Superhuman - Beware Service Providers

After reading founder RahulVohra’s excellent piece on product market fit in First Round Review, I became interested in Superhuman, a “luxury” email overlay backed by A16Z. I’m not sure if it was #marketresearch - to learn from someone so thoughtful on building good product - or simply due to #fomo, but I figured I’d give it a try.

I’ve no idea if I’ll still be a customer in 6 to 12 months. But what I can say is that the #professionalservices industry can learn a lot from the Superhuman onboarding experience.

Let’s take a step back - Superhuman sits on top of @Gmail and @Gsuite, promising to make users get through their inboxes twice as fast as before. That’s a pretty gutsy promise - in return for hundreds of dollars a year, Superhuman will help me processes my free inbox - which was already pretty efficient due to a decade of @Google email innovation - faster. If I can get back half my email time, that’s pretty valuable - but there’s no real reason why I should believe I can.

Still, the buzz around the app made me curious. Finding out I probably couldn’t have it due to a 200K person waitlist made it even more intriguing. Even though I could have found someone to refer me in, I simply added my email to their website and I was told I was selected to jump to the front of the queue. After a survey and an onboarding session, I’d be on my way to inbox nirvana. Actually, only after first entering my credit card and promising to pay $30 per month could I then be onboarded and on my way to inbox nirvana.

Then something interesting happened - I was booked for a 30 minute onboarding with a full time employee of Superhuman, who showed me my own inbox inside their app, taught me tips and tricks, and customized all the features just for me. Not only had I jumped in front of 200,000 people but Superhuman cared enough about me to spend the money and time to make sure I had a personalized experience. So, I was now part of an exclusive club I didn’t really deserve to belong to (after all, hundreds of thousands of people got there first), but also I was meaningful enough to Superhuman that they would burn cash on me.

The onboarding process focused on what was great about Superhuman and made me feel like canceling would be giving up on a great opportunity I was lucky to have and a rebuke to the onboarding specialist (“Just email me if you want to cancel.”) Concerns I might have had about giving a start-up full access to the closest thing to a personal log of my life that I have - my inbox - were smothered out by a feeling of the email superpower being granted to me.

Now that’s great #onboarding. It almost didn’t matter that the facts about the case are quite different. First, the product wasn’t built custom for me but rather I was a participant in #masscustomization - the same product everyone else had was made to feel like it was being modified just for me. It wasn’t.

Also, the 200,000 person waiting list was actually made up of users of non-Google email product - most everyone in the corporate world is on @Microsoft Email, which Superhuman doesn’t support. So I was special only in that I was running my business on an alternative email server.

And that magical onboarding process? @Superhuman spent about $15 of my monthly fee on my onboarding (according to @Glassdoor, the average onboarding specialist gets paid around $65K per year, meaning about $30 per hour, over which time two people can be onboarded).

Realizing all of this, why did I still feel great about the process and what can knowledge services learn from it?

First, I was sold a strategy with a supporting software - the combination of which meant I was being sold an outcome, even if I couldn’t readily tell how much of the outcome was due to the product itself or the associated insights. That outcome was about speed through thoughtful design - sort of like buying a Tesla for all the reasons besides reducing CO2. Sure there are other ways to get the same outcome but this comes in the best package.

Hiring an “email coach” who would have inspired me to join the cult of “inbox zero” (that zen moment when you have no new emails to deal with, which Superhuman congratulates by showing you a mountainscape or some other tranquil natural scene) would have been useless. Buying an “email for dummies” book that told me all the keystrokes to customize my free Gmail inbox would similarly have been like giving me a treadmill without the willpower to exercise. And both would have made me feel like the problem was that I couldn’t handle my inbox. But Superhuman was like hiring a personal trainer to look over my shoulder while I used the latest gym equipment, customized for my capabilities - the full package was worth exponentially more than the advice. And rather than feel bad about my inabilities, I was made to feel special.

This is something most management consultants tend to miss - insights and strategies are important but unless you equip clients with the tools to be successful, and in a way that is empowering, they accomplish nothing. Increasingly clients will demand these outcomes rather than advice - Superhuman shows one analogue consultants can aspire to.

Second, the pricing was transparent. Let me be clear - it was transparently expensive - but it made me feel like I was in control. When I signed up for our accounting system, @Xero, I was urged to do so quickly to get a 50% discount on the first six months after which point I’d be hopelessly glued to the accounting system and paying full price. When I agreed, I felt like I resigned myself to it, not aspired to it. Instead of teasing me with a discount, Superhuman invested that cost of client acquisition into actually acquiring me as a useful client - that was pretty valuable.

Most knowledge providers fall down on this point too, making it much harder for clients to say yes. Fixed prices shift all the risk on to the provider who has to deliver the required knowledge solution at that cost, regardless of what it costs them to produce it - so providers often try to bill by the hour, keeping all that risk with the client. Or providers invent an inflated fixed price that they can't justify. Navigating that balancing act makes clients feel helpless and less able to commit. In the future, we at ProfeTech think clients will become used to transparent pricing in their #B2C lives and demand it in their #B2B lives.

Finally, Superhuman created all the atmospherics around their brand to make me feel like I would be missing out if I didn’t sign up. But what it didn’t do was pressure me to make a deal. Big Four accounting firms or Big Three strategy firms invest tons in elevating their brand - expensive wine-and-dine events, big name keynote speakers etc - but all of that is done to create goodwill for when the bill for knowledge is delivered, to associated sticker shock. Instead, Superhuman was effortlessly indifferent about whether I would sign up - like an attractive person at a bar knows they have a lot of options. But once I showed commitment and signed up, I was made to feel critical to the journey - I was made to feel loved.

Let's summarize. I bought an expensive email overlay I probably didn't need without a discount or a free trial and emerged from onboarding feeling enabled. While there are some very solid reviews of Superhuman (like this one from @TechCrunch here) that highlight how one can emulate it, I'm more willing now to ride along than I thought I'd be. At the end of the day, this isn't really a lifestyle but simply about making me more efficient. Yet, when I sold efficiency advice as a management consultant, I don't have any memory of customers ever feeling so empowered.

So, pay attention service providers - as tastes shift, so will demand and the market. Tolerance for opaque pricing, sales squeeze tactics, and advice without outcomes will be as outdated as a Gmail inbox - meaning you may not realize you’ve gone out of date until you’ve been fully eclipsed by a new total package.

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Sean West is Co-Founder of ProfeTech, along with Steve Heitkamp. We're obsessed with the future of the knowledge industry and see parallels to related questions in everything we do. Check us out at www.profe.tech and on Linked In