Takeaways: Superhuman's secret to success

Takeaways

📘 The early Superhuman team did something most founders would find wild: they ignored most customer feedback. Not because it wasn’t useful—but because most users weren’t the right users. To find product-market fit, you need to make something some people really love. Not something everyone just kind of likes. This means identifying your "very disappointed" cohort—the people who would be devastated if your product disappeared—and doubling down on what they love. The rest? Learn what’s holding them back, but only act if they’re aligned with your core value prop. That’s how you get product-market fit. Not by pleasing everyone.

📘 Your schedule is what you plan to do. Your time log is what you actually did.
Rahul Vohra tracks his time using a system he calls the switch log. Every time he changes tasks, he messages his EA (or himself via Slack) with a simple note like “TS: reviewing roadmap” or “TS: deep dive on onboarding.” Over time, this log reveals how he's really spending time—not how he thinks he is. That’s how he realised he was only spending 6–7% of his week on product and marketing. Today, it’s 60–70%.

📘 The best growth channel is invisible. Even Facebook never sustained a viral coefficient over 1. True virality—the kind that compounds indefinitely—is a myth. What does create sustainable growth is word of mouth: one user telling another, unprompted. That happens when people love what you’ve built. Which is why Superhuman obsessed over delight, quality, and speed—not growth hacks.

📘 Pick one attribute and own it. Superhuman’s entire product and brand is built around speed. From day one, Rahul chose to differentiate on one clear value prop. Not design. Not AI. Not features. Just speed. And it worked. When you’re battling incumbents, pick something they’ll struggle to match. Gmail and Outlook are slow by nature. Superhuman made that its wedge.

📘 They manually onboarded thousands. Superhuman didn’t just tolerate 1:1 onboarding—they required it. For years. You couldn’t sign up without going through a white-glove onboarding call. Why? Because it guaranteed activation, boosted NPS, and created word of mouth. They only stopped once they hit a segment of users who didn’t want onboarding and needed a world-class self-serve flow.

📘 Hiring execs isn’t always the move. Rahul made a mistake most CEOs make—he hired too many VPs and overloaded himself with direct reports. It made the company slower. So he hired a President, cut his reports from 8 to 2, and shifted his time back to his zone of genius: product, design, and marketing. The result? The company sped up again.

📘 Superhuman’s AI writes like you. From summarising threads instantly to replying automatically with your voice and tone, Superhuman’s AI is deeply integrated into the product. The surprise? “Write with AI” was used 37 times per user per week. Rahul thought it was just a commodity feature. Turns out, even small AI touches—if they’re delightful—can massively boost usage.

📘 Selling to Outlook users is not like selling to Gmail users. When Superhuman expanded to enterprise, they had to rethink everything: a fully-featured calendar, enterprise security controls, Outlook-specific features. They also had to sell to multiple stakeholders—IT, security, workplace ops. That meant building features they never needed before. But it’s paying off. Big firms are rolling it out across thousands of employees.

📘 The principle: if you can’t identify one strong reason to do something, don’t do it. A pile of weak reasons doesn’t equal a good decision. For every major decision at Superhuman, Rahul asks: “What’s the SDR (Single Decisive Reason)?” It forces clarity. It avoids hedging. And it’s a shortcut to better decisions.

Top Quotes

💬 You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people.

💬 If you think about what a company has to do, it has to grow. How do things grow? Well, it’s creating something that people share. There’s one way, which is something that people want to share. But there’s actually another way, which is simply creating something remarkable.

💬 You can measure product market fit. You can optimize it. You can systematically, even numerically, increase product market fit. And you can have an algorithm write your roadmap — a roadmap that is guaranteed to increase product market fit.

💬 Gamification doesn’t work because rewards massively undermine intrinsic motivation. But game design works — it indulges curiosity, playful exploration, and pleasant surprises, and those things create lasting engagement.

💬 Superhuman AI is constantly helping you. It’s organizing your inbox, making sure you never drop the ball, and even working for you when you’re not working — like drafting follow-ups and automating workflows while you’re on vacation.

Superhuman's secret to success