At Superhuman, we build software like it as a game. Now, most software companies worry about what users want or what users need, But if you think about it, nobody needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. When you make a game, you don't worry about what users want or what they need. Instead, you obsess over how they feel. Because when your product is a game, people don't just use it. They play it, They find it fun, they tell their friends, they even fall in love with it.
And it turns out that game design is an altogether different kind of product development. I was professionally a game designer, and I've been actually designing games since I was a little kid, and I think that is the thing that separates my approach as a product person and Superhuman's approach as a company to building software.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics you use by the world's most accessiful people to get so much.
Out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba.
I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. Before we get to today's show, I just wanted to do a big shout out to all the wonderful people that have been leaving reviews for How I Work. It's just so lovely getting your feedback on the show and reading your reviews, So a huge thank you to those.
That have done that.
And if you haven't done that, but you're enjoying How I Work finding it useful in some way, I would love it if you could leave a star rating or a few words wherever you listen to this podcast. It's hugely appreciated and also is a great way of helping other people find out about How I Work. And also a reminder if you have a question that you would like me to answer. I am continuing to do a few listener question episodes and I'll be recording a few
more of those over summers. So if you've got a question on your mind around the world of work or productivity or something around those topics, drop me a note at Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au. All right, let's get on to today's episode. Now. If you're a regular listener of How I Work, you will know that I am in love with Superhuman, which is an email client, which basically means it's my way of accessing all of
my emails. So at Inventium we use a Gmail or the g suite of products for our email.
But with an email.
Client, you basically can get all your emails sent to different software and for me, I choose Superhuman. I've been a user for I think about eighteen months now.
I initially found.
Out about Superhuman through Tim Kendall, who was a guest on this show. He used to be the president of Pinterest and then is now CEO of Moment, which is an app that helps you spend less time on your phone and it's just awesome. It makes email a joy. So I was so keen to get Rahul Vora on the show because Rahul is the founder and CEO of Superhuman And in case you haven't heard of Superhuman, it
is literally the fastest email experience in the world. So according to Superhuman, users get through their inbox twice as fast and many see inbox zero for the first time in years. Previously, Rahul founded reportive, the first Gmail plug in to scale to millions of users, and Reportive was acquired by LinkedIn and I was also a big fan of Reportive. I love that plug in and found it
very very useful. So I was so excited to speak to Rahul, someone that has spent the life last few years really thinking a lot and I would say obsessing about email and productivity. And I got to say, this is one of my favorite interviews from this year. Rahul just has so many very very practical strategies in this interview.
He is so articulate and so thoughtful, and there are quite a few things in this interview that I had never come across before in terms of strategies, and certainly have really challenged and changed some of the ways I think about my work and approach the different tasks.
In my day.
So on that note, let's head to Rahul to hear about how he works.
Rahul, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me excited to be here.
Oh I am so excited that I was able to get you on the show as a guest because I am a massive, superhuman fan. I was going to say the biggest fan, but I just feel like there are so many fans out there I can't possibly claim that title. So Firsley, thank you for just creating such a wonderful email client that really does make email quite joyful.
You're so very welcome. Thank you for being such a happy user. Warms my heart to hear it.
Oh good, good.
Now, I feel like you obviously have spent years and years and years thinking about email, thinking about your own workflow for email, and I'd love to start there. So can you talk me through? I guess, firstly, what is your relationship with email? Given this is the thing that you focused on every day, and what like? In a more nitty gritty detail, I guess does your workflow look like for processing email?
Well, starting with my relationship with email, it really does go back quite some way back in the day. I founded a company that folks may remember called Reportive, which was the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users. We sold that to LinkedIn at a round two twenty twelve, then it became LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and the idea behind
reported was pretty simple. On the right hand side of Gmail, we showed you what people look like, where they work, their recent tweets, links to their social profiles, so we could help you establish connection, like a real personal connection with people much better in your email. And now, as you know, I'm the founder and CEO of Superhuman, where
we make the fastest email experience in the world. Most of our users end up getting through their inbox twice as fast as before, and many of them see inbox zero for the first time in years, which, as you can imagine, is pretty life changing. So my own personal workflow for email now, I get thousands of emails every single day. There are certain minutes in the day where I'm receiving north of five to seven emails in that minute, so you know, an email every ten to eleven seconds.
This is, therefore, something I've thought a lot about. Without specialized tooling like Superhuman, it would be impossible more than a full time job to stay on top of it. So there's a few different things. First of all, I almost never ever touch the mouse. We design Superhumans so that you can do everything from the keyboard. You can fly through your inbox purely by typing, and that's a rule that I abide by, not just inside Superhuman, by the way, but in almost every piece of software I use.
I go above and beyond to make sure I'm learning those keyboard shortcuts and becoming more efficient and more productive as a result. So that's step one. Step two is to make very liberal use of our split inbox feature. Do you yourself use the split inbox feature?
I sure do so.
In a nutshell, my workflow with email, everything comes into the inbox.
Then I've got and actually got.
This from Laura may Martin from Google who's their executive productive advisor. I took what she shed on the show, and so I've got my inbox where everything comes into. Then anything that needs to be actioned by me and doesn't rely on anyone else, I actually star them, so I hit the S shortcut and then that goes into
my to do list inbox. I've also got a read later inbox, and I loved when I was able to do that with Superhuman in terms of splitting my inbox into just labeling things read later, and then they go into that inbox.
And then I've got all.
My subscriptions and calendar invites and things that are sort of the non urgent not sent from an actual human to me inbox. I've got my four inboxes and that's my workflow. Like I'll batch process to do items, I'll batch process my inbox and try to clear it or get it to at least inbox five or six at the end of the day.
So that's in a nutshell.
What I do fantastic, really great to hear that usage of split in box. It's just one of those magical features where everybody has its set up differently and in a way that is optimal for them, so mine is very different. I have a split for GitHub. Obviously we're a technology company. The engineering team is the critical path to getting stuff done. So I want to be the best, most responsive CEO and founder that I can possibly be. If someone tags me on GitHub saying hey, what should
the copy be here? Or can you please review this piece of code or this piece of functionality, I want to be right there unblocking the team immediately. And as an entrepreneur that's important. The way that we act and react sets the bar of agility for the company. So I have a GitHub split. All mentions on GitHub come to me. Similarly, I also have a Google Docs split. We now are about sixty people inside of Superhuman. Roughly a third going on a little bit more are engineering.
The rest is across every single other function and I want to know whenever I am commented or addressed in a Google Doc, I want to be able to jump in and unblock as quickly as possible to speed up decision making inside a company. So I have a Google Doc split. I also have a staff and team split. This is an internal email split. This allows me to separate external conversation from internal conversation because we are now at the phase of company where internal conversation is the
stuff that needs to happen as rapidly as possible. Generally speaking, that's true for most organizations at around this size. It's a little bit different when you're smaller. It's also a little bit different when you're later. And then finally, I use the important other split. As you might know, this is an AI driven split to separate out person to person email correspondence from things like e commerce promotions and
other forms of automated email. Now, the cool thing about this set up splits is it gives me a structure that mirrors the structure of my day. So the first thing in the morning, I meant the getsub split, unblocking all the engineering team. Then I'm in the Google Doc split, unblocking everybody else. Then I deal with internal email, and then I get back to the outside world. And I
almost never ever go to the other splits. I think the only time is whenever I do when I've reset a password or something like that, and I know it's going to be sitting in there amongst the huge number of emails that I don't have to look at. So that's a triarche level. Things get split into the inboxes like.
This interesting And so basically you're going through the main inbox where everything's arriving, and then petitioning them off or filing them into the right split inbox, or have you got it set up that things will automatically land in the correct split the latter.
This is the magic of split inbox. I think if I were automatically filing, the benefits wouldn't be significantly greater over Gmail directly. But because all of these things automatically end up in their respective inboxes, it saves me significant amounts of time. Also, and this is the nuanced point. It saves me significant amounts of context switch overhead. And every engineer would be familiar with that term. Processes are designed to avoid context switch overhead. That's how today's processes
get so fast. And when you think about the human mind, it's an often bandeid about term, but the idea is the same. It takes us about twenty to twenty three minutes to recover from an interruption. Similarly takes us that
amount of time to recover from a context switch. If you imagine a typical inbox and you're going from an email with a candidate to an email where you're organizing the podcast, to an email where you're maybe talking to a potential investor, to an email where you're doing customer support, to an email where you're commenting on an internal management document, to an email where you're dealing with an engineering question. That is just so much context switch that to go
through my inbox linearly would be absurd. I wouldn't be able to get through it. And I think that's true for most knowledge workers today. We're all doing so many more different kinds of things than we were doing before that you need software to help you make sense of the chaos and to be able to split things up into different streams of work.
And so do you batch process your email then during the day, Like how often would you close superhuman?
For example?
Superhuman is constantly open for me. However I only do email in a batch twice a day, so I look at it first thing in the morning just to see if anything unusual has happened Over night. Is there anything that I need to jump on top of right away? I would say that's relatively rare. That's probably once a week where I have to sort of groggly send an email from bed, so to speak. Usually not a common occurrence. And then typically it's an hour in the morning and
about an hour or two in the evening. The email workload is greater at the beginning of the week, so mondays it will tend to be about two hours because there's all of the weekend to catch up on as well. I don't actually do my email on the weekend. That's a relatively unusual thing. I think most people do. So Monday is a little bit heavier, and then by the end of the week it's quite a bit lighter. And I do hit Inboxero every single day.
Wow, and no email on the weekend. Tell me about that.
I just believe that the weekends should be for rest and recuperation. And when you get thousands of emails every single day, like I said, I could if I wanted to spend my entire day doing email, and it's just not a sensible or a good use of time for me to do that. So I'll keep an eye on it. I do have notifications on my devices, and so I
see the emails come in. I am, of course, only getting notified on the important emails, and I'll jump on something that needs immediate attention, but that is increasingly rare.
I imagine that there would be a lot of listeners, like other CEOs senior leaders who I don't know if they're getting thousands of emails a day, but that'd be like, how are you limiting your time in your inbox to just two one hour blocks a day? Like what are you doing differently other than what we've already spoken about that is allowing you to do that?
Are there any.
Other kind of tricks or hacks or things that you're doing differently to the average person?
Quite probably. So there's really two different levels of this, or several. Actually. The first level is what I call the mechanical or the control level. And I said this before, I'll say it again because it's so important you have to stop touching them mouse. We don't even notice the slowdown that it causes because our brain is involved in the mechanical work of moving your elbow and your wrist and your fingers, and so the time therefore just seems to pass, but it really does add up over the
course of the day. I can place you human the same way I can play the piano, and that itself creates a ton of efficiency. The next level is of triage. When you're receiving not just thousands, even hundreds of emails a day, you can't feasibly get through every single one, and so you have to use something like split inbox to make sure that the emails that you do get to are actually the ones that matter the most. I don't, of course, look at the thousands of emails I get
every single day. I rely on splits like important other like team like Heurban Google docs to make sure I'm getting to the most important ones. And thereafter it's things like our snippets feature. So you probably know that you can create. These templates are sort of like canned responses, but on steroids. They're so much more powerful that automates
a lot of the repetitive aspects of email. So typically I'll get perhaps fifty emails a week from folks saying, Hey, I heard about superhuman on a podcast and i'd really love access. How do I you know or can you please introduce my friends to Superhuman? I really want them to have access, And so what I will do is I'll then use a snippet, and the snippet will simultaneously
do a whole bunch of different things. It will move the sender to BCC, will thank them for making the introduction, It will c see the right members of my team, it will becc our internal CRM, and it will type out a really nice email. And it can do all of that in two seconds. So you take a five minute activity, you make it a two second activity, and you can start to see how I can stay on top of an inbox that is receiving thousands of emails a day and still hit inbox zero every single day.
Yeah, I think that that's great, and I must say I love snippets. I realize so heavily on that feature. I want to come back to what you were saying about not using the mouse and just using keyboard shortcuts, and I feel like I'm maybe I'm halfway there with super Huge, and I'm just thinking I do use the
mouse actually to go between my split inboxes. But I guess a more general question like if someone is listening to this and going that makes so much sense, but it can be hard to remember keyboard shortcuts how well, like, what's the best way to approach that? How do you approach that when you're learning new software so that you can use it as efficiently as possible.
The good news is most software shares a common set of keyboard shortcuts, so once you start to develop the muscle memory, you can very intuitively learn shortcuts in any new app that you pick up. So I suspect that every listener listening to us on this podcast will know command see or control SEE, and command V or control VAS, copy and paste, and almost everyone will know command or
control b IU for bold, italic and underlying. And the reason we know these is because they work in basically every single context that you might want to use them in. That's also, fortunately, how other keyboard shortcuts work. So, for example, this this notion of changing splits where you're using the mouse. For example, if you were to just hit tab, you'd go over to the next split, and if you hit shift tab you go to the previous split. That is
actually a fairly common convention in software. This works on both Windows and Mac. Hitting tab will typically take you to the next control, the next thing that you can interact with on the screen, hitting shift tab will typically take you to the previous one. But this is a real problem. It's not easy, and I do realize that you know, there is effort involved when it comes to
learning and remembering these keyboard shortcuts. So we built this really cool thing called Superhuman Command, and in our onboardings we teach people that you really only have to remember one of them, and that is command K. You hit command K and pops this box. You then simply type
in the thing that you to do. You can even misspell it if you like, and it will not only give you the command for doing it right there and then so you just hit answer, it will also show you the keyboard shortcut for doing it the next time. So a really simple example, let's say you didn't know the shortcut to compose an email. Hit command K, type
in a few characters of the word composed. It could be let's say com and it will show you that the shortcut is C. So when you're doing it that first time, you can just hit entwer and you're composing an email, and the next time you can hit C and you'll be off to the races. You'll never actually have to look that one up again. So that's how most users learn the Superhuman shortcuts.
Now, you mentioned the onboarding process of Superhuman, which, when I think about all the software applications that I've used in my life, this was like an onboarding process that I've never experienced. I told so many people about it, and I've never experienced anything that amazing. Can you describe to listeners what does the onboarding process look like? And I'm assuming because I've been using Superhuman for I don't know, eighteen months now or something like that, I'm assuming that
it hasn't changed overly. But essentially, there was a human that onboarded me. And how you actually designed that process, which was just it was joyful.
Well, I'm so glad to hear that because that was the key thing that we were designing for joy or delights, And folks who know me know that in my previous life, I actually used to be a game designer. So we're bringing a lot of that idea behind game design into how we designed the Superhuman experience. We specifically design for
joy or delight, which we define as pleasant surprise. So instead of just leaving our customers with the product, which I think almost any other company would do, we provide this personalized one to one concierge onboarding experience to every new customer. Now, these happen with one of our wonderful onboarding specialists, who are not only experts in email, there
are also experts in productivity. So yes, they learn about you, they learn how you're doing your email now, and then they show you how to do it twice as fast. Inside of Superhuman. They'll show you command K Superhuman, command that thing that I just mentioned, so that you now have the tools to continue to teach yourself when the call is over.
I imagine just to give listeners a sense of how many users you've got, because some people might be listening and going, well, I've never heard of Superhuman, So that's fine when you've only got a handful of users, but how many users are you up to now?
Well, I can't share the user number directly because we are a venture backed company, but in the context of onboarding, I can share that we've done tens of thousands of onboardings like this. Every single one of them was one to one, every single one of them was a VIP white glove experience, and we just really care about that.
It's interesting because most founders. Most CEOs I've spoken to about this thought that it would be impossible, that we wouldn't figure out a way to make this scale unit economically, that at some point it just would all fall over and break. But I think we've been able to scale this far past the point where most people thought we'd have to stop.
I think it's amazing.
And I mean, for look, for any listeners that do put your name on the waiting list for Superhuman, I'm going to assume that there's still a long waiting list, am I am I right in saying.
That there is. There's over three hundred and fifty thousand people on the wait list. But for members of the community, folks listening to this, what I would say is if when you sign up, put the How I Work podcast in how did you find out about Superhuman, and we'll be able to bounce everyone in the community right to the top of the queue.
Amazing, amazing, That's that's very good news for listeners. Now, on the topic of batching, which we touched on before, I've also I heard that you batch your meetings. Can you talk about what that looks like and how exactly that looks in a typical week for you I do.
I not only batch meetings. Superhuman actually runs on what I call a staggered calendar. Most people run very inefficient calendars that one on ones are randomly dispersed throughout the week. Team meetings happen whenever anybody happens to be free, and there's relatively little time to focus and to do deep work. So here's how staggering works. If you run a team, do your team meeting on Wednesdays and stack all of
your one on ones on Tuesdays. If your reports run teams, ask them to do the same, but a day earlier, so they run their team meetings on Tuesdays and they stack all their one on ones on Mondays. And if your organization is big enough, you can push everything down one day if you have another level of management. Now, this staggering has a number of benefits. Number One, information
moves through the company very quickly and very efficiently. Problems are discussed one on one on Monday in specific departments with individual contributors on Tuesday, and if necessary, they can be resolved by leadership on Wednesday. It takes at most two days for information to travel that way. Number two, what I found is problems are usually solved along the way. For example, in your Wednesday leadership team meeting, you might hear, oh,
this problem came upon Monday. We discussed it as a department on Tuesday, and here's the solution we'd like to go with. And what you might find yourself doing is saying, well, that sounds good, great, thank you for letting me know. And number three, it leaves Monday, much of Wednesday, and all of Thursday and Friday free to do deep work, which is the stuff that only you can do and which requires your full concentration.
Do you have any rituals around deep work, around getting into flow?
What does that look like for you?
I would say that my best and possibly most unorthodox ritual is the switch log. And I came to the switch log by asking the question do you know how you spend your time? Now? Most people think they know, but they don't really. Yes, you have a calendar, but calendars are poor reflections of reality. Urgent tasks require our attention, important work, they not even be on our calendars. And
as the saying goes, you change what you measure. So my question morphed from do you know how you spend your time to a more simple one, which is how do we measure time? And this is the switchlog. It's a surprisingly simple and super effective Tech League Number one log when you start a task, number two log when you switch a task, and number three log when you take a break. And here's the crazy part after that, do whatever you want, and I really do mean it.
Turn up for your meetings, obviously, but otherwise follow your intuition and do what seems important. So I then start to log my time at Slack. Every time I start a task or change a task, I will send a little message to a channel in Slack. You can do this with a private channel, or you can send it to another person to have them help you analyze it later if you want to do that. And they're simple
things like and that. They typically start with a TS, which in my parlance stands for tasks, which so it will be something like ts colon calendar design review if I'm doing some product work, or ts colon email if I'm doing email, or ts cole on Twitter if I'm doing community work on Twitter, or ts colon arr goal if I'm doing revenue management goal setting. Now you might think this sounds very error prone. What happens if you do a different task, or you've get to log a task,
or you switch. Very easy. If I log one task and I instead do another, it's usually obvious to me about five or ten minutes in that I'm doing a different thing to the thing I said it was going to be doing. That's very easy. I just go back to Slack and I edit the message. If I forget to log a task, that's also okay too. I just log it when I notice it, with the time built into the message. So instead of saying ts colon meditation, I might say five point thirty colon meditation because I
started it at five thirty. And sometimes I start one to ask and this is the final issue that most people have, switch to another for five minutes and then switch back, and that's okay. I'm logging these things or almost like a lawyer, if you will, in increments of minutes. It's actually even more granular than what a lawyer would do. And whatever happens, the key thing is, do not worry about updating your calendar. You can analyze all of this data.
Post hoc, and so what does that analysis look like?
And just to be clearly, are you doing the log every single day or are you just doing it for periods of time to get greater self awareness and change your behavior.
Accordingly, I do personally do the log every single day because I'm very lucky, very fortunate to work with a really amazing EA who can help me analyze it on a weekly basis. If you don't have that resource, this is something that you might want to do perhaps twice a year, once in January, once again at the halfway point of the year. The analysis itself is relatively simple. You take all of your tasks, you then categorize them.
So my categories include product design, recruiting, PR management, leadership, email, and meditation. And then you just chart the time spent in each category. And I'm thinking of an example of a week I had earlier this year where I actually only spent four percent If I recall correctly of my time on recruiting and are whopping twenty two percent on public relations work, you can then start to compare this
with rules of thumb and your ideal week. For example, I know that as the CEO of a Series B venture backed company, I should be spending roughly thirty percent of my time on recruiting my own personal effort on doing pr work is probably less important than hiring someone who can do that better than I could, And so I immediately found an actionable insight after the week where that was the case.
I love that example. That's fantastic.
I'll occasionally have guests on the show that do track their time. I don't think I've met anyone that does it every day, but hearing you talk about it is inspiring me to actually go through a bit of a time treking phase. Now I want to come back to meetings because I know that you've got a specific process that you use to run meetings at Superhuman. Can you describe what that is?
Absolutely? Most teams run very inefficient meetings where certain is shoes are discussed to the exclusion of others, and this is doubly dangerous. Not only do you spend too much time talking about these issues, other important problems become very starved of attention and can often go for weeks at a time without anyone actually paying attention to them. So we use the decision making process outlined in a really great book. I believe this is available for free online.
It's called The Great CEO Within by Matt Mercury. He's a well known CEO and executive coach here in Silicon Valley. Now the process has three key ingredients that make it so effective. We've also tweaked it a bit to make it our own, so I will describe our version of it. Number one, if somebody wants to bring something up in the team meeting, they must write it down beforehand and share it with the team by six pm on the
day before. And the idea is we should avoid talking about things that were not written down, as we can read much faster than we can speak. And if you're spending your team meeting just communicating your idea or then that's obviously inefficient because you could have written it down and folks could have read it beforehand. Number two, if somebody wants to speak about something in the team meeting, they must have read and commented on the documents beforehand.
Why this is a pure issue of respect. We should avoid commenting on things where we did not invest the time to get up to speed, as it needlessly wastes the time of those who did. So. It's not enough for someone just to write a document saying, hey, this is the thing that I think we should do. This is the problem. This is the solution, and only half
the team read it. If that's the case, and sometimes it is the case because certain weeks are busy in others, then the half of the team that didn't read it are not party to that decision. They're not party to that discussion. This keeps things moving very quickly. Number three.
If something is discussed in the team meeting is discussed for at most five minutes, and if consensus is not reached within five minutes, then the conversation stops and the decision maker is identified, and we use the Jeff Bezos rule of thumb to identify the decision maker fairly simple. For reversible decisions, the decision maker is anyone other than myself. You shouldn't have the CEO making reversible decisions. For non reversible decisions, then the decision maker should be me and
we use a frameworker responsibility matrix. We happen to use Bane and Koe's rapid framework to assign any roles in the decision making process. And after the meeting, the decision maker will gather all the required information, and this part's key. They make the decision before the next team meeting, and this avoids you know, that phenomenon of just kicking the can down the road for especially hard decisions and not actually making them. And we found that by doing all
of these everyone is always up to speed. Each item takes at most five minutes, and in one hour you can get through ten items with tons of room for fun and banter along the way.
I love that approach and just how well thought through it is. Can I ask how meetings external meetings work for you, because I imagine that inefficiencies would drive you crazy. But you know, people that are not within the organization probably have different approaches to meetings and how they like them to run. Do you bring that approach to external meetings that you're having or are you kind of happy to be more of a chameleon? I guess in that sense.
Not really, because I think external and internal meetings have very different purposes. So I am talking specifically about a team meeting where you're trying to take a set of high quality decisions as efficiently and as effectively as possible. I don't think that has ever been the case for me for an external meeting. It's very very rare. Journal meetings are some kind of sales or emotional process. It's
actually the entirely opposite goal. You're not trying to get through a high number of decisions in a very high quality fashion. You're trying to be persuasive or to create some kind of outcome, like this person wants to work for my company, or they want to invest in my company, or we're going to have this partnership, or we're going
to do this initiative together. So that's a wholly separate process where and we can talk about this if you like, but it's much more about understanding the other person, what their goals are, what the motivation is. It's about active listening, and by that I mean, you know, not saying ahar all the time, but really truly actively listening, responding to the points that are made, and just progressively working towards your goal.
Well, yeah, I would like to delve into the topic of persuasion. I read when I was researching for this interview that Jonathan Siegel was very influentially in teaching you about how to create great pitches. And I imagine with your background, you've done a lot of pitching. So what is now your approach to pitching ideas and even more broadly, trying to persuade someone as to the merit of what it is that you're doing or what you're selling, so to speak.
Here's the thing about Jonathan Siegel. And there was one other person very similar to Jonathan who I knew a decade earlier, Seamus Hashier. He was a friend back from university. They taught me so much of what I know about pitching today. The thing that sets them apart from others is they are incredibly fast talkers, they're incredibly fast thinkers, and they're also supremely confident. Now this does not mean that you should talk incredibly quickly or be supremely confident.
What it means is you can lean into that skill set or develop that skill set if you don't have those things today, and by hearing them pitch countless times would shameless. I was in an entrepreneurship club, so I heard him pitch gosh, I don't know, hundreds of different business ideas. And with Jonathan Siegel, he was a mentor an advisor to my last company. I had him pitch my own company to me, way better than I was pitching it to other people. I began to see that
it was practice and confidence. Now in order to make this actionable. What I have is a very simple three step process that I think you can apply to any pitch. It doesn't even have to be a venture pitch. Number one, what is the problem that you're trying to solve and convey not just what the problem is, but also how painful it is, and really make it a motive, Really help the audience connect with that pain and how many people feel that pain? Number two, what is the solution
that you have in mind? What is the solution that you've built if it already exists? And number three, and this really only applies if you're raising venture investment, how does this become a billion dollar opportunity. I'm also a very active angel investor, and this third point is actually
where most founders fall short. Many times I end up passing on great founders with great businesses because I was not able to get to conviction that the business could support a huge I a multi billion dollar outcome.
That's a good process, And yeah, I feel like where I think where a lot of great pictures fall down is that the lead with the idea or they won't build up enough pain in the problem that people are experiencing, which I think is a really valuable thing to remember.
Now you're immersed in the world of technology and software, I'm curious, aside from Superhuman, what are your favorite apps or pieces of software for being more productive and organized and sailing through the day more easily and effectively.
Yeah, well, of course my favorite is Superhuman. I wouldn't be able to do my job with outis. Apart from that, I use Trello for my work tasks. This is after trying every single task management app that exists, and I try every new on when it comes out. I still find as old school as it is that Trello is a good balance between simplicity. It doesn't have a complex
mental model or a complex information hierarchy, and collaboration. I can share my personal board with my EA, I can interact on boards of other people in the company who also use Trillo, other groups in the company, and it has just the right level of customizability for my needs. Now. I know that some people will need more complex project management solutions. They might use it to doist or an asana, But for me, Trello is great for my work tasks. I do try and keep my personal errands and my
administration out of Trello. I find that it's just helpful to not be distracted, for example, about paying your taxes when in the middle of the workday. So I actually use Apple reminders for personal errands and for administration. For example, this morning, I got my yearly reminder to pay my exorbitant San Francisco property tax, so I should get on that before it starts accruing interest. Why do I use Apple reminders, Well, I can't really see myself abandoning the
Apple ecosystem in the next few years. I was a die hard Windows fanboy growing up, switched over to Apple about ten years ago. Haven't looked back since. I think I'll be with the Apple ecosystem for the next ten years. And I want my long term reminders, things like I need to get my car smog checked three years from now, or I need to pay my property tax November every
single year. I want those reminders to be in the operating system itself, and not in a tool like Trello, where if something good enough came along that was different to Trello, I would happily jump ship. And so for me that being in the operating system is very important. So between superhuman Trello and Apple re mind I sail through my day significantly faster than otherwise.
Now, you mentioned that you will try new software where it comes out, and you'll compare that to what you're currently using. What is your approach to trying new software? Because I feel like this is something that a lot of people do but maybe don't do it as well as they could.
So what does that look like for you?
I think it really depends on what your goals trying the new software are. So I am, actually this may come as a surprise. Not an early adopter. I don't try things simply because they're new, you know. I'm not the kind of person that, for example, might hang out in product hunts on a daily basis and sort of
scan through and pick out the new things. If you are an early adopt, if you are excited about trying all the new stuff, then of course communities like product hunts and specific subreddits will be a great place to go and do discovery. For these tools, I tend to rely on social network and social signal. I'm very active
on Twitter. By the way, my dms are open. If listeners want to get in touch, feel free to send me a DM, and good tools will once they've maintained or rather obtained a little bit of social momentum, they'll become very clear on Twitter. And that's usually a triggering point for me. If that doesn't trigger me, then sometime after that someone will almost certainly tell me, Hey, you
have to try this thing out. It's really cool. I think you'll love it, And that for me is usually the trigger when I give a new tool.
A go on Twitter.
Are there specific people that you follow that you find really great at highlighting new things that you might want to be giving a go to.
So, like I mentioned, I'm actually a partner in a small angel fund. So my partner in this is Todd Goldberg. I would highly recommend that folks follow myself and him. Todd runs the fund day to day. I obviously run superhuman day to day. I put an hour or two a week into the fund, helping us assas companies and working with the founders that we've invested in. And I find that Todd has this incredible nose for finding really
amazing experiences very early. And we are actually working on We're not quite sure the format it will take right now. We're thinking maybe we'll go all school with this. I and email list we're working on an email list for product curation, so stay tuned. I would say, watch this space, follow myself and Todd on Twitter, and we'll be going live with that project over the course of the next quarter or so.
Amazing. I'm very excited about that.
And are there any new or soon to be released apps that you are feeling excited about? Obviously, with the caveat that you're not a self described earlier adopter.
Absolutely so. My favorite new tool is descript or descript not entirely sure how you say it. It's an incredible piece of audio and video editing software from Andrew Mason, who folks may remember as the founder of group on Now. The amazing thing about descript is that it works like
a doc. So you record your podcast or your video and then imagine instantly seeing a Google doc like transcription of what was said, and like in the Google Top, you can select a piece of text, you can comments, you can collaborate super easily with anyone else on your team. But here's where it gets mind blowing. You can also select that same piece of text, hit delete and it
will magically remove that piece of audio or video. You can automatically remove all filler words like and R. You can even type in what you wish you would have said and it will generate the audio in your voice as if you would have said it. And they call that last feature overdub. So if you produce audio or video, I highly recommend checking the script out. It's totally game changing.
Yes, I couldn't agree more. Played around with it a bit, and it's super fun.
Now.
One thing, I found this great quote about you on LinkedIn. I think it was in your LinkedIn profile at one of the recommendations that you've got, and this person said, Rahool could design products with his eyes closed and the result would still be more desirable, forward looking, and dramatic than anything from a typical product person. And I read that and I mean that completely aligns with my experience
of Superhuman. But what is it that you do differently in how you approach the work that you do that makes.
You different from a typical product person.
Superhuman? Rebuild software like it as a game. Now, most software companies worry about what users want or what users need, But if you think about it, nobody needs a game to exist. There are no requirements. When you make a game, you don't worry about what users want or what they need. Instead, you obsess over how they feel. Because when your product is a game, people don't just use it. They play it, they find it fun, they tell their friends, they even
fall in love with it. And it turns out that game design is an altogether different kind of product development. I was professionally a game designer, and I've been actually designing games since I was a little kid. And I think that is the thing that separates my approach as a product person and Superhumans approach as a company to building software.
That's fascinating.
And you know, I think about listeners who are not designing software for a living but are doing other things, and I just think, you know, look, that's that's a great philosophy for whatever it is, like, whatever experiences you
are creating in the line of work that you do. Look, my final question for you, and you've kindly suggested that people can send you a DM on Twitter, like, what is the best way for people to find out more about you, interact with you in some way and use Superhuman and maybe.
Will have it.
Just that's a reminder of what people should put in where they should email their request to join the waiting list. How do they do that and what they need to put in the subject line to jump that very long waiting list.
For sure. So I love interacting with folks in the community. It brings me great joy. I'm very very easy to get a hold of. You can either email me Rajol that's my first name, r Ahul at superhuman dot com, or send me a Twitter direct message. My dms are open for folks who are interested in getting access to Superhuman. I would obviously recommend doing that, especially if your job
revolves around email. If you're the kind of person who's in email for hours a day, as many of us are, this is something that can just help move help you move through your inbox so much faster, especially if you've had aspirations of hitting inbox zero. Just sign up and in the section where it says how did you hear
about Superhuman? Enter the How I Work podcast. We do have a waiting list of north three hundred and fifty thousand people, but if you enter this podcast into that box, we will jump you to the front of the line and get onboarding you as rapidly as we can.
Awesome, awesome, and listeners, just do it. Superhuman. It is just bloody awesome, Rul.
It's just been such a joy chatting to you and hearing how you work and how you think.
You know really deeply and practically about all these things. So thank you so much for your time.
Thank you remember hello there.
That is it for today's show.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Rahul as much as I loved.
Doing this interview.
And if you know someone that you think could benefit from what Rhul had to say, why not share this episode with them? Just simply go into your podcast app and click the little share icon, which is generally a little box with an arrow pointing upwards. I believe, and and you can share that with someone else that you think could benefit. And if you are not a Superhuman user, gosh, I wish I had shares in the company, but I
don't take Rhul up on his office. So go to superhuman dot com, put your name on the waiting list mention the How I Work podcast and you will bypass those three hundred and fifty thousand people that are on the waiting list for Superhuman. I guarantee you you will love it. Okay, that is it for today's show. I will see you next time.