AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:05:26 · Dan Turchin, Rahul Vohra
[00:05:26] S1: Rahul, I had the pleasure back in 2019 having received a personal invite to superhuman, which at the time, it was just called Superhuman. And I kind of on a whim registered to be on a wait list. Of all bizarre things, I got a call from someone on your team to see if I could clear the wait list. I... At the time, I thought that you were building a rocket ship, a literal rocket ship and not an email client based on how sophisticated that onboarding conversation went. Since then, you've really become renowned for kind of coaching others through how to find product market fit. Just if you could share a little bit about the backstory, how you thought about the onboarding process and how that contributed to the the early success of Superhuman. [00:06:18] S0: So there's a lot of ground that we could cover here. Are you more interested in how we define products market fit, or are you more interested in the genesis of the onboarding program? Where would you like to go? Give [00:06:31] S1: us a case study in how you used the output from those onboarding conversations to deliver early versions of Superhuman.
00:06:40 · Rahul Vohra
[00:06:40] S0: Got it. Okay. So to begin with, I was insistent that we do every user. We put every user, I should say, through an onboarding, that we actually sit down and we watch them use the product because nothing approaches that in terms of the amount of information you get and how much you learn when you're watching those users. It's actually relatively easy to get people to try a new piece of software, especially if it's in a well known space like email. I mean, there are any number of upstarts that come and go. Any company can at least try to build an email app. It's, of course, incredibly difficult to build one that people fall in love with. And say, hey, folks. Come try this email app. And overnight, you'll get tens of thousands of people easily to come try your thing. However, imagine what most of those people go through. For most of those people, they will download the app. They'll put it through its paces, encounter a few bugs. Maybe think to themselves, okay, I'll I'll report one or two things, but they probably won't even do that. And then as the bugs they encounter increase, this is inevitable for early stage software, they end up giving up on the product. Sometimes it's bugs. Sometimes it's feature parity. Sometimes it... The the secret source didn't quite land. But that's the normal experience of a new user with a new piece of consumer software. That is why churn is such a big problem in any new piece of consumer consumer software. So I've seen this happen with any number of companies, and I knew that that would happen to us unless we did something different. So I don't really believe in doing a traditional launch at this point. What I believe in doing is putting your products in front of increasingly large sets of customers, and then listening to their feedback, and tweaking and iterating for them. So we initially did this, and we were initially onboarding as low as five users per week. And I would actually go to the customer's office. I would take a bottle of wine or some kind of gift to say thank you. And deliberately, also at this point, these were also the most influential people you could find in Silicon Valley, well known CEOs and investors. And I would... This this whole thing would take an hour or two. We would sit down and I would ask them to show me how they're doing their email today.
00:09:06 · Rahul Vohra
So they would pull up Gmail and then they would show me how they do it. I would then give them a demo of Superhuman. I would then say, okay, this is the point where you have to pay. And so I would ask them to pull out their credit card and and put it in, like type in the number as I was in the room, which led to some socially awkward moments. But I'm also a strong believer in charging from day one for for your products because price is actually part of packaging, is actually part of products. The... All of these things are inextricably linked. And I would then spend the next hour or so actually onboarding those users, showing them how to take their workflow, dial it up to 10, and get through their inbox twice as fast as before, responding to important messages faster. And about half of those users actually hit inbox zero within that session, which for them was life changing. Like, this was something that was just impossible before using Superhuman. Of course, during that process though, we would find 10, 15, 20, 25 bugs. And the fact that I was there watching as opposed to the user having to spot that something had gone wrong and report it meant that we found way more than if the user was just trying to find issues themselves. So I'd be furiously scribbling down notes in my notebook of all the things I'd seen that had gone wrong. And here's the part that made this magic. I went back to the team and I said, there is no point onboarding the next five or 10 users until we fixed all of the things reported by this week's five or 10 users. And the reason for that is we'll never start to get to the next layer of issue until we fix this layer of issue. There are there are only so many issues you can actually think about and encounter in a half an hour or a forty five minute period. And so initially, were some grumblings, but the logic made sense and we started to work on all of these issues. And sure enough, that uncovered the next set and the next set and the next set until what you actually have is a finely tuned, highly polished product experience that most people are just unaccustomed to today. And this is how, unlike almost every other... I think, actually, every other email startup that has come and gone, we were actually able to, in a very high quality fashion, reach parity with something like Gmail or Outlook.
00:11:34 · Rahul Vohra
And actually, not just parity, a polish that goes way beyond those products. Then we started looking at the the metrics of those users. And on every single metric that matters, whether it was churn, retention, net promoter score, product market fit score, virality, we were seeing a best in category numbers. And I was like, wow, is this the product? Is it the onboarding? Is it me? Am am I just that charming in these meetings? And so we started to change each variable one by one to disambiguate. And that the first thing we did was I no longer did the onboardings. So I asked our head of growth, actually, my my brother, who's well known now for for doing growth consulting to to to many amazing startups. And I was like, hey, Gaurav, you go do the onboardings. In fact, instead of five or 10 per week, why don't you do 20 per week? And I started sending him around San Francisco, and he was doing the exact same playbook I was doing. And his numbers were great too. And I was like, okay. It's not just me. Maybe it's him. We should hire a team of people to do this. Not like go crazy, just like a few people. And whenever you're doing this, you wanna hire more than one person, just just in case there's a false negative due to the person not being particularly good. So I think we hired two or three people simultaneously to start doing these onboardings. One of them didn't work out, but the other two had phenomenal numbers, almost as good as the numbers that we were putting out to begin with. And then I was like, well, we've got these calls down to half an hour each. I think we can design a schedule where folks do 44 or 45 of these calls per week. And I I did the the back of the envelope napkin math. And I was like, wow. This this actually works out. This this could be a whole new go to market motion that no one has actually ever really come up with before. We have this huge wait list of people who want access. So why don't we hire incredibly compelling people who are experts in productivity, who know email and productivity products inside out, can help our users become fully onboarded in a matter of minutes, something that no other software to my knowledge has tried to do at this scale. And so we hired a whole bunch of people, and we scaled that team up. And that became known as the the Superhuman Onboarding, which is the thing that you experienced.
00:14:03 · Rahul Vohra, Dan Turchin
And that is the thing that, as you know, many companies since then have then copied. And to this day, I I still get founders asking, wait. What are all the the tips and tricks? How exactly did you do the Superhuman onboarding, and and how can we make that work for us? So it's an incredibly powerful technique. It doesn't work for every product, but for the products where it's well suited, it can have an outsized impact. [00:14:30] S1: So you didn't get your PhD in computer science. You famously dropped out. But I'm gonna declare right here that you got your PhD in another CS, customer success. [00:14:39] S0: Pretty much. Maybe. I... I'm a huge believer in the the customer is always right, or at the very least, they always have something to say. They may not be right. And it's our responsibility as founders, as builders, as leaders to take that feedback, whatever it is, and to figure out what to do with it, to interpret it. And so we built so many systems around doing just that. [00:15:02] S1: Early on, you sought the advice of arguably the founder of the growth hacking movement, a gentleman named Sean Ellis, who told you about what I think later became, like, the Sean Ellis rule, how to evaluate the success of customers with products. If you wouldn't mind, I think we've benefited our audience just to hear a little bit about how Sean thought about measuring growth and and some of the lessons that you took into Superhuman.
00:15:30 · Rahul Vohra
[00:15:30] S0: For sure. So this is where our product market fit engine came to be. And at Superhuman, we built our very own product market fit engine. The engine gives you a way to define products market fit, a metric to measure products market fit. It also even gives you a methodology to increase products market fit, and it can even write your roadmap for you. And that's a roadmap that will take you to products market fit over time. But in order to understand how it works, it's probably worth starting with what even is product market fit. It... You know, it's a phrase that gets thrown around, but what actually is it? Well, it turns out to be the number one reason why startups succeed. And the lack of product market fit, on the other hand, turns out to be the number one reason why startups fail. It was clearly super important. Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator, would say that it's when you made something people you want. Sam Altman would say it's when users spontaneously tell other people to use your product. But in my opinion, it is actually Marc Andreessen who has said the most vivid definition. He would say, you can always feel it when product market fit is not happening. Customers aren't quite getting value. Users aren't growing that fast. Word-of-mouth is not spreading. The press reviews are kind of blah, and the sales cycle takes too damn long. But you can almost always feel it when products market fit is happening because customers are buying as fast as you can add servers. You're hiring sales and support as fast as you can. Reporters are constantly calling you about your hot new thing. Investors are staking out outside your house and money is piling up in your checking account. And that is indeed a very vivid definition. It was one that I was staring at through tears in the summer of twenty seventeen because it seemed so subjective, so unactionable. What do you do if by that definition you don't have products market fit? Indeed, can you measure products market fit? Because if you can, then maybe you could optimize it. Maybe you could systematically even numerically increase it. So in the summer of twenty fifteen, we'd started much like any other software company by writing code. And in the summer of twenty sixteen, we were still coding. In the summer of twenty seventeen, we were still coding.