Superhuman
The textbook approach/method to Product Market Fit.
💡 Idea Validation - Aha Moment
💡 Building with Early Users
💡 Doing hings that don’t scale
🏢 The Company
Superhuman is an email service that helps you manage your inbox faster and more efficiently
“Superhuman makes email suck less”
✨ The Initial Idea
The initial insight that would become Superhuman came to Vohra in recognizing that while email was still one of the most important tools for communication, the existing tools hadn’t progressed the way the rest of the tech world had. They were slow, clunky, and difficult to use.
He believed the future of email looked different, and that he would set out to create that future.
🧪 Testing the Idea
The key hypothesis for Vohra to validate was: Do users value the following three differentiators with email?
- Speed of tool
- Shortcuts to get your work down more quickly
- Clean interface
Can we deliver upon this? Will users pay a premium for it?
🏆 Building the MVP
Superhuman took their time to release to the public, but that didn't mean they didn't iterate with real users. It was quite they opposite. They iterated and tested delivering upon the three differentiators through a PMF process broken down below.
You can see the full breakdown of how they reached PMF here but in-short, they built a framework to ensure they got there efficiently.
It begins by surveying early users and asking, ‘how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product.’ Then segment the results by those who would be ‘very disappointed’ if they could no longer use your product… this unlocks your super-user and the path to PMF.
From there, find out what is the key reason they care about you to paint a picture of your high-expectation customers. If there is enough of an initial group in this camp, you may have enough of that persona as a primary target and develop a strong niche for growth.
While the post digs deeper, the next big step would be analyzing the feedback from the ‘on-the-fence’ users to see if there are opportunities to convert them into fanatics. With this group, you’ll focus on results from the survey on ‘How can we improve [Insert Startup] for you?’
“Politely disregard those who would not be disappointed without your product. They are so far from loving you that they are essentially a lost cause.”
With this combination, you should have a strong foundation to build roadmap by ‘doubling down on what users love and addressing what holds others back.’
Repeat the process until you’ve hit Product Market Fit.
Now, this goes for products that have already launched but if you’re curious about pre-launch products, we would suggest this profile on Canvas or Substack.
Full Process and Interactive Article here.
🚀 Growth & PMF
Superhuman took longer than most to launch their MVP, but in doing that they built up a long list of early users. This can backfire if these users are not brought along for the journey but thankfully for Rahul, they knew how to build hype a.k.a. FOMO.
Superhuman focused on growing an email list before launching… they treated it as importantly as one would treat acquisition for a newly released product.
The main top-of-funnel drivers included PR and Paid Ads. From there, they built a WOM growth loop into the waitlist. Users could move up the list by sharing on social media (Facebook etc.)... as this brought in more users, the growth loop spun faster. And once, they'd reach PMF, they opened up more and more space to this channel accelerate.
💡 Startersss Tips
- Niche focus early-on re: PMF
- Pair it with exclusivity and create hype while building
- Focus on what makes you different and go all-in on that
- Approaching PMF like a science (Survey)
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