Rahul Vohra: belief

Transcript context

…Either during the nine months or at the end of it when you first start working on it and then into your process will get to before you launched, there are couple of value props in there but one of them is like fast rate. Did you land on that? How quick did you get to that or whatever like in your mind is the most specific value prop you needed to nail? Speed was a value prop from very early on. I think as I introspect this, it came out of some of the frustrations developing Rapportive on Gmail. Obviously, Gmail at the time was my primary email interface. I was the founder and CEO of that startup and I was doing a lot of email-based work, so I was intimately familiar with how slow Gmail was and how slow it was getting. I had therefore this hunch, this inkling that speed was going to be a very big deal. But like with any hunch or inkling, one does have to validate it. In the first year of Superhuman, as we were primarily building, we threw up a landing page. It was a terrible landing page, just a basic Squarespace thing that took us all of two hours to put together. All you could do on this page was throwing your email address. When you threw in your email address, you got an automatic email from me. In that email, there were two questions. Number one was what do you use for email today and number two was what were your pet peeves about it. I had two hypotheses going in. Hypothesis number one was that for Gmail, people were upset about how slow it had gotten, how it wasn’t working properly offline and how they had to use Gmail plugins to make it do the things that they wanted to do. Then for third-party email clients, people were upset about how buggy they were, how unstable they were, and how they don’t sync properly. All of which are still true today. So much head-bobbing on this side of the table.…

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