From one piece Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder) 15 beliefs · youtube.com
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What he found is that the companies that struggled to grow almost always had less than 40% very disappointed. Whereas the companies that grew the fastest almost always had more than 40% very disappointed. And this question, this metric is way more predictive of success than something for example like net promoter score.
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And I'd say the second thing is to get to products market fit, 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, right?
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which is number one, you can measure product market fit. Number two, you can optimize product market fit. Number three, you can systematically even numerically increase product market fit. And number four, you can even have an algorithm write your road map for you.
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I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
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I then asked myself, is the position of speed unique? and is it available? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes because almost no software was being sold or has ever been sold on the value proposition of speed.
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And it struck me how the most well-known brands have stood for one clear thing. Like they have a clear position. And so in order for superhuman to be memorable, I believed that we needed to occupy a clear position that was unique and which was available and which reinforced our product strategy.
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And that's why when you have a missionritical product like email where you are interfacing with customers with candidates with investors it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a halfbaked product.
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But the idea that is this never going to be a thing. I think that's a dangerous thought. We we can't start thinking that way because at what point do you stop second guessing yourself?
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What I'm saying is do what feels right for as long as as it feels right to do. Then at the end of the week you can see where your time is going.
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So, this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did.
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And number two, the superhuman opportunity deserves everyone who works at the company to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius. And so that includes me as well as everybody else. So what I did is I hired a really great president. I went from eight direct reports to two.
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But this is the hard part. When you're when you're doing that market widening, you're not solution deepening. And so your perceived product velocity may decrease. You can avoid some of these things with some smart technology decisions, but mostly you just have to grind through it and it is worth it to get to the other side.
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you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories. Solution deepening and market widening. Now solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users but not making the product itself any better.
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what is it that creates true virality? It's not viral mechanics. It's word of mouth. It is brand that this is how you can kickstart a brand.
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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, 100 people