Playbooks

Thanks to listener Jeremy Diamond for contributing these Playbook notes! He’s one half of Automatter, a newsletter about processes and the people who automate them.

1. Start with a clear, specific articulation of the problem.

"Email sucks now" may have been accurate, but it wouldn't have helped anyone land on a solution. When you deeply understand the problem, you are more likely to create the right solution.

• Rahul's original pitch was literally a screenshot of Gmail's interface where he pointed out all of the little things that added up to make the product experience worse.
• From that strong foundation, Rahul then spent time applying his singular viewpoint to designing an email experience that he would want to use — the classic founding story of solving your own problem.
  

2. Apply segmentation, targeting, and positioning to your product roadmap.

Rahul has written in-depth about how they quantified product-market fit to gain a granular understanding of their customers, their wants, and their needs. You can apply the same high-level marketing principles -- through surveys or interviews -- to identify who your product is for, how you're going to reach that audience, and what message will resonate with them.

• It is common to segment demographically, but there is significant variation within most large demographics. Superhuman identified which personas would convert to truly loyal users, then further analyzed who those users thought the product was for, what value they got out of it, and finally used this data to build more precise customer profiles to target.
• The team also prioritized feature requests from their next-most-loyal segment to figure out how to move them from on-the-fence to committed, rabid customers.
  

3. You can wedge into a competitive space without forcing your customers to incur switching costs.

• Rahul's previous startup Rapportive was a Gmail plugin — it was additive but the users remained primarily inside the Google ecosystem.
• Know how the underlying platforms will respond to your product. For email, the underlying protocols are open, even though Gmail has dominant market share. The market was already well-defined and served by lowest-common-denominator products, but there was an opportunity to tap into an influential niche with super high willingness to pay. And because of the open underlying nature of email, this did not prompt a direct competitive response from the platform provider.
• Superhuman (as of this writing) still assumes the customer uses Gmail and doesn't take on all of the backend responsibilities that Google can handle. From the customer's perspective, it simply replaces the frontend, so the only switching cost incurred is the time to learn the new tools.
• Part of that cost is addressed for every user through 1:1 onboarding, a practice that Superhuman has held to long past the point when other startups would have transitioned primarily to self-serve onboarding. And as users get more comfortable with the product, they discover more hidden and helpful features because the Superhuman team applied principles of game design to help their users feel... well, superhuman at email.
  

4. The digital waitlist is back, and it can be an incredible distribution hack.

In a world of abundance and growth-at-all-costs, Superhuman used scarcity to choose their growth rate, pre-qualify their sales leads, and drum up even more organic interest.

• When this interview was recorded, the waitlist was at 180,000 people. However, Superhuman granted faster access to direct referrals from existing users and allocated the majority of new user onboarding to these referrals.
• The act of referring (or asking for a referral) was itself a strong indicator of interest and Superhuman further qualified these leads by an automated survey process before approving them for 1:1 onboarding. As a result, the supposedly unscalable 1:1 onboarding was in fact very efficient, converted at extremely high rates, and brought on the best possible customers.
• Superhuman's earliest adopters tended to be high-status people — founders, investors, and executives — which gave the product cachet that accrued to Superhuman's brand value. In addition to valuing the product on its own merits, having a Superhuman account (and "Sent from Superhuman" email signature) suggested that you were important enough and busy enough to spend $30 per month to improve your professional communication. This cachet drove even more requests for referrals, which spilled out into social media and became a meta conversation of its own.

Links

• New York Times article announcing the fundraise: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/technology/superhuman-email.html 
• Rahul’s Medium post on acquisitions: https://medium.com/swlh/rip-mailbox-or-founders-how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-being-acquired-261da4f6d566
• Rahul on finding product-market fit on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/