Superhuman

“At the end of the day, it was very much a, you know, premium product, immediate paywall, and the core ICP is founders, right? And we also experienced this at Whisper, right? Like the early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience. I think today it's an…”

“To be honest, in any of the three kind of core companies that I've been at so far, It hasn't worked yet, but maybe I'll get a chance to change that at Victor.”

“Yeah, however, there are counterexamples where time to value was actually really high but word of mouth was awesome, and you know, the canonical example here is Superhuman, the mail app, where you actually had to go through an interview before you got access t…”

“What they, like, the aha moment of that made me realize is like, okay, the key part is ignoring the people that are, like, somewhat happy with your product, right?”

“I mean, I think fundamentally a great product leader is a great Storyteller. Someone that is able to understand what the customers actually need, what problem that actually needs to be solved and can form that into a story that is just well understood and well…”

“The idea that like you are a designer and therefore you stay in these lanes and you do these tasks and you don't do engineering work or you don't do product work just like doesn't make sense. Like it doesn't work that way.”

“So is the design phase going away? No, like you still have to do that sort of thinking. And there are many Different tools for doing that sort of thinking.”

“Write specs for humans. I hope most people aren't writing specs for humans any longer.”

“You should use the thing that's going to code it to help you write it because it's going to end up creating a version of that output that is more compatible with what it understands to do the work.”

“I actually think that this will lead to creativity and certainly like taste standing out more than ever, because I think you're going to have this like flattening where you are going to have a lot of things that just like, oh, you know, here we go. It's this, …”

“I think the idea that everyone can build is not a moment in time hype cycle.”

“We're basically at the point where we're approaching about half.”

“In 24 months, I hope it's like 90%.”

“And I don't need, typically, the agent to say, hey, I found this lot, and this lot, which one do you prefer? I just asked for 15 minutes. Find it. Do it. I have an admin, when I was asking her, like, on Slack, find me 15 minutes. She's not asking me if I need,…”

“So we had to implement the pagination search. So like semantic search for like the first, I would say, 40 and deep search. Not that one. Okay. Next 40, next 40. So I'm kind of like using this agentic loop, and while you don't have find the answer, continue and…”

“We're working right now with Anthropic to basically do kind of like a building on the fly, small, kind of a key component of lambdas that will build the code to do the aggregation.”

“We use a Turbo Puffer on the back end to store like .”

“We use Base-Ten to run some I would say some LAMA, some BERT model for classification.”

“We would always start with the highest and more expensive model. To get the right quality. And when the quality is nailed, then we can spend time trying to optimize.”

“A lot of people think about cost in terms of dollars per million tokens, right? And I think that that is actually amateur thinking. This only, only the kind of pricing you care about if you're a solo developer, but once you're in a large scale, like you guys a…”

“Right now it's in beta. But right now my emails, like internally, when someone is asking, hello, can we meet next week for lunch? Automatically I will have like three slots proposed in the draft and I can just like send the draft that is prepared for me.”

“I think the browser would be like more and more thin. I believe they would be like thinner and thinner, but they will disappear or they would be like just embedded in the OS eventually.”

“Oh, the answer is like ChatGPT, or like OpenAI and superhuman are competitors. Like this is what we fight against to some extent.”

“In Q one, we were roughly set at four PR per engineer per week. In Q one, in Q two, we were closer to five PR per engineer per week, and in Q three, we're closer to six. So the global throughput, and again, PR per engineer per week, we can debate, but that's a…”

“Superhuman may, like, we have 50. 50 engineers. And your user base is roughly a million? Yeah, like, less than that. Like paying users probably 100,000.”

“And that really helped us get to, like, that first million dollar. Like, that one versus page with both superhuman and front probably drove, like, most of our initial customers.”

“They came up with a 30 dollar price point per month, which was pretty simple. But the way they kind of told the story was that, you know, you pay a dollar a day for actually getting four hours of productivity back in the week.”

“After superhuman, we were one of the Products to add this, like, common menu that, like, also makes things easier”

“Superhuman had raised a hundred and fourteen million. It was valued at eight hundred and twenty-five million during peak Zerp. According to Reuters, Superhuman has annual revenue of thirty-five million dollars”

“We are in a company that is similar to superhuman that will be at More than their revenue in nine months for what it took them eight years to go to.”

“Their onboarding sequence is so good that I make every one of my portfolio companies look at it, so I highly recommend Superhuman.”

“The staircase was beautiful, but you're watching Rahul walk down this beautiful staircase, and by the time he's walked to the bottom, kind of, you've moved on. And so then, in this, like, attention economy, you really need to make it short and snappy.”

“What then is the true secret behind virality? And he said, it is word of mouth. It is the virality you can't measure that isn't a mechanic that isn't in a feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user About your product.”

“We've definitely found that there are whales, to use the gaming terminology, that one person is going to be responsible for inviting 25, 50, a hundred people, and they may have various motivations for doing that. In Superhuman, as an individual subscriber, if …”

“So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two and the amount of time that I spend on product design, technology, and marketing went up. From six to seven percent to about 60 to 70% of my week.”

“Another way to think about it is it's like a, it's almost like a grownup co-founder. The two people I co-founded the company with, Comrade and Vivek they've long since gone from superhuman. We're now a ten-year-old organization, and I'm one of those rare found…”

“We fix the line length, or the typographical measure, to the optimal length for reading speed, which, depending on the font, is around 90 to a 120 characters.”

“To answer your question, at Peak, we had about 20 people doing manual onboarding.”

“You don't want to lose money doing this, and we always made money doing onboarding, to be clear.”

“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 ma…”

“And it turns out that the median answer for the third question was 30 dollars per month. And that's how we picked our price.”

“On average today, users are using it 37 times per week.”

“And I can share because we just finished this analysis that over 20, 24, the percentage of emails that are AI written and sent with superhuman has grown four times just in one year.”

“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.”

“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've bought that does that, which is ChatGPT, so thank you.”

“I do feel undoubtedly that email inboxes are going to start to have AI in them and the AI is going to help you process, categorize summarize your emails in a way and respond, help you with the responses. The problem is Do I really believe that you are going to…”

“We invented the snooze button you now see in Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman, even Slack.”

“The more people become, you know, multi income, multi job, the more we're going to be treating ourselves like businesses. And so tools like mercury, Which is basically like, I want business banking for myself. I want business email for myself. I think there's …”

“I think superhumans at 40% is a threshold of some sort. I think ours were like 80 maybe. It was nice, but I think it was, I think we over read into this because I think you asked the question of people who actually use this piece of the product. So you very ea…”

“I'm still their number one refer knock on wood. Nobody's overtaken me in the last year or so.”

“My general view is that in the early days of your business, pre-product market fit, the goal is getting to product market fit as quickly as you can, which means you should be optimizing for one metric. Your product market fit score, which I discussed on a rece…”

“Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. Our customers now get to their inbox about twice as fast as before. They're replying to their important emails eight to 13 hours sooner, and they say four hours or more every single week.”

“After benchmarking hundreds of startups, Sean found the companies that struggle to grow always get less than 40% very disappointed, and the companies that grow most easily almost always get more than 40%.”

“And with that engine, we now can systematically increase products market fit, and it even automatically generates our roadmap for us, and that roadmap is guaranteed to make the metric go up.”

“Most founders, because we're builders, we obsess over the product itself. Well, you know, the product isn't resonating quite as much as it could or should, so let's keep tweaking the product. It turns out to be way faster to tweak the market, because you can l…”

“Just by segmenting, in our case, our products market fit score jumped by 10% from 10 to two percent To 32%.”

“Now first, and as painful as it is, we have to ignore the not disappointed segment. This might be difficult because they are very loud, but they are so far from loving the products that they are essentially a lost cause. And it's also very important because th…”

“Use the main benefit of the very disappointed users to segment the somewhat disappointed users. In our case, the main benefit is speed. So first of all, we have the somewhat disappointed users for whom speed was not the main benefit. I strongly advise that you…”

“If we only double down on what users love, and this is what vision-driven teams tend to do, we would not increase the product market fit score, because you're only addressing feedback from the people who already love you. If we only address the objections from…”

“We actually spent 18 months building an offline-first architecture, which works not just when you're offline, but also when you're in low connectivity, so that you can always move really fast, no matter whether you're in an office, in the back of an Uber, in a…”