Superhuman: The fastest email experience ever made 🦸

(5 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is transforming the way we use email, making it faster than ever

• They already have over 50,000 paying users and BILLIONS of emails sent

• They’ve already raised $108M with their latest round at an $825M valuation 💰

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Superhuman 📈

Superhuman was founded by Rahul Vohra in 2014 with the vision to build the fastest email experience ever made. ⚡️

With Superhuman, you can get to your inbox twice as fast as before, reply 1 to 2 days sooner, and save 4 hours every single week. 

✉️ Superhuman can write and even send out emails on your behalf, execute complete end-to-end workflows, and classify every incoming email automatically.

It can even remind you to follow up, auto-write the follow up using certain prompts, and send them out all on your behalf. 🔔

📧 Email is a much bigger problem than most people realize. It’s slow and dominated by incumbents like Gmail (1B+ users) and Outlook.

💡 You can’t just come out with an email client that kind of works to compete with these guys. It has to do something really special.

⚡ ️ For Superhuman, that one really special thing was SPEED.

p.s. 👀 I found out about these guys when a founder friend told me it’s genuinely one of the best productivity tools out there. I then saw the signature “Sent via Superhuman” a couple of days later when emailing an angel investor. I thought I had to dig deeper into it, so decided to write this.

Backstory 👀

🛠️ Rahul Vohra was born in Birmingham, UK and started programming at the age of 8. His initial motivation was simple: 

"If I could learn how to program computers, I would be able to make my own video games".

🎓 By the time he got to university, he’d already accumulated “10,000 hours of programming” according to Rahul. This got him into the University of Cambridge where he studied Computer Science.

📚 After completing his undergrad, he started a PhD in machine learning and computer vision. He soon found this was a big mistake and misaligned completely with his goals.

📉 He dropped out 1.5 years into the PhD and started a company: Rapportive. In the Summer of 2010, he got into Y Combinator with the idea.

This was the first Gmail extension to scale to millions of users. 🚀

💼 By 2012, Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn for $15M, making this Rahul’s first entrepreneurial success.

👨‍💻 Rahul then worked at LinkedIn for 2 years, witnessing the startup grow from 1,500 employees to over 10,000.

Founding Superhuman 🦸

💭 While working at LinkedIn, Rahul noticed that email was a space controlled by incumbents that’d taken over every email user.

 It was Gmail, Outlook, and maybe Yahoo in the race, that was it. Billions of people use email, yet no one was innovating on it.

Rahul thought if he could build an email provider/tool that could help you control what comes in and out of your inbox, he could be onto something.

This would make it a lot faster and help people save a ton of time. ⚡️

🗓️ It took 18 months to build out Superhuman's MVP and get their first paying customer.

In the Summer of 2015, they were writing code. 💻 In 2016, they were still writing code. And in the Summer of 2017, they were still fixing bugs and iterating (still writing code…).

There was an intense pressure to launch since Rahul’s last company had launched, scaled, and been acquired in a shorter time frame. 💥

⏳ Even after the first 18 months, they didn’t have all their functionalities built in, but it was extremely fast.

🚗 “Imagine you’re in your Tesla. Imagine what it feels like to smash the pedal and accelerate to 60mph in 3 seconds or less. Are you ever going to go back to having a regular car?”

⚡️ That’s exactly how Rahul wanted it to feel using Superhuman for the first time.

Early Traction 🐣

👥 Superhuman acquired all their first 100 paying customers through word of mouth and their network of investors.

This allowed them to update their product and iterate as quickly as possible, fixing bugs at a sustainable pace. 🔧

In the earliest days, Superhuman would do 1-to-1 VIP concierge onboarding sessions to observe them using the product and help them maximize efficiency using it.

Rahul himself would travel to people’s offices, bring gifts, etc., all to teach them how to use their email a lot faster. 🎁

👨‍🏫 This is when he met Sean Ellis: Ran early growth at both Dropbox and Eventbrite, and authored the book Hacking Growth (750k+ copies sold).

📊 Sean taught Rahul that a leading indicator of Product-Market Fit (PMF) was asking users “If you could no longer use the product, how disappointed would you be.”

💬 If > 40% of people answered “very disappointed” this was an early sign of PMF.

📉 Initially, only 22% of Superhuman users answered “very disappointed”, so Rahul analyzed the data from these users and doubled down on segments where people were obsessed with the product.

⚙️ They made some alterations to the product based on Sean’s framework, and in the space of 3 quarters, they got to 60% of users saying they’d be “very disappointed”.

🔥 Their users were obsessed.

📣 A ton of word of mouth spread and some blog posts by Rahul that went viral. By 2019, Superhuman had up to 275,000 people on their waitlist all ready to pay $30/month…

📞 Rahul insisted on getting on a 30-minute call with each and limited growth to 100 new users a week.

💡 Most founders would jump at the chance to capture that revenue, but Rahul stayed patient. He knew that if he did that, his customers would churn out a lot quicker.

Stats 📊

📈 By 2023, Superhuman reached $100M ARR with one of the highest SaaS retention rates.

🌐 Around 30% of their site traffic comes from their signature “Sent via Superhuman” at the bottom of every email. Another 30% of traffic still comes from invitations/referrals.

💼 Superhuman customers now include Netflix, Compass, Brex, Deel, Notion, and Spotify.

📅 As of 2024, Superhuman has over 50,000 paying customers and 151 employees.

💵 On August 4th 2021, Superhuman raised a $75M Series C at an $825M valuation led by IVP with participation from Tiger Global Management, Will Smith (yes, the actor), and The Chainsmokers bringing their total raised to $108M. Previous investors include Andreesen Horowitz and First Round Capital.

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