Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…And they may have various motivations for doing that. In Superhuman, as an individual subscriber, if you refer somebody else and they sign up, you both get a free month, which is a great incentive if you're paying out of pocket. So we have people who send many, many hundreds of invites, and there are some people who essentially have free superhuman for life now due to how many people they've invited. But of course, that incentive doesn't necessarily work inside of a company or inside of a team where ultimately it's the company paying for the product. So you have to then come up with new motivations for those people. And that's where there really isn't any substitute to having a genuinely multiplayer or a genuinely collaborative product. That's one of the huge evolutions we've taken Superhuman through over the last probably about two years. Early last year, we launched what we call Superhuman 2.0. And the basic idea is we saw almost every single other app of Note become collaborative by default. Figma, Notion, Loom, these are all multiplayer or collaborative by default. Yet email, the one tool that we all use more than anything else, even more than things like Slack, was still firmly stuck in its single-player origins. I want to come back to something that you mentioned that I kind of didn't come back to, and I think is really core to what you just shared, which is word of mouth being so important. People talk about all these viral features and sharing contact books and all these things, and your point is that takes you to a place, but really what helps a consumer-ish product spread is... Is word of mouth people sharing with each other, which then the question is, how do you do that? We're going to talk about a lot of things that you did to make superhuman something people want to share. But in the end, it's just like making something people want to share. That's like the definition almost. So then it's like what makes people want to share stuff? It's amazing. It's helping them something that is remarkable. 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.…

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