Prompt Cast
Superhuman CEO Rahul Vora on Building the Fastest Email Experience and Achieving Product Market Fit
TLDR Superhuman CEO Rahul Vora discusses the creation of Superhuman, an email platform that offers a fast email experience, and how they validated their hypotheses through user interviews. He also shares insights on pricing, building the company's brand, and achieving product market fit.
Timestamped Summary
00:00
Superhuman, the fastest email experience ever made, recently raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, and in this episode, the hosts interview Superhuman CEO Rahul Vora.
05:32
Superhuman CEO Rahul Vora dropped out of university to become an entrepreneur, and while fundraising for a non-profit organization, he realized the need for a tool that would allow him to see information about potential donors in his email, leading to the creation of Reportive, which eventually caught the attention of LinkedIn.
10:54
Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra realized the potential for a new email platform after seeing the inefficiencies and problems with existing email clients, and recognized the massive market opportunity with one billion professionals spending three hours a day on email.
16:31
Superhuman is an email platform that offers a fast email experience, allowing users to get through their inbox twice as fast compared to Gmail and achieve inbox zero.
22:19
Superhuman validated their hypotheses that people disliked Gmail for its speed, lack of offline capabilities, clutter, and plugins, and disliked third-party email apps for their stability, sync issues, and bugs through 1,000 interviews with early users and used the shutdown of Mailbox as an opportunity to drive traffic and validate their initial idea.
28:12
Superhuman used a methodical approach to develop their pricing, including using the Van Westendor pricing sensitivity meter and conducting one-on-one interviews with early customers to determine the price point of $30 per month.
33:46
Superhuman's pricing was initially set at $29 per month, but was quickly rounded up to $30 per month after conversations with pricing experts.
39:50
The founder of Superhuman spent a significant amount of time and money on building the company's brand and signaling to potential co-founders and investors, including purchasing a domain name, creating a well-crafted landing page, and iterating on the copy and design.
45:41
Superhuman intentionally took two and a half years to develop their product because building a quality email client in a competitive market like Gmail takes time, and the advice to launch early and iterate applies more to startups creating new markets with network effects.
51:27
Superhuman follows a growth model where they onboard a specific number of users each week, with 70% of new users being referred by existing users, and they have a qualification process to ensure the product is a good fit for users.
57:29
The host discusses different definitions of product market fit, including Mark Andreessen's vivid definition, and then introduces a benchmarked predictive way to measure product market fit by asking users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product.
01:03:59
The CEO discusses a four-step process called Saber (Segment, Analyze, Build, Repeat) to systematically generate a roadmap and increase product market fit, but acknowledges that not every startup idea will end up at an end state of product market fit even with the correct algorithm due to reasons such as running out of money, team disagreements, and fatigue.
01:10:16
The CEO emphasizes the importance of founders and CEOs persistently pushing through challenges and obstacles, and quotes Paul Graham to explain that building for a narrow segment of users and overfitting the product is actually advised, as most good startup ideas are of that type and can lead to adjacent and even better ideas.
01:16:32
Superhuman is hiring for a product manager role and engineers, and they are looking for phenomenal developers to join their team.
Categories:
Technology
Business
