Building and Scaling Superhuman's PLG Engine

Gaurav Vohra on scaling Superhuman's PLG motion from the ground floor

Just a few months ago, Grammarly announced the acquisition of Superhuman in a push to build out its AI for its productivity suite. Prior to the acquisition, Superhuman raised more than $114 million in funding from backers including a16z, IVP, and Tiger Global, with its last valuation at $825 million.

Gaurav Vohra was employee #1 and built Superhuman from the ground up — having led Growth, Product, Marketing, and Analytics. Now, Gaurav advises founders on growth with a focus on product led growth, working with fast growing companies such as Clay, Replit, Readwise, Wispr Flow and many more.

In this conversation, we discuss:

Gaurav's background and journey to startups + Superhuman
Lessons from building a high-leverage RevOps function and transitioning into consulting
What early growth looked like at Superhuman — and why they didn't A/B test for 4 years
Hiring the first 9 engineers through a hyper-instrumented, founder-led recruiting funnel
Superhuman's "hard mode" GTM strategy: targeting CEOs, VCs, and power email users
The rationale behind their white-glove onboarding model and the decision to scale it
Creating intentional FOMO through waitlists, referrals, and Twitter virality
How Superhuman built a localized monopoly among high-expectation customers (HXC)
Why onboarding was led by ex-teachers, and how analytics drove quality assurance
The bottoms-up growth framework: fixing churn → activation → demand gen
Why paid acquisition failed, and what replaced it as the key growth engine
Building for team expansion, not just individual users, to achieve high NRR
Designing opinionated, interruptive onboarding flows — like video game tutorials
The "PLG trap" and why horizontal tools need clear vertical buyers
Gaurav's #1 advice for PLG founders: fix your pricing and packaging first

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