Top Takeaways
1) Don’t just follow generic wisdom. Your strategy should match your product.
Examples of an onboarding process matching the product hook and core value proposition:
- Superhuman chose to have a 30-min, 1-to-1 onboarding session, so users can have the skills to use the product.
- Fitbod adds steps in the onboarding flow because they are optimizing for the most customized workout.
2) Using game design principles can make your product intrinsically motivating for your customers to use.
3) Design your product for flow. Keep it simple on top. As you add complexity make sure it sits beneath your product hook.
4) Have core pillars and repeat them constantly so your employees know how to make product decisions.
Listen on Apple Podcasts
Rahul Vohra, Founder & CEO of Superhuman
Superhuman is the world’s fastest email experience.
https://superhuman.com | @rahulvohra
Oura CEO Harpreet Rai on improving sleep, hardware, & more | E1213
What is game design?
- Game design > gamification
- Gamification: just adding points & rewards
- 1970s Stamford experiment showed that just adding rewards can decrease motivation.
- Intrinsic motivation (doing it because you find it satisfying & interesting) > Extrinsic motivation (doing things for rewards)
- Game design encompasses the art and science of psychology, mathematics, interaction design, and storytelling
- When gamification works, it’s because the underlying experience is already a game.
Critical components of games
Goals
- Games need goals that are concrete, achievable, and rewarding.
- Superhuman’s goal is “get to inbox zero”.
- They make it achievable by onboarding users with a 30-minute call where they teach shortcuts, faster workflows and take action to wipe the slate clean so users are close to inbox zero.
- When you hit inbox zero, you feel triumph over your email, a previously rare and incredibly rewarding experience.
Emotions
- Need to be able to analyze human emotions.
- Design for optimism and hopefulness, pride & triumph.
- Show stunning imagery to widen the emotional repertoire.
- Plutchik’s wheel, 8 core emotions, each one has a polar opposite across the wheel, it can guide the product development process.
Controls
- Controls can be why a game succeeds, Wii sold 100M units, partly due to their revolutionary control system.
- Controls in business software are typically inadequate, and far less responsive than video game controls. Superhuman built their own keyboard handler to not lose keystrokes (they want their users to have a fast experience).
- Create rapid & robust controls.
Toys
- The best games are built with toys. You have fun both with the broader game and the toy itself.
- A “toy” in Superhuman: Snooze Email Time autocomplete, which encourages playful exploration (2d becomes 2 days, timezone math, and other pleasant surprises)
- Make fun toys and combine them into games.
- Product success is when using it is fun, even without a goal.
Flow
Flow is:
- Intense and focused concentration on the present
- Merging of action and awareness – so absorbing that we don’t think about the future or worry about past
- Loss of relative self-consciousness – so demanding that we don’t care what others think about us
- Personal control – so easy that we always know what to do next
- Distortion of temporal experiences – so powerful that it quite literally alters our subjective experience of time, tied by the flash by an instant, or stretched out forever
- The activity becomes intrinsically motivating – the most powerful and effective form of motivation
Conditions for flow:
- Always know what to do next
- Always know how to do it
- Freedom from distractions
- Receive clear and immediate feedback
- Feel a balance between challenge and skill
The experience fluctuation model
Cook vs. Zuckerberg: Apple and Facebook go to war over privacy
Principles of Game Design
- Create concrete, achievable and rewarding goals
- Design for nuanced emotion
- Create rapid and robust controls
- Make fun toys, and combine them into games
- Make the next action obvious
- Give clear and immediate feedback with no distraction
- Balance high perceived skill with high perceived challenge
How Superhuman creates the flow
- Users know what to do next: Superhuman eliminates decisions the user has to make. When users archive an email they are immediately shown the next one.
- Users know how to do it: Superhuman is based on shortcuts. Early on, users would forget the shortcuts so Superhuman designed the “superhuman command” (command+K). This pulls up a text-based search that does the command and teaches the keystroke.
- Users are free from distractions: Superhuman limits users to just one conversation at a time. By not showing users new email or other conversations they can stay focused.
- Users need a balance between challenge and skill: Superhuman increases users’ ability to process email. But for power users that were already skilled, they provide an additional challenge (balancing it), “hit inbox zero without ever touching the mouse.” Counterintuitively, sometimes you need to make your product “harder” to use.
Side note: Superhuman is super-focused on making their users successful, which is why they have a 30-min onboarding process. This makes sure that they don’t have a “leaky bucket” where lots of customers start using their product and churn out. To grow in control, they use a waitlist. Right now, it is 400K people long! Because Jason is an investor, Rahul had his team make a special way for This Week In Startup’s listeners to skip the waitlist at superhuman.com/twist (be forewarned the service costs $30 a month, and currently is only compatible with Gmail)
Jesse Venticinque, Co-founder & Product Head at Fitbod
- Fitbod is a personal trainer in an app that uses data and analytics to help you build on your previous workout so that your next workout is proven to be better than the last.
- Fitbod only shows one workout at a time, creating a focused slot-machine type effect.
- “Best is someday. Better is every day.” – Fitbod motto
The Product Hook – the foundation for product-lead growth
- The Product hook is a simple & discrete user behavior, a transaction or flow that is repeated.
The product hook operates at each step of the growth cycle
- Acquisition
- Conversion
- Retention
- Referral
The four phases of habit creation
- Trigger
- Action
- Investment
- Reward
How Fitbod uses the product hook
- Trigger: Psychological need for certainty about how to exercise effectively.
- Action: Launch Fitbod and it gives you a clear path to a personalized workout.
- Investment: Users spend time entering data for Fitbod to personalize workouts, that investment in personalization increases switching costs.
- Reward: Fitbod sets incremental, achievable goals that leave users feeling a sense of achievement & competence after conquering the workout.
Converting users to paid customers
- The product hook is the onramp
- Maximize the first impression of the product hook.
- Reduce friction in repeating the product hook.
Freemium
- Fitbod used a freemium tiered monetization model in 2016 where Fitbod Elite had pro features to personalized workout.
- Freemium maximizes WAU (weekly active users) in the conversion funnel.
- Freemium = users can access some part of the app for free, but all new features were behind the paywall to boost conversion.
- However, the consequence for freemium at Fitbod was that the value was split across the two tiers. Having personalization features behind the paywall weakened the product hook for free users.
Product hook optimization
- The Fitbod team decided to switch from the Freemium/ Paid model to a Trial period than 100% Paid.
- The Trial gave full access to the product for a limited duration. This allows users to have the full Fitbod personalization experience.
Results
- Conversion % increased.
- Trial users experience a full product hook.
- Subscriber retention/LTV increased
- Subscriber growth boomed.
Different Trial Models
- Fitbod A-B tested trial modes (Timed vs. Activity)
Timed Trial: credit card (cc) up-front to try a workout.
- Fewer downloads, and therefore fewer users reaching the product hook.
- Fewer % downloads who tried at least 1 workout.
- Can’t build a big business on people forgetting to cancel.
Activity Trial: 3 free workouts. No cc to try a workout.
- Upsell in the reward phase after each successful workout.
- Creates warmed-up cohort to retarget (Easy to offer more pulls of the product hook, ex “you have 3 new free workouts”).
- For FitBod, this strategy drove more revenue because it was based around the “atomic unit” of Fitbod (one workout).
App Onboarding Strategies
- Onboarding = the initial flow to create an account.
- Common advice is to minimize the number of screens a user has to go through to start using the process so the user can use the product as fast as possible, but this doesn’t always make sense.
- Fitbod’s goal is to set it up with the most personalized initial workout so they actually added steps to collect more user data. This optimizes the product hook.
- The business model (trial period) & onboarding sequence all maximize the product hook.
Retention Strategies
- Great retention unlocks scale, you can invest and plan with high retention.
- You can compound advantages when your product hook gets better with more usage. Fitbod tailors future workouts based on any changes the user makes, workout frequency & difficulty ratings.
- Design new features to leverage the product hook
- Keep it simple on the outside, layer any complexity below/behind the product hook.
- Use referral methods that leverage the product hook such as customers can offer a guest-pass to a friend (3 free workouts), share a specific workout, and share gym equipment profiles customized to a specific location
- Word of mouth is hard to measure, Fitbod uses a survey after a conversion event, “how did you hear about us”
Resources for Learning more about product-lead growth
- The Hook Model: How to Manufacture Desire – Nir Eyal (nirandfar.com)
- David Sacks: Legendary Startup Product Expert – Starting Greatness podcast
- Product First – David Sacks Bottom Up (Substack)
Q&A
What is the right cadence for releasing features?
- Superhuman designed an algorithmic way to create a roadmap with their product-market fit engine
“A good analogy for product management is filling a jar with rock, pebbles, and sand. The rocks are new products, pebbles are features, and the sand are small fixes. If you want to fit the most stuff in the jar, you put the rocks in first, then the pebbles, then the sand. If you put the sand in first, somehow there’s not enough room for the rocks. Product management is like that. It’s about resource planning — maximizing the amount of stuff that you can push through the system with a fixed amount of resources. You will actually fit more through your roadmap by planning the rocks on a quarterly cadence.” – David Sacks
- Customers do expect new features for a subscription, so companies need to deliver to keep retention high.
Fitbod is influenced by the book: 4DX: The 4 Disciplines of Execution
- Lag measures: High-level goals like retention & conversion (you can only measure them after the fact)
- Lead Measures: actionable steps that you or any other employee can take as a proxy to change the lagging measures (Example product lead measure: perform 5 usability tests with beta testers)
What’s the secret to adding new features to a product?
- No one asked for a faster email at Superhuman, but Rahul believed they wanted it.
- However, when running a company with some degree of product-market fit you want to balance your time. Half the time spent doubling down on improving what features are working and the other half creating new solutions to address objections to increase your customer base.
- It’s important to develop strong intuition about what your customer needs.
- Hire people who can focus.
- Have clear company goals and constantly repeat them, so everyone in the company knows them automatically.
- When everyone knows the company goals they can see how their job connects to the greater mission.
- Company values & mission can help employees make decisions.
How do you know when to kill a feature/remove it?
- Fitbod launched Android 7 years after their iOS app, so they were able to experiment with only the best feature set for the Android apps.