Get inspiration on productivity, design, and technology. And when you left your email address you would get an automatic email from me and I would ask a question, What do you use for email today and what are your pet peeves? And that started a conversation and I would jump in and then when the volume was too high, other people on our team would also jump in, and wed go back and forth talking with these people who were signing up on our webpage. Set up your survey. Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra built an engine to find it here's how. Okay. The MPS score on the other hand measures how strong your word of mouth effect is. This is a great opportunity to highlight your product's most important, relevant, and enticing features. I use it together with Vimcal the combination is just amazing. Maggie:Right. Then NLP is used to improve the product focusing on fans' opinions. You are distractible by default, which destroys flow. We'll send you regular dispatches from Superhuman with exclusive content and productivity best practice. You need fuzzy string matching. So for Superhuman, we asked ourselves the question, what would Gmail look like if instead of being 14 years old, it were built from scratch today? 21:39 Put everything on the line Finding product-market fit is an obsession for every startup. A well-built command palette is immensely powerful. With a command palette, keyboard shortcuts are easy to discover and explore. Its visually gorgeous. When challenge exceeds skill, we feel anxious or worried. Well, I think like many entrepreneurs, it starts off with a bit of a personal pet peeve, an itch that you want to scratch. Transport the viewer to another place with wide shots that set context. Then, ensure the suggestions are relevant: Now you're showing only commands that match what the user typed but we can still make them even more relevant! It definitely did not work for me. Here's an overview of everything that's changed. Unsplash is a wonderful image library where photographs are shared, for free, by a community of 200,000 hobbyists and professional photographers. Through 1:1 onboarding, we massively increase skill for almost everybody. . Lastly, choose photos that look natural and not overly produced: that is, photos with HDR effects or strong image filters. So then if I remember correctly in the article, which well link to in the show notes, but in the article you talk about how the goal of a product team is to get product market fit, but its really hard to know when you actually have it. That option isnt available to everybody. Make functions visible, and limit alternative actions. According to Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff [ 1 ], the concept of product/market fit (PMF) was initially created by Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine and popularized by Marc Andreessen. The product/market fit engine is powered by user feedback with a lightweight survey . To drive home the emotions of joy and delight, consider how you can innovate upon the use of photography in your product. The related concept of a super race refers to an entire category of beings with the same or varying superhuman characteristics, created from present-day . Here's an overview of everything that's changed. Maggie:Awesome. Find a balance between engaging the user and being practical: no need to put a cool but rarely-used feature at the top. (For a little history, see this fantastic article by Matthew Guay.). Most recently, I got back from PTO and came back to about 550 unread emails. 1. Sometimes it was reliability, sometimes it was speed. Users don't need to take their hands away from the keyboard. I will wear the shirts/socks with pride. If they type "archive", they should still find what they're looking for. "Add Zoom Link" can only be used for a new calendar event. Look at every part of your product and ask: "If I had to remove just one thing, what would it be?" For example, the Superhuman email app offers dozens of keyboard shortcuts to help users search, label, filter, and send messages more quickly. This encodes emotion into our users' email habits, making new workflows more memorable and easier to learn. Maggie:Right. If you ever get the sudden urge to check social media, the news, or another distracting site while you should be working, Forest may be able to help. Without a command palette, keyboard shortcuts don't leave room for mistakes. To achieve this, first pick a keyboard shortcut that is simple, memorable, and doesn't clash with regular typing or common shortcuts like Cmd+C for copy, Cmd+V for paste, or Cmd+S for save. Before Superhuman, there would have been all this back and forth via email to schedule meetings: "When are you free?". It is really fast. How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product-Market Fit by First Round (2018) Yeah, Product-Market Fit is hard. But for people who are listening who are maybe in that bucket of wanting to be first time founders or they are first time founders, or maybe people who are sort of considering being an entrepreneur, what advice would you give to them sort of having been through that process yourself a couple of times now? Just tell the extension which sites you want to avoid and when. science shows can help boost productivity! The tension from the asymmetrical composition adds visual interest to otherwise balanced scenery. With ClickUp you can create tasks, track your time, capture and annotate screenshots, save notes, and turn email messages into to-do list items. Repeat PM turned first-time founder Ryan Glasgow addresses the tough product questions every founder faces, from segmenting the market and iterating on early MVPs, to finding product/market fit and You can't rely on your customers to figure out what to build. The term superhuman refers to humans, human beings or human-like beings with qualities and abilities that exceed those naturally found in humans.These qualities may be acquired through natural ability, self-actualization or technological aids. Superhuman makes it less anxiety-inducing to let my inbox fill up a little bit. And then it was use that to get into an accelerator. In addition, emphasizing our preferred wording helps the user when that wording is used in other contexts (e.g. The first time around, I couldnt do that at all and you know, you just cant do that. Grammarly can help avoid those awkward situations by checking your spelling, grammar, and construction in real-time as you write. That changes things for you a little bit, especially when it comes to fundraising. All entrepreneurs and product managers are committed to it. Users prefer search to menus, which are only helpful if they understand the way your menus are organized. Finding product market fit is the foundation for growth and critical milestone for venture backed businesses when raising money, as well as for the venture capitalists themselves when investing. Its all getting you through your email twice as fast. Today, many web pages include the information you're there to read, plus a lot of clutter you don't want or need: ads, banners, sidebars, all of which get in the way of a productive browsing experience. You're driven by boundless energy and a wellspring of creativity you are completely absorbed by your task. They may not seem important, but 100 ms is the threshold where actions feel instant. I dont think Ive ever heard anyone say that actually. And then there was a lot of thinking on top of that as well, to come up with the whole product market fit engine. I started, scaled and sold Rapportive in 20 months from writing the first line of code. Enter Superhuman, Rahuls current company, built to be the fastest email experience ever made. Show and hide commands based on what's currently active. Some feel worry: their skill is low-medium, but their email does matter. This quick lesson is showing you how to build a Product/Market Fit workflow (on Airtable) based from the Rahul post on the Superhuman journey. Superhuman Product/Market Fit Engine Demo Watch on Product Market Fit Superhuman Product/Market Fit Engine (Part 1) Watch on Set up an Airtable base and in your Table add some columns: Email (email) Ensure that subjects face toward the center of the image. We've all heard that product/market match drives commissioning success additionally that the lack thereof is what's lurking behind almost every failure. To create ever-changing rewards, we choose photographs that span a variety of subjects: from architecture, through wildlife, to landscapes. So then we also talked a little bit about, in our previous chat about NPS versus this score, because I think something that Im sure a lot of product people and other people in startups and I guess really anywhere are thinking about, how do I know when Im at the right point? But first Id love to know how did you pick the inbox problem and sort of what led you to focus on email in the first place? We all know how difficult it is to avoid distractions (like social media) when your work takes place online. It takes all the manual effort out of time tracking, automatically detecting and tracking when you're working within a browser window. To create flow, you should sometimes make the goals of your product harder to achieve. Capture keyboard events with an ad-hoc event listener, or by using a library dedicated to it. After that point, we started adding a trickle of users and we started really slowly, like were talking maybe one user every month or two. Richard Browning created the exosuit by . We were just working down that list. Maggie:Awesome. Superhuman is in hypergrowth. Like I want to build the most usable, the most useful, the most amazing product in the market. While abstract photographs can be visually beautiful, it's disorientating if the viewer can't discern what the image represents, or where to look. When somebody takes an action, they should get feedback instantly. 2. Founder, CEO, and author Sophia Amoruso explains the power of spontaneity. "Good design is as little design as possible. Rahul Vohra Gallery Share You can find the original article with more nuances and backstory on each step of the process on First Round Capital's blog. And with each new user we were learning so much. That is, users who configure and control it to better serves their needs. Maggie:Right. To many users, it's simply another beautiful image; but some will feel the thrill of recognition as they connect the image and event. It may feel like with each failure youre not really making progress, but if youre smart, then you actually are and youre learning things and youre gaining lessons that you can apply to the next iteration. 9:28 The metrics: NPS vs the PMF When building or improving your command palette, here are your most important takeaways: I hope this post was helpful to you, and that you got some ideas on how to make and improve your command palette! At Superhuman, we choose Inbox Zero images that reward our users with joy and surprise exemplifying our principles of game design. 0:35 Rahul explains what led him to focus on email and inbox problems Analyze feedback. One of the best articles I have read in recent times is How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit by Founder-CEO Rahul Vohra. Today's Inbox Zero photo is dedicated to the pups of Superhuman, who increase our productivity by: Ensuring regular breaks Providing moral support Brightening up meetings(Meet them here: https://t.co/nVfzdGS9bT )#InternationalDogDay pic.twitter.com/iPPz1URAAW. 20:50 Rahul shares some additional advice based on previous failed startups How we used the Superhuman's Product-Market Fit model to learn what to build and whom to target. Users can quickly and easily discover new features. At Superhuman, we do a light version of this by keeping track of the last used item in some lists for example, labels. But what sets Strict Workflow apart is that it also incorporates the Pomodoro technique. Scheduled sends, automated follow-ups, and reminders, Real-time checks for spelling, grammar, construction, and more, Turn email messages into tasks with a single click, Combines multiple task management features in one extension, Note-taking and annotation abilities built in, Set parameters and time limits for distracting web pages, Customize to work during certain time windows, Captures the spirit of team collaboration in an asynchronous platform, Automatically generates step-by-step guide with screenshots, Easy, one-click organization for notes you find on the web, Options for saving full pages or just specific information from them, Visual representation of data related to how you spend your time, Colorful, easy-to-read visual representations of tracked time, Instantly switch between work and personal accounts without logging out or in, Organize all your tabs, windows, and projects in one area where they can be accessed with one click, Helps focus by removing unneeded tabs from view, Organize all your tabs for each project or task into one place, Reduce strain on your computer and browser, Don't disappoint the owl by getting off track, Encourages working on one task without distractions. Hangout 32:52 Slides Rahul Vohra (Founder/CEO, Superhuman) - The Product-Market Fit Engine from Business of Software Conference Learn how great SaaS & software companies are run We produce exceptional conferences & content that will help you build better products & companies. So with that in mind, when I was thinking of what I was going to do next, I deliberately focused my attention on ideas that would actually require a reasonable amount of capital. But an especially cool feature that comes with RescueTime is how it assigns a productivity score to certain websites. If a project expands to meet a new geographical market, that gets a separate split. With keyboard shortcuts, Split Inbox, and built-in calendar and scheduling, Superhuman enables me to have a sophisticated workflow all through my email and in a very fast, easy, and consumable way. Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra built an engine to find it here's how We've comprehensively redesigned all our gestures for iPhone Superhuman for iPhone is now faster and easier to use than ever before! If you're someone who tends to bounce between tabs, windows, projects, tasks, and more, you need Switch. When somebody uses your product, their next action should always be obvious and it should be obvious how to do it. And the good news is once its moving, because its so dense and heavy, itll actually keep moving all by itself. Maggie:Well, are you getting it now with your users have Superhuman? I asked them to pull together the survey and to instrument it and to connect it up to type form and to make sure it goes out to users once they hit a certain activation threshold. At least thats what it looks like from the outside. This helps users unlock extreme speed and achieve a magical state of flow. This document contains a powerful engine to define, measure, and systematically increase product/market fit. The group that answers very disappointed will unlock product/market fit. And flow is so rewarding that we experience intrinsic motivation the most powerful form of motivation, where activities become inherently interesting and satisfying. Let's say you start with a simple list of commands, with only a title like so: (JavaScript, but essentially pseudo-code). productcoalition.com. Rahul:Right? Ground-level viewpoint you could hike here, Vivid colors, but a typical overcast day. Finding product-market fit is an obsession for every startup. But what about visual distraction? Superhuman have turned paying customers into their biggest fans - on average, every new user of Superhuman brings in one new user down the road. Here's five nuggets of gold: 1. You can directly affect challenge and skill with your experience design. One of our team members is a bit more bizops and analytics minded. Its definitely the start, but there are also other things like I mentioned, theres things like design, theres things like scarcity can drive MPS as well, interestingly. 13:02 Rahul explains the process of slow product build And screen time increased 50-70% on average during the COVID-19 pandemic, so that number is likely now much higher. Without getting a handle on email, things would've fallen through the cracks that's where Superhuman came in. We set a challenging goal: hit Inbox Zero without ever touching your mouse! But in the age of remote work, is that practical or even possible? 2:29 Rahul dives into how Superhuman approached the problem with his team Once the user starts typing something, take the score we used to filter the commands and use it to sort them as well. Product-market fit is the number one reason why startups succeed. And on top of that people were installing plugins like our own Rapportive, but also things like Boomerang and Mixmax and each plugin took those problems, the clutter, the memory, the CPU, the performance offline, and made them dramatically worse. And especially for a product like ours, where email is mission critical. Our chief business officer was the first one from our team to use Superhuman. But when it comes to understanding what product/market fit really is and how to get there, most of us quickly realize that there isnt a battle-tested approach. This is the most counterintuitive aspect of flow. Or listen to the full audio version below? Maggie:So I want to get into that product market fit score and measurement. In our case, the dialogs obscure most of the app, and there are few enough actions you can perform in them that we just use visible UI elements instead. CEO Rahul Vohra is the founder of Superhuman, a startup that claims to be "building the fastest email experience in the world.". During those years, he developed an intimate perspective of the email space and its many problems. Dieter Rams said it best: "Good design is as little design as possible.". Get inspiration on productivity, design, and technology. A palette that only gives you access to a small set of commands is not very useful. When the user types something, you want to filter the commands that match but you must be forgiving. There are a lot of new projects and new responsibilities. In other words, you shouldn't use Cmd+K for some types of actions, and Cmd+P for others. By now, you have a command palette chock full of commands that can be called from anywhere in your app! Initially, we aimed for 100 ms or less. Practically speaking, we have something like this: For a single command, you can define the score as: Calculate that for all commands, and do the same filtering as before: One design note: when typing "archive", the displayed command could be "Archive" (the matching alias), or "Mark Done" (the main title). You aren't limited by screen real estate, so you can avoid cluttering the UI. In this example, "Mark Done" elicits a feeling of satisfaction and completion rather than "Archive", which evokes a feeling of endlessly accumulating email! This balances challenge with skill, and once again creates flow. I want to make sure Im measuring everything. Would you suggest product market fit first and NPS second, or how would you think about that? 21:15 You almost certainly will have several failures before succeeding Milliseconds matter. I tried. For example, in Superhuman you can drag-and-drop an image into a draft to make it an attachment or an image embedded in the message itself. It changed the game for me and made email less stressful and more manageable. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. A Google Docs integration means you can use the extension seamlessly with a wide variety of documents. So good job guys. But before that, its just not a thing that people would say and so you know, maybe we stumbled across a perfect storm, kind of the fact that we found a market where the incumbents have scared off most new entrance, where the products that exist already are really old, were the most influential people also feel the most pain and maybe its just a perfect storm, but I think it is actually replicable in other industries.