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 Rachitsky** (0:00)
Let's talk about product market fit.

**Rahul Vohra** (0:01)
You have to deliberately not act on the feedback of many of your early users. And this is at the same time as listening to people intensely and building what people want. That's what we're here to do, is to make something that people want. But it can't be all people. And the question becomes, how do you listen to them? And then even of what they say, what do you pay attention to and what don't you? And the trick here is...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
You're not doing what a lot of CEOs think they need to be doing with their time. A lot of CEOs think they need to spend time on hiring or org building. And you intentionally, I will spend time on product and marketing design.

**Rahul Vohra** (0:36)
So this is a technique that I call the switch log. And it's born out of the observation that your calendar says what you thought you were going to do, but it's really only your trail of work that describes what you actually did. How can we capture that? I came up with the following idea. What if I just did whatever the heck I wanted?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
What's the most pivotal moment in your career, in your life?

**Rahul Vohra** (0:58)
I learned the real secret behind virality. There is no such thing as a truly viral product. What then is the true secret? It is...

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:11)
Today, my guest is Rahul Vohra. Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman and one of the most thoughtful and insightful and articulate founders that I've met. As you will see in our conversation, it's hard not to be captivated by Rahul's storytelling skills and also his really insightful takes on how to build great products and teams. This episode is for anyone who is looking to build their product taste, help their teams move faster, learn how to think better from first principles and also learn about Superhuman's very unique approach to building their company, including why they manually onboarded every single new user for years and why they decided to stop, why they ignored most of their customer feedback on their way to finding product market fit, and also how you can use his approach to finding product market fit for your own company, also the power of game design in building great products, a very contrarian take on pricing strategy, what Rahul has learned about building scale products on top of AI and LLMs, and so much more. A huge thank you to Ed Sim, Conrad Erwin, Bill Trenchard, and Gaurav Vohra for suggesting questions and topics for this conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Superhuman that you can start using immediately. You also get a year free of Notion, Perplexity Pro, Granola, and Linear. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Rahul Vohra. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake. For modern growth teams, companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform. Where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com/lenny, and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
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