6 ms·

Superhuman built an engine to find product market fit (2018)

59 points by tekkk 2y ago

cklemming 2y ago
Does anyone know how Superhuman is doing these days? It's been a bit quiet since their insane hype-cycle during the time this article was published.
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  I hope, they are not getting ready to do a Rapportive.
- ricokatayama 2y ago
  Even though I don’t have real information, I feel that they focused so much on the power user that they must have a high level of stickiness. I don’t even believe they expected to scale beyond the ICP.
- dreadlordbone 2y ago
  They've been shipping features somewhat regularly. One I really like (but was unfortunately gated behind a $10 price bump) was being able to ask AI to find an email "where's that email about blah" or to have it summarize a long email chain "hey what am I supposed to be doing here"
  - avree 2y ago
    Have you checked out Shortwave? One of the Firebase founders started the company, and they have a really powerful AI e-mail client.
    - jamest 2y ago
      +1 to Shortwave being great
- carbine 2y ago
  I wonder as well -- I have witnessed extremely low churn in the people I know that use it, but that's obv anecdotal.
andrewstuart 2y ago
I felt that Superhuman was super good at making investors and VCs enthused, but that’s not product market fit. I guess it’s VC product fit. Or VC salesman fit or something. As the other comment in this thread asks “the proof is in the pudding, does Superhuman have product market fit today?”
Satam 2y ago
My experience with Superhuman has been terrible. Back in the day, I tried to sign up. Couldn't. Then they started allowing sign-ups, but there was a mandatory onboarding/sales call to get started... Finally, some time ago managed to sign up in hopes it could help to manage multiple inboxes with a unified inbox for all of my accounts. Nope doesn't have that. Canceled my subscription immediately yet I kept receiving their spam for a while. Overall, a very scammy vibe.
- conception 2y ago
  I had the opposite vibe. Had the same process went through the call and they asked what I needed and wanted from an email client and after telling them they said that it probably wasn’t for me yet. And I didn’t sign up. They emailed me when features I mentioned were added and then a couple of years ago tried again. Been using it everyday since then as my primary email driver at work. They know they have a niche product - a paid email client; an expensive one at that! So they filter so word of mouth and reviews and all match expectations and make sure their product is a good fit. It has been the opposite of scammy.
  - voiceblue 2y ago
    TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users would be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared. Wait! That means, if the only person using your product is your mom, you have PMF. Based on what you said and the TFA, this is Superhuman’s PMF approach (i.e., perversely satisfy this metric by filtering users). I don’t understand where this “engine” is, but perhaps that’s it.
    - khafra 2y ago
      > TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users would be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared. > Wait! That means, if the only person using your product is your mom, you have PMF. This just seems straightforwardly correct. If you want to find the size of your total addressable market, use a different tool; this one is for product market fit.
    - 2y ago
codegladiator 2y ago
obviously no real content in TFA, upvoters can elaborate why this is interesting
- meeech 2y ago
  because there were some interesting nuggets. Maybe nothing new to you - but not everyone has read everything on the topic. though this was more about their process rather than an 'engine'. but you know, headlines /shrug
- smrtinsert 2y ago
  Would love a suggestion on books to start conceptualizing of a business in terms like these, instead of how I currently think of it (tech stacks and cost)
  - apsurd 2y ago
    From one engineer to another, I've been getting great mileage out of Product leadership podcasts. https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback Think of it like you're making a career change and immersing yourself in a new circle. Not strictly studying, rather just hanging out and taking it all in. It helps my brain more fully switch into the "product leader identity". It's been very helpful and fun.
    - smrtinsert 2y ago
      thank you!
bko 2y ago
The article discusses a way to test product market fit prior to launching. After launch its obvious. But then the way it tests product market fit is asking its users if they would be disappointed if the product didn't exist. But if you have users you can simply test product market fit to see engagement. If people are engaged, that's a good sign. If you have people that are signed up and aren't engaged, that's a bad sign. The author uses Slack as an example of a company that has product market fit and over 50% of users surveyed would say they'd be "very disappointed" without Slack (the magic number to beat is 40%). I wonder how that poll would fare for Microsoft Teams, that has 320 million MAU compared to around 40 million for Slack (roughly, few years old but order of magnitude is ~10x). Does Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams because very few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped existing? Or is usage a better metric?
- ensemblehq 2y ago
  Enterprise software is a different beast as the buying cycle and structure is a lot different. Selling into the enterprise requires a different go-to-market strategy. It's why you never see things like 'Superhuman' reach mainstream tech.
- digging 2y ago
  > Does Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams because very few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped existing? Or is usage a better metric? I'm coming from a lay perspective but they just seem like totally different markets. I don't know a single person who has ever used Teams voluntarily. I don't know a single person who likes Teams. But I know tons of people who use it every day, because it was bundled and cheap or convenient for their employer to install it on their machine. Meanwhile I don't currently have any Slack communities that drive me to use it, but if given a choice between Slack and Teams I'll always pick the former. (Actually Discord is where most of my communities are now, and I'm not happy about that either; it's great for social gaming and pretty bad for text chat - although for different reasons than Teams. I am heavily engaged in Discord, and I would be happier if it ceased to exist, because it would force alternative modes to be chosen)
  - 2y ago
dwallin 2y ago
Is it just me, or is this bad statistics? With a small sample size and large numbers of personas / categories you would expect to see a positive bump, even if there was no statistical relationship between the persona and the preference. Since you are only eliminating categories that don't happen to be represented in the subset you are testing, you can only ever actually go up. For demonstration I rolled 20 dice randomly for 6 personas and 3 categories of preference: 1, 5, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 5, 6, 3, 6, 3, 2, 1, 3 A, A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, B, C, A, A, B, A, B, B A = 10, B = 6, C = 4; Which gives me 20% for C I restrict myself to just the numbers that voted for C (2, 4, 1, 6) removing all 3 and 5s I now am left with: 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 6, 6, 2, 1 A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, C, A, A, B This now gives me A = 8, B = 3, C = 4 And now I get 27%, a nice 35% boost! Even better than Superhuman's 10% boost. But this is all an illusion, there was absolutely no dependency between the persona and preference here, which you would only see with a large enough sample size.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  The pudding proof is the percentage of “very disappointed not to have” in the next round of customers, after adapting customer targeting and product from the previous customer batch.
nextworddev 2y ago
Never used Superhuman - has to be one of the most hyped startups with the least amount of IRL users that I know of
flappyeagle 2y ago
You should ignore this article. They ultimately did not get PMF
- mguerville 2y ago
  They found PMF in a niche (productivity-obsessed email-superusers), which is decent market in size, but raised money and got press coverage like a mainstream so in the end it feels like they kinda failed. It reminds me of Peloton (though they did go mainstream-ish), or the Snoo (smart baby bassinet)... just because a ton of people email/exercise/have babies doesn't mean the bulk of them are in the market for the hyper-optimized and high-price solution.
lowkey 2y ago
Notably, Rahul copied the well known Sean Ellis metric then failed to credit the originator - and got famous. Kind of sketchy in my opinion.
sarora27 2y ago
You gotta love good survivorship bias stories like this. Especially those written by VC armchair quarterbacks. It's always the same examples reiterated over and over again.
- avree 2y ago
  It's way too early to call Superhuman a 'survivor'. But, most mail app companies do get acquihired before their products are killed.
ed 2y ago
Having followed this exact playbook to validate several products I can confidently say this will give you false positives and the only reliable way to determine when you have PMF is: accidentally get PMF on something so that you know what it feels like (it’s unmistakeable). Peter Reinhardt from Segment has a must-watch talk for anyone interested in this topic https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?si=pogHC45L58U7K6mW https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?si=pogHC45L58U7K6mW

59 points by tekkk 2y ago

Does anyone know how Superhuman is doing these days? It's been a bit quiet since their insane hype-cycle during the time this article was published.

Brajeshwar 2y ago
I hope, they are not getting ready to do a Rapportive.
ricokatayama 2y ago
Even though I don’t have real information, I feel that they focused so much on the power user that they must have a high level of stickiness. I don’t even believe they expected to scale beyond the ICP.
dreadlordbone 2y ago
They've been shipping features somewhat regularly. One I really like (but was unfortunately gated behind a $10 price bump) was being able to ask AI to find an email "where's that email about blah" or to have it summarize a long email chain "hey what am I supposed to be doing here"
- avree 2y ago
  Have you checked out Shortwave? One of the Firebase founders started the company, and they have a really powerful AI e-mail client.
  - jamest 2y ago
    +1 to Shortwave being great
carbine 2y ago
I wonder as well -- I have witnessed extremely low churn in the people I know that use it, but that's obv anecdotal.

andrewstuart 2y ago

I felt that Superhuman was super good at making investors and VCs enthused, but that’s not product market fit. I guess it’s VC product fit. Or VC salesman fit or something. As the other comment in this thread asks “the proof is in the pudding, does Superhuman have product market fit today?”

Satam 2y ago

My experience with Superhuman has been terrible. Back in the day, I tried to sign up. Couldn't. Then they started allowing sign-ups, but there was a mandatory onboarding/sales call to get started... Finally, some time ago managed to sign up in hopes it could help to manage multiple inboxes with a unified inbox for all of my accounts. Nope doesn't have that. Canceled my subscription immediately yet I kept receiving their spam for a while. Overall, a very scammy vibe.

conception 2y ago
I had the opposite vibe. Had the same process went through the call and they asked what I needed and wanted from an email client and after telling them they said that it probably wasn’t for me yet. And I didn’t sign up. They emailed me when features I mentioned were added and then a couple of years ago tried again. Been using it everyday since then as my primary email driver at work. They know they have a niche product - a paid email client; an expensive one at that! So they filter so word of mouth and reviews and all match expectations and make sure their product is a good fit. It has been the opposite of scammy.
- voiceblue 2y ago
  TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users would be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared. Wait! That means, if the only person using your product is your mom, you have PMF. Based on what you said and the TFA, this is Superhuman’s PMF approach (i.e., perversely satisfy this metric by filtering users). I don’t understand where this “engine” is, but perhaps that’s it.
  - khafra 2y ago
    > TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users would be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared. > Wait! That means, if the only person using your product is your mom, you have PMF. This just seems straightforwardly correct. If you want to find the size of your total addressable market, use a different tool; this one is for product market fit.
  - 2y ago

codegladiator 2y ago

obviously no real content in TFA, upvoters can elaborate why this is interesting

meeech 2y ago
because there were some interesting nuggets. Maybe nothing new to you - but not everyone has read everything on the topic. though this was more about their process rather than an 'engine'. but you know, headlines /shrug
smrtinsert 2y ago
Would love a suggestion on books to start conceptualizing of a business in terms like these, instead of how I currently think of it (tech stacks and cost)
- apsurd 2y ago
  From one engineer to another, I've been getting great mileage out of Product leadership podcasts. https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback Think of it like you're making a career change and immersing yourself in a new circle. Not strictly studying, rather just hanging out and taking it all in. It helps my brain more fully switch into the "product leader identity". It's been very helpful and fun.
  - smrtinsert 2y ago
    thank you!

bko 2y ago

The article discusses a way to test product market fit prior to launching. After launch its obvious. But then the way it tests product market fit is asking its users if they would be disappointed if the product didn't exist. But if you have users you can simply test product market fit to see engagement. If people are engaged, that's a good sign. If you have people that are signed up and aren't engaged, that's a bad sign. The author uses Slack as an example of a company that has product market fit and over 50% of users surveyed would say they'd be "very disappointed" without Slack (the magic number to beat is 40%). I wonder how that poll would fare for Microsoft Teams, that has 320 million MAU compared to around 40 million for Slack (roughly, few years old but order of magnitude is ~10x). Does Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams because very few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped existing? Or is usage a better metric?

ensemblehq 2y ago
Enterprise software is a different beast as the buying cycle and structure is a lot different. Selling into the enterprise requires a different go-to-market strategy. It's why you never see things like 'Superhuman' reach mainstream tech.
digging 2y ago
> Does Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams because very few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped existing? Or is usage a better metric? I'm coming from a lay perspective but they just seem like totally different markets. I don't know a single person who has ever used Teams voluntarily. I don't know a single person who likes Teams. But I know tons of people who use it every day, because it was bundled and cheap or convenient for their employer to install it on their machine. Meanwhile I don't currently have any Slack communities that drive me to use it, but if given a choice between Slack and Teams I'll always pick the former. (Actually Discord is where most of my communities are now, and I'm not happy about that either; it's great for social gaming and pretty bad for text chat - although for different reasons than Teams. I am heavily engaged in Discord, and I would be happier if it ceased to exist, because it would force alternative modes to be chosen)
- 2y ago

dwallin 2y ago

Is it just me, or is this bad statistics? With a small sample size and large numbers of personas / categories you would expect to see a positive bump, even if there was no statistical relationship between the persona and the preference. Since you are only eliminating categories that don't happen to be represented in the subset you are testing, you can only ever actually go up. For demonstration I rolled 20 dice randomly for 6 personas and 3 categories of preference: 1, 5, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 5, 6, 3, 6, 3, 2, 1, 3 A, A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, B, C, A, A, B, A, B, B A = 10, B = 6, C = 4; Which gives me 20% for C I restrict myself to just the numbers that voted for C (2, 4, 1, 6) removing all 3 and 5s I now am left with: 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 6, 6, 2, 1 A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, C, A, A, B This now gives me A = 8, B = 3, C = 4 And now I get 27%, a nice 35% boost! Even better than Superhuman's 10% boost. But this is all an illusion, there was absolutely no dependency between the persona and preference here, which you would only see with a large enough sample size.

Nevermark 2y ago
The pudding proof is the percentage of “very disappointed not to have” in the next round of customers, after adapting customer targeting and product from the previous customer batch.

nextworddev 2y ago

Never used Superhuman - has to be one of the most hyped startups with the least amount of IRL users that I know of

flappyeagle 2y ago

You should ignore this article. They ultimately did not get PMF

mguerville 2y ago
They found PMF in a niche (productivity-obsessed email-superusers), which is decent market in size, but raised money and got press coverage like a mainstream so in the end it feels like they kinda failed. It reminds me of Peloton (though they did go mainstream-ish), or the Snoo (smart baby bassinet)... just because a ton of people email/exercise/have babies doesn't mean the bulk of them are in the market for the hyper-optimized and high-price solution.

lowkey 2y ago

Notably, Rahul copied the well known Sean Ellis metric then failed to credit the originator - and got famous. Kind of sketchy in my opinion.

sarora27 2y ago

You gotta love good survivorship bias stories like this. Especially those written by VC armchair quarterbacks. It's always the same examples reiterated over and over again.

avree 2y ago
It's way too early to call Superhuman a 'survivor'. But, most mail app companies do get acquihired before their products are killed.

ed 2y ago

Having followed this exact playbook to validate several products I can confidently say this will give you false positives and the only reliable way to determine when you have PMF is: accidentally get PMF on something so that you know what it feels like (it’s unmistakeable). Peter Reinhardt from Segment has a must-watch talk for anyone interested in this topic https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?si=pogHC45L58U7K6mW https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?si=pogHC45L58U7K6mW