Superhuman's secret to success: Ignoring most customer feedback, manually onboarding every new user, obsessing over every detail, and positioning around a single attribute: speed | Rahul Vohra (CEO)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

notes

CHAPTER

Enhancing User Onboarding and Engagement

This chapter explores the strategic choices between manual onboarding and self-service options to enhance user engagement and retention. It emphasizes the significance of a personalized onboarding experience and the need for financial feasibility to ensure customer lifetime value. Additionally, the discussion highlights the importance of evolving product market fit through targeted user feedback and the incorporation of game design elements to improve overall user experience.

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Transcript

Episode notes

Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. Prior to Superhuman, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plug-in to scale to millions of users, which he sold to LinkedIn in 2012. He is also a prominent angel investor, and his fund has invested $50 million in over 120 companies, including Placer, Supabase, Mercury, Zip, ClassDojo, and Writer.

What you’ll learn:

• The unexpected insight about virality Rahul gained from LinkedIn’s head of growth.

• Why Rahul restructured his entire executive team to spend 60% to 70% of his time on product, design, and marketing instead of the typical CEO responsibilities.

• The counterintuitive approach to finding product-market fit using a methodical system inspired by Sean Ellis, and how this algorithmically determines your roadmap.

• How manually onboarding every user (Superhuman had 20 full-time people doing this at peak) created superfans and allowed engineers to focus on product rather than onboarding flows.

• The “Single Decisive Reason” framework for making better decisions by avoiding collections of weak justifications.

• How Superhuman’s AI features have evolved to create a truly intelligent email experience that works while you sleep.

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/superhumans-secret-to-success-rahul-vohra

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Where to find Rahul Vohra:

• X: https://x.com/rahulvohra