From Singleplayer to Multiplayer: How Superhuman is Stacking S-Curves | Gaurav Vohra, Superhuman Growth Leader
Gaurav Vohra shares how Superhuman began evolving from an individual-first productivity tool to introducing team-centric solutions, opening-up a unique path to move up-market.
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Superhuman is known as the premier email app for individuals who craved speed, efficiency, and elegance.
I was an early-adopter and still love it today.
But like many successful scale-ups, it faced a critical question: how do you sustain top-line growth when you start saturating your initial market?
Most startups in this position try to move up market, adding a sales-led motion. Superhuman knew that this would be important, but recognized that there was more to be done. So, in addition, they rethought the core product's role, introducing multiplayer collaboration. This carefully considered set of moves helped set them apart from competitors, and added new viral growth loops.
Here, Gaurav Vohra, founding growth leader at Superhuman, shares the story of how this strategy came to life.
Setting the Stage: The Challenge of Scaling
Prasid: Paint a picture for us—what did Superhuman look like at the time? What was the team structure, and where was the company in terms of growth and revenue?
Gaurav: At that point, we were a startup moving into growth, with just over 100 people. Our marketing team was small—around four full-time employees and three contractors. The growth team wasn’t fully formed initially but eventually converged into about eight engineers, two PMs, one designer, one data scientist, one customer support lead, and one growth PMM.
The initial core team, though, was lean—just a PM, an engineer, an analyst, and a designer.
Prasid: What was the state of the business, and what challenges were you facing at that stage?
Gaurav: When you have a product that performs well, like Superhuman did, you achieve one milestone—stable single player retention in the first year. But then you hit another gravity trap: long-term churn. This is the kind of churn that slowly eats away at cohorts. An example is customers changing jobs every few years and some percentage of them stopping using your product. Eventually your churn and newly acquired cohorts equilibrate.
At this point, you risk growth slowing. We knew we needed to pull levers to get ahead of this.
Exploring the Options: The Paths Considered
Prasid: Before deciding on multiplayer, what other paths did you explore to address these challenges?
Gaurav: There are a few typical moves at this stage:
Building new products for new use cases: This is common when you hit saturation. You create new products and charge for them. It’s a way to establish deeper, entrenched network effects across multiple products.
Take Readwise, for example. It started as a single product and then launched Reader—a concept that’s 10x more ambitious, better than Pocket and Instapaper.
Adobe is another example, with a suite of products that complement each other.
Expanding existing product into adjacent categories: If you’re a consumer/prosumer product, you can unlock growth by tailoring your product to meet broader business needs. This could mean adding features for larger teams or, improving security and admin. This requires a lot less R&D than launching an entirely new product. Notion exemplifies this by evolving from a collaborative workspace for teams into a tool an entire organization can adopt. For us, it made more sense to focus on making what we’d already built work for teams. It required less R&D than launching entirely new products, and it aligns with our vision of scaling Superhuman.
Introducing Multiplayer: What Superhuman Built
Prasid: So you made the decision to introduce multiplayer features. What did you build?
Gaurav: Adding team purchasing, team features, and product-led sales was pivotal. This allowed us to go up-market and improve retention, not just at an individual level but for entire organizations.
We built a set of features for teams to collaborate over email, getting more done while saving time and money.
In particular, Superhuman allows users to share email threads with anybody in the world. Others on the team can view and comment on the email directly—without the need for clunky forwards or external tools. It’s a clean, efficient way to collaborate, and it fits right into the workflows our users already rely on.
Prasid: Many productivity tools already cater to teams. What was different about Superhuman’s approach?
Gaurav: Other email tools like Outreach, MixMax, and Salesloft all cater to the sales team. While effective for their purpose, they don’t inspire the kind of love that comes from dramatically improving an individual’s life. Superhuman approached multiplayer differently. We brought our robust individual-focused experience to teams, amplifying what makes Superhuman exceptional.
Prasid: What specific pain points were you addressing?
Gaurav: One of the biggest was how teams collaborate over email. People were screenshotting emails, forwarding threads, or using Slack to share context—painful and inefficient workarounds. We validated this through hundreds of user conversations. Once we knew the problem was real, the question became: how do we design a seamless, cohesive experience that makes collaboration frictionless?
Prasid: What did the implementation look like?
Gaurav: An iterative approach is crucial. We shipped small multiplayer features early—for example, shared snippets, shared read statuses—and iterated based on user feedback. Once we saw traction, we built more comprehensive functionality, like thread sharing and collaboration.
Structuring for Success: Designing Growth Pods
Prasid: Great. So the product team has their vision of what they’re going to build. On the growth side, you now have to build a team to distribute it. How did you structure the growth team?
Gaurav: I led the formation of two growth pods:
Expansion Pod: Focused on team growth through multiplayer, virality, and surfacing sales leads.
Activation Pod: Constantly improving the new user experience to improve activation, reduce churn, and drive virality.
These pods worked closely with our core team, who builds functionality. For example, the core team ensured features like thread sharing and commenting work seamlessly, even offline. Meanwhile, the growth pods drove adoption by surfacing these features, educating users, and creating viral loops.
Key team members included Growth PMs, tightly aligned with Core PMs. Within sales, we needed Rev Ops and a Head of Sales who truly “gets” both product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales (PLS). Data scientists supported marketing, growth, and sales, ensuring tight coordination between these functions.
Prasid: What did you look for when hiring for the growth pod?
Gaurav: We needed people who could ship fast—that’s the key DNA element we looked for.
We also sought individuals who could think beyond their domain. For example, engineers who think like product managers, PMs who think like designers, and analysts who can write code. This cross-disciplinary mindset not only speeds up the process but also ensures team members can pinch-hit when needed and challenge each other effectively.
Prasid: Tell us more about what the expansion pod worked on.
Gaurav: Expansion in particular has been focused on driving the multiplayer viral loops.
Their Core team counterpart is deeply focused on making the actual functionality work.
But even with the functionality you still need to do all the following:
Draw user attention to thread sharing and commenting
A surface area for not-yet-users to engage with shared threads
Make the act of sharing or commenting send compelling notification emails
Efficient conversion paths from being a 'casual' engager to actually being a user
This is a classic “Core creates value, Growth distributes value" split. 80% of the value that is built can be left on the table if you don't have a group focusing on distributing value.
Prasid: This viral loop is a cool idea—the idea of a "surface" so that you don't need to be a paid subscriber of Superhuman in order to collaborate on a thread that's shared with you. This is true PLG as opposed to marketing-led growth.
Prasid: You had also previously mentioned standing up a PLS motion - which is not something Superhuman had up to this point. How did PLG and PLS work together?
Gaurav: Think of it as an escalator. PLG drives self-serve adoption and tees up customers for PLS. We approached PLS in two stages:
Echelon 1: This stage focused on engaging users who showed strong signals of interest, like specifically requesting to talk to sales—referred to as 'hand raisers.' We staffed a sales team—including account managers, CSMs (Customer Success Managers), and SDRs (Sales Development Representatives)—to directly handle these high-potential leads. This lets us capitalize on the strongest opportunities effectively.
Echelon 2: This stage targeted users exhibiting weaker signals of interest. Unlike Echelon 1, this approach leaned heavily on data-driven plays to identify potential opportunities and automated outreach. Conversion rates in this stage were typically lower, as the leads were colder and less engaged. Many companies make the mistake of starting here, but it’s far more effective to focus on Echelon 1 first.
Multiplayer functionality sped up every part of this escalator, making the system more efficient and scalable.
Measuring Impact: Success Metrics
Prasid: How did you measure success? Can you share any specific metrics or outcomes that highlight the results of this strategy?
Gaurav: The results were significant:
Launching thread sharing and commenting saw the highest weeks of expansion revenue in Superhuman’s history.
Teams that adopt collaborative features grow seats and revenue at twice the speed of teams that do not.
At the same time, we began closing some of our largest enterprise sales opportunities, showing clear traction with bigger customers.
What worked best was we introduced viral loops and workflows that didn’t previously exist, and they drove engagement in ways we hadn’t seen before.
However, there were challenges. We were building something quite radical, and there was inherent risk. Creating a way for teams to collaborate on email required us to pay extra attention to user education. We included in-app warnings and heads-ups to help users understand what was at stake—guiding them through these changes without overwhelming them.
And taking these updates to customers needed nuance. Collaboration doesn’t dominate the zeitgeist right now. People are focused on AI.
Prasid: Did this influence how you positioned Superhuman during the rollout?
Gaurav: Absolutely. Our core promise remains saving users four hours per week—making Superhuman the most productive email app ever made. We adapted this messaging to reflect what’s relevant today: “Collaborate faster and get more done with AI-powered email.” We placed collaboration and AI on the same level in our messaging hierarchy.
Lessons Learned and the Future of Growth
Prasid: What are your biggest takeaways?
Gaurav:
Start on core swings early—they’ll take longer than you think.
Avoid over-optimizing one area of the growth funnel. There are diminishing returns, and it’s better to take a holistic approach.
Speed of iteration / speed of shipping is the most important leading indicator. Teams that proactively find ways to ship faster will win.
Superhuman’s expansion to multiplayer wasn’t the next logical step in a standard SaaS playbook—it was a bold move to evolve what an email tool is. Superhuman deepened its existing offering, showcasing a thoughtfulness that’s a core part of their identity.
For companies, the lesson is clear: the best growth solutions often involve changes to the product. Start with first-principles, look for the road less traveled, and let the customer be your guide.
Thanks for the write-up! 🙏