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20VC: Rahul Vohra @ Superhuman, The Most Downloaded Founder Episode of 2019

Jan 3, 2020

Rahul Vohra, Founder and CEO of Superhuman, shares insights from his journey in the startup world, transitioning from Rapportive to revolutionizing email. He discusses the importance of reversing engineering product-market fit and highlights strategies used by Dropbox and Airbnb to refine their offerings. Vohra emphasizes the need for founders to engage with dissatisfied users and leverage feedback for growth. Moreover, he unveils his approach to product roadmap prioritization and the intricacies of personalized onboarding that boost user experience.

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ADVICE

Converting the "Somewhat Disappointed"

Focus on converting "somewhat disappointed" users who resonate with your product's core value.
Disregard feedback from those who don't align with your main benefit.

ADVICE

Feature Prioritization

Prioritize features by addressing what holds users back from loving your product.
Spend equal time improving core features and addressing pain points to enhance product-market fit.

ADVICE

Growth Timing

Avoid pushing for premature growth before achieving product-market fit.
Once achieved, shift focus to aggressive growth.

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Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO @ Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast — and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years! To date, they have raised funds from our friends at Boldstart, First Round, John Collison, Sam Altman, Wayne Chang, Mike Ghaffery and Yes VC just to name a few. Previously, Rahul founded Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. Rapportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn.

In Today's Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How did Rahul make his way into the world of startups with the founding of Rapportive and how did that transition to changing the world of email with Superhuman?

2.) What does Rahul mean when he says, "you can reverse engineer a process to get to product-market fit"? What does Rahul believe is the defining metric which determines your "product-market fit score"? What is Julie Supan's framework? How did Dropbox and Airbnb use it to increase their product-market fit? How can founders implement it into their process?

3.) What can founders do to expand the customer base to include users that currently are "somewhat disappointed"? What are the right questions to ask? What do we do with this feedback? How do we further segment the user base? Why should we "disregard the users whereby the primary benefit of the product does not resonate"?

4.) How does Rahul approach product roadmap and prioritisation? How can founders ensure that continuous tracking and user feedback is engrained within the organisation? What tools does Rahul do to monitor and capture this? What are some of Rahul's biggest lessons from going through this painstaking process stage by stage?

5.) Finally on fundraising, what does Rahul mean when he says, "always be raising but never be actively raising"? What are the benefits of this? How can founders transition catch up coffee into fundraising subtly? How does Rahul feel about party rounds? What are the pros? What are the downsides? How does Rahul advise founders here?

Items Mentioned In Today's Show:

Rahul's Fave Book: The Art of Game Design

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