INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The &Sent viaSuperhuman iOS& email signature has become one of the strangest flexes in the tech industry, but its influence is enduring, as
the $30 per month invite-only email app continues to shape how a wave of personal productivity startups are building their business and
product strategies.
I had a chance to chat with Superhuman CEO and founder Rahul Vohra earlier this month during an oddly busy time for
He had just announced a dedicated $7 million angel fund with his friend Todd Goldberg (which I wrote up here) and we also noted that
LinkedIn is killing off Sales Navigator, a feature driven by Rapportive, which Vohra founded and later sold in 2012
All the while, his buzzy email company is plugging along, amassing more interested users
Vohra tells me there are now more than 275,000 people on the waitlist for Superhuman.
Below is a chunk of my conversation with Vohra, which
has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: When you go out to raise funding and a chunk of your theoretical user base is sitting on
a waitlist, is it a little tougher to determine the total market for your product?
Rahul Vohra: That a good question
When we were doing our Series B, it was very easily answered because we&re one of a cohort of companies, that includes Notion and Airtable
and Figma, where the addressable market — assuming you can build a product that good enough — is utterly enormous.
With my last company,
Rapportive, there was a lot of conversation around, &oh, what the business model? What the market? How many people need this?& This almost
never came up in any fundraising conversation
People were more like, &well, if this thing works, obviously the market is basically all of prosumer productivity and that is, no matter how
you define it, absolutely huge.
