"Let's talk about product 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 peopl..."

"is the founder and CEO of Superhum and one of the most thoughtful and insightful and articulate founders that I've met. As you'll see in our conversation, it's hard not to be captivated by Rahul's sto..."

"strategy, what Rahul has learned about building scaled products on top of AI and LLMs, and so much more. A huge thank you to Ed Sims, Conrad Irwin, Bel Trenchard, and Garavora for suggesting questions..."

"you Rahul Vora. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies lik..."

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"here. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Hello. And thank you for having me Lenny. I have so many questions for you. We're going to have so much to talk about. I actually want to start with your time befo..."

"don't. And so I think this is a really cool real case study illustrative example uh that we can analyze. So let me ask you this. What did you notice that told you something needed to change at superhu..."

"I think to break this down, it's important to start by defining what we mean by a slowdown. There's the kind of slowdown that is unavoidable in certain spaces and then there is the kind of slowdown th..."

"that's not one thing. That's actually three things because you have to support Office 365 on desktop and then on iOS and then on Android. And that's all much easier said than done. I think we at Super..."

"who does what. When we hired our initial executive teams, I followed very conventional wisdom. I ended up with a a set of VPs and eight, I think, direct reports, maybe even nine. And I thought that's ..."

"else. 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 6 to 7% t..."

"then there's this point about people delegate and then they real like a leader delegates hires all these execs and then like this is not what I wanted. Why have I done this? And things and you think i..."

"at the behest of what some timetable says you do or you don't have to do? So I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted? What if every single time I changed task,..."

"to do. Then at the end of the week you can see where your time is going. And I realized at one point that I I was spending only in those days like 5% of my time on recruiting whereas perhaps I should ..."

"the afternoon at around 3 p.m. And you just carve that out on your calendar. You know, everyone knows Raul at 3:00 he's going to be out. Absolutely. And my EA knows they are the one who's organizing t..."

"That is very actionable. We're going to link to that in the in the show notes. Okay, I'm going to try to bring us back on course. The other thing you mentioned that I think is really interesting is hi..."

"Incredibly interesting. There's so many so much there. Uh one just a couple things I'll share and then I want to move on to a different topic. One is just it's cool. The solution to helping you move f..."

"that came up again and again when I talked to folks that you've worked with investors and superhuman and the two themes are uh contrarian thinking in terms of building the company and strong attention..."

"went to him and I said, "Hey, listen." And this is going to sound crazy. I want to take on Gmail. He said "Do you have a deck?" I was like "Yeah, here it is. One slide. Here it is." And there was a sc..."

"began inventing ways and finding channels to deploy capital properly. I love the story. I love all these stories you're sharing I've never heard before. Uh and by the way, Ed is awesome. We're talking..."

"font work when this is inviting you to a party? Many fonts, including almost all serif fonts, are actually too somber or too sober for that. Or to pick another extreme, does the font work if it is inf..."

"optimizing for reading speed and for comprehension. And then number four finally, Adelfands has very unusual treatment of the at symbol in an email address. It actually puts the base of the A in the a..."

"the market and the structure, the nature of your business model. For example let's say you're building a marketplace in a green field opportunity. So imagine Lyft or Uber in their heyday and there's a..."

"release something that didn't work. I'm reminded of a story of a founder that was in Y Combinator told me about their demo day experience and they used mailbox which some folks may remember was also a..."

"Now, is this the end of the world? No. An investor can overlook that. Probably a good thing that you're trying new apps. But was it horrifying? And was it ter like was it really scary? Absolutely. And..."

"You need to get that right. This reminds me of uh something else that one of your early investors shared with me, Bill Trencher from First Round Capital. He talked about how speed was the thing that y..."

"answer was overwhelmingly yes because almost no software was being sold or has ever been sold on the value proposition of speed. The last time I could remember anyone trying to do this was when Google..."

"chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of One Schkeema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina. Yes thank you for having me on, Lenny. What is the latest with One Schkeema? I know you n..."

"The next area I want to spend time on and I imagine will have much uh insight is some of the contrarian ways you approach building superhum that a lot of companies never thought about doing that you d..."

"option. When we started building self-service it seemed nearly impossible. In fact, it was terrifying because it's difficult to overstate how much the entire DNA of the company was built around this i..."

"quickly raise funding, like for example the zero interest rate phenomenon era you can actually use dollars to avoid building a first-time user experience and all of the normal growth loops that you wo..."

"to lose money doing this and we always made money doing onboarding to be clear. It's just that at a certain point that the mass market, whether it for us it's enterprise or all of the proumers in the ..."

"increase product market fit. Now, if that sounds crazy, I would be the first to admit it's doesn't seem like that should be true, but go check out that post. I think it is still the most widely shared..."

"it here in in a very easy to gro fashion. So, let's assume for the sake of argument that you can put a number on product market fit. And it turns out you can. Very simply, you're going to ask people, ..."

"promoter score. Okay, so far so easy. How do we make this number go up? Well you want more people to be very disappointed without your product. And the trick here is not to act too much on the feedbac..."

"is. So you have then articulated the subsegment of the subsegment that it makes sense to pay attention to. And there's another question in the engine to figure out what they don't like about the produ..."

"to it. Okay. Next topic that uh I'm excited to get your take on is is game design versus gamification. This is some one of the more unique ways you think about designing product. And when people hear ..."

"that we should make business software like we make games because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends. They fall in love with them. It's another way ..."

"presence of a reward have their motivation. So what's happening? What's happening here is researchers differentiate intrinsic motivation and exttrinsic motivation. With intrinsic motivation, we do thi..."

"itself. So, for example, in Superhum, one of our favorite toys is the time autocompleter. If you use Superhum, this is the thing that appears when you hit H when you snooze or set reminders on emails...."

"would encourage people to do is think about the features of their product. Do those features indulge playful exploration? Are they fun even without a goal? And do they elicit moments of pleasant surpr..."

"In other words, we serve the high end of the market. Once you understand your positioning, you can then move on to pricing. And one of the best books on this is a book called monetizing innovation by ..."

"ahead with that press. Okay. There's a couple more things I want to chat about in the time that we have and then I know you have to run. One is around AI and the work you guys are doing there. I know ..."

"after that was instant reply. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every email already has a draft reply. You would simply edit and then send. And sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. And I can sh..."

"Then you'll never drop the ball again. All you need to do is hit send. With autodrafts, Superhuman will now automatically draft your follow-up emails for you and will soon be drafting replies to basic..."

"fit to me. This all sounds wonderful. Like it just makes sense. This is the stuff we've been promised our underwater cities and flying cars and then just email that just works magically and replies fo..."

"was like, I don't know, but let's build the thing. People love that. So interesting. Maybe I should just create an anti-me to do AI road mapping. That's a simple agent right there. Whatever says, do t..."

"super important. Wow. Okay. So, it sounds like essentially just building all these features that uh large companies need is kind of the road you're on right now. Exactly. And there's two stakeholders...."

"someone comes to you with a decision the way you use this idea is you ask them what's the single decisive reason pretty much. Yeah. And what they can't do, I mean obviously this happens. People are hu..."