How Superhuman got its users
A waitlist and a one-to-one video onboarding, turned into a status signal. Scarcity was the message.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
Reproducible, but it will cost you real money, real months, or a skill you may not have.
The edge you do not have: A recognized founder and an investor network acting as amplifiers
- A loop your customers run for you: every paid user puts the product in front of the people you want next
- A referral lever worth more than a discount, plus a metered demand pool you release week by week
- Payroll for people whose whole job is running onboarding video calls, and the nerve to keep most of the queue waiting
- A product whose normal use plants your name in someone else's inbox, plus a high-status seed list you can reach personally
Community in 2026
Excellent for retention, slow for acquisition. It does not create the first wave, it amplifies it.
Everything on this channel →The play
6 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Newsjack a competitor shutdown: write the survival post, syndicate it, point it at an email capture page.
done whenYou have a list of people you can email before the product exists.
- 2
Launch invite-only: no account without a one to one video call, and run the early calls yourself.
done whenEvery account was opened by a completed call. No self-serve signup path exists on your site.
- 3
Put 'Sent via Superhuman' in every outgoing email so each user shows the product to their contacts.
done whenPeople you never contacted ask for access after seeing the footer in mail from someone else.
- 4
Make referral the queue jump: give most onboarding slots to direct referrals, and reward both sides.
done whenA referred person gets onboarded while someone who signed up cold the same day is still waiting.
- 5
Cap growth at onboarding capacity: choose each week how many people to let in, and let the rest queue.
done whenYour waiting list is bigger than your paying base, and you still set the intake number every week.
- 6
Publish the product-market-fit survey method you used, with your own results from your first users.
done whenFounders outside your company cite the method back to you without you raising it.
The product itself
read from superhuman.com, live“Superpowers, everywhere you work”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Acquired by Grammarly
What else they ran
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.