[00:00:00] Gaurav Vohra: You do need to be thinking about like two, three, four years from now, once you've kind of hit your ceiling, what comes next? Do you start selling to teams? Do you sort of build a second product? Do you charge more per user through some like usage based pricing? What is it?

[00:00:00] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:32] VO: How do you build a habit forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative churn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely bootstrapped, profitable and growing.

[00:00:46] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:00:56] Andrew Michael: Hey, Gaurav, welcome to the show.

[00:00:59] Gaurav Vohra: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[00:01:02] Andrew Michael: It's great to have you. For the listeners, Gaurav is the head of product growth at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made. Gaurav is also an advisor to several startups. And prior to Superhuman, Gaurav was a Labs Associate at Oliver Wyman. So my first question for you, Gaurav, is what does a Labs Associate do at Oliver Wyman?

[00:01:22] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, that's one of those job titles that doesn't mean anything to anyone, isn't it? So if you're in the management consulting world, you may know what the career progression there looks like. It looks like analyst, consultant, associate, engagement manager, and then usually partner, or maybe principal and partner. But in non-consulting words, it's a senior manager, essentially. It's someone who manages projects, has been around maybe four or five years in consulting. That's associate.

[00:01:53] Gaurav Vohra: And then it's confusing because when you join a law firm or many other places, associate is like tier one, like, new college grad. Exactly. So I only realized that about four years ago. I'm like, why does consulting call this associate? Anyway, and then Labs was this part of Oliver Wyman that was, so Oliver Wyman is a management consulting firm. We specialize in sort of strategy consulting for big companies that have big problems.

[00:02:18] Gaurav Vohra: And around about 2010 or so, the company realized it was quite an early adopter really. It realized that it wasn't cutting edge just to deliver strategy anymore. You actually had to do something with that strategy as the consulting firm. So they started delivering software on top of the strategy. And it was this really cool thing. You'd spend six weeks building the strategy and then you spend six months building the software.

[00:02:41] Gaurav Vohra: I found my way into the technical team in Oliver Wyman. I was actually a builder of software, creating the data backends, creating the front ends, working with engineers or even being the engineer myself. And digital or technical team inside of Oliver Wyman was called Labs. It was actually called like a bunch of other things at different points in time, but when I was there, it was called Labs. So, Labs Associate is like, I was an associate level person within the Labs kind of division.

[00:03:07] Andrew Michael: Nice. And then very next thing you did after that was join your brother as part of the founding team for Superhuman. Like how did that go down? Like how did he pull you over onto, Superhuman side?

[00:03:19] Gaurav Vohra: It quite literally pulled me over from London to San Francisco. No, around 2014, I was in London and had been consulting for like four years. I was thinking, you know, this is great, but what's next? I've been here for a while doing the same thing. Part of what I was craving was kind of a change of physical scene. Like being in the city of London was awesome, but I was also wondering, is this it? Am I really going to live in London for the next couple of decades in my entire life?

[00:03:48] Gaurav Vohra: And London is, as you might know, just, like, enormous, right? It's a huge city. Like, and not, and candidly not one that I found much identity with. You know, I liked it and I still do. My friends are still there, but I wanted a bit of a different scene. The nice thing about working at a consulting firm is they can transfer you to wherever they have offices, generally speaking. So I kind of looked at a world map and the options with places like Dubai, New York, San Francisco.

[00:04:14] Gaurav Vohra: I did actually have a conversation with my brother, independent of Superhuman. He was basically like, well, given you're working in this technical team, you might want to consider San Francisco. It's a great place over here. You know, it's basically the center of tech. And I also had seen that he'd exited his last company Reportive to LinkedIn a couple of years earlier. And so I'd seen firsthand how tech could kind of dramatically lead to great products, great outcomes for people who work on those products, and how it's just very exciting.

[00:04:44] Gaurav Vohra: So we moved out with Oliver Wyman to San Francisco. I'm very grateful that the company sponsored our visas to get out here. And then serendipitously, not by design, I was sitting down again with my brother and talking about the kinds of things I wanted to do next. He started to pitch me on Superhuman. He'd been thinking about this idea for about nine months or so after he'd left LinkedIn. He was like, been thinking about this for a while.

[00:05:12] Gaurav Vohra: Reportive was great and we sold it to LinkedIn. It made email better in this one way. What if you took the power of Reportive but also all of the other features and all of the other ways that you can make email better. And what if you package that into one beautiful, elegant, hyperfast product? And he was sort of showing me the mockups and the same deck that was used to raise money from pre-seed angels.

[00:05:35] Gaurav Vohra: And, you know, I thought to myself, this sounds brilliant. This is exactly the kind of thing I would like to work on at my next step. At the same time, I also needed a company that was, you know, going to be patient with my visa and immigration status. So it kind of like made, yeah, majorly fit the bill. So yeah, this was about 10 years ago and, you know, I was all in, I was like, this sounds incredible, right?

[00:06:03] Gaurav Vohra: Like not only is this the kind of thing I want to work on, it's also, second time founder understands the space, has connections to the right people to raise money, to hire the right founding team, et cetera. And there's a lot I can bring to the table as well, as a person with like five years of great technical and commercial experience.

[00:06:22] Gaurav Vohra: So I jumped in, and the remit was always growth. It was always like, focus on our growth, which, as you know, straddles many, many disciplines. But that's exactly what consulting teaches you how to do, is to straddle lots of different considerations and disciplines, and then bring usually one or two areas of firepower. In my case, it's analytics and data. But bringing that to the front to drive growth.

[00:06:45] Andrew Michael: Nice. Yeah. Because I noticed you had moved around a little bit in roles at Superhuman over the last few years. You said you always gravitated around growth and they got a market function. But it's interesting as well just hearing the backstory and how you got roped into joining at the time. Ten years is a long time. I'm sure there's a lot of lessons learned as well along the way. What would you say was the most surprising thing you learned over the last 10 years while working at Superhuman?

[00:07:14] Gaurav Vohra:  I think one of the most surprising aspects is that quality just takes a lot of time. To build something that's that high quality, there are relatively few shortcuts, I would say. As a growth person, you're always looking for the shortcuts. You're always looking for the kind of growth hacks or the wild ideas that massively pay off. When it comes to the R&D, building the technology, there's relatively few shortcuts. You have to just sit down and grind away at the features that you want.

[00:07:44] Gaurav Vohra: And in our case, the features that we wanted, things like offline mode, having it be super fast, the full suite and plethora of power features that email power users expect, just getting that up and running on only Mac OS, only Chrome, no mobile app, only supporting Gmail, took the best part of 18 months. And maybe it's because email products are huge in surface area as well. But to get all of that just like feeling and working really great, it took a long time back then.

[00:08:18] Gaurav Vohra: Now, can it be done faster? Yes, 100%. There are companies today I know, I'm talking to, who are building the Superhuman for X and they do a much faster version of it. Indeed, many of them actually just copy our product and design and so they have a leg up in terms of some of the cycles. But it just takes kind of a blood, sweat and tears sort of an approach. You look at some of the other companies that have achieved sort of breakout success, you actually then go back to when they were started and you're like, wow, they've been going for that long, really? You see that sort of pattern over and over.

[00:08:52] Andrew Michael: Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is something I was chatting to Mohannad Ali, who was one of the previous ex-CEOs of Hotjar as well. And we were having this discussion, we're talking about sort of how AI is advanced now and how you can do so much more with so little and the speed to, which you can do. And I think like it's one thing going fast and like being able to get something off the ground. And it's a totally different thing, like building something polished that works. And it's amazing and creates an incredible experience around it.

[00:09:20] Andrew Michael: And that craft, I think, as you're saying, like it takes time to get to the point because you can spin up an MVP of like an email client in no time, but to have it with the speed and the real time and like all these sort of bells and whistles that come with it, like that really takes expertise and it takes like iteration. It takes persistence. And it's not something that just happens like that.

[00:09:42] Gaurav Vohra: Definitely. I think there's two market environments to consider if you're a startup and you're thinking about this. One environment is your green field. Your first move in the market is kind of a land grab situation. Then you can just move as quickly as possible, ship your MVP, figure out how many customers you can acquire, and just hopefully hold onto as many of them as you can. That is the right move if it's a new technology. So AI, great example.

[00:10:07] Gaurav Vohra: If it is an existing technology, if it's a space that's been around for a while and you're building the better version of it, like Superhuman for email, you kind of can't afford to do that. Like you have to be better than the incumbent, and so you need to come out with something that's so much better. And to achieve that quality bar takes time. Now, not every startup is doing this, but many are, right?

[00:10:26] Gaurav Vohra: And you don't need to look any further than like Apple, for example, who famously, you know, deploy like the second mover version of technology, where they wait for like two or three years, for other companies to sort of work out all the Kingston issues with their latest device, and then Apple comes out with the best one. But it's like two or three years later. So yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say every startup has to go slow to build something. Definitely, if you're moving first, you can move fast.

[00:10:55] Andrew Michael: Yeah, I would say the only thing I think maybe in the AI space, I'd make the distinction as well, is like, is what you're really doing new in the AI space or are you just like, is your AI an improvement of the existing solutions? So like, and I think in that case as well, then you really need to think like, how do you make this 10x better? Or if AI is your core competency, then yes, like you need to be moving fast at the same time, because I think a lot of what's coming out today is just like increment, like the use of AI makes it slightly incrementally better than the current way of doing things and not exponentially better.

[00:11:26] Andrew Michael: And I think like, that's still like, figure out how to use these tools to get to that point. Also, it takes time and iteration as well. Because most of the things I hear from people outside of tech, when they go to try out these products, is like, oh, I tried it out. It didn't work. They maybe did one or two prompts, and then, oh, this wasn't for us, whatever.

[00:11:45] Andrew Michael: But if you know how to use it and you spend the time doing it, it's amazing. Most users aren't willing to do that work to figure that out and to go through the things. So I think the time between it takes you to figure that out for everybody for the mass markets. You need to get a level of polish that's–

[00:12:01] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, that's true.

[00:12:02] Andrew Michael: That differentiates yourself. Nice. So 10 years as well, like you spend a lot of time in growth and we talked about this a little bit before the show is that Superhuman as well, like started out as a B2C product. Slowly over time, you started to like, notice a use case for businesses in the B2B space. I'm keen to hear maybe just at the very, very start, like when you started noticing this pattern of this behavior, what did those conversations look like? Obviously being a data analytics person, you mentioned like, what patterns were you observing that said, okay, there's an opportunity and we need to dig into it further.

[00:12:38] Gaurav Vohra: So it was actually less about noticing and more about a deliberate strategy that was always there from the very beginning, but it was like a sequencing or an order of operations kind of thing. We had the strategy slide, I could probably pull up actually from I think 2016 maybe, where it was like phase one kind of who are we going after phase two, phase three, right?

[00:12:56] Gaurav Vohra: Phase one was, like founders, VCs, entrepreneurs, leaders, managers, and tech startups. And they're all kind of like B2C, right? Air quotes B2C, because they're actually all using email in a work capacity. They're using Superhuman to get their work done better. So there was never really the true B2C play of like, you know, my grandma or like, you know, your best man from your wedding. Like, then the emails that they're sending and receiving are not what we're trying to make better.

[00:13:25] Gaurav Vohra: I mean, we can make them better, but it's not sure that's worth $30 a month. So we always knew that was, like kind of ground zero. That's our ICP, but it's a work use case. And then phase two of that strategy slide was all of the people who work with those people, right? So their recruiting team, their sales team, their biz dev team, et cetera. Slightly kind of lower down the org, you could imagine it.

[00:13:49] Gaurav Vohra: We were still thinking about getting those people on, acquiring them as individuals. We knew that phase three moves into more of a team or an enterprise kind of play. Okay, you've got the CEO. You've got maybe seven of the executive team plus seven people on the sales team. Let's turn that into a 15-seat account, maybe a 50-seat account, and start moving it up the escalator of a team cell.

[00:14:14] Gaurav Vohra: The question was really just when to deliberately transition from phase to phase. And how much product change is necessary to get from phase to phase? Or can you really just take the same product and sell it in stage one, and then stage two, and then stage three? This question around what changes the product needs is really interesting, because there are some products that are extremely team-y. There are some products that are very solo player-y, but are still sold to teams.

[00:14:44] Gaurav Vohra: And that's one of the biggest questions we've been talking about in the last couple of years. But suffice it to say, we knew from the very beginning that we just wanted to sell to companies, people doing email for work, and seeing every single consumer at the beginning, like a B2C customer, as really the seed of maybe some future team opportunity.

[00:15:05] Andrew Michael: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's nice that you had this foresight from the very beginning, so it allowed you, maybe, to start thinking about the decisions that were being made further down the chain. How did you think about, though, then the product aspect of it as well? Because it's one thing, servicing to the specific ICP you started with, and then when you start to go into use cases like sales or ops, their use cases for email also changes, and their frequency of usage changes, their pattern behaviors, and all of this becomes different.

[00:15:34] Andrew Michael: So did this become a conscious product decision and changes made? Or did you try to always keep it something that would work across the board for all? What did the strategy look like on the product front?

[00:15:44]  Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, so this is like an evolving product strategy, I would add. This is like every three months, every six months, the product team is sitting down and talking about exactly this thing. There's kind of two spectrums or two angles I want to try and articulate. One is the, how solo player-y versus how team-y is your product.

[00:16:02] Gaurav Vohra: Take a product like Slack, all the way over here on the team-y end of the scale. Like you can't really use Slack on your own. You can use it to send yourself a reminder, but it's a team product, right? Notion is somewhere a bit to the left, right? You've got the opportunity to use it as a single player. You can kind of use it as your note-taking tool. But really, it's great when you use it as your team's Wiki. That's when it comes into its own.

[00:16:25] Gaurav Vohra: And then way over here on the other end, we say Superhuman v1. Just the email product, that is great for you as an individual. Where's the team angle there? And similarly in that category, you have things like calendar apps and note-taking apps and all that kind of stuff. The question becomes, how team-y can you make those things? Or how team-y are the problems that customers experience around those workflows?

[00:16:50] Gaurav Vohra: And what we discovered is that there's actually a load of unmet needs when it comes to individuals and teams using email together. I'll give you a really simple example. You're a salesperson. You are trying to close a deal over email. These things always happen over email. You might get invited to a Slack Connect channel, but probably not during the procurement process. That's more like customer success later on.

[00:17:11] Gaurav Vohra: So you're still trying to close something over email, and you want your manager's sign off on custom pricing. What do you do? You take a screenshot of this email thread, and you dump it into Slack. And you wait for the Slack response. And then when you get the Slack response, you go find that email again, and then go back to the customer. Horrible. That's like 20 steps involved, or something that should take one step.

[00:17:32] Gaurav Vohra: So we built a feature that allows you to share threads with your team. You can take any thread and add anyone. Literally could be anyone on the internet. Doesn't even need to be a Superhuman user. And they can see that thread. Not only that, they can then engage with that thread. They can add a comment. They can input on the thinking. So you can be like, hey, Sarah. I say, Sarah's my manager. I'm a salesperson.

[00:17:52] Gaurav Vohra: What do you think of this pricing? Do we have the green light for this adjustment? Yeah, sounds great. Let's go for it. All that right in line on the thread. And that becomes your history. That's your audit trail, then, of exactly what happened. One really, really simple example, really simple use case. Salespeople love this. But I'll add that the feature there isn't really specific to salespeople.

[00:18:13] Gaurav Vohra: It can be used by founders who are also trying to collaborate on hiring somebody. It could be a recruiting team working together. It could be finance and a product manager going back and forth over some vendor or cost negotiation that's happening. So that's like a horizontal team-y versus solo player-y, everything. We built a handful of those features. So the product strategy is like, let's devote at least 30% of our R&D resources into building these multiplayer features that serve many teams in companies.

[00:18:44] Gaurav Vohra: And they also have to serve the sales team really well because the sales team is like the biggest team that uses email. But it's not, like, exclusive to the sales team. It works for the founders, it works for the VCs, it works for the recruiting team, et cetera. So that's like one layer of the strategy. Another layer of the strategy is–

[00:18:57] Andrew Michael: Which in a way, all of those are sales people, by the way, like–

[00:19:01] Gaurav Vohra: They're all kind of doing–

[00:19:02] Andrew Michael: Everyone's kind of doing a form of sales. Yeah.

[00:19:05] Gaurav Vohra: Everyone's kind of selling, unless you're sort of trying to beat up a negotiator over cost, a vendor over cost. You're negotiating something down as opposed to–

[00:19:12] Andrew Michael: You're saying, well, their product isn't good enough for your money as well.

[00:19:15] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, yeah. I like that. Yeah, so it's nice. Yeah. So that was one layer of the strategy. But the other strand, obviously, is I think what you were alluding to, which is the specific use cases and needs that a salesperson might have. You can think of those as the verticalized needs. So that's an integration with HubSpot and Salesforce. The ability to edit the record that pulls out of HubSpot right from your email to change the status from opportunity to like closed one or whatever.

[00:19:46] Gaurav Vohra: And so there's a handful of those features as well as constellation of specific to sales team features that are also part of the product strategy. We devote maybe around 20% of the R&D bandwidth to that. That adds legitimacy, pulls in the sales teams, and those features may or may not be team-y. They could just be like more power tools for the individual salesperson. But they sort of enhance the product's usefulness to this kind of team or this persona that is definitely in target and in scope for us.

[00:20:18] Gaurav Vohra: You might be wondering, well, what happens to the other 50% of your R&D? If that's only half, where's the rest? And it's basically like 30% or 20% AI, right? Just so much you can do with AI and email. And then infrastructure and growth. Be like, kind of the remaining chunk as well. Yeah.

[00:20:38] Andrew Michael: So you're part of the remaining chunk, then, of what you get to spend time on from a growth perspective.

[00:20:42] Gaurav Vohra: Well, this is interesting, right? So as a growth product professional, yes, you have your sort of like little corner of engineers and whatever you're running growth experiments, you're doing this and the other. But I think it's incredibly important to know exactly what's going on in every single part of that product strategy. Because frankly, many of the biggest growth lifts are going to come from one of those areas. It's like the platform shift or the seed change that happens because of some core evolution, that's actually where the growth is going to be.

[00:21:11] Gaurav Vohra: And so what was really fun over the last, let's say, six months or so was the growth in multiplayer teams just working as though they were one team. Because multiplayer has a ton of core functionality to build around thread sharing and commenting and blah, blah, blah. And growth has a ton of growth loops to put on top of that to make it work, to make it viral, to make the email notifications and invites and stuff all functional. And so, yes, I'm kind of part of that set, but it's also highly interconnected to what's happening over here.

[00:21:40] Andrew Michael: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's my view on growth in general, as well. It's like really, they're both of, a good growth function is to identify opportunities no matter where they are in the organization. And for the most part, they live in product, but it could also be in enabling customer success, or unlocking use cases for sales, or using sort of technology to enhance those experiences. And as you say, like, probably the biggest area though is product and has the biggest influence overall.

[00:22:06] Andrew Michael: And it's one of those things where, like it takes time I think for companies to realize how much of an impact. Like they all know it's important, but then we'll always look to like, marketing's not working or sales aren't closing or like the product's not like the last step to say, okay, like maybe it's the product's problem or the product's problem to fix this. And I think that's like, and always an interesting angle.

[00:22:29] Andrew Michael: And it's important to be like, over the bandwidth so you can get that full view and understand, okay, where do the biggest opportunities lie? And it sounds, like, Superhuman definitely after speaking to, who in the past is like very centered around growth anyway in its DNA. So the whole company almost operates in a growth manner and a mindset. Would you say that's fair?

[00:22:50] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there's different definitions out there of what it means to operate in a growth mindset. I would say that's, one of the definitions is you think carefully about your inputs and your outputs and you're kind of scientifically or scientifically enough measuring things, right? And I would say the entire company sort of has that logical kind of angle to the actions being taken.

[00:23:18] Gaurav Vohra: There's another definition around sort of recklessly shipping random stuff to try and figure out what's going to work. Frankly, I'm like a proponent of, you know, shipping something that's a little bit unpolished to see if it works and then polishing it later. And I would say the company does not ubiquitously operate in that manner. There are parts of the company which rightly focus on quality and uptime and, you know, stability, like infrastructure, for example.

[00:23:43] Gaurav Vohra: And we would never ship an AI feature, for example, that was half-baked and that still didn't really work. We would ship it, but with a very, very big kind of beta sort of label on it, right, to make sure everyone knows that it's still early. Whereas with a growth experiment, if it doesn't work on an iPhone 4S or if you didn't fully test every use case, it kind of doesn't matter if there's a 50% chance you're going to rip the experiment anyway.

[00:24:11] Gaurav Vohra: So different definitions of what it means to kind of operate in growth mode. But certainly a unified strategy around what we're doing, such that it drives the right outcomes, has been something we've always thought about.

[00:24:23] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I think it's a very interesting point you make as well, like in terms of, I think specifically in Superhuman's case, because it definitely comes across as a product that's, like, super polished and the experience matters a lot. So I'm sure there must be some sort of conflict as well within the business from time to time when, like, growth is trying to run and release experiments. And as you say, maybe not covering all the use cases and there may be a little bit, bug in some small instances.

[00:24:49] Andrew Michael: Like how do you deal with those tensions internally as well with a team like Superhuman so that the team understands the value and is not freaking out every time you just try to ship something new and slowing things down rather than enabling speed?

[00:25:03] Gaurav Vohra: I would say there's two buckets of tension coming to my mind that are related but different and are sort of resolved in different ways. One is it's go, time. You've built the thing. You've executed an initiative. And now you need to launch it, but it may impact another team or it might marginally conflict with someone else's idea of what to do next. What's a good example of this? It could be like shipping, like a talk to sales button or changing where the talk to sales button is on the website or in the product.

[00:25:32] Gaurav Vohra: You've got to go talk to the sales team and make sure that everyone's on board with the change. Now here's where I think great internal relationships really count. For the head of growth to be able to just go and chat with the head of sales and figure out, Are we all okay with this? Are we on board with this change for the next two weeks? It's an experiment. You know, 50% of our users will see this. You have to have that kind of relationship.

[00:25:55] Gaurav Vohra: And I'm making it out to seem, as though growth shipped something that's going to screw over sales. Frankly, ideally, it should be the opposite. It should be like, hey, sales, are you ready to take a bunch more leads? Right? Because this is the thing that we're shipping that's kind of in your favor. But you can imagine other flavors of it, right? You're kind of tweaking the pricing or something, and it's sort of making a sales conversation a little bit more fraught with risk. So that's like bucket one. It's like execution stuff.

[00:26:22] Gaurav Vohra: And I think you just got to have great internal relationships. You got to talk about these things. And ideally, you talk about them as early as you can in the process, not when it's like you're literally about to launch. Yeah, maybe before you start, before the project kicks off, get that stakeholder in the room.

[00:26:37] Gaurav Vohra: Second category is, I think, around more resource allocation. And this is like, you've got, let's say 50 engineers, what percentage of those engineers go on X versus Y versus Z? That, I think, is almost completely separate and is this very, I think it's a very thoughtful and organized, planful thing that you have to do six months in advance, really, three, six months in advance at least, to say, look, for where we are as a company, we have this, this, and this we need to do or that we want to do.

[00:27:07] Gaurav Vohra: Our best guess is that it's going to take, whatever, a team of seven engineers this amount of time to build these things. So we have to reserve that budget. So it's like finance sitting down does money budgeting. You sort of have to do headcount budgeting as well and say, look, well, that's what we're going to do. Well, if we do that, then we're only going to be left with four engineers working on, let's say, product-led growth or two engineers working on infrastructure. Do we feel okay about that?

[00:27:33] Gaurav Vohra: Something could literally break, and then we would have to rip people off and put them on that project. And that's a separate process that I think happens slightly less frequently, but needs to, again, have all of your key decision makers sort of thinking about the same things, and particularly your head of engineering, who's like at the center of that conversation to say, Okay, these are all the things that need to happen in this company.

[00:27:55] Gaurav Vohra: Here is what core products and growth products and marketing and sales and whatever needs to do. Okay, now my job is to figure out how to fund all of those things, but then also bring in the right people to continue to expand the capacity.

[00:28:09] Andrew Michael: Yeah. Now I definitely see those two, two passes while being like points of a friction potentially and figuring those things out. Is there maybe not like a third bucket as well where, as you're trying to sort of figure out the tension between speed and quality, like in our issue as well, like you're probably shipping at different speeds to the rest of the organization as well and pipelines are built differently around this and the way that it's like, Ops is working as well DevOps and so forth. So.

[00:28:41] Gaurav Vohra: You're 100% right.

[00:28:42] Andrew Michael: How do you approach this then and getting that alarm and right? So like there's not this huge imbalance between the tempo and pace of the rest of product and engineering.

[00:28:51] Gaurav Vohra: I wrote a post about this last week. I'm not sure if this is a sort of server for me to talk about.

[00:28:56] Andrew Michael: It's not, but we'll leave this inside the show notes.

[00:28:59] Gaurav Vohra: Amazing. Okay. Love it Yeah, I had this recently actually where, I don't know, I turned my attention away from the experiment. I was closely tracking for like two or three days and I came back to look at it a little later and it still hadn't shipped.

[00:29:14] Andrew Michael: You were peeking.

[00:29:15] Gaurav Vohra: No, no, no. Actually, no, sorry. The team hadn't shipped it. Yeah, I hadn't gone out yet. And I was waiting for it to go out and I went, I came back and it had been slowed down. And the reason it was slowed down was because there was a bunch of like, you know, polish requests, right? Things that didn't look or feel quite right about the test experience. That meant that we didn't even get to ship it yet.

[00:29:33] Gaurav Vohra: And I looked down the list of requests, and I was like, these are all legitimate, right? Like, if this thing was the production experience, I would want all of these things and probably more, but we're testing this thing. Like, it's currently set up as a 50/50 split test, and we may rip it. None of these things make or break the validity of that test. All of these could wait until after the test is proven out. And so we could have shipped this thing like three or four days ago, I think.

[00:29:56] Gaurav Vohra: So you're absolutely right, there is that tension. Whereas if you're shipping a feature, like the AI thing I mentioned earlier, you want it to be good, especially, again, if you're competing against a giant incumbent and you have to retain customers away from said incumbent. So then you want to put the polish cycles in before you ship. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Growth has this thing where I think they should ship 70% good enough tests, see if they win, as long as the lack of polish doesn't invalidate the test, and then polish it and then ship it properly to 100%.

[00:30:26] Gaurav Vohra: Whereas core, especially in a high quality product, needs to polish the thing first and then ship it and make it awesome. So that tension can ruffle feathers. You'll have all sorts of different perspectives around, we're breaking our design principle, or this isn't great code. We have this lingering flag in our flagging system. You might have DevOps or leadership saying, don't feel good about, like the quality bar here. Yeah, exactly.

[00:30:58] Gaurav Vohra: And all of those concerns are totally reasonable, totally legitimate. And if the product becomes a collection of those bad experiences, then that's bad for everybody. Growth is kind of the first one to find out about that. You just have to make sure that you fix all the rubbish after you determine if the test is worth it.

[00:31:17] Andrew Michael: If it's going to be worth it or not, yeah. I wonder if there's a good way then as well, like yourself, deferring those changes as well so that it's explicit. Maybe even upfront as well, calling those things out. So when people go to review it before they've even had a chance to review and call stuff out there to you. Because a lot of times you also know what's subpar and what could be better already from the outset. And perhaps that's also a good way of saying, this is not permanent. This will change if it ends up being shipped.

[00:31:45] Gaurav Vohra: I think the example I should have,  yeah, for any iteration or any piece of scope, the exam question is, does it invalidate the test if we don't do this thing, right? And if the answer is no, then it's like, well, put it on the fast-follow list. And that requires someone, hopefully the growth PM, but maybe there's some, it could be the designer, it could be the engineer, whatever, or anyone else. It requires someone to really understand what it is you're testing.

[00:32:09] Gaurav Vohra: Like, what really is your hypothesis and what signal are you looking for to prove or disprove said hypothesis? I often find that people close to the experiment really get that. And then, that's like three or four people. There'll be like 10 other people around the project who have no idea what the actual experiment is, who don't know what the hypothesis is, who don't know why we're shipping this thing.

[00:32:30] Gaurav Vohra: And you sort of have to, if you're one of those three or four people in that nucleus, you have to spend a reasonable percentage of your time educating those 10 people on what the hypothesis is so that they can be on the same wavelength when it comes to then figuring out quality and scope implications. And it might feel laborious and painful to have to do that. Ideally, you come up with a very streamlined and efficient way to kind of capture that thinking and then get that sort of, shared to everybody.

[00:32:57] Andrew Michael: Yeah, no, I am definitely, I'm thinking through the challenges all myself because it's something going through at the moment. I'm figuring out, like, what is the, striking the right balance of, like being able to communicate effectively so it's clear to everyone on the team. And at the same time, I think there also needs to be, like a level of trust and autonomy as well in the team to be able to get things and to move fast because like this is probably the third area out of the other two that you mentioned. I think that probably has the biggest impact to slow things down and derail.

[00:33:28] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, definitely.

[00:33:30] Andrew Michael: So you started your career out as a consultant, you went and you joined your brother, you learned a ton of the 10 years you were there. And now we're chatting just before the show that you're actually moving a little bit back into an advisory kind of role now, like going back to the roots. I'm keen to hear a little bit about what you're up to now, what's motivating it.

[00:33:52] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, once a consultant, always a consultant, apparently. For the last two years, actually, not super recently, but really for the last two, four years, in addition to my time in a week that I spend on Superhuman, I've also been working with startups as a growth advisor. Over the last two years, I've worked with around 10 or so different startups in kind of a formal growth advisory capacity, and maybe double or triple that in a very informal sense, just helping founders, basically.

[00:34:26] Gaurav Vohra: But in the formal sense, it's kind of like an official arrangement where we meet on a regular basis, and I'm helping them with everything, growth. It could be strategic. It could be a little bit on the execution side. I'm often interviewing candidates for my clients and helping them build their founding growth team, for example. And the idea that, oh, like, part of the idea is, well, A, I can give a lot.

[00:34:50] Gaurav Vohra: Or I can pay forwards a lot of what I've learned and share that with startups that are doing a wide variety of incredibly cool things that I see as beneficial and valuable for the world. And B, I also get to learn a lot from those experiences. I get to see a wide variety of different business models and approaches, kind of like, test things out in a way. I'm a bit of a video game nerd, so I like to think of it sometimes as sort of speed running startups.

[00:35:18] Gaurav Vohra: You get the opportunity to play that 0 to 1 million ARR journey over and over again and see if you can improve how you do it each time with each successive run. And by seeing that, you get more useful to everybody. You see that into, you get that pattern matching, get that intuition. And you can then apply those learnings to absolutely every company you work. So it's just like the most beneficial thing for everybody.

[00:35:47] Gaurav Vohra: I'm a big fan of these outcomes that are not zero sum, right? It's like, positive sum for everyone involved. And I think kind of being committed to just one company and only spending time with one company is possibly one of the worst things you can do when you're sort of mid to late stage in your career because you get too myopically focused on just the scenarios and peculiarities of that environment such that you stop being as useful as you could be.

[00:36:12] Andrew Michael: Yeah. I definitely see that. And I think like, it's one of the things as well, like for me, I'm always tinkering, like playing with things on the side and I need to keep learning continuously because it's you fall out of date so fast as well, especially if you like, you keep to your own little bubble and you're not speaking to others and you're not learning. Like, throughout my career, I've always, like, if it's not working with other startups, it's like having, like regular calls with other growth professionals and like exchanging notes and seeing what's happening.

[00:36:41] Andrew Michael: Because like, it is too easy to fall into, like this narrow minded trap where you live in your little bubble and get stuck in your ways as well. So you see a lot of different things now as well. Obviously you've been in the space a long time now. I'm keen to hear like, is there anything fundamentally different about the way teams are operating, growth teams operating today, from when you got started?

[00:37:05] Gaurav Vohra: That's an interesting question. I don't think anything is massively, like I would say fundamentally different. I think the technology landscape has obviously changed. You can spin things up way faster, way more independently as a growth person now. You might not get blocked on an engineer to build something and ship it. You can use AI to do just about every portion of the job.

[00:37:30] Gaurav Vohra: So you can do things a lot faster, maybe five times faster, maybe even 10 times faster, but you're still doing the same things. That's what I was doing like a decade ago. One fun example, like, I don't know, 10 years ago, right, I'd have the annoying data migration things to deal with as like a one person growth team. Early days, Superhuman, it was like, okay, wow, I need to get these like 50,000 signups from product hunt over into our database.

[00:37:56] Gaurav Vohra: Like, all right, let me sit down and like script that bad boy out, right? I'm going to sit down and write some bash that's actually going to, like do this for me. You know, I might sit next to an engineer for like four hours and, you know, bug them every 20 minutes with a question. Now, ChatGPT can just do it in five minutes. Just tell it in words what you're trying to do, and it gives you perfect code. You just run it, oh, it works, okay, done. Onto the next thing, right? So you're–

[00:38:20] Andrew Michael: It's the next thing.

[00:38:21] Gaurav Vohra: I think your actions per minute is way higher now as a growth professional, and so you can cram a lot more into the same amount of time, but it's still the same stuff. Just a few months ago, I was uploading 100,000 records into a database. It's the exact same problem that hasn't changed. It's the kind of stuff you just have to do.

[00:38:41] Andrew Michael: Just the speed and velocity. But I think also, as you point out, is that the growth, typically you might have had growth PM. I think those are more evolving to growth engineers, where now they have the abilities of AI, so they've been able to do a lot more. And the skills now involved in a road become a little bit more diverse. You still need to have good designer, good engineers. But you can, as you say, as a growth PM, do a lot more than you were in the past. And the team itself becomes a little bit more like multidisciplinary.

[00:39:13] Gaurav Vohra: I think that's definitely true.

[00:39:14] Andrew Michael: And less siloed, like this is a design job, this is an engineer's job, and so forth. I think like–

[00:39:20] Gaurav Vohra: I think that's true. Yeah. I think people have become... It's been easier for people to get more T-shaped in their skill set. There's actually another thing–

[00:39:27] Andrew Michael: It's all kind of blurred.

[00:39:28] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, a little bit, yeah. There's another thing I thought of actually which has fundamentally changed, which is just where are people hanging out? If you take more of the marketing side of growth, less like the product side, and you think about the job as like reaching people where they are, you know, just like, you know, where does Gen Z hang out online? What do they do? And how are those behaviors different to what you expect from millennials or like Gen X?

[00:39:54] Gaurav Vohra: You know, that's pretty damn different. Some of the things you have to do in order to like break through the noise and get the attention of, kind of a newer generation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so that, you know, whether it's, you know, the obvious stuff like vertical video and being on TikTok and like having that sort of strategy. That is if your customer is like Gen Z. It may not even be Gen Z, but like, if it is.

[00:40:17] Gaurav Vohra: But then there's like, some way less obvious stuff around just the vibe and the dynamic of like how newer generations sort of online and use technology, which in a way, people joke that like the only way you can really understand it. It's just a higher one and put them in charge of that problem, like higher agency, and just let them loose on your social media accounts with zero oversight. That's the only way it's going to work. So I do think there have been some pretty drastic changes in that sense.

[00:40:46] Andrew Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And I think also in line with that as well is that just the sheer number of products, and it speaks to the noise thing, I think it just exploded. And definitely, I see at least like this, and talking about the quality aspect is that you can no longer get by with a subpar experience in your product. Your product needs to be polished these days for people to give it attention to start with.

[00:41:09] Andrew Michael: Even for early adopters. I would say the early adopters' expectations have raised over the years as well, just because we were now spoiled with really, really good products everywhere all around us. And the bad ones now in the past could get by with just solving the problem really well. It feels like now the bar has been raised, definitely.

[00:41:30] Gaurav Vohra: The bar has been raised. I think your brand is so critical. I think your brand has always been critical, but even more so now than ever, it sort of helps you punch through the noise.

[00:41:39] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it feels almost like distribution now becomes like, distribution and brand become the two most important things if, like the technology aspect is being sold for at a much more rapid pace and people can do more with less. And most products are blurring on everybody else's, like everyone's moving to everybody else's territory now and trying to expand and whatnot. So I think, like nailing distribution and brand is like the only way really to stand out in the future. Nice.

[00:42:07] Andrew Michael: So I see we're running out of time. I want to make sure I ask you a couple of questions I ask every guest. First one, what's one thing that you know today about churn and retention that you wish you knew when you got started with your career?

[00:42:19] Gaurav Vohra: I'm thinking of two things, but as I think about it, they're really just, like the same thing at the end of the day. But maybe I'll kind of articulate them both. In a B2C sense, right, if your retention curve keeps sloping down to the right, then you're toast. You're never going to scale beyond a certain point. But even if it scales, sorry, even if it flattens out, let's say you have 60% long-term retention, and those people are with you for the long haul, you still have a problem of scale.

[00:42:46] Gaurav Vohra: It's still very hard to continue to grow top line, I should say bottom line ARR if you're seeing a consistent drip of churn because there will be these longer term churn moments in your customer base. It could be that a competitor comes along and then all of a sudden you're losing market share, or it could be you sell work products and the natural turnover of your customers is like every three to four years, is like when they get a new job, and that's when they ditch your tool and they sort of just have to go someplace else.

[00:43:20] Gaurav Vohra: Obviously, everyone says like, have great, you know, you need great retention, you need to have low churn. But just fundamentally the shape of single-player churn, meaning that there's kind of like a ceiling to your growth. The only way you outrun that ceiling is through massive distribution and massive acquisition. Right? So some really famous examples of this, Netflix, Spotify, continue to grow by scaling their acquisition and their reach growth. Nice. But not every startup can do that.

[00:43:47] Andrew Michael: And they also have reactivation a lot as well, I think. So at some point, reactivation becomes a meaningful portion which not every business, as you say, has that.

[00:43:55] Gaurav Vohra: Right. And there's a sort of the Duolingo piece on that a year or two ago around just how important reactivation is. And I guess the second version of that is, Okay, when you start to sell to more of a team, sell a team use case, just knowing that you really want to be striking for expansion use cases that outweigh the churn, it's fine if those customers churn out. If you lose three for every 100 in a year, as long as you've gained more than three, then you can just acquire domains, acquire logos, and just let them grow over time.

[00:44:25] Gaurav Vohra: I think most people in product-led growth, especially in sort of, more of a B2B sense, obviously know this, they obviously work on this. But I am regularly surprised by the number of founders I'm talking to who have yet to kind of make these realizations early in the journey. They're like, oh, I've got this great product, I've got this great idea, I can scale it. And it's like, well, yes, you can to a certain level.

[00:44:49] Gaurav Vohra: You do need to be thinking about like two, three, four years from now, once you've kind of hit your ceiling, what comes next? Do you start selling to teams? Do you sort of build a second product? Do you charge more per user through some usage-based pricing? What is it?

[00:45:03] Andrew Michael: Now, for sure, I think that calculating you, because it's a simple formula as well, you can calculate your growth ceiling and see where you get actually built at, tools on the churn.fm website for this. And for most people, when they see it, it becomes like this, oh, shit moment. It's like, is that when we're going to stop growing? Like, I thought this thing was going to be going forever. This is a dream of it.

[00:45:22] Andrew Michael: Yeah, it's a good exercise to actually do, is just to, like do the basic math, obviously, like just assuming everything stays the same as it is today. Like when do you stop growing? And it's… normally lights a few fires for people to figure things out. And definitely for us at Hotjar. Cool. Last question then is obviously, you speak to a lot of teams, you focus on growth. Like what's one question that you wish more people would ask, but they don't.

[00:45:48] Gaurav Vohra: Oh, interesting. And my glib answer here is, how did you hear about us for their customers? A lot of people are like, oh, we think this channel is really important, and it's firing for us, but I'm going to spend more money on it. How do I get a paid marketing specialist in, to light up our meta campaigns? Or we really need to double down on affiliates? And you're like, hang on a second. How do you know that these things are actually working for you?

[00:46:19] Gaurav Vohra: Well, we've got to… We can see our conversions in our Google Ads account, or we're paying all these affiliates all this money in our affiliate tool. And say, well, are you actually asking customers, how did they hear about you? No, why not? It takes four seconds for every customer to just select from a radio checklist when they're onboarding. And that data is insanely useful and valuable to you. Just put it in the onboarding flow.

[00:46:46] Gaurav Vohra: How did you hear about us? Give them 10 options or whatever it is, and use that. Use that to actually figure out where people are hearing about you. Is it perfect? No. Will it give you, point you in the right direction? 100% yes. So I kind of wish people were paying a bit more attention to that before they started deciding their marketing strategies.

[00:47:02] Andrew Michael: Yeah, we've debated this a lot recently as well. Like you spend a lot of time trying to figure out through attribution and, but there's just so many flaws and that's becoming harder and harder as well with, like dropping cookies and things like that. And the simplest thing is just to ask and it makes onboarding or it’s like every quarter, you're running it for a week or two weeks and just trying to figure out the baseline. But there's probably nothing that will really be telling you the nature of asking customers.

[00:47:27] Gaurav Vohra: Yeah, 100%.

[00:47:28] Andrew Michael: Gaurav, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting today. I've learned a ton. Thank you so much for joining. Whatever we discussed, we'll make sure to leave in the show notes for all our guests. Before we drop off, is there any final notes you want to share with the listeners?

[00:47:41] Gaurav Vohra: No, I just want to say thanks so much for having me on. Super fun conversation. Thank you.

[00:47:45] Andrew Michael: Thank you. It was great having you.

[00:47:48] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.fm. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew@Churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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