systematically overcoming the objections of the somewhat disappointed users, but specifically those for whom the main benefit resonates.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You then go back to the somewhat disappointed users and in the superhuman example, I would simply ask wait, do you like superhuman because of its speed or for something else? And if it's something else, well, and this is hard to do, but politely disregard those people and their feedback because even if you built everything that they asked for, they're still pulling you in a different direction. And the thing that they like the most from your product isn't actually what the people who en masse love it the most for is.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to act too much on the feedback that the very disappointed people are giving you because they already love your product. Also not to act at all really on the feedback that they're not disappointed people are giving you because they're so far from loving your product that they are essentially a lost cause. But to focus on the segment of the somewhat disappointed people, they kind of love your product, but something, and I would wager something small is holding them back. So you then divide them into two camps, the camp for whom the main benefit of your product resonates and the camp for whom it doesn't. And what do I mean by that? Well, you go back to the people who really love your product and you basically ask them why. What is it about my products that you really love in the early days of superhuman? It would have been speed and keyboard shortcuts and the overall design aesthetic as well as the time that we were saving you.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Sean Ellis found. Sean Ellis, if you don't know him, is the guy who coined the term growth hacker, and he instrumented, benchmarked this initial question. What he found is that the companies that struggled to grow almost always had less than 40% very disappointed, whereas the companies that grew the fastest almost always had more than 40% very disappointed. And this question, this metric is way more predictive of success than something, for example, like Netpromoter Score. Okay, so far, so easy. How do we make this number go up? Well, you want more people to be very disappointed without your product. And the trick here is...”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, that's really the meat of the engine. So let's see if I can condense it here in a very easy to grok fashion. So let's assume for the sake of argument that you can put a number on product market fit. And it turns out you can. Very simply, you're going to ask people, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? You give them three responses. One of them is very disappointed. The other is somewhat disappointed. And the other is not disappointed. Very disappointed means I would be like devastated. I love this product or I need this product.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd say the second thing is to get to products 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. It can't be everybody. 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? Of that's covered in the product market fit”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core ideas are still weird enough that I'll start there, which is number one, you can measure product market fit. Number two, you can optimize product market fit. Number three, you can systematically, even numerically, increase product market fit. And number four, you can even have an algorithm write your roadmap for you, and that is a roadmap that is guaranteed to increase product market fit. Now, if that sounds crazy, I would be the first to admit it doesn't seem like that should be true, but go check out that post. I think it is still the most widely shared post on first round review. It's called, I think How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Products Market Fit or just Google the Superhuman Product Market Fit engine. And you'll see the algorithm laid out there fully explained and why it works.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. You don't want to lose money doing this. And we always made money doing onboarding, to be clear. It's just that at a certain point that the mass market, whether it for us as enterprise or all of the prosumers in the world, you hit a top of funnel width. It needs to be wide enough where manually onboarding no longer makes sense.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growth loops that you would then have to build. You would then instead focus all of your engineers on finding product market fit or in solution deepening or in market widening, but not, for example, on a first-time user experience, not, for example, on activation because you have humans doing activation for you. And by contrast, I saw other companies often competing spend almost half their engineering dollars on those things, on self-service flows for products that ultimately did not find products market fit. So it makes sense to do if you really want to create that brand, which I think all consumer companies need to do, and if there is money falling off trees for whatever reason, which we did have for a period of time, arguably AI companies have that again today. So if you can weave this into your strategy, I think you should, but you should also know when to stop.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the flip side is why would you even do this to begin with? What we found two things. Number one, the user metrics are excellent for things like engagement, retention, product market, fit score, MPS, virality. For all of those metrics, I think you will significantly beat your industry benchmarks if you go to the effort of one-on-one onboarding your early customers. And it becomes so powerful to have that early cohort of superfans when it comes to things like building a brand. And if folks remember that conversation from way up at the top, what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand. This is how you can kickstart a brand. And number two, in a world where you can easily and quickly raise funding, like, for example, the zero interest rate phenomenon era, you can actually use dollars to avoid building a first-time user experience and all of the normal”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the reason to stop is that there will always be certain personality types who do not want to go through a one-on-one onboarding. And at a certain point, those people will become very important. And you will need to be ready with a world-class self-service option. We started building self service, it seemed nearly impossible. In fact, it was terrifying because It's difficult to overstate how much the entire DNA of the company was built around this idea that we would Onboard users manually. After all, we did so much in our one-to-one onboardings and there's only so much that software can do. Now we did after a lot of grind and persistence eventually figure it out and we have a world-class self-service experience today, but we did not at the time.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So for folks that don't know, in those early days, we insisted on one-to-one concierge onboarding, and it was absolutely the right thing to do. You couldn't use superhuman unless you went through the onboarding experience. And now it's almost the reverse. Almost every new superhuman customer goes through self-service. The onboarding experience is still there. But again, it is absolutely the right thing to do. To answer your question at peak, we had about 20 people doing manual onboarding.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then finally, I did what I call the cocktail party test, which is to look at cocktail parties and to watch how people pitch your product to other people. And in our case, the pitches were simple. People would say, dude, you have to use it. It's really fucking fast. And that's it. That was the pitch. And that's how I knew that speed would be a really great position for us to start with.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has ever been sold on the value proposition of speed? The last time I could remember anyone trying to do this was when Google launched Chrome, and obviously that went incredibly well for them. And you may remember they had slow motion videos where they were pairing Chrome render web pages and showing that was faster than an actual strike of Lightning. No one had done it since then. And I then asked, well, does speed reinforce our product strategy? And again, the answer was overwhelmingly yes. I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggled.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it struck me how the most well known brands have stood for one clear thing. Like they have a clear position. And so in order for superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy. In the first year of superhuman, therefore, I interviewed hundreds of potential customers about their experience with Gmail and with Outwork and predictably almost everybody said that email takes way too much time. But interestingly, many people also said that Gmail and Outlook were way too slow. And that was how I first thought that speed could be an interesting position for us. I then asked myself, is the position of speed unique and is it available? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes, because almost no software was being sold or”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bill is right, and I agree with him. You have to pick something. Knowing what to pick is the trick. And in the early days of Superhuman, I read a book on positioning that really influenced my thinking. And it is, I believe, called positioning the battle for your mind.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a half-baked product.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then one of the investors said, Hey, by the way, you might want to check your email client because I've been getting some of your emails twice. And now he goes back into his Gmail. He sees that, yes, actually the original emails that were queued up in Mailbox have now indeed been sent. And some of the investors, unfortunately most of the investors, he actually pitched twice. Now, is this the end of the world? No. An investor can overlook that. Probably a good thing that you're trying new apps. But was it horrifying? And was it like was it really scary? Absolutely. And imagine this wasn't investors. Imagine this was a customer, someone who you were trying to convince to buy your thing and that you knew what you were doing and you had attention to detail and you had everything just buttoned up and under control. Well, now you've lost face. Now you look foolish. And that's why when you have a mission critical product like email where you are interfacing with customers, with candidates, with investors.”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this founder was using Mailbox and was having an amazing demo day. They're working the room, they're meeting investors, they're pitching their photography app in this case. And he went home that night and went to his laptop, fired up mailbox, and sent off a bunch of follow-up emails. He waited a day, didn't hear back. He waited two days, didn't hear back. On the third morning, he figured something was up. So he fired up Gmail, went to his sent mail, and you guessed it. There were no scent mails there. So something had broken with mailbox. So he's cursing to himself, trying to remind himself everything's going to be okay. Sent all the same emails from Gmail manually. And they all came through”
2025-03-23 · Lenny's Podcast · Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source