Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, it turns out you mentioned remarkableness. That is one of our core company values. And if you think about what a company has to do, it has to grow. How do things grow? Well, let's take Elliot's advice at face value. And I believe it's true. It's creating something that people share. You mentioned one way of doing it, which is something that people want to share. There's actually another way, which is simply creating something remarkable. You use that word, and that is one of the core values of Superhuman. So we have create delight, create something that is so joyful that it really truly brings people delight. We have deliver remarkable quality, something that is so striking, so compelling and worthy of attention that people can't but help tell others about it. And then we have build the extraordinary, which is a measure of the sort of efficacy or the innovativeness of what we want to build. So that's another trick, which is literally baking these raw ingredients for growth into your company values. I didn't know that was one of your values. That makes so much sense. OK, we're going to come back to that because I think that is there's so much to learn about how you think about product and how you think about building the company that builds the product. But I want to actually start here with how this conversation came to be. So. The CEO of Product Hunt, Rajiv, tweeted months ago, he tweeted this and we're going to show this if you're on YouTube. Superhuman's product velocity feels like it's kicked into another gear as of late. Does anyone else notice this? And I saw that. I'm like, I completely have noticed this. Feels like there's just feature shipping left and right. AI this, AI that. Feels like it's just like a new company. And I tagged you on the tweet. I'm like, hey, Rahul, it changed. And you answered with a few things. And I just made it clear there's a lot to learn about what you did. Because a lot of companies are in this phase, I think, of just like things are moving as fast as we want. We used to be so much faster. We used to ship all these features and now we don't. And so I think this is a really cool, real case study, illustrative example that we can analyze. So let me ask you this. What did you notice that told you something needed to change at Superhuman? And then what did you change that actually had the most impact on your ability to ship and move faster? I think what we noticed was this sentiment. And we felt it first ourselves, but we also started hearing it from the market, from our users, from our customers, that we'd slowed down. And as a founder, as a CEO, that's the absolute last thing you want to hear. It's our job, after all, to speed things up. And when I ask people what do they mean by slowing down, they didn't mean the product, of course. The product wasn't working any slower, but that the pace of delivery seemed to have slowed down. So I think to break this down, it's important to start by defining what we mean by a slowdown. There's the kind of slowdown that is unavoidable in certain spaces, and then there is the kind of slowdown that is quite avoidable. We actually had both. So starting with unavoidable slowdown, you can classify anything that you build in a company into one of two categories, solution deepening and market widening. Now, solution deepening means making your product better for its existing users, but not making it available to more users. Whereas market widening means making your product available to more users, but not making the product itself any better. And there are some spaces, there are some markets, there are some platforms where market widening is really fast and really easy. And there are some spaces, email is one of them, where market widening is really hard and really slow. And when we started, we had a great deal of focus. We only supported Gmail. We were only on the web. And in those early years, we could pour every ounce of R&D energy, every engineering dollar into solution deepening. making the products better for existing users. And of course, users loved it. It's how we got to product market fit. It's how most startups do. But at a certain point, almost every company then has to start investing in widening the market. For example, The market of people who will use a new Gmail front end but without a mobile app does exist, but it is relatively small. And this is something that every new email startup is going to learn sooner or later. In order to keep on growing, you are going to have to need to add an iOS app. and then a macOS app, and then a Windows app, and then an Android app. And then you'll soon want to support Office 365. But that's not one thing. That's actually three things, because you have to support Office 365 on desktop, and then on iOS, and then on Android. And that's all much easier said than done. I think we at Superhuman now know things about these APIs that literally no other company knows. And I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. So fast forward to today, and Superhuman now works wherever you do on every combination of Gmail, Outlook, Mac, Windows Web, iOS, Android. And this actually turns out to be a really great technology moat. Almost no other email app can claim this. It's taken many years of intense investment. And I think we'll touch on this later, but it's one of the main reasons why we can sell into the enterprise,…

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