[HN Gopher] Superhuman built an engine to find product market fi...
___________________________________________________________________
Superhuman built an engine to find product market fit (2018)
Author : tekkk
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-08-29 09:06 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (review.firstround.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (review.firstround.com)
| cklemming wrote:
| Does anyone know how Superhuman is doing these days?
|
| It's been a bit quiet since their insane hype-cycle during the
| time this article was published.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I hope, they are not getting ready to do a Rapportive.
| ricokatayama wrote:
| Even though I don't have real information, I feel that they
| focused so much on the power user that they must have a high
| level of stickiness. I don't even believe they expected to
| scale beyond the ICP.
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| They've been shipping features somewhat regularly. One I really
| like (but was unfortunately gated behind a $10 price bump) was
| being able to ask AI to find an email "where's that email about
| blah" or to have it summarize a long email chain "hey what am I
| supposed to be doing here"
| avree wrote:
| Have you checked out Shortwave? One of the Firebase founders
| started the company, and they have a really powerful AI
| e-mail client.
| jamest wrote:
| +1 to Shortwave being great
| carbine wrote:
| I wonder as well -- I have witnessed extremely low churn in the
| people I know that use it, but that's obv anecdotal.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I felt that Superhuman was super good at making investors and VCs
| enthused, but that's not product market fit.
|
| I guess it's VC product fit. Or VC salesman fit or something.
|
| As the other comment in this thread asks "the proof is in the
| pudding, does Superhuman have product market fit today?"
| Satam wrote:
| My experience with Superhuman has been terrible. Back in the day,
| I tried to sign up. Couldn't. Then they started allowing sign-
| ups, but there was a _mandatory_ onboarding /sales call to get
| started...
|
| Finally, some time ago managed to sign up in hopes it could help
| to manage multiple inboxes with a unified inbox for all of my
| accounts. Nope doesn't have that. Canceled my subscription
| immediately yet I kept receiving their spam for a while.
|
| Overall, a very scammy vibe.
| conception wrote:
| I had the opposite vibe. Had the same process went through the
| call and they asked what I needed and wanted from an email
| client and after telling them they said that it probably wasn't
| for me yet. And I didn't sign up.
|
| They emailed me when features I mentioned were added and then a
| couple of years ago tried again. Been using it everyday since
| then as my primary email driver at work.
|
| They know they have a niche product - a paid email client; an
| expensive one at that! So they filter so word of mouth and
| reviews and all match expectations and make sure their product
| is a good fit. It has been the opposite of scammy.
| voiceblue wrote:
| TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users
| would be "very disappointed" if your product disappeared.
|
| Wait! That means, if the only person using your product is
| your mom, you have PMF.
|
| Based on what you said and the TFA, this is Superhuman's PMF
| approach (i.e., perversely satisfy this metric by filtering
| users).
|
| I don't understand where this "engine" is, but perhaps that's
| it.
| khafra wrote:
| > TFA says finding product market fit is when 40%+ of users
| would be "very disappointed" if your product disappeared.
|
| > Wait! That means, if the only person using your product
| is your mom, you have PMF.
|
| This just seems straightforwardly correct. If you want to
| find the size of your total addressable market, use a
| different tool; this one is for product market fit.
| ibash wrote:
| The engine part is looking for users that are somewhat, but
| not totally satisfied and building for them.
|
| That is - you don't want to build for people that already
| love your product (it's already great for them!) and you
| don't want to build for people that absolutely don't like
| your product (would need a very different product), but
| instead build for people that you can convert from
| "somewhat like" to "love".
| azinman2 wrote:
| They literally said you can do this at around 40 users.
| chasebank wrote:
| I had the same exact experience. I was looking for a Sparrow
| replacement for years after google bought them and shut it
| down. I think that's all superhuman needed to do, recreate
| sparrow.
| azinman2 wrote:
| If you're on an Apple device, Mail.app provides a unified
| inbox.
| solidasparagus wrote:
| I have to disagree with the scammy part. They were pretty
| serious/intense about teaching you how to use superhuman, so
| the daily emails for the first week could be considered spammy,
| but personally I found them useful when trying to learn to be a
| power user.
|
| It was not worth it for me at that price point, but they
| clearly put so much craftsmanship into the app, I feel obliged
| to defend it from be called scammy. It remains on the short
| list of best "new technology" experiences for me, right up
| there with some of my first Apple devices.
| carbine wrote:
| I had the opposite experience as well. Big fan, can't live
| without it. It really helps me manage multiple inboxes
| effectively. As someone with a similar email challenge it
| strikes me as less than ideal to view all inboxes in one view?
| The inbox in question is a pretty important piece of context
| for the email.
|
| I also tend to get annoyed with forced 1:1 onboarding, but they
| seem to have found that the tool is only sticky if they help
| retrain your habits. It worked for me, and others I know.
| codegladiator wrote:
| obviously no real content in TFA, upvoters can elaborate why this
| is interesting
| meeech wrote:
| because there were some interesting nuggets. Maybe nothing new
| to you - but not everyone has read everything on the topic.
| though this was more about their process rather than an
| 'engine'. but you know, headlines /shrug
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Would love a suggestion on books to start conceptualizing of a
| business in terms like these, instead of how I currently think
| of it (tech stacks and cost)
| apsurd wrote:
| From one engineer to another, I've been getting great mileage
| out of Product leadership podcasts.
|
| https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback
|
| Think of it like you're making a career change and immersing
| yourself in a new circle. Not strictly studying, rather just
| hanging out and taking it all in.
|
| It helps my brain more fully switch into the "product leader
| identity". It's been very helpful and fun.
| bko wrote:
| The article discusses a way to test product market fit prior to
| launching. After launch its obvious. But then the way it tests
| product market fit is asking its users if they would be
| disappointed if the product didn't exist.
|
| But if you have users you can simply test product market fit to
| see engagement. If people are engaged, that's a good sign. If you
| have people that are signed up and aren't engaged, that's a bad
| sign.
|
| The author uses Slack as an example of a company that has product
| market fit and over 50% of users surveyed would say they'd be
| "very disappointed" without Slack (the magic number to beat is
| 40%). I wonder how that poll would fare for Microsoft Teams, that
| has 320 million MAU compared to around 40 million for Slack
| (roughly, few years old but order of magnitude is ~10x). Does
| Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams because very
| few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped existing? Or is
| usage a better metric?
| ensemblehq wrote:
| Enterprise software is a different beast as the buying cycle
| and structure is a lot different. Selling into the enterprise
| requires a different go-to-market strategy. It's why you never
| see things like 'Superhuman' reach mainstream tech.
| digging wrote:
| > Does Slack have more of a product market fit than Teams
| because very few people would be disappointed if Teams stopped
| existing? Or is usage a better metric?
|
| I'm coming from a lay perspective but they just seem like
| totally different markets. I don't know a single person who has
| ever used Teams voluntarily. I don't know a single person who
| likes Teams. But I know tons of people who use it every day,
| because it was bundled and cheap or convenient for their
| employer to install it on their machine. Meanwhile I don't
| currently have any Slack communities that drive me to use it,
| but if given a choice between Slack and Teams I'll always pick
| the former.
|
| (Actually Discord is where most of my communities are now, and
| I'm not happy about that either; it's great for social gaming
| and pretty bad for text chat - although for different reasons
| than Teams. I am heavily engaged in Discord, and _I would be
| happier if it ceased to exist_ , because it would force
| alternative modes to be chosen)
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I am heavily engaged in Discord, and I would be happier if
| it ceased to exist, because it would force alternative modes
| to be chosen
|
| I'm almost on this bandwagon, I was super annoyed when all my
| groups from from google chats and such to discord. Now that I
| have to keep it around for at least one of those groups, I
| don't really mind, but having to initially install it and get
| used to it was annoying.
| digging wrote:
| It's fine for friend (small, private) communities. My
| problem is that Discord is virtually _never_ a good option
| for public communities, but it 's almost always the go-to
| choice (because "everyone already has it").
| dwallin wrote:
| Is it just me, or is this bad statistics?
|
| With a small sample size and large numbers of personas /
| categories you would expect to see a positive bump, even if there
| was no statistical relationship between the persona and the
| preference. Since you are only eliminating categories that don't
| happen to be represented in the subset you are testing, you can
| only ever actually go up.
|
| For demonstration I rolled 20 dice randomly for 6 personas and 3
| categories of preference:
|
| 1, 5, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 5, 6, 3, 6, 3, 2, 1, 3
|
| A, A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, B, C, A, A, B, A, B, B
|
| A = 10, B = 6, C = 4; Which gives me 20% for C
|
| I restrict myself to just the numbers that voted for C (2, 4, 1,
| 6) removing all 3 and 5s
|
| I now am left with:
|
| 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 1, 2, 6, 6, 2, 1
|
| A, A, A, B, C, B, A, C, A, C, A, C, A, A, B
|
| This now gives me A = 8, B = 3, C = 4
|
| And now I get 27%, a nice 35% boost! Even better than
| Superhuman's 10% boost. But this is all an illusion, there was
| absolutely no dependency between the persona and preference here,
| which you would only see with a large enough sample size.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Never used Superhuman - has to be one of the most hyped startups
| with the least amount of IRL users that I know of
| flappyeagle wrote:
| You should ignore this article. They ultimately did not get PMF
| mguerville wrote:
| They found PMF in a niche (productivity-obsessed email-
| superusers), which is decent market in size, but raised money
| and got press coverage like a mainstream so in the end it feels
| like they kinda failed.
|
| It reminds me of Peloton (though they did go mainstream-ish),
| or the Snoo (smart baby bassinet)... just because a ton of
| people email/exercise/have babies doesn't mean the bulk of them
| are in the market for the hyper-optimized and high-price
| solution.
| lowkey wrote:
| Notably, Rahul copied the well known Sean Ellis metric then
| failed to credit the originator - and got famous. Kind of sketchy
| in my opinion.
| sarora27 wrote:
| You gotta love good survivorship bias stories like this.
| Especially those written by VC armchair quarterbacks. It's always
| the same examples reiterated over and over again.
| avree wrote:
| It's way too early to call Superhuman a 'survivor'. But, most
| mail app companies do get acquihired before their products are
| killed.
| ed wrote:
| Having followed this exact playbook to validate several products
| I can confidently say this will give you false positives and the
| only reliable way to determine when you have PMF is: accidentally
| get PMF on something so that you know what it feels like (it's
| unmistakeable).
|
| Peter Reinhardt from Segment has a must-watch talk for anyone
| interested in this topic
| https://youtu.be/_6pl5GG8RQ4?si=pogHC45L58U7K6mW
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-29 23:02 UTC)