20VC: Superhuman's Rahul Vohra on How To Measure Product Market Fit, How To Construct A Process To Increase It & How To Implement A Strong Feedback and Reporting Cycle To Sustain It

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2019

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We are back and what a Founders Friday I have in store for you today with me, Harry Stebbings,
0:03.9	at H. Stebbing's 1996 on Instagram with 2Bs. Now, I should not say this, but there are some episodes
0:09.6	I look forward to and I'm more excited about than others, maybe. And this one today is absolutely
0:14.3	the case there. I've been so excited about this one for so long. The product is incredible and has taken much of our world by storm, and so I'm thrilled
0:21.2	to introduce Rahul Vora, found and CEO at Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world.
0:27.0	Fun fact, users get through their inbox twice as fast, and many see inbox zero for the first
0:31.8	time in years. To date, they've raised from friends at Bold Start, Wayne Chang, Mike Gaffrey,
0:37.0	and the SVC, just to name a few.
0:39.1	And previously, Rahul founded Reportive. The first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users,
0:44.0	Reportive was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn. I'd also have to say huge thank you,
0:47.7	both to Ed and Elliot at Bold Start and to Wayne Chang for some fantastic question suggestions
0:52.3	today. I really do so appreciate that.
0:54.9	And we mentioned some incredible companies in the intro there and I want to spend a minute to
0:58.4	talk about Brex. The first corporate card for startups, Brex founders Henrique and Pedro, built a
1:03.5	payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they are in
1:07.6	Y Combinator. They decided to build Brex. With instant online sign-up,
1:11.7	no founder liability required, and limits 10 to 20 times higher than standard cards. Yes, pretty
1:17.0	incredible, I know. And you can sign up for Brex today and get card fees waived by entering
1:21.4	the code Harry during sign-up. Honestly, it really is such a special service. And speaking of special,
1:26.9	did you know that there are five job openings for every one developer
1:29.9	in the US?
1:30.8	No wonder hiring great engineers is impossible.
	...

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