great one. Take feels good. Welcome to Season four Episode 10 The Finale of Acquired the Podcast about technology acquisitions and I pose I'm Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal and we Are your hosts. Today we're covering superhuman the fastest email experience ever made. This show was originally going to be a limited partner bonus show with superhuman CEO Rahul Vora on understanding his algorithmic approach to find product market fit. But we realized that superhuman was a perfect way to round out our trilogy on the modern productivity stack on the heels of our zoom and slack AIPO episodes. And we learned that the timing would be perfect with some big news that just dropped for superhuman indeed. Well, they just raised their $33 million Siri's be funding, led by Andries and Horowitz on the heels of some very rapid growth. As you'll hear if you want to read more about the company after this episode, you can click the link in the show notes for The New York Times article that broke the news. Now, in lieu of doing our normal description of the LP show at this time, we have a big request. Please fill out the Season four survey.

It is tremendously important to us here at acquired world H Q to no. One who are audiences for better content, but to to make sure that we work with relevant and interesting sponsors for everyone and to sweeten the deal. If you fill out the survey, you will be entered into a raffle, where we will give out one pair of second generation airpods that you can use to listen to all the acquired you want. And there will be 10 other lucky winners of free LP show subscriptions for one year. You can click the link in the show notes or go to acquire dot FM slash survey, and again, we deeply appreciate you doing this. It's hugely important to us, and in fact, if you have five minutes to spare right now, I'll even invite you to pause right here. And we will be with you as soon as you get back. I swear.

Ah, hello, cheesy and too cheesy. Holy just great. All right, Well, lastly, before we dive in, I want to thank the sponsors of all of Season four Perkins Kui Council. Two great companies we have with us today Ned Prissy Ah, partner in the corporate and securities practice who regularly advises clients working with the SEC. Now, Ned, aside from the window being open, what do you think has contributed to all these companies going public at once? Yeah,

I think a lot of one of the factors is a lot of these companies are using, you know, the I pose, as it truly is a marketing play, not so much as is really marketing to raise money to further their business, but truly to try to gain, you know, more users and get the get the publicity of the AIPO cos you know, if they grab users quickly, if they have a strong position in the market, they have strong relationship. It makes it more difficult for some other competitors to come in and and dislodge them from market on. I really think that's why you saw a lift and uber ago be so we need to get out right around the same time so they could secure their market share of publicity and in their businesses. Great. Thanks, Ned.

If you want to learn more about Perkins Kui or reach out to Ned specifically, you can click the link in the show notes or in Slack. Now, without further ado, here is our conversation with superhuman CEO Rahul Vora. So welcome acquired. Help Ease to a very special episode of the LP show. David and I are sitting here in superhuman world H Q on California Street in San Francisco and ah, we have with us an awesome guest. Rahul Vora, CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to the show.

Absolutely. Thank you

both for having me. Yeah, you bet to give a little brief bio. So Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, the wildly popular, blazingly fast email app that is changing the way ah lot of us think about our relationship with our inbox. And before superhuman, Rahul was the CEO and co founder of reported selling that toe linked in in 2012. So if you noticing a pattern there, I think I definitely am. Rahul is also an active angel investor, an adviser to several startups and we're lucky to have him with us today. So I already said, Welcome to the show, so I don't need to say that again. But what the show. Thank you. Are we right that this is your second office.

This technically is our fourth office

fourth, often house. And you're about 30 people Now, here it looks like we all Yes, it's Ah, nice and decked out in superhuman colors. It's

like, Yeah, we do like our pinks and purples. And although it was sort of trying to keep the we just moved in vibe. We don't want to go too crazy here. Yeah, we found as we grow so fast that by the time we have made a place nice it's like, OK, time to move on to the office. It's awesome. The problem with early stage startup offices. Good problem to have get from nab. Let's talk for a minute before we get a superhuman, which we're gonna spend most of the episode on. Can you tell us the quickly on reported How did How did you started? And it was a very quick turnaround, So reported was basically started to satisfy my own need.

It was a classic case of scratching my own itch. I was at the University of Cambridge at the time, and I, in fact, had just dropped out of the PhD program. I'd started a PhD there in machine learning and computer vision. This was way before either of those things were cool or even feasible. In any case, I dropped out because I realized that what I wanted to be was an entrepreneur. But I didn't have an idea at the time that I wanted to pursue. So why networks my way into the part of the university that helps staff and students create companies called Cambridge University entrepreneurs on Essentially, What I would do is I would actually come to folks like yourself veces angels, big tech companies. And I would say, Hey, can I please have some money?

And they'd be like, Why? And I'd say, Well, I want to give that money to staff and students at the University of Cambridge who are making cos it's gonna be awesome. Trust me on these focuses sort of rub their hands together and go cool. How much equity did we get on? I would say non whatsoever thing. This is a charity that we're ready here. We're trying to help people learn how to build businesses, and by the way, we're going to make some amazing businesses as well. And as we've covered multiple times on the show. Cambridge is actually a really great entrepreneurial of. I mean, arm came out of Cambridge,

as did many other companies. It's even crazier. Um, Cambridge Silicon Radio. Let's see who else there was that company that Qualcomm acquired? Um, I've got the name and more than companies. Thio. My partner, Riley Wave, was a grad student. Cambridge friend Nelson Eventbrite. Plenty of Silicon Valley has come from come from Cambridge in the UK Yeah, a little bit of giving you money. They did. They didn't actually give me money in the end,

but the point of the story is I was thrust into this not for profit fundraising at a very young age with no training in this field whatsoever on dhe having grown up learning how to program on being a very competent program. At the time, I was just wondering to myself for what tools would help me do this fundraising better on I imagine if in my email I could see what people look like, where they were based links to their recent tweets links to their social profiles than I would be able to authentically connect with that person and establish report so much better. Hence the idea behind reported. I couldn't find that product in the market. So in about six weeks I just sat down and built that first version,

and that was that was totally magical. I remember the first time I had installed the plugin was Was it first for Gmail and then chrome? Or was it? What was the implementation

of that? It was, in fact, always a chrome extensions, although before it was a crime extension. Technically, it was a Firefox extension. This'll was in 2010 where people, it's kind of hard to remember now, but people were still skeptical that chrome was a great thing. The tastemakers at the time, we were all sitting in five, so it started as a Firefox. Add on on. Later on, it was a chrome extension.

I do definitively remember that eye opening experience of you can type someone's email and then, like a second or two goes by and then boom. There's all this enrichment about them, and it's like now it's taken for granted because this idea has permeated in tow, sort of other products throughout the years. But is something really magical to it?

How did the connection with linked in happened. And we've also talked a bunch of on the show about the importance of email to linked in and Lincoln's growth and on boarding. So I imagine you popped up on their radar screen pretty quickly. What was the relationship like? We had a great relationship that ultimately it ended up in, I guess, a technical consummation there quiet us initially, like many acquisitions that started with a business development relationship. On the way that that transpired was we were consumers oven a p i at the time provided by don't if you guys remember a company called Rapley Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah, totally. So rapidly is one of those first Cos to who acquired the know. So wrap leaf ended up transmogrified ing. To some degree, they became life friend,

uh, Andi. Then they were acquired by Axiom on have recently spun out as a large public company. I think they're now worth $3 billion most doing really well. But back in the day, it was a relatively small startup called Rapley. Yet despite their small size, they were the only company. Remember, this was back in 2010 to whom you could supply an email address and they would give you the full social context about that email

today. That's full contact. Clear bit. Those are the sort of providers that would be their coms today.

Correct. Now it's sort of and then there are others as well, and that now it's sort of a almost a commodity market place for that data. But back then, it was this sort of edgy, crazy new thing that you were able to do, and so me being opportunistic entrepreneur, I was like, Cool, let's take this a P I Let's package it up, which actually wasn't a crazy amount of work. And let's let's jam it into Gmail via the use of a browser extension. So that's where the data came from. Now you can imagine that Lynton were none too pleased about an upstart selling their data total, and Lincoln famously has always made it really hard. Thio get mass quantities of data out of there because they have a network effect, indeed,

and we definitely didn't want or need mass quantities and everything, by the way that we were doing, was for the benefit of Lincoln's hardest court members which is ultimately why it was such a good relationship with them. But they approached us. Tow at one point, were like, Hey, listen, we really would prefer it if you were not buying our data off third parties and I was like, Cool, I would really prefer it if I had access to the A P I Yeah, so first, the only internal. Right now, we both stated our preferences for awhile until, I think a few months later,

we realized that maybe an actual business development relationship would be the best thing, which was truly remarkable because I think at that point, in fact, it never grew beyond us. There were only ever about 20 companies that had access to this secret Lincoln, a P I. That's also and that was that was probably right around the time of their I p. All right, this would have bean halfway through 2011. I don't recall exactly when they I p o d. I would have been around that time. It was either ended 2011 er big beginning at 2012 I believe the chap I was dealing with his Adam Nash, who went on to be the CEO wealth from two news now Dropbox. And he was super nice about it. So I went in and he was like, Can you demo what you would do with the Lincoln?

A. P I and I showed him the work flows, and he was looking for things like, Is the copy helpful? Are we trying to deceive? Users clearly know what we stealing data? Absolutely not. Is it for the value of the Lincoln member? Yes, it is. He was like, Okay, great. You should be a partner.

I personally wanted to dive into that to sort of give context on how we got to where we are today. What I love to start to steer the conversation to is the founding of superhuman. And David and I have previously talked a couple times on the LP show about things that companies do pre and post product market fit and definitions of it. But Rahul, you yuet superhuman have actually built metrics around it and found sort of systematic and scientific ways to find product market fit. I'm teasing sort of our analysis section here later cause I want folks to know that we're gonna dive into the founding of superhuman right now. But where we got eventually is to a company that waited over two years tow launch and really built something sort of amazing in a very sort of both art and data driven way. And then we're going to sort of diving until that whole story. But talk to me about the initial idea for superhuman where it came from and how you convinced yourself that there's a business to be started selling, a new email platform

writes. It isn't necessarily obvious from the outset. I do agree with that at Lynton Iran, all of our email integrations. It was my responsibility, rather to get linked in data Ellington profiles into other e mail clients. And so I became very familiar with how professionals do. Their email on the T. L D R is badly, so I took a year off after I left on. During that time, I was looking for what I wanted to start next, due in part to the Ai Po and to the acquisition. I was very fortunate to be in a position where I didn't really have to work on, so I focused on impact. You know, what was the biggest thing that I could possibly do on my mind kept going back to a 2012 McKenzie study,

where they showed that the average professional and there are one billion professionals in the world. The average professional spends three hours a day reading and writing. You know, it's not hard audibly right like that crazy. It's I mean, it's it's just mind blowing. And so during my year off, every single day I was doing the very simple math. One billion professionals times three hours a day is three billion hours a day that go into email on I couldn't find. I couldn't think of anything bigger than that to do a market that big. And nobody had built a real business, innit? Correct. Because people were scared because Microsoft and Google between them had systematically almost prevented dancers and getting this area. Exactly. And so it was during that time when I looked very closely at how people were feeling about Gmail on dhe.

Bizarrely, I saw this product get worse every single year, I think, because I was building on the Gmail. It's not really a platform because I was building a Gmail browser extension. I could I had a front row seat to what was happening here, so I saw the products becoming more cluttered, using more memory consuming, more seep, you slowing down Your machine's still not working properly offline. And then on top of that, people were installing plug ins like ours reported, but also boomerang. You'll remember Mix Max clear bit, you name it. They had all all sorts of streak and what happened right?

It's kind of guilt inducing for me, because reported was the first to get millions of users. And I'm like, I am sorry, guys. I did not intend. I know it. It actually makes me sad. Well, one of the, you know, rules. I think we've talked about it various points on the show before, like all rules and start ups and ventures meant to be broken. But you can't build a big company on the back of somebody else's platform like they're very, very few examples.

And as long as Gmail and Microsoft are the platforms and you're just building plug ins reported being the most successful among them, you're just gonna be a plug in. I think that's true, although I would like to see for example, Graham really be the exception to that rule. I think at this point they're probably the highest valued, most successful plug in business and fingers crossed. They actually break the barrier and very captains their own thing. But you're right that there's a lot of existential crises around

there. Yep. Can I ask, when you were thinking about what to start and you were fully impact driven on, that was your mind able to go to places that weren't email because you knew it like, Is it that you knew it so well that you felt that you sort of were uniquely positioned and owed it to the world to fix that problem? Or was it more like I tried to think of other stuff and email is where my head

waas. So I did absolutely go to other ideas. I spent time in the summer 2014 researching any number of things I could do on. I got quite deep into what you would now call concierge health. So an on demand doctor who might turn up on dhe sort you out with it with whatever ailment you might be feeling again, I I saw the potential for a very large amount of impact there. But it's interesting that you you mentioned this idea of going it to the world. I very much felt like I did and still do. I do believe that there is the perfect start up for every founder, the one where if you do it, you have an outsized chance of success. The story arc is just perfect, and it's it's kind of the start up. Or if you do, everybody will cheer you on because they want you to succeed because it feels like it's, you know, it should be destiny that this thing looks and that started exists for most founders and for me.

I believe that it was superhuman. It was the natural, logical, progressive evolution from reported. It is the thing that we always wanted to build anyway, on was actually the solution to all the problems that we created whilst we were messing around. It reported what you just said. It resonates so much cause Lake at the stage, that seed stage that we invested in waving the PSR works at like I have some version of that conversation, like every week, you know, like I'm just I'm just curious. What were there people who helped you through that phase? Or was it like a journey you had to go on on yourself when you're by yourself to realize like okay, like the destiny is superhuman? There were definitely lots of people who helped me through that phase.

We just mentioned Adam Nash earlier, and I remember when I left Lynton he was CEO of Wealthfront at that time and I went to him and I said, Hey, I have this idea for a new email experiences called superhuman. Here's what it's gonna do. It's amazing. I want to go and start it. He was like, Well, what? Slow down. Are you gonna take any time off? And I said, Yeah, I'm planning to take some time off And he said, Well,

how much time do you think you need? And I said about three months, and he was, like, wrong. However much time you think you need, it's actually more like three times that you probably need nine months off, and in retrospect, he was completely right. I ended up taking about nine months off before I felt comfortable settling into what was essentially the same business idea that I've been working on for about four years. Eso During that time, I did explore lots of other ideas. I had a few mentors that I would constantly bounce concept off, but I just felt myself always coming back to this. This one idea, because it's hard to explain.

I just I couldn't stay away from it. I think that's a good sign. When you can't stay away from an idea, it's It's a strong indication that you should probably go into it. Yeah, totally. No matter how bad the idea resonate so much for, you know, certainly for me. And starting wave assume for you. And 1% for Kimberly Glow. Like everything required like Yeah, totally so cool here. Okay. So superhuman. So superhuman is the fastest email experience of all time.

Our users get through their inbox about twice as fast compared to in Gmail. They respond more quickly to the e mails that matter, and many of them see inbox zero for the first time in years. So you can imagine that's pretty life changing. Tell me more.

You've never said that before. I'm sure. I just wake up saying that every day not too overly Fanboy here, but I can absolutely vouch for all of that. And it's ah, especially on a day like today, where I'm down in San Francisco and traveling literally feel like I have superpowers plowing through my email at the end of the day. And, um, you guys have built

something amazing. So thank you during those either during the nine months or at the end of it, when you first started working on it, and then into the two year process will get to you before you lunched. There Couple value, perhaps in there, but like one of them is like fast, right? Did you land on that? Like, how quick did you get thio that or or whatever like you in your mind is like the most specific value property needed to nail speed was a value prop from very early on, and I think as I introspect this, it came out of some of the frustrations developing reported on Gmail. Obviously, Gmail at the time was my primary email interface. I was the founder and CEO off a off that started when I was doing a lot of email based work on, so I was intimately familiar with how slow Gmail was and how slow it was getting.

And I had therefore this this hunch, this inkling that speed was going to be a very big deal. But like with any hunch or inkling, one does have to validate it. So in the first year of superhuman, as we were primarily building, we threw up a landing page. It was a terrible landing page, just like a basic squarespace thing that took us all of two hours to put together on. All you could do on this page was throwing your email address, and when you threw in your email address, you got on automatic email from me. And in that email there were two questions. Number one was, What do you use for email today? On number two was,

what were your pet peeves about it? And I had two hypotheses going in. I put this number one Was that for Gmail? People were upset about how slow it had gotten, how it wasn't working properly offline and how they had to use Gmail plug ins to make it do the things that they wanted to do and then for third party email clients. People were upset about how buggy they were, how unstable they were on how they don't sink properly. All of which is still true today. So much dead bombing on the same talking to an apple male country boy, I feel for you. So we had to validate that in that first year of superhuman. I think that we had maybe in the region of 5000 sign ups on that landing page 5000 emails that went out 1000 conversations actually happened there. 4000 interviews that I did with early users, probably way more than most founders would actually do. And resoundingly, those two hypotheses were confirmed. People disliked Gmail for the speed and the lack of offline and the clutter and the plug ins, and people dislike third party email apse because of the stability and the sink and the bussiness.

How did you drive traffic like, How did you get top of funnel to get all of those responses on your landing page

in the early days of a startup? I think, and this is what we did. The best way to do it is to pick one or two events per year where you can insert yourself into the cultural zeitgeist. So for us, one such event was when Mailbox was being shut down and

our i p

yeah, sadness, right? But it was the perfect narrative to say, Hey, I'm over here. Come, come look at our company And the trick when doing these is to think of interesting, avid green content. So you guys are the perfect people to talk to about this, you know, more than anyone else just how hard acquisitions are. I currently have one of the most widely read articles on how to survive an acquisition on it was written in response to the mailbox.

Shut down. I think it's your only medium post rate.

It's probably my only medium post. Correct, because I usually end up in the sort of second part. To your question, I usually actually end up syndicating posts, You get farm or reached that way on. So that post ended up on Medium also was syndicated to q z dot com on yes, it was about how do you survive an acquisition on? We were able to insert it into the zeitgeist because relevant our company's some news event was happening and I think if we as founders think hard enough, there's probably one or two things a year where that's true and you only need one or two things again. Now it's a pretty intense period, I think to write that article probably took me about three days of not doing anything else on then. Another day of shopping it around. So four days, all in. But those four days bought, I don't know,

north of 5000 sign ups. And then those are the sign ups that you need to validate your initial idea. Yeah, when you saw the news, that mailbox. So it's being so Lake. How quickly did your mind go to opportunity like I'm now gonna go take four days to do this? Like, practically immediately. Immediately, I said to the team, This is something that we need to capitalize on and take advantage off. We have to make ourself relevant. We didn't actually do anything, and this is just often how startups go until there was about a week to go. So the last week was a scramble. I was like, remember that idea that we had a few months ago? We like we need to do

it right now? Yep. Start ups. Before we get into kind of our discussion, I I wantto talk about kind of a provocative question. Have we reached the end of the era of the M V, P or ship a crappy version. But before we get there for the listeners who don't know superhuman costs $30 a month for a female client like talk about a narrative violation, this is, I think the last browser that tried to charge for you to use was like Omni Web in, you know, the early two thousands. And I think it would be absolute heresy today to to say, Oh ah, you know, it's It's not even a mail service. It's backed by Gmail.

It's It's an application through which to interface with with Gmail. But boy, is it great and oh, my gosh, I pay 38 $30 for it. How did you come to a revenue model of we're just gonna ask people to pay? How did you pick a price point and had you validated? I think

overall, with pricing strategy, you have to analyze what you're going up against. And we were going up against free or nearly free. Gmail and Microsoft are practically free. If you are a consumer, and if you're in the enterprise is being paid for you anyway, so you don't see or feel the cost. The only way to win. And I think it's Reed Hoffman, who popularized the following statement, is to be contrarian and write. I don't necessarily know how to be rights, but I do know how on there's nothing more contrarian against a free product than to charge as as much as seems reasonable or maybe even more than seems reasonable. Yeah, but then to back it up with the goods that actually make it worthwhile. So before we tried to address pricing,

we actually first addressed are positioning and we ran through a series of questions. I'm a car guy, so a lot of my analogies do with cars on. So, for example, we asked ourselves, Are we the Ford of email? No, not really. Are we the Mercedes of email? Not quite, but maybe we're getting there. Are we the Tessler of email? Okay, this is beginning to feel about right, and there's a classic positioning game that you can do.

It's a little bit of a mad Libs exercise where you say, for a target customer who has a a need or an opportunity, my product is in this category on dhe. This key benefit, unlike some other competitive product, will create this primary differentiations from crossing the chasm. Yeah, yeah, I believe Jeffrey, Morning Crossing the chasm came up with that frame and then, like it's been used many times, but gotcha. So I'm clearly not as widely read as you are as a framework way. Would you go to business school? You learn a lot of like, useless trivia.

So I actually found this piece of wisdom as I find much in my wisdom off the First Round Review Journal, which is incredible on it was written by Ariel Jackson, who who listeners may not know. But she was the product marketing manager, a Google who launched female, and I was like, Wow, like, OK, here we go. I have to meet her. Unfortunately, we were a first round or are a first round investment, and so that was very easy. And so I got to spend a lot of time with her working on our positioning on. I have it right here.

So we came up with. For founders, CEOs and managers of high growth technology companies who feel like the work is mostly email, superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. It's what Gmail could be if it were made today instead of 12 years ago. Unlike Gmail, superhuman is meticulously crafted so that everything happens in 100 milliseconds or less on. We've since expanded beyond that very, very narrow. So great, that's what you have to do. You have to start with something that

narrow. Yeah. Is there a risk in starting with something that narrow that you're not going to be able to expand outside of it? Or do you feel like if you can nail it for that core group than you're always gonna be able to find more room around the edges?

Very much the latter. So I think we should come back to that point because I have a I have a thing that I should probably share with the listeners. But just to tie the positioning back into the pricing because this is a very methodical exercise that we ran through. So Step one is understand the lay of the competitive environment In our case, we were going up against two incumbents whose products of free or practically free Step two is Come up with the positioning like I just described. And when you read our positioning, it's clear that superhuman is a premium tool for a premium market, and Step three is. Develop your pricing. Now. There are many, many ways to develop pricing, but one of the easiest ways, uh, this will appeal to the business school guy knew is the van Western door pricing sensitivity meter I see had knots going on over here. That seems like a fancy name. It's just some dude's name.

I think hey was probably very smart. Very clever. Did a lot of pricing anyway. So he said, Ask your target users. Four questions number one. At what price would you consider superhuman to be so expensive that you would not consider buying and number two At what price would you consider superhuman to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn't be very good? Number three. At what price would you consider superhuman to be starting to get expensive so that it isn't out of the question? But you would have to give some thoughts to buying it on number four. At what price would you consider superhuman to be a bargain? A great buy for the money. Now most startups actually orient around the fourth question, the bargain for the money because there's some kind of network effect or a green field effect. While they're trying to take advantage of a first mover effect or so on

this land that they want to go get all the users, we may as well prices low as we can tow. Get him all

Exactly, which is why most founders I know have the experience of a board meeting where your board members are like, Hey, you know what? Maybe you should half the price. Maybe we should just, like, make this free and like, give this away from wait, have you done this toe? I have done this. Yeah, My point is this Last week. It's actually entirely the correct thing to do. If you're building in a new market, more there is a land grab were the first mover advantage that you're trying to chase, however,

definitely not the case with email, not the case with email, where there's a big incumbent on the competitive products of great start ups like superhuman should orient around the third question, when does it feel expensive? But you'd still buy it anyway, On that makes sense. If you're building a premium product now, for us, the median answer to that third question was $30 per month. And that's how we picked the price that we very methodically went through competitive landscape positioning and then pricing using this very simple pricing methodology. And were you using people who had engaged with the survey that you were driving traffic to you? This was actually well before we started doing this service s O. This is when we were on boarding our 1st 100 customers. I did all of these manually in the on boarding, and these on boardings used to be much longer. They were one hours or one and 1/2 hours.

I'd give them a demo of the product, and then I'd look them in the eye, and I'd be like, Hey, this is the thing that you have to pay for now. They didn't know going into the den. I mean, they kind of knew. But like always, we're always reminding

you that you can't see Rahul right now but like it's almost like this. Like a terse dad. Look that he's giving you. It's like, Now, son,

I have some news for you on. I would actually very sternly looked them in the eye and say, This is the thing you have to pay for. Can I ask you a few questions about how you feel on pricing? And they'd be like, Yes, and then I just I'd go into it and I'd write down the numbers on After we'd done 100 of these things, the answers were pretty clear. That's also that's amazing. And you haven't changed the Preysing since. Well, actually, the initial pricing was $29 per user permanence. We didn't think too hard about that. That was just like, Well, you know, it seems to be the right price at roughly the right order of magnitude. On then, I had a few conversations with some pricing experts who pointed out that if we are truly owning the premium experience in our category than ending your price with a nine probably isn't the best thing to do, So we pretty quickly rounded it up to $30 in

interest. That's fascinating. Never thought about that, especially because, like Apple does, you know, 12 99 for your iPhone or, you know, I think it's 12 99. I know Walmart undercuts it like 12 95. Interesting. That's super interesting psychology. Wow, you said you wanted to circle back on the positioning. Yeah, so let's dive in now to this this analysis section. So for listeners,

I want to set the stage on sort of a timeline for this whole thing, because I do think it's it's kind of crazy how long it waited before seeing the light of day. When did you break ground on designing, Superhuman. When was the first line of code? And when did you start rolling out to these 1st 100 users?

I first started sketching out the concept and the business model for super human in February of 2014. That's five years ago now, Wow or more brother. And then it wasn't until nearly a year later, in January of 2015 when I started designing the product. That's when I first put pen to paper. I wrote the landing page before I did anything else, all of the copy that you see on superhuman dot com is actually copy that was written in January of 2015 on I created hundreds of detailed wire frames on the first line of code was not written until May, the fourth in 2015.

And just to get nerdy like, uh, how are you doing? The wire frames and sketch? Are you literally sketching it out? Is that what's your preferred methodology here?

It depends on how clearly I can see it in my head. It will often start with a extremely sketchy sketch on paper on. Then, once I can begin to see it, my my tool of choice is still both something come kind of old school about it. I can use it extremely fast, way faster than I am and sketch. That's why I did it, huh?

That's your superhuman of Ah, bro, typing technology's pretty much okay, so started sketching for a year than did a year of design. After that,

in the week after I left Lynton, in my gusto to get something done, I actually went out and pitched a bunch of e sees that same week thought this was the February 2014 before Adam Nash is advised. Yeah, he was like, Yo, chill out, which was great advice. And so I had term sheets. At that point, I could have raised money. But he suggested, as did many others who knew me. They were like, Listen, you're really burned out. Maybe you don't see it yet on.

I did go through this roller coaster of emotions in the following months, as as I was processing the burnout from from the last four years. So let's say that there was, like, a few weeks in early 2014 and then most of 2014 was time or break time. Yeah, and then I really got going again around Q four of 24 scene on my advice to any listener who's going through the same thing or who shortly will be is Don't try and just jump straight into it. You can't go from being a professional party animal like I waas into okay, I'm not going to do 12 hour days again. It just doesn't work. I went from not working to four hours a day to five hours a day to six house a day, and I slowly built that muscle memory. Backup on the first few things were things like Let's buy superhuman dot com. Let's investigate trademarks. Let's raise some seed capital. Were you pulling together a team at this point?

Two? I was trying to, but you know that that is, ah, longer term thing. And then there are things you can do, even when you you don't have a team. What I did in Queue for was I bought superhuman dot com, and I raised about $750,000 of seed capital. And then in January, I did the wire frames that in February I engaged with a design agency to make those wife frames into really beautiful markups. High fidelity

markups. I think that's a little bit of a contrarian thing to bring in a design agency, sort of that early in a start up, rather than hiring a designer or doing it in house,

it is, and it's turned out to be super expensive compared to firing a designer. I think I spent $45,000 on turning these wire frames into high fidelity markups. I do. Speaking of frameworks, I do have a framework on this, which explains why I think it was the rational thing to do in my case, if you want to hear it. Okay. So I think the fundamental job off a founder is to create momentum. And in my mind, I like to imagine this gigantic flywheel and it's made up of the most dense material in the universe. And the job is to get this thing moving. Now most founders the first time. Ah, probably technical on the way that you get this fly real moving is you make a thing, you launch a thing and hopefully people like your thing and it starts moving by sheer force of user numbers.

This was certainly how reported worked. It took me about six weeks to build the first version tens of thousands of users in 24 hours, and it just kept on growing now dramatically there, after which is cool. So the flywheel just started moving by itself on that point, it's like, OK, can I now hold on to this thing? Yeah. When you are a second time founder on your coming back at it again, you get to do things in weird, strange orders, but still moving the flywheel. So for example, the money that initial $750,000 that was raised in 2014 4 superhuman was raised on the basis of primarily one slide where I took a screenshot of Gmail on I just read, lined out everything I didn't Like.

I said, I'm gonna make this pretty and fast and you'll believe me because of what I did. Pretty because he felt reported right. There is no execution risk here. I know how to build a thing. I know how to hire the team. I know how to market the thing. This is what I'm gonna do. Yet on that $750,000 starts this flywheel moving. So now I'm like, Cool single founder. I've got this money in the bank. I'm not paying myself. Obviously, I don't need to do that. What else can I do to get this fly real movie?

Well, that domain name looks pretty juicy. Let's see if I can make that happen on guy who sold it to me. Well, it wasn't the most pleasant of individuals. Hey, never are never fun. He took a perverse sense of enjoyment out of sending me abusive and insulting emails. Unfortunately, I didn't have to deal with this myself. I hired experts broker to go after the main way. Ended up getting a very good deal. But that's another example of how you can get this fly real moving now. You might think, as many people said at the time. Whoa.

So you just raised 750 k. And you're going to spend what was, like, 20% of it or something on buying a domain name. Yeah, right. That's crazy. I know how you would feel about that is a seed investor. Yeah, I would be like, we need to have a conversation. So I think I did by the dull cone that I let it lapse. Probably has it now. In any case, I thought about it long and hard, and I realized that in the grand scheme of things,

this is gonna turn out to be no money whatsoever. Most importantly, this is a sign to the world that this flywheel is moving. You were serious about that. I'm super serious about this. The people I'm really signaling to at this point our potential co founders number one. Yeah. And potential investors number two. Yeah, and we'll see what comes back to the market to like If you were tryingto create a new market, it would be wholly irrelevant, right? But you're trying to compete with established entrenched competitors and back to your positioning like you are the you know, the Tesla's not the What was Ah, Tesla before was test. What

was the name of the E one thing? The one everyone? Yep. Not the eveyone. Which, of course, Rahul, staring at us like we're crazy. Of course you wouldn't know because it wasn't the

Tesla, right? Right before the roads, The Roadster, before the before Thomas joined. It was the eveyone. That is a pretty terrible name.

Yeah, actually, it was the T zero, the t zero. That's because it was It was my mathematicians

was like, at a time. That's kind of cool, though It just reminds me of the Terminator contention that you probably don't want in itself. Yes, So, in any case, the flywheel the domain was another piece, then the landing page, like a really well crafted landing page where every single sentence had been iterated hundreds of times over. I'm not even exaggerating. By the way, I spent 4 to 6 weeks writing the copy for the landing page on, then another six weeks doing the wire frames and then $50,000 to the design agency to creates these beautiful designs. These are all examples of how a single founder who once upon a time was technical, I wouldn't claim to be particularly tactical nowadays, can create.

You did drop out. I did wrong. I instantly forgot everything. Exactly. It is an example of how a single human being can start the fly. Real spinning on that helps both with recruiting co founders as well as with raising investment.

Yeah, I'm gonna catch us up on the timeline. So it's summer 2017. So we started in February 2015. So we're two and 1/2 years and it's a 14 person teams still haven't shipped. This is frickin heresy for start ups that are supposed to, you know, be embarrassed of your your first version. So Reed Hoffman there's this famous sort of Reed Hoffman mindset. If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late, so could superhuman have done this and sort of put your maybe your worst foot forward to get some signal and then sort of iterated, iterated, iterated? Or did it have to be done in this way where you and a team went away for two and 1/2 years and sort of created the magic internally?

I think it had to be done this way. I noticed, with almost every single other email app, every single other productivity app that they went through the following motion, they would raise some seed money. They would make thing. It wouldn't be a very good thing, not because of the teams weren't talented Orwell intentions. Most people here are, but you're competing with Microsoft and Google that on the domain is so inherently complex. It is a very, very difficult thing to build an email client that people actually want to use. And it does take more than two years. I challenge anybody to do that faster. I don't think it's possible. On the same is true by the way of a Web browser or a database or of a compiler. Any sufficiently hard productivity tool will take many,

many years to build. But back to the Reed Hoffman quotes. You know, I'm still embarrassed today, but in many aspects of superhuman, and I probably always will be. So I think Reed is actually still correct the nuance here, though, and I think this is the question that you might be asking is how applicable is the advice to superhuman on. I think his advice applies most to start ups that are creating new markets, and especially to startups that haven't network effects. So, for starters, that air creating new markets, the alternative is usually a terrible experience. You guys will talk about this on Friday.

But remember trying to hail a cab in San Francisco before uber existed, right? Well, you could have used capitalists are taxi magic? Yes, Yes, I remember standing in the rain, which, of course, made everything worse on the Embarcadero for like, like ability to 40 minutes. So waiting for a taxi to arrive and they keep on whizzing by you. It was the worst that exactly to your point. There was a moment in time after after I OS was open to third party developers where the time had come and there were there were probably seven companies, legit companies that all got started and like then it was like you need to move. You need a ship yesterday.

You need to move as soon as fast as possible. Lock up all the supply and all the demand. Exactly, because at that moment in time, anything you release, even if, as reads says, it's embarrassing to you is going to be worth it for a critical mass of users. Yeah, and that gives you a small advantage on when you have a network effects, as all of these companies did, that small advantage is going to start compounding on himself. Great for that kind of company. But for a start up like superhuman

in an existing

market exactly where the alternative product is. Gmail on dhe without an explicit network effect built into it. Right now the bar is very different. I wanna double click a little bit on the network effect. Peace, obviously, reporter have had a network fact, or at least you were building on other people's network effects for me would be a more accurate way to put it. Were you intentional about at least this first, you know, act of superhuman not being a network effect business, I don't actually think that reported had a network effect we may be using the term in a different way. Eso by a network effects. I mean, where the value of the products becomes more valuable, the more people are using it different for exam, that's what.

Has I caught myself? You didn't really. You were building on the fact that, like Lincoln had that, uh, you were using their data. Yes, I think it's always great if you could build in a network effect. We believe that with superhuman there are underlying network effects that will become apparent overtime on that. In the meantime, we don't need one. And the reason why we don't need one is that we can solve the marketing and the retention challenges in a different way, which would be unable to by making the product very desirable, very viral and very sticky once you actually start using it.

So you mentioned competing in an existing market where the bar is already very high versus a land grab opportunity as a framework for can you sort of take your time and be very intentional and methodical and frankly, spend a good amount of money developing your first version of your product? Other other sort of vectors on which toe sort of decide whether you need to launch yesterday or you can take your time other than other than that market timing.

Yes. So I have another framework for you.

Excellent. David, Be very excited. Yeah,

I can see that. I'm not going to claim credit for this one because it's not mine, but it is. Oh, boy, it's right. So this one came to me from Sherman Otra. Hey is founder and CEO of Koda, another great productivity tool. And we were talking about our respective attitudes to launch and, you know, sort of a CZ you've bean alluding to superhuman has at this point so famously held back from a public launch. So too has Koda. And he was able to put into words what what I had been feeling for a very long time. And he said a startup should only launch for one of three reasons. Number one. Either you need more users or customers to sell to number two.

You need more capital to spend or number three. You need more candidates to hire if your benchmarking well across all three. If you're attracting all the users, you need to. If you have all the capital you could spend. And if you have no trouble hiring leaving yet, then why would you launch? It's a relatively expensive, distracting one time event that's gonna bring an influx of people into your product. They'll find a myriad of bugs, because, course we'll start ups. We don't have perfect products, and you won't be able to fix them on a responsible timeframe. So you'll just end up with thousands, if not tens of thousands of disappointed people.

And I was like, Yes, that's exactly what he said. True that this is the problem that happens in productivity. And so we just decided that that we wouldn't, you know, who knows? Maybe we never will launch. What

were your free lunch today, right?

I mean, this'll point. It was like way have a lot of users. We have a lot of revenue, are growing very quickly. We pre launch. Who knows? I think we're just doing it in a very different fashion. Yeah, on the way that we actually model the company is from my favorite pull Graham Essay started. Yeah, Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is such a good essay. Probably his best for listeners who don't know. He basically says the most important thing a startup needs to do is to grow on DDE,

especially if you're a technology startup. You probably like to optimize things on. You like to optimize things on a short term basis. So let's optimize short term growth rate. Pick a weekly growth rates that you like. It might be 2%. It might be 3% of might be 4% per week and just do it. Do it every single week, and you will be shocked at how fast you grow every month and every year. And we've been running superhuman that way for the last two years. Every single week, we just pick a number of users that we will onboard the following week, and that's how we grow. You have them the lake finest control knobs on that of any company I've ever

heard of. Well, I mean, you have ah, wait list of 180,000 people who are dying to use the product and can't. So you just choose every week. How many of those people were gonna let in? Is that about capture it?

That's more or less correct. Although I would say that the waitlist is a relatively small funnel into the product, the fastest way in. And one of the reasons why superhuman it's so exciting is that each week 70% of our new users are virally referred within products from the previous week.

Huh? Fascinating. So do you put a governor on how many referrals can start the next week? Or if you're referred, is it we will grant you and you know, access, no matter what

the still a qualification process. We were pretty clear on who's superhuman is good for and who it's not going to be good for. I got qualified out six months ago because I'm a primary I've had. User. There you go. This was before we had iPod shortcuts and we did very excited. Thio slide back in. It's

gonna be good. So I'm gonna blatantly steal from your essay on first round review, which, if you're listening to this and you're finding this interesting, you are just gonna be beside yourself reading this awesome piece that rock who wrote on the first round review. But you basically at superhuman developed a way to measure product market fit and a four step process to get there. Can you sort of talk about what that process is?

Sure, the context for this or the motivation was we had to spend a number of years to get the product to the point where people would actually pay for it. And that's not something that most teams want to go through. Most teams want to build a thing, launched the thing, make money. Go, go, go. But it was very obvious to me, as a member of our target market, that we didn't have products market fit. I didn't need to do the big, splashy launch in order to convince myself to my own level of satisfaction that our products wasn't good. And if it was just obvious and it was obvious because I couldn't personally switch away from Gmail to superhuman. And if I couldn't, then why would anybody else do you feel like you were uniquely equipped to be able to hold yourself to that bar cause you're a second time founder?

Yes, but only because founders were a core target market for who we were going after. Because I had experienced the pain that we were trying to solve when I was running my last company. I very clearly could see Oh, we haven't solved that pain Not yet. And I could feel ourselves getting closer every single day. But I had to find a way to explain this to the team. You know, these are hyper ambitious superintelligent engineers and designers and people of all disciplines who poured their hearts and souls into the product, right. They needed a way to understand not only that we weren't ready, but how not ready we were or how close we were on the precise steps that we could do in order to get there. So I went out and about. I read everything I could find. I started searching for definitions of products. Market fit on this,

quite a few out there. So, for example, Paul Graham would say, It's when you made something people want. And I think that's a pretty good definition. But I wanted something more actionable on. I think Sam Altman had a slightly different take, which is it's when users love your products so much that they spontaneously tell other people to start using it without you even asking them to do that. And that's a different take on it. So pedis takers around Desire Sam's takers around distribution or sort of net promotion. But perhaps the best definition I found all the most interesting, at least, was mark and reasons, and he had the most vivid definition. So he would say,

And I have it right here because it's quite lengthy and detailed. Number one. You can always feel it when products market fit is not happening. Customers aren't quite getting value. Users are not growing quite that fast. Word of mouth is not spreading. Press abuser kind of blood on the sale cycle takes too damn long, but you can always feel it. When products market fit is happening. Customers are buying as fast as you can add servers. You're hiring cells and support as fast as you can. Reporters are constantly calling you about your hot new thing. Money is piling up in your checking account. Investors are staking out your house on you start winning Company of the Year Awards from Harvard Business School. My

favorite is the part about staking out the house. It

does actually happen, can confirm wild, so I can tell just by your reaction. Whilst this is a vivid and accurate definition. There is a challenge to using this in running the business, which is that it is a post hoc definition. By the time investors are staking out your house or blowing up your phone, you probably already have your last monsoon is achieving product market fit. At that point, you're no longer interested in quantifying So I remember staring at this definition through tears in the summer of 2017 thinking, Oh, boy, we don't have this. And we are so so far away. Yeah, from having this. But how do I explain that? Did you have a board at this point? Did we have a board at this point?

David, why is that relevant?

I you know, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But you obviously had investors. Was there a group of people to whom you felt beholden? Thio explain this current state of the business too. That's a good question. So a cz I cast my mind back. The answer is yes, of course. We did have a board. We never did any board meetings, which which is why I had to think about it. So our board formally at the time Waas Bill Trenchard from first round who's been incredible to us on dhe Informally, I would speak basically every two or three days with Edson from both start their New York based funds. That does really great enterprise investments on

they let your seed round,

right? They Yes. They actually wrote settlers check in. Yeah, that 1st 7 50 was from them and they wanted to write a $1,000,000 check. I was like, No, I'll take 2 50 at this cap on. Then I went to, went away and made some progress, and I came back like, I'll have another 2 50 now, but it's more expensive. Thing next to 50 was added even more. Expect Hashtags. Second time founder. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Just play the game playing nicely on everyone Will will enjoy themselves. Um, yes, we did have a board, but it wasn't really a thing that I was turning to them for help on. So the tears to your eyes were like yourself. Like not not justly. Less so like yourself and like Oh, shoot. Now I gotta go explain to everybody where we are. Oh, sure. Yeah. Like explaining it to the board was the very least of my concerns because,

you know, these air phone ed I made money for in the past. A report of Bill is a long term investor here. I'm just fundamentally believes in what we're doing. All of our their investors fundamentally believe in what we're doing. If I went to them and I said, Hey, this is the direction I think we should go. They would always be, like, good. We believe in you. This this is why we invested in it was the team who are working on this day in, day out. I wanted to give them a path and an engine that could work. And so I found a piece of work by Shawn Ellis,

who's famous for coining the term. With that, exactly. He came up with that. Andi He ran early growth that drop box logmein eventbrite uh, enduring his days of doing growth consultancy to startups, he found a benchmarked predictive way to measure products Market fit. You simply ask your users How would you feel if you could no longer use the product and you let them answer either I would be very disappointed. I would be somewhat disappointed or I would be not disappointed. And you measure the percentage that say, Very disappointed on what he found is that the companies that struggled to grow almost always had less than 40% very disappointed on the companies that grew the most easily, almost always had Maur than 40%. Very disappointed. In other words, if more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, guess what? You have initial products, market fits and

threatened to take it away and see what they say.

Exactly. It's it's a stroke of genius. I'm not gonna claim to investment. He did. It's Maur predictive of success than Net promoter score. It's benchmarked across hundreds off venture backed companies. It's a really phenomenal metric, and you know the most exciting thing about this metric and the thing that we did it superhuman, is that you can use it to build your very own products market fit engine. You can use it to come up with a systematic methodology to numerically optimized products. Market fit, which sounds crazy, but it's true you can actually build this thing

fascinating. So that is the measuring stick by which you can determine if the changes that you're making in the product are bringing you closer to product market fit. What, then, is the other side of that equation? Tau actually govern how you should change the product to hopefully get you closer when you measure that, like, how do you? How do you figure out what the inputs need to be in your product changes?

So we have a whole very Lenzi article about. I'll give you the we'll put in the show notes. Yeah, I'll give you the quick summary. But I would very much recommend reading the article because there's a ton of subtlety around how to do this correctly. Eso It begins fundamentally with surveying your users. For every user who comes into your product and who then experiences the core benefit of your product, that usually means they've done the thing, whatever it might be. Two or three times they've probably been there for about two weeks. You send them a survey, and in that survey you ask a number of questions. You ask four questions, uh, number one. How would you feel if you could no longer use? I'll take superhuman as an example.

How would you feel if you can no longer use superhuman with the answers that I outlined? Number two. What type of people do you think would most benefit from superhuman number three? What is the main benefit that you get from superhuman on before? How can we improve? Superhuman for you? Free text ordered our drop downs s O. The 1st 1 is a tri state like I described on the other three. Yes, Free Street on type form is is what we use. It's probably the easiest way to get this done. Nice keyboard shortcuts. Great. That's actually why we wait.

That's like that's our primary at finer Square labs. That's like all we use for validation.

Now I wish everything had keep what chocolates to just make everybody's lives so much better and faster.

How do you then use those four questions to guide you toward what features should we build our change?

So we then have a four step engine to systematically generational roadmap on increased products market fit on the four steps that you go through our number one segment number to analyze number three build on number four, Repeat, and it just occurs to me that this creates a nice acronym, which is Sabre segment. Analyze building. Repeat. So you got a saber your users. That sounds quite violent.

This is getting So it's interesting because, like, you're an artisan like you are someone who I mean, you spent the 34 weeks writing copy on the landing page like you're an artisan. And yet what you're describing here, it's an algorithm to start a product market fit startup. It sort of begs the question like if you have the right sort of team who are capable of doing all of these functions writing that survey, analyzing the results, you know, doing saber will every startup idea end up at an end state of product market fit If you apply the correct algorithm to it, I

think that this greatly increases your chances. But the sad and realistic answer to your question, I think, is obviously no why? Well, let me give you three big reasons. Number one. Many start ups will run out of money before they finish this process. Number. Too many co founding teams will have disagreements and fell apart. And number three many teams will just get tired. Yeah, and go You know what? I can't do this anymore. And then those are the three fundamental reasons that people will fail even given the sabre products market fit Engine?

Yeah, it could be, too, if you start with a kernel of I had an idea that is sufficiently bad for a sufficiently incorrect market. It could just take too long to ever entering your way toward whatever that that the ultimate correct and status.

Yes, I do have some rules of thumb around that. So the first step of this engine is to segment on dhe. If you like, we could get into the details of how you might do that. But if after that first segmentation step, you're very disappointed, score your products. Market fit Score is in the region of 5 to 15%. My considered advice to you would be to suggest not doing that product like totally realistically.

We all have only so many years on this

earth. Take the capital you've raised. Take the team that you have on dhe. Go brainstorm and try something else. I'm sure your boat will be supportive if you have the data to show that it's not really working. Yes, But if you're in the 15 to 25% mark, which is where we were after that original segmentation, then I do believe you can actually illiterate your way to success. And it's the challenge. Then becomes raise enough money and keep morale high enough for long enough so that you actually have the time to make it work.

Hence, the job of the CEO the Mo Mentum created also

extracts me that I'm curious if you'd say this has to be the case. But in your case certainly is the case. You have this engine mixing metaphors. The engine is the like transmission of the start up. But the two engine the star is like your passion like this is your destiny, right? Like you were through that nine month process like there was no other company that you would start. And I would imagine that is, in many ways giving you the perseverance, the drive tow Look at your 15 to 2025% you know, score on that on that rubric and say, Okay, we're gonna make it better, you know, versus like who? I think so. I suspect I may just be on the far end of persistence compared to most people.

We had a very interesting debate as a um as an executive team over the last year about redefining our company values on dhe. This idea of persistence kept coming up over and over again. I was like, You know, maybe we should have persistence as a value. No, ultimately, it didn't end up becoming a company value. But, um, I do believe that even if it's not a company value, every single founder needs to exhibit unnatural levels of persistence. I think again, to quote poor Graham, he talks about grimly determined founders and how, during the days when he was operating,

why see, He would see these people come out to college and they're like the super nice and bubbly. And then, like a year or two later, they're just these sort of grimly persistent people who will stop at nothing. And they've got the battle scars from running through brick walls over and over and over again. And I do genuinely believe that if you're a co founder, if you're found, especially if you're a CEO, this is your job. You have to run through the brick walls over and over and over and over again. And when it's time that other people might be thinking of giving up or backing out, you have to be the person say no, we're gonna keep on going.

So we're gonna loop back to a previous question that we sort of talked about toe end this segment here. I'm gonna read it from my, uh my Google doc here, which is written much more eloquently than I phrase earlier. So when you're building for a narrow segment of users who love you at the start, how do you think about building for them without over fitting the product to them such that you can't serve the broader market later?

So I'm going to read the answer from my equivalent Google Doc. It's not even my answer, but this is This'd just something I believe so strongly because it seems so self evidently true to me on again. It's gonna be a poor Graham quote eyes it about local Maxima. It is Yes, yes, I'm gonna quote two different off his essays. Did the deejay Raul So number one is going to be from startup ideas, um, where he talks about how you find start of ideas on some good startup ideas. Incidentally and tangentially to this answer, one of them is just bilge e mail. But fast on Dhe that was public on the Web for about 10 years before we started superhuman. So the idea was out. That was one of PDS start of idea. I'm pretty sure it's in The essay started Pied. Wow,

he says on I'm gonna try and quote this for memory. He's like, just bilge e mail. But fast, it's become so slow there are sufficiently many people like me that and he had some insane price that would spend $1000 a month on Gmail because it's literally all we do. Yeah, I mean, he should have started superhuman.

He wasn't grimly

determined. It was not grimly determined. Okay, so start up ideas, he says. When a startup launches that have to be at least some users who really need what they're making, not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually, this initial group of users is small for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed on that could be built with the amount of efforts that a startup usually puts into Version one. It would probably already exist, which means you have to compromise on one dimension. You can either build something that a large number of people want a small amount or something that a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are off that type. In other words,

what he's saying is, don't worry too much about building for a narrow segment of users and therefore over fitting. It's precisely what he's advising that you do. And then you might say, Well, doesn't that give you the problem of being boxed into a particular niche or a particular segment of the market? And then to coat from a different essay? Won the majority reference start of equals growth, he says. In theory, this sort of hill climbing could get a start up into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum, but in practice that never happens. The maxim er, in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated, most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.

And so this I'll give two very classic examples. One, of course, is Airbnb, where the idea of couch surfing is extremely adjacent to the idea of houses being hotels. On the other, very timely is uber where the idea off a luxury car that comes to your house with a chauffeur is adjacent to peer to peer driving. It's amazing. I mean, literally every single one of the, you know, quote unquote a plus. Companies that we're gonna cover on this season of the FDA is the every beep interests lift Hoover Slack Stripe fits this definition. Ah, like

that live in stripes. I mean, I think it was right not to like the original market was startups that need to get their merchant accounts faster and and implement them quickly. And it turns out everybody that needs better merchant accounts. So it's Yeah,

make some when I get well to put words in your mouth for email like, yeah, who? The business people executives who spent three hours a day on email they need like they, like, really desperately care about faster email. But everybody cares about really faster email right? Like absolutely on the good thing for us. It turns out that even that particular markets will lead to a multi $1,000,000,000 company. And so there is this potential to create a enduring franchise. A company that could last for over 100 years, None, but certainly our goal here.

All right, well, we very much look forward to covering the superhuman hypo on the main show. Next. Thanks. The next record I'm gonna be, um I don't know who else is in your cohort. That's gonna be all I p going around the same time.

I'd love to see all the great product of companies right now. Notion at

table, we're in a total renaissance. We are. We really are. It's so clearly. Well, before we break Rahul, where can our LP is find you on the internet? And two, What is the best way for them to get access

to superhuman? Okay, so I am on Twitter at Rahul Vora. That's my name R e h u L v e o h R. A. And of course, at email at Rahul at superhuman dot com. And to get access by far, the best way is to get a referral from an existing user. I would just recommend going to search topped twitter dot com and typing in superhuman. There is a high volume of tweets. There's a lot of very helpful superhuman users out there. You can see which one's the most helpful. Users are just by who's jumping in on which threads giving out invites. If you don't feel inclined to do that level of work, then you can sign up on the website. But that will be a fair bit slower. All right, what about, um

what do you hiring for? I'm sure there

are lots of listeners who would love to come work here. Well, you mentions that just before we started your Your primary audience is actually product managers right now, and it turns out that I'm hiring for our very first product manager. Whoa. So this is a super exciting role. You get to work with me for better for worse a ll day every day on building the fastest email experience of all time. And I'm really thrilled to be hiring for this role. I've carried product in the company for a number of years, and it's a really fantastic opportunity for the right person. Terrible boss, but, like, great, I I think I rate okay, but yes, really Great product.

Really great product. Uh, in addition to that, engineers off all types lead back end engineer, front end engineer. Ah, if you're a phenomenal developer, we'd really love to speak

with you. Awesome. What? We rarely ah do LP shows, I think, with early stage companies that are still early stage in quotes here. But I think we very intentionally and selectively reached out. I think we think incredibly highly of superhuman. So LPs if you do feel so inclined that that that may be interesting for you please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you. Awesome. All right, Well, listeners, if you aren't subscribed and you like what you hear, you totally should. And also,

if you were way too excited about this episode earlier to pause and fill out the season for a survey, now is literally the perfect time. You should totally click the link in the show notes, or you should go to acquired dot FM slash survey. You should take the survey and you could win a pair of second generation airpods or one of 10 acquired LP subscriptions Thank you so much for for doing that We really appreciate everyone also thank you to Perkins Kui, the best sponsors in the world And we will see you next time. Thank you everyone.