Month: December 2025
Choosing Your North Star Metric
This article by Lenny Rachitsky is about choosing a North Star Metric. It discusses what it is and why it is important. It also details different metrics to consider depending on the type of company.
What it feels like when you’ve found product-market fit
Stories from the founders of Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Substack, Stripe, Datadog, GitHub, Segment, Dropbox, Superhuman, Instacart, Nextdoor, and many more
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra walks us through the framework his startup used to make product/market fit more actionable, detailing the survey and four-step process that were key to measuring and optimizing it.
If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.
This blog by Paul Buchheit is about product design and discusses the importance of focusing on a few key features and making them great, rather than adding many features. Great products can be simple and don’t need to be everything to everyone.
Early Work
This article by Paul Graham argues that overcoming the fear of failure is essential for starting new projects.
Michael Seibel – Building Product
YC CEO Michael Seibel outlines how successful startups think about building something people want.
Michael Seibel – How to Plan an MVP
PMF – The only thing that matters
RAHUL VOHRA: Finding Product Market Fit (Deep Dive)
Your Face. Your Voice. Your Job. Who Owns It in an AI World?
Video Metrics & KPIs Building your Product
Sometimes, their unique approach can feel counter-intuitive. For example, what if I told you they are happy to turn away paying customers if it would distract them from their “high expectation customers”. Or their mandatory human onboarding where a Superhuman employee takes a new user through a 30-60mins call to get them setup, understand how they personally use email & customize their experience vs a more scalable online experience that would save money in the short term. Superhuman have turned paying customers into their biggest fans – on average, every new user of Superhuman brings in one new user down the road. In this episode, we go deep into the engine they’ve built, how they design their product using video game dynamics and learning how to listen to the right customers. Five Things To Listen Out For: (1) Building a product-market-fit engine – we discuss several product-market-fit definitions and the approach Rahul took to understand when they had hit this point (2) High Expectation Customer – what this is and why it’s important to find (3) Turning Email Into A Video Game – how to design products to make you feel a certain way by taking principles from video game design (4) Following Your Passion – is this misguided or good advice? (5) Preparing For A Recession – is this something Rahul is thinking about and how he thinks this might impact the business world
Supporting files
Speaker
Rahul Vohra is no novice to the startup world. He previously built and sold Rapportive to Linkedin before setting out to build “the fastest email ever made” for the power users who fell out of love with Gmail, Outlook, and others. You can’t argue with their results. Superhuman have 220k+ people on their waitlist, which costs $30/month and they’ve raised north of $50mil at a $260mil valuation from elite investors like First Round Capital & Andreessen Horowitz. But what stood out most to me while meeting Rahul was his focus on the long term. We discussed “building a company that can last for 100yrs” while convincing his co-founders to “do their life’s work” with him. At one point, Rahul described sitting in front of his computer in tears because he realized he hadn’t built what he had set out to.