ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Superhuman aims to make responding to emails less time-consuming by building a blazingly fast, yet gorgeous email experience. CEO and Founder Rahul Vohra joins Scott Britton and Andrei Newman on the Built by Humans Podcast to offer some untraditional takes on user onboarding journeys, how you can build software products that feel like games, and why productivity and mental health are intertwined. Here are some key takeaways:
- When trying to build a quality product, be wary of early customers experiencing bug fatigue — if
too many users run into the same set of bugs, it can overwhelm both them and your
development team. Instead of risking this with a traditional all-at-once launch, consider a
measured pace of onboarding that allows your team to fix bugs at the same rate they’re found.
- Keeping a manageable onboarding pace coincides with a good strategy for developing the
onboarding process. Start by ensuring the founder can tackle onboarding calls, and as long as
you’re retaining healthy customer metrics, transition to shorter onboarding times and specialized
teams to make the process efficient. Nail it before you scale it.
- While ‘gamifying’ your product with explicit rewards can decrease end-user motivation, some
underlying trends of game design can be implemented to create an extremely engaging product.
Consider all your individual features as toys forming a larger game for the user. If each feature
is created as its own engaging toy, the overall product acts as a game that motivates users to
learn all its features over time.
- Communication is a major stress point for remote workers: 89% said that responding to emails
and messages was the worst part of their day, while over half said they think their presenteeism
and quick responses are valued just as much (if not more) than substantive work output.
Superhuman’s software largely eases this process, but reworking workplace norms to reinforce
clear communication in remote work can also help improve your employees’ productivity and
mental health.
- When building a quality product, it’s best to limit your building to a single platform. Choose a
target market, and build on whatever platform is used most. Going multi-platform can be a
monumental step — good strategy usually means waiting until your customer requests demand
that you expand into new markets.
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