 All right, welcome. I'm Henri Mäkivirta, head of Schloss's year-round product node by Schloss. I'm honored to moderate this session with the absolute superstar Rahul Voora, the co-founder and CEO of Superhuman. Building a strong brand is crucial for attracting customers and setting your company for long-term success. But for early-stage startups with limited resources, the many choices can be overwhelming. Among options like community building, performance marketing, PR, the key question remains, which ones are the right for your business? Enter Superhuman, an email app adored to the point of being labeled evangelical. When you get an email signed with Centvia Superhuman, you know that this person is serious about their email game. It's a signal for speed and productivity. In our fireside chat, Rahul will share hands-on advice and best practices for you to shape a compelling brand identity for your startup. Within the hearts and minds of your customers is no small feat. But to hear, to help you with the journey, we have Rahul Voora. Let's jump into it. Why is building a brand important? And why is this something that founders in their very early stage should worry about? Building a brand is one of the most important things a founder can do. And that is because it is critical to growth. Now, that may seem odd when we talk about growth. We normally talk about things like content marketing, virality, SEO. We don't usually think about brand. But it is actually brand that powers all of those things. And I learned this firsthand after selling my last company to LinkedIn. I got to report to our head of growth who scaled LinkedIn from 20 million members to north of 250 million members. And I vividly remember my first one-on-one with him. I sat down and I said, Hey, can you tell me everything there is to know about virality? And he said, Rahul, virality doesn't exist. And I said, well, what about Facebook? What about Instagram, Twitter, even LinkedIn? And he said, well, the best viral features have a viral factor of around 0.2. Even at LinkedIn, our address book import had a viral factor of 0.4. Even Facebook had a viral factor of at most 0.7, and that was for less than a year. And so confused, I asked. Well, how did these companies reach scale? And he said, every consumer internet company that has reached a massive scale has done so based on word of mouth. It is the virality you can't see. It is brand. And as a startup, how do you build a brand? Well, it can be tempting to jump into names and fonts and logos and colors and so on. And those things are important. But you shouldn't start there. You should start with the foundation. And for me, the foundation boils down to three things. Number one, your ideal. Number two, your positioning. And number three, your brand attributes. Once you have those three, you can then jump into the other things. If we double click on those, so your ideal, your positioning and your brand attribute starting with your ideal, how do you define your ideal for the startup? So your ideal is not your slogan. It isn't your tagline. What it is is a short and memorable phrase that describes how your product or company makes the world a better place. And Agilvi, one of the most acclaimed ad agencies in the world, actually has a formula to help you figure this out. So your ideal is going to boil down to the intersection of two things. Number one, some kind of cultural tension. And number two, your product or your company at its best. So let's take the personal care brand Dove. In 2004, Dove found that only 4% of women consider themselves to be beautiful. And so the critical tension here is anxiety around appearance in an age where almost every image is digitally altered. And their solution is a real genuine to soap that actually provides real care. And so putting it together, you can see the ideal. Dove believes that the world would be a better place if women could feel great about their appearance. So to take my own company as an example, Superhuman, we make the fastest email experience in the world. And there's roughly a billion professionals in the world, and on average we spend three hours a day reading and writing email. That's three billion hours every single day or north of a trillion hours every single year. The cultural tension here is that workplace communication is very stressful and takes way too much time. And Superhuman at its best is software that helps you realize your potential. So putting those two things together, our ideal is that we believe the world would be a better place if professionals could end every day feeling happier, more productive, and closer to achieving their potential. Now people often wonder how long an ideal should last. How durable should it be? You should aim for about ten years. In other words, if the ideal would still seem worthy ten years from now, you've got it at the right level. All right, so we got the ideal from the example with Dom. How do you figure out the positioning? So when we were figuring out our positioning, we actually worked with Ariel Jackson, who was one of the first product marketing managers who launched Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, many of the great products, and she has this great article positioning your startup as vital here's how to nail it. In that article she advises that you use a formula. It goes something like this. For your target market who has a particular need, your product has this benefit, and unlike competing alternatives, your product has this key differentiation. In the article she gives an example of Harley Davidson. So the example is for macho guys and macho wannabes who live in an era of decreasing personal freedom and who want to join a gang of cowboys, Harley Davidson is the only motorcycle manufacturer that makes big, loud motorcycles. It's a great example. So we met up with Ariel, who is amazing by the way. We did some further reading, especially the book positioning the battle for your mind was very useful, and we started to ask ourselves these questions. Are we the Ford of email? No. Are we the Mercedes of email? Well, kind of. Are we the Tesla of email? Well now we're guessing there. And with that in 2015, we came up with our first position. And it goes like this. For founders and CEOs of high growth technology companies who feel like their work is mostly email, superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. Unlike Gmail, superhuman is meticulously crafted and everything happens in 100 milliseconds or less. You might be thinking, that is ridiculously niche. We're talking founders and CEOs of high tech companies and even then only those that use Gmail. Isn't that market tiny? And the answer is, of course, yes. But you want your position to start narrow so you can speak directly to the people for whom your product is best for. Then as you expand the market, you can widen your position over time. Today our position would be more like this. For high performing professionals on high performing teams, superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. They respond faster to what matters most and save hours every single week. Superhuman is what Gmail and Outlook could be if they were built today instead of decades ago. So that's our position today. All right. So we got the idea with an example with Dao and an example with Tesla. We figured out the positioning. How do you figure out the brand attributes? So again, it can be tempting at this point now that you have the ideal and the positioning to jump into what is the company name, what are our fonts and so on, but don't do that. Instead, try and come up with five words that describe your brand. These are your brand attributes and I've come across three ways to do this super effectively. Number one is emotions. How should your brand make people feel? And personally, I like to use an emotion wheel to do this so you avoid the obvious emotions. And in my opinion, the best emotion wheel is by the Hunter Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. They have over a hundred nuanced emotions that you can pick from. The second way is personality. If you were to meet your brand at a party, what would their personality be like? It can be helpful to think of a well-known celebrity and try and describe them. And then the third way is empty spaces. In your category of product, your industry, what is an attribute that isn't used? Because those things will be more memorable and therefore more powerful. So in 2015, we ran this exercise for Superhuman and we came up with the following five brand attributes. Number one, Zen. Superhuman should feel minimal and calm. Number two, elegant. It should feel thoughtfully designed. Number three, premium. It should feel like you're using a really well-made product. Number four, powerful. You should feel like Superhuman gives you superpowers and number five, exclusive. Using Superhuman should feel special because not everybody has it. Superhuman will last for 10 years, but your positioning should last around 18 months, so too should your brand attributes. And over time, as we've expanded our market, we've had to redefine our brand attributes. Exclusive is no longer helpful. We're now many years on from that. So recently we revisited these and we came up with the following four. Number one, remarkable. Superhuman should be striking, worthy of attention and literally cause conversation. Number two, delightful. Superhuman should elicit nuanced emotion across joy, love and surprise. Number three, still powerful. Superhuman should still feel like it gives you superpowers and number four, avant garde. Superhuman shouldn't follow trends. It should set trends. So those are our four today. All right. You were talking about this wheel. How can people find the wheel? What was the name of the wheel? The Hunter Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. So that's JUNTO. If you Google that, you will easily find the wheel. And then there's a separate talk I've done with A16Z which is how to build software like it's a game. I actually walk through using the emotional wheel in quite some detail. All right. So we now have the ideal, the positioning and the brand attributes. Is this where you came up with the name? How did you came up with the name Superhuman for Superhuman? Yes, absolutely. So this is the best point to come up with your name. And you basically have two choices. You can either pick a name that has relevance to your position and your brand attributes. Or you can pick a name that maybe it has some other meaning but it doesn't yet have any relevance to those two things. We chose path number one. Although Superhuman doesn't speak to email or productivity, it does resonate a lot with the position and the brand attributes that I just outlined. Now once you have a name, you want to consider it through multiple lenses. The first lens is, well, how easy is it to spell? Superhuman is obviously very easy to spell. The second lens is what does the name look like, especially when somebody new to the brand will first see it. Now for Superhuman, that's usually our sent via Superhuman viral signature. And that was top of mind for me when picking the name. Sent via Superhuman sounds intriguing, exciting, aspirational. You're much more likely to click that than something boring like sent with mail. So you have how easy is it to spell? You have how does it look like when it's first seen? Then of course, is the domain name available? Is the trademark available? And what about the social handles? And for us, that was much trickier. The domain was not available and neither were most of the social handles. Yeah, I could imagine that if the domain name is not available and it's super something, superwoman, superman, superhuman. How did you acquire the domain if it was not available? Well, it was tough. And like I said, it wasn't available. And actually even worse, it was owned by a professional domain squatter. But the good news is that it wasn't actually in use for anything at the time. So I felt like I had a fighting chance. Now if you're trying to buy a premium domain like that, the most important thing is that you do not reach out as yourself. Instead, find a domain broker and find a very good one. If you don't have a good one, ask your founder friends until you get an intro to a good one. Now what a good domain broker will do is they'll figure out who the owner is, they'll look at their recent transactions, they'll see if they have friends in common and if necessary, they'll create fake personas so that it isn't obviously you or them trying to buy the domain. This may sound crazy, but buying a premium domain is pretty brutal. Superhuman ended up costing us around $175,000. And that may seem like a huge amount, and it was because at the time I'd only raised $750,000 for the company. So this was more than 20% of all the money we had and actually the very first dollars I spent from the company. That sounds like insane. It certainly was a decision, but I was very confident in the decision because I knew how important a great brand would be to at the time investors and then eventually customers and then eventually as we were scaling the company future employees. So we negotiated the deal and best of all I found a way to make it feel nearly free. See it turns out the owner didn't want upfront cash. What they wanted was cash flow. So we ended up negotiating a seven year zero interest at least to own deal, which is roughly if you do the math, about $1,700 per month. Two years later we raised a full seed round and then a year after that we raised our series A. So it ended up feeling nearly free. And what was the story behind your social handles? Were they available? How did you acquire them? Well they were all almost unavailable. Obviously we wanted superhuman as our handle, but that wasn't available, so we chose superhuman co as in the superhuman company on almost every platform we could. It's not fantastic, but it got us off the ground. We then went back to our position and we asked, well, we're trying to get to founders and CEOs of high tech companies where are they? They're obviously all on Twitter, that's the best place to be. And at the time Twitter had a policy where if the username had not logged in for a long period of time and also if you had the trademark you could file a claim. And so we started the long process of getting the superhuman trademark. A few years later we had it, we filed the claim, but it turns out that wasn't enough. It didn't automatically happen. We then had to network our way into Twitter, find our way to the chief technology officer who fortunately happens to be an avid user of superhuman. He then pulls some strings internally and we were able to get the superhuman Twitter handle. But from start to finish, that was a three to four year journey. So you put a lot of effort into the domains and the handles. I guess when there's a superlative and a word super, it needs to be spot on. That's right. All right, moving on to the content side of branding. Superhuman is well known for the product market fit engine. How does building a brand relate to finding a product market fit? Well, you have to do these things at the same time. I often hear founders say, well, I want to focus on product first or I want to get to products market fit first, then I'll worry about the brand. That's actually a bad idea for four reasons. First of all, if you have a strong brand, that can actually help you with products market fit. It can put you in front of the right people in the right market. Second, if you have a weak brand, then it can become a blind spot. Let's say you pick a company name that isn't great, it's just fine. Well, over time, because you're seeing it every single day, you'll forget that it's not great and just fine. And then eventually, you may even become attached to this not great company name. The third thing is, brand assets actually become more expensive over time. Let's say I wanted to buy superhuman.com today. Could I buy it for $175,000? Absolutely not. Because there exists a company, Superhuman, that is well known and has publicly raised over $100 million. Even if I could convince the owner that I wasn't affiliated with the company, the very fact that the company exists massively increases the price. And then number four, actually searching for products market fits can help inform the brand. We're not here today to talk about products market fits, but as a founder, it's one of the most important things that we need to do, and if this is something that you're doing, check out the superhuman products market fit engine, because it gives you an algorithm, a way to define products market fits, a metric to measure it, and a methodology to increase it. Now as part of this algorithm, you end up surveying your users and you ask the question, who do you think this product is best for? And here's the magic. It turns out happy customers will always describe themselves using the words that matter most to them. You can then turn those words into your position and into your brand attributes. So it turns out to be a very cyclical thing. In other words, do your brand early and do it well. All right, so we've now defined the brand. How do you actually grow it? Well, you grow the brand the same way you grow a company. Pick three, four, maybe five channels that you can do well and which compound on one another. And the best book, by the way, that I've found on this topic is Traction by Gabrielle Weinberg and Justin Mez. In Traction, they define over 23 different channels for you to consider. At the start of Superhuman, we all read this book and we wrote down every idea we had per channel and we scored each channel based on confidence and cost. That's how we got to our first four channels, which were press, influencers, thought leadership and virality. And once we knew what the channels were, we spent roughly half of our time working on the products and then the other half of our time on the channels themselves. All right, so press, thought leadership, influencers and virality. How did you approach press? Well, I get asked this question all the time. How can a startup with few resources achieve press? Well, the answer is very simple. Inject yourself into the news cycle. Eventually, something interesting will happen in your space. Attach yourself to it. For us, this first happened in 2016. Mailbox had acquired, sorry, Dropbox had acquired Mailbox, an email app for $100 million and then shut it down a short while later. In the meantime, I'd sold my last company to LinkedIn, also an email company, and it survived the acquisition by 10 years. So I felt very qualified to write an article on how to make that kind of an acquisition successful. I wrote the article, we syndicated it to qz.com and a top medium publication, and that drove the first tens of thousands of visitors to our site, which gave us the first several thousand signups. Was that like a one-hit wonder, or did you do multiple injections to the news cycle? Was there like a PR agency involved in this, or how did you go about it? There was no PR agency involved in this. I think we were perhaps five people. And yep, that was a one-hit wonder for that particular news cycle. But there are always going to be news cycles. I did the same thing with, for example, when COVID hit and we were heading into a very sharp recession. I wrote an article for Angel List on how to run your startup during a recession. Now, when it comes to PR agencies, it took us a while to hire one. We didn't hire one until after our series B because we decided that media broadcast, i.e. television, was going to be a key part of what we were doing. That's when you should hire a PR agency. And with that, we got onto CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, and a few other media channels. But since then, it's no longer an important part of our media strategy, and so now we don't have a PR agency. Instead, we have a single in-house head of communications who runs all of our communication strategy. All right. Then you mentioned thought leadership. How should you approach this? And if the founder doesn't want to do the thought leadership, how should the startup approach this? How do you approach thought leadership? Well, if you don't want to do it, I don't know what to tell you, it's one of the easiest things you can possibly do. I'll give you our example. In our case, we wanted to create something that every single founder and every single CEO and actually even beyond that, most people in technology should be aware of and ideally it's required reading. So I thought, well, what if I could push the state of the art on product market fit? It's something every single startup has to figure out and actually there's not that much that's been written about it. So I set out to write the best article I possibly could and it turned out way more effective than I ever thought it would. This article, the Superhuman Products Market Fit Engine, is now the most shared article on first round review and it is the default way that founders measure and improve products market fit. So simply ask yourself, what is your equivalent of that article? What is required reading for your ideal target market? All right. If you'd have to pick either like influencers or like trying to win the lottery on virality, like which one would you go for and how would you approach that? So influencers takes an incredible amount of work but for a brand like Superhuman, it's immensely powerful. We wanted to win the hearts of minds of Silicon Valley and our belief was if we could identify influential entrepreneurs and thought leaders and then one-on-one onboard them onto Superhuman, not only are they more likely to love the product but they'll help spread the word and it turns out that it was remarkably effective, it absolutely worked and for that reason we extended the one-on-one onboarding to almost everyone, whether you were influential or not. However, if I were to choose, I would choose virality even though the two synergize really well and the reason is virality is one of the few channels that is scalable. Unlike influencer marketing where you're putting in the time or performance marketing where you're paying dollars, virality actually works for free. Now the caveat is not every product is a good fit for virality. Superhuman is the perfect fit because we make a communication product. Almost all of our users corresponds with hundreds, if not thousands of other people and they send out emails that often include the viral signature sent via Superhuman and that is still shockingly effective. It ruins the number one driver of traffic to our website and is responsible for north of 40% of all of our site visits. That's a great topic to go deeper into after the Q&A, after the session. Final question. What would be the one thing that you would like the audience to remember from this chat? If I could pick one thing for everyone here to remember, I would say it's this. Remember that conversation I had with my boss, the head of growth at LinkedIn. This is now 10 years ago. Word of mouth. Every consumer app or company that has ever reached massive internet scale got there off the back of word of mouth. It's the virality that you cannot see. It is ultimately a brand. Word of mouth. Thank you so much Rahola. It's been amazing. Thank you.