
Harmony Anderson didn’t wait 90 days to make an impact at superhuman — she launched a major campaign in her first five weeks.
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Harmony Anderson
Launch a campaign as fast as possible. Just get into it. There's no better way to learn and to see what's happening. Like you're going to learn everything you need to know in a month. I don't just want 10% growth increase like I want a 25% or more growth increase overnight. 70% of our time and resources are going to go to moving up market because it's a big deal. If I want to stay at 15 to 20 million dollars business, I can stay with founders. But if I want to hit 100 million or 200 million, I have to move up market.
Stephanie Postals
There has been a big underinv investment in brand related things for the past couple years. And then now a lot of DMOs being like, oh, we stopped doing that and now we're not being found in the LLM search results. We don't have content out there. We don't have thought leadership.
Harmony Anderson
Content marketing is, it's like fashion. It's cyclical. It goes around like a couple times every handful of years. And I think some companies do need to regroup and say, okay, was the brand we built five years ago, is it still going to work? What we're seeing now is content creator and influencer programs. It's like brand. It's the new brand, right? The new pr. And if you are micromanaging the attribution and the direct seat attribution, you're losing the whole purpose of influencer and content creator marketing.
Stephanie Postals
When thinking about moving up market and scaling quickly. I know you've been at a lot of companies where you've gone from a $20 million AR company to 200 million. How do you think about building out playbooks for that level of scale?
Harmony Anderson
This seems so basic, but every, I'm not kidding, every company I've gone into can't do it right.
Stephanie Postals
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends. I'm so glad you're here. This is your host, Stephanie Postals. And before we get into who the amazing epic guest was today that we talked to, I want to ask you a favor. Please hit that subscribe button, give me a rating and review. Let me know what you think of this show. I'm dying to hear from you and I'd love to help get this show spreading throughout the CMO community, throughout other marketers, and really getting it on their radar. Thank you. Thank you. So today's episode was with Harmony Anderson. Harmony Anderson is the head of marketing and growth at Superhuman. You know, that AI email productivity tool that spread like wildfire through the entrepreneur and founder community. And now they are moving up market. And that is why I wanted her on the show and I wanted to hear what she's up to and how she's growing this amazing company. This interview was one of my favorites because Harmony has worked at companies that have gone from 20 million ARR to 200 million ARR. So she has the playbook for what it looks like to scale massively, how to grow, what kind of marketing campaigns work, which ones don't. And one of my favorite pieces of advice that she talked about was as a marketer, coming in and going hard, making moves within that first 30 days, launching huge campaigns and really trial by fire and getting out there quick, which is very different than many of the other CMOs that I've talked to on marketing trends, which is why I love this hot take and hearing how she gets into a company and acts within days to get her name on the map and to show results very quickly. We also got to talk about something that a lot of marketers in this world have brought up, which is the move into enterprise or moving up market. A lot of the brands who've come on the show so far are either startups or they're already enterprise. But then there's also the in between of a lot of these smaller companies now looking to move up market. But what I haven't talked about yet is exactly how to do that. And so we talked about some of the companies who've done this well. We also name dropped a few companies who did not do this well and things to look out for when you have a very loyal group of customers that basically got you where you are, they built your company and now you're having to focus on a whole different group of customers who are very different, while not forgetting about your original ones. So super fascinating conversation around the playbook of moving up market. And because Superhuman is such an AI native company, we also got to talk about how to stand out in this very noisy AI everything market. Everyone is AI everything. And so how do you stand out? How do you position what your offering is? How do you show your customers what you have and convince them to try you out? And the other thing that we got to discuss is her tech stack right now and how she thinks about her rev ops department and how she thinks about operational structure when it comes to driving revenue. So yes, I had her call out her favorite tools, the exact one she's using, which ones she doesn't like, and she even threw in one of her top marketing campaigns right now. That you probably would not think is a good one when you hear it. So enjoy the interview. Harmony, welcome to the show.
Harmony Anderson
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah, I'm really excited. I've been thinking about this interview for the past week or two since we were speaking last. And I'm like, man, we're going to get into some very juicy things. But first I want to start with just a bit of your background because you've been at some cool companies, you've seen a lot and so if you could just give some highlights of where you've been.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, I've been in tech startups, B2B SaaS for the most part my entire career. I've been really lucky to work with some really amazing growth companies. Some of the highlights really are Thousand Eyes. They were acquired by Cisco six or seven years ago and that was my first kind of major foray into demand gen and to end revenue marketing selling to network engineers. And I tell people still to this day it was the hardest marketing I've ever had to do because network engineers hate marketing. So we had some really fun programs in place that really helped us drive revenue there that like you would never think of, like limited edition T shirts. So really a fun experience there. And then I spent a long time at outreach sales engagement software, running their global demand and operations org, which was just one of the highlights, honestly of my career so far. Amazing team, great product. I was an early kind of user adopter of their solution and that was one of the companies actually similar to Superhuman, where I was like, I have to work here, like, how do I get a job at this company? And luckily I knew a bunch of people that worked there and so I had a long stint there and then a couple startups in between and now I'm at Superhuman, which is AI, native email and calendaring. So productivity, the suite of productivity tools and I've been here for less than a year. We're a startup, so it's like eight months going on three years and it's been just an incredible ride. And I'm overseeing all of marketing and growth product here as well. So it's been a lot of fun, amazing.
Stephanie Postals
So I'm sure you had many people trying to pull you their way, many companies trying to get you. What attracted you to Superhuman?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, I, I was lucky enough last year to take some time off to really think about what I wanted to do and just like take my time and looking for the right fitness fit in the right company. And so I had a Bunch of things I was looking at. One of the big ones was I obviously want to be on the front of AI, which I think everyone does now for the most part, but really AI, native focused building models, really thinking deeply about the future of AI and where it's going. And I wanted to be at a company that was shaping that vision. And Superhuman had reached out to me, and I honestly ignored them for a while. And I was like, email, I don't know. Email been around forever. Like, why is this interesting? And then over the course of a few months, I kept seeing it pop up. Like leaders. I really respected companies I really respected it. Kept saying, sent by Superhuman in the emails. I was like, okay, maybe I should pay attention to this. And I also have a really bad relationship with email. Like, I have forever. It's hard to keep up. I've always disorganized. I mean, it went so far back as to. I had an EA once who would literally check my email for me and tell me if I needed to respond. I'm not proud of it, but I just could not keep up with that, too. I was like, right, yeah, it's like. It's kind of embarrassing, but it's like, what am I missing? And so I was like, let me chat with them and use the product and give it a shot. And it solved so many of my problems so quickly. I was like, they're onto something. And I saw this vision of coming in and really being able to help them scale their growth and. And the product's really transforming the market, and it just worked out so well. Ultimately, the team was incredible, and I just feel incredibly lucky, honestly, to be here growing marketing.
Stephanie Postals
So good. So something that caught my ear, I think I was listening to another podcast that you've done, and I've had a lot of CMOs come on this podcast, and many of them talk about, you know, our first 90 days. You really got to listen and go slow. And then I was listening to you, and you're like, no, Move fast and break. Like, launch the biggest campaign in your life as quick as you can. And so I actually wanted to start there of, like, what the early days at Superhuman look like for you, because it feels very different than at least what some other marketing leaders have said on this show before, which is why I love it.
Harmony Anderson
Oh, my gosh. I mean, you. You, yeah, you start a new role, and you're like, okay, I've got a ramp period. It's going to be a little slow the first 60 days. Like, I can kind of just like breeze through, get to know people. And I did not have that. I mean, I. I actually signed my join Superhuman on a Thursday, and then I flew on that Sunday to Arizona for an executive off site to do planning for the next year fiscal planning. And it was insane. An insane, like, onboarding. But one of the things I like to do just to learn about my team, learn about the processes, what's running, how people work together is launch a campaign as fast as possible. Like, just get into it. There's no better way to learn and to see what's happening. Like, what works, who steps up, who has strengths in areas that you didn't expect, and do it as fast as possible. And you're going to learn everything you need to know in a month. Ultimately, you're going to know, like, okay, I need to hire someone in ops, or I don't, or, you know, really good at writing or doing campaign strategy. But we're not really great at the content or we have a really big gap in design or it could be anything. So I did that at Superhuman. And honestly, it was really opportunistic at this point because we saw in our business that we had. I heard through the grapevine, I think one of my CEO had just like mentioned this in passing, that we have a spike in growth in January and it's because people are coming back for the new year. They have messy inboxes, they have New Year's resolutions to be more productive or more fit, like, you name it. A lot of it, though, is about like bettering yourself or professionally, like bettering yourself as a, as a, as a leader. And it was just a one little comment and I was like, oh, well, if we can see a little spike, how can we turn that into a big spike? And I started in November. I was like, well, we literally like end of November. So I'm like, we actually only have five weeks to do this. Let's do it. And we saw incredible success. So highly recommend it.
Stephanie Postals
Had you done this at outreach or other places that where this mentality came from? Or was it more like your CEO saying, hey, do something quickly?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, I have done it at previous startups. The first company I did it at was a company called Engine Hotel Engine. It was the same sort of thing. It was. They never really launched major campaigns. They had never done any sort of campaigns and product launches at one time. So I'm really big proponent of like the lightning strike philosophy around launching products and campaigns. So I did it there and it was also really successful. We saw a ton of Growth. And I had a previous leader who used to do this, who I honestly learned this from. So, like, let me try it now that I'm an executive and it is just like absolute best way to learn. And when I was at Engine, it took us a couple of months to get it off the ground here. It was like, we don't have, like, we have a deadline, which is great. So we were all forced to push against the deadline. But it's just a great. I try to tell as many, like especially new marketing leaders do this because one, you'll see success, you'll learn about your team, you have a quick win as a marketing leader. So you're not just, you know, slowly getting through the year.
Stephanie Postals
So how do you prove what you're going to do or show it ahead of time to convince, let's just say your CEO to let you do this? Because I think you have to have a certain kind of CEO who's like, yes, go hard. Like, spend more money than I typically would spend to see if this will work. Like, you definitely have to have a lot of trust. But how do you position it in a way where they're like, oh yeah, this definitely makes sense to go after many different angles in this campaign.
Harmony Anderson
I mean, I think the big thing is like I always focus on the outcomes, even if I'm two weeks in or I'm two years in. If you can point back to here's what I want to run and here's what I'm expecting it to drive. And the reason I'm doing this is because I want it to drive a step change in growth. I don't just want 10% growth increase. Like I want a 25% or more growth increase overnight. Essentially, this is what it's going to require. And so I'm always, always, always trying to, to focus it, point it back to outcomes and have that be the guiding principles to why we're making decisions and why we're spending the money, spending the resources, hiring new people. But it always has to be outcome centric.
Stephanie Postals
And then what about when it comes to this more dark funnel buying? I mean, even when you think about Superhuman, how that spread in the early days was just seeing it in someone's signature, something that's totally not attributable very easily, I would assume, unless they kept the little, you know, maybe click here type of thing, which I'm. I would not probably keep that. My signature. Yeah. So how do you show them? Yes, here's what you know, is more predictable versus here's the Gray area. Don't ask me exactly to measure it, but I know it's doing something which to me is like the market we're heading into now more than ever.
Harmony Anderson
Oh my gosh. And it's, it's such a big topic. Right. For marketers and sellers or just go to market teams in general, where you gotta track everything, every single active, every single program between sales and marketing. And not just sales and marketing, but marketing and the SDRs and the AES and the CSMs. And it's like, it's just, it can, it can become somewhat toxic if you, if you're not careful. And I ran a, I went really deep into our data outreach. I was there for so long and we were like really trying to increase efficiency and we saw that marketing and sales 90 plus percent of the time, touch every single deal, no matter what. They're all influencing every single deal. I went back and I was like, why are, why am I just like scraping through this, all this data and this attribution when the reality of it is if we're working as a team, we have the same goals, the same objectives, same KPIs, we're going to hit our goals. We have to just have that seamless relationship throughout the whole funnel. What we're seeing now is that so many companies, whether or not you're B2C or B2B, are moving into content creator and influencer programs. For example, it's like brand, it's the new brand. Right. The new pr. And if you are micromanaging the attribution and the direct seat attribution, you're, you're losing the whole purpose of influencer and content creator marketing. And so I, that was one of the areas that we are moving really deeply into, is scaling influencer marketing, scaling programs with content creators. And I told my team, I was like, this is not, I'm not gonna be able to track directly how many seats come from each influencer. I'm gonna be tracking how many impressions they get, how many times are being shared, how many comments they have. Are people liking them, are they not liking them? And the broader the reach we get, we're going to see our user count increase and we're gonna see them start hitting our market. But it's, it's a scaled more brand centric play, which you just can't always directly attribute back to like sourced seat revenue.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah, which is why I think there has been a big underinvestment in brand related things for the past couple of years. And then now what I've heard is a lot of, you know, CMOs being like, oh, we stopped doing that and now we're not being found in the LLM search results. We don't have content out there, we don't have thought leadership content. You know, we don't have ugc. We have nothing because we deprioritize brand and we focus so hard on attribution models to basically market to our internal marketing teams that we're doing a good job in like a very budget crunchy type of period. And so yeah, it's, it's an interesting space to make up for it.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, yeah, it's hard, it's harder to do that. Like you need to always be working on it and always be iterating and testing new narratives and the fastest way to get those in market is through this broader scale brand and influencer type of marketing. And especially on the PR side too. I know that's come up a bunch of deeply even PR generally, but so much press and media is behind paywalls now. And so I was at a really fun CMO event a couple weeks ago and every single CMO there was reallocating. It's not even their budget, but they're taking their PR leaders and they're saying, stop briefing analysts, stop trying to get bylines, stop trying to do those big press releases. Take that and put that effort into finding the best influencers, testing, building this pipeline of people and content creators to talk about your brand because they're seeing the scale be one creator hits. It's more than what you would get ultimately with traditional press. So it's just, it was, it changed my whole perspective honestly on brand and thought leadership marketing.
Stephanie Postals
Yep. Yeah. I mean if, if you think about like the Forbes, the business insiders, the ones that you know, have the paywalls or the gated content and all that, if the world moves to where we think it's moving to, which is most people are going to be, you know, using ChatGPT to search for things, taking those results. I mean those results are coming from places that are not paywalled, places that are not gated. It is going to be coming from YouTube and YouTube shorts and Reddit and Quora and all these other places. And so figuring out how to have your brand showing up in those places in a non corporate way is, is, I mean something I feel like I'm saying all the time so.
Harmony Anderson
And honestly I'm saying it all the time trying to get my team on board and we're moving in that direction, but it's changing so fast that it's, it is hard to keep up. And, and I don't even. We're not doing it exceptionally well now. Like we're barely scratching the surface on all of this. But I'm trying to dig into, yeah, SEO and like making sure that we're, we're building our content strategies to, to be LLM friendly, you know, with like boxes, like very clearly answering questions. And it just, it changes so quickly. And I'm honestly trying to pull in as many partners, contractors, consultants as possible who are experts or becoming experts to help me do it right versus having my teams just like trying to learn it on their own.
Stephanie Postals
I mean, I think that's smart, especially with how everything is moving so quickly. I mean, trying to be like, okay, now go figure out a new world of SEO in LLMs that no one knows really right now. Everyone's just trying to figure it out, make up methodologies and like, who knows? But yeah, finding people who are like that, they're only focused on that is probably, yeah, great.
Harmony Anderson
It's incredible. It's incredible how fast the market is moving right now.
Stephanie Postals
So when it comes to this fast moving market, how do you think about positioning an AI first AI native company, knowing that every company now is AI something and it's hard to know who has what, whose products, like 1% better. Do you even need to say the word AI anymore? I mean, to me is it kind of like crypto where you're like, you don't need to say, it's like powered by Bitcoin maybe it's just like that's behind the scenes. Blockchain's behind the scenes. It's just doing a good job doing the thing. Like how do you think about this AI market and standing out and how to position yourself?
Harmony Anderson
I mean, that is changing so much too. I was talking to one of my kind of mentors the other day and we're like, it's going to become like software. Like it just is. Like we don't just, we're not talking about the cloud all the time. Like who talks about the cloud anymore? Nobody, because the cloud is the cloud. I don't think we're there yet, I think, but I think we're going to get there really quickly. My philosophy is like within the next 12 to 18 months, as more people begin under having a better understanding of AI, it's going to start shifting out and then it's just going to become mainstream. But I think the main point of this is that everyone knows they need AI but they don't necessarily know what it is, where to start, what the vision is, what's the art of the possible with AI. And so as marketers and as leaders of these AI companies, we have to be their guides and we need to very clearly articulate this is what our product does. Here's how it is AI or how AI is fueling it, powering it, and then we have to walk them through it. Right. It's a brand new category. We're in this huge revolution, tech revolution, and we're in the beginning stages. How we're doing that at Superhuman and have done it a couple other companies that are AI focused is being really clear on using data and being really clear on the outcomes. Your solution is still driving and I've said outcomes a few times, but the more you can get to outcomes as you know, the better it's going to be. And then so talk about the outcomes, talk about the data, talk about the vision, and then show them what that actually means because it's just hard to grasp. You're saying AI, AI native AI powered agents, agentic AI. Like we're still in the beginning. Like, unless you're an early adopter and you're building this on your own, like no one knows what that means truly. So we're talking about it. We're saying, okay, like we with our solution, that is AI native versus AI power, because we're actually building AI into it. You can respond to your emails one to two days sooner. You can save four hours a week on your email. Email. We have like within our community. We have sent, I think it's like 500 million messages and we have triaged 2 billion conversations. Like you put data on it and then like, wow, I didn't even realize like that was possible. I mean, I went through the same thing as a consumer. And then we're creating those demos of saying, let me show you what it looks like in your workflow. Like, let me make this simple for you as a, as a buyer.
Stephanie Postals
Yep. Okay. Yeah. When you say the outcomes like that of you save this many hours. We are learning from this many emails. That definitely convinces me. And I'm thinking for most consumers, I'm just like, as long as you give me a good outcome, I really don't care what tech you're probably using to make it great. If you have a thousand vas behind the scene and somehow my inbox is great, awesome. But if you have AI, too cool. As long as it's making my life better. And I think that's a Helpful reminder, looking at all these companies right now, who are, you know, shoving all the AI terminology, like so much of it, oh my gosh, without even saying, like, our product solves this problem for you. Like, you're still a consumer and this is what it does for your life or for your company. Instead of keyword stuffing all the AI.
Harmony Anderson
Terminologies, you have to listen to your customers. And that's the great thing Superhuman did early on was they like our CEO built for founders. He was a founder, he built for founders. All he did was listen, listen, listen, built for himself. Then it ended up kind of becoming a really great product. But we listened so much and we said like, email is painful. It is like you have too much of it. You don't, you can't triage fast enough, you're not responding fast enough, you're missing emails. So let's build a solution for that first. Then now that we have AI, you don't have to triage your email, you don't even have to write your email if you don't want to. You just log in, everything's organized, everything's triaged. You're, your emails are auto drafted for you and you just edit and send. And I mean, we say we save four hours per person per week, but I know for a fact I am saving more than four hours because it's doing it for me. So I think going back to where do you fit within where productivity suites, like where do you fit within someone's day to day or their, their hourly workflows and quantitatively what does that mean for them and just really pulling them along that journey.
Stephanie Postals
So you all are at an interesting point right now where like you just said, this company was built for founders by a founder and that was who your initial customers were. And still a lot of your customers are entrepreneurs, founders, you know, people with small companies. And now like many other companies that I talk to, you guys are moving up market, showing that, you know, enterprises can use you as well. And I would love to talk about this because this has been a theme when I've like, I can think of at least 6 CMOs at these different companies that also started in a similar place and then had to pivot or reposition themselves to then be attractive to enterprise buyers. Yeah, and so I'd love to hear about this journey and how you're navigating it.
Harmony Anderson
It's every single company I've started, every single company I've worked at is doing the same thing. Yeah, you're starting with SMBs or founders because those are your people, they're early adopters, they have high intent. Anytime they're starting to use new software and, and then, but then you hit a point where you're like, okay, sure, if I want to stay at 15 to 20 million dollars business, I can stay with founders, but if I want to hit 100 million or 200 million, I have to move up market. It's not sustainable to just be building for founders. It's a really interesting shift and I am a revenue marketer through and through. So typically, honestly, up until superhuman, I am just going to look at where the revenue could come from and I'm going to say we're just focused on this like outcome driven. Again, revenue driven. If we're going to get to 100 million, where is that money going to come from? And sit. And it's usually not from the SMB, it's usually not from founders. And so with the caveat that founders and builders and startups, they might not drive you a large portion of your revenue or your net revenue or profit, but they have so much influence outside of that. They usually have a lot of clout in the market. They are evangelists, usually. They have typically have a lot of followers on social media. They are influencers in and of themselves as founders. They're part of founder communities. They usually will go through, a lot of them will go through accelerators that have massive networks of people. And so we're, you know, we were thinking about earlier this year of, okay, we need to know, we need to move up market and build our product for them, but we can't lose sight of the community that got us here. And so how, so how I look at that is I even have, in our planning documentation, we have, okay, you know, 70% of our time and resources are going to go to moving up market because it's a big deal. Right. It takes a lot of effort. And if you're not focused that much on it, it's not going to happen. You're not going to do it successful. But we're still dedicating time and resources to fostering the relationships within this community and ensuring that we're not leaving them behind because they will help us grow. Ultimately, they're just not going to show up in your as a major like revenue line in your P and L.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah, but it's like what you mentioned earlier, there's a lot happening that you can't tie back to. Yes, it's this community that's helping drive it. And you know that they also are the Ones that got you here and can help with momentum as you move forward.
Harmony Anderson
Exactly. And so I, I honestly was like, no, I was like, absolutely not. I'm not focused on this in January. And Raul, our CNO and I were like, look like we got to think about it a different way since it we're not going to see them scale our revenue to 200 million. And so I'm actually actively hiring for a second basically startup evangelist or startup program manager to build like host happy hours, be in the field, be having, you know, really in depth conversations with founders and builders and the accelerators and really make sure that we're maintaining our foothold within this community and supporting it as we grow. So we're dedicating resources now while then a lot of the team is really trying to push us up in this mid market plus direction.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah. So how did you know that a startup evangelist would have been like, did you hear from your community like, hey, you're forgetting about us, like we need someone on the ground floor here or like, how did you get that feedback to put someone in the communities?
Harmony Anderson
So we just, we kind of just like I would say we forgot about the startups. We just, we weren't proactively communicating with them as much. And we did see that we had a competitor that started taking over some of the accelerators that we originally were like 100, 100% influenced in. And so we're like, oh no. Like, how is this happening? It's like, well, because we're, we haven't proactively built programs for them and we also, we used to have a super, like a previous version of a Superhuman for startups program where we're like, just give them seats like they are our people. Right. And so we actually launched a new version of that where our offers are even bigger. You can join Superhuman with five seats for a year free and use it basically your entire build, your entire like founding team. We look at it as like giving back to our startup community and our founders and our builders and we're trying to just go back and say, okay, I know you tried this other product, but ours is still better. Like come back like we're here. And it was, it was a little bit of a. Oh, we just lost this specific. It was like one accelerator that we started just like losing our foothold in. And so it was, it's a good indicator though of what the, of where we were heading, which is why we've now pivoted back to making sure we have resources there.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah. And I'm Guessing you could see direct metrics tied to losing that accelerator partnership as well. Like that'd be a pretty obvious one I would assume, right?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, I mean it wasn't as again, like the revenue is still little. They're tiny, tiny deals and we're giving them big offers. So it's really just a, this is more of an anecdotal and a subjective view of like in the conversations we are having, we keep hearing about these competitors starting to pop up, up and so we needed to stop and redirect then after that.
Stephanie Postals
Okay, so now as you're moving up market, what have been some of the biggest learnings? Hiccups. I mean, I can imagine that's a interesting process to go from marketing to founders and positioning the company that way and being like, me too, we're the same. And then all of a sudden having to probably, you know, reorient in a very different direction, which would require, I mean to me it sounds like it could be a whole rebrand in a way of like everything that you've been doing. So what have you been learning along this process and how's it been going?
Harmony Anderson
The great thing is that we never tried to move up market and failed. Like we're in the beginning stages of this and so. And we have a really solid brand already. Like if you, we have a wall of love on our website, if you just are Even ever on LinkedIn or falling superhuman. It's just like people just talk about us without even ask, without having us ask them to, which is great. Like we just have so much customer and to us it's like we don't need to rebrand. Our brand is fantastic. We just need to leverage what we have and do it right as we're moving up market and really building for this new audience. And so it kind of goes back to the values, the outcome that our product is driving. Like you can be a founder of a five person company and you can also be an executive at a 5,000 person company and the value is still the same. And so what we now have done is we're leading with our product value. We're really leaning heavily into of course, the outcomes we're driving for you, what it means for you and your workflow. And then we're adding the enterprise credibility on top of it. So you're increasing your speed, you're increasing your focus. It's a delightful product. We know you hate Gmail and Outlook, so use ours. And then the signals on top of that for enterprise, we also have SAML and Scim we have really great implementation if you want it. We have security and admin controls. We add that on top for the actual buyer themselves. But we're leading with, you're going to see this value as a user and if your whole team is on it, you're going to compound that value the more people you have using it. And so we did have to add Personas, of course. Like, we now have business transformation leaders, AI leaders, biz ops. There's just more people that now we have to build narratives for. But it's still rooted in the same product value and the same brand narrative.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah, I was just reading a piece around how you should be writing those narratives. For example, for a product like this, how your CIO is going to read your security for this product here, you can give them this one pager so they know exactly how secure this is. And here's all the questions they're going to get, or what questions your CEO is going to ask, how much it's going to save on headcount and time and whatever. Like just having these documents ready for the whole network of buyers that will be waiting as you move into these enterprise deals.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, you're, you're just expand, you're expanding, like, and I think some companies do need to, to regroup and say, okay, was the brand we built five years ago, is it still going to work? Hopefully, if you went through that process correctly. Like, yes, because you want brand to keep going. It's such a marathon. Right. To build that affinity. And that is what the Superhuman team did, which is great. Like, it's, it's, it's worked well for us. Like, I feel very lucky to come in and not have to do a rebrand and like, not have to focus on that. Like, there's so much momentum. And so then it's taking that into your point, it's making sure you're saying the right things, you're building the right material to help have those conversations and move those deals through. It's not easy. It takes a lot of time. Right. Like I, I restructured my product marketing team, so now I have a product marketer who is only dedicated on moving up market and landing managed deals with sales. Like, that's all he does and he's really, really great at it. But you know, we just did that three months ago. Three or four months ago. We just kind of pivoted our teams to be organized that way.
Stephanie Postals
I could imagine maybe it's slightly easier for you all because you haven't been around like a really, really Long time. Whereas I'm thinking about other companies, even one, like maybe Canva for example. They've been around a while and they were really so branded as, you know, just the startup's friend and now them trying to move to enterprise. I feel like they probably could have a harder time because they just were so well known as one thing and just, you know, like, oh, we're just like a basic tool for basic design, you know, and now they're like, no, we can do everything that Adobe can do. Maybe like, you should use us too enterprises. But I'm like, it might be easier because you, you weren't branded for like a decade in the market as, you know, one thing for one group of people.
Harmony Anderson
Well, it's so fun. I actually we had our first ever like go to market off site in February where we did it was just sales, marketing, cs. We did a bunch of training. It was like vision setting. And I had this whole presentation on examples of companies who have started as B2C or self serve kind of individual products and have moved into the enterprise. And Canva was an example I use. So it's like I had four slides and Canva was like, here's where they started this year, then it went to this year and then here's how their messaging and narrative changed along the way. And like Canva started as, yeah, a design tool where you built like ads, you know, for your. Or just for anything but like ads or flyers or whatever. And now they call themselves like the visual design tool or Visual design for everyone. And there's all these different use cases and they've built their team's work, you know, their team's workflows and Org structures and things like that from their product. And I was trying to paint that picture for our team of this is. And I had like, you know, a timeline. I was like, we're like early on, we're here. This. Canva did this really quickly, right? Like, not a lot of companies can make that pivot as fast as they did, but that's where we're going. We're trying to become not just an email tool, but an AI native productivity suite that is email. It's calendaring, it's task management, it's, you know, you name it. Like, like that's on our roadmap ultimately to build. And that requires a lot from everyone in an organization to really get there. But it's fun. It's really fun to do.
Stephanie Postals
I mean, that's such a different mentality to how you just explained it. Because one Goes like, maybe the original use case of Super Superhuman was this is your end destination. Like this email solution is your end destination. And now you're saying that's just the starting point. Like we're going over here with all the other things and how to open up the portfolio of like offerings and showing people like, this is just the starting point is the email productivity solution and all these other things.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, and I think it's. I've my vision really for not just Superhuman, but productivity in general is if you use email, you can see value out of Superhuman. You have a lot of email, you can see even more value. But what if you could log in to this one instance of Superhuman, for example, and AI has now read your emails, it has read your calendar and it's read your chat across personal and professional. And then it says, hey, today, here are your top five things and here's what you need to do and what you really need to focus on in order to be a successful leader or operator. And I look at that, I'm like, that would change my life. I'm using Superhuman both personally and professionally. But I have two inst. Like, I have two different, you know, login instances of it. So how do we like really combine that of like, you're a productive person versus you're just a productive professional. And I, I just think it could completely change the way I want that as a human. I want that.
Stephanie Postals
I'm looking, I'm looking at that for all of my tools right now. When chat, we have our Chat GPT Enterprise account. And then I've got my personal Stephanie Postals one and I'm like, just put them together. Talk. Yeah. And I want to be able to share all these with my team. I don't want to have to only do in the enterprise. Like, it just, it's. But it's interesting because that's how the world was for a long time. Like, keep it so separate and you don't want people seeing your dinner recipe accidentally in Chat GPT on your work account. Like, so I think it's interesting how now people are like, no, just. Just make my life easier and just merge things. Give me time.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, it's. It totally is a, It's a mindset shift. It's a habit change and we talk about it a lot. Like, you know, a lot of. Some of the features that get requested of us is unified inbox so I can unify my personal and professional. And there's a lot of schools of thought there where it's like, but that Makes you less productive. Like how do you have. Because you're thinking about things differently. I'm like, yeah. Yes. But the reality of it is like sometimes my kids, you know, school reports are more important than this business meeting. I know, crazy. But like I might have to do that first. Respond to that email first versus this one. It's also a very personal decision. And so I'm all about like build the flexibility for how people prefer to run their lives. And then like we shouldn't tell that to them themselves, but we should let people build it.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah, yeah. You can just have a mom filter and every mom would be like, yeah, I want it all in one spot.
Harmony Anderson
Oh my gosh, it'd be amazing. Yeah.
Stephanie Postals
Yep. I'm thinking back now to the slide you were talking about about companies moving up, marketing it. What other companies, if you're okay sharing, were you looking at what things did you learn? What were maybe pitfalls that you're like, look, this one did it wrong and things that you're avoiding. I would love to kind of get into that session that you did and learn from it.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, it's really fun. I actually. So I had Google as one which it was my first one. So I was like, okay, it's hard to compare yourself to Google. Like you shouldn't like I don't want to like set us up for failure here, but they did something very similar. It was like they, they started with individual products. Obviously they were searched. If we go way back, they're search tool. I started with like Gmail to G suite and they built that out over time. And the reason I use that as an example too is because we're, we're email but we don't need to just be email. I mean we're not just email, but for the most part like there's a long tail there. I also use Dropbox as an example. Like they were very consumer in the beginning as well of like just host your docs on the cloud. And then they moved to being fully enterprise as well. And then I had one other. But. But I mean the main thing was we don't need to reinvent the wheel because there are a lot of companies out here have done this really successfully and so let's learn from them. Take what they've done, what they've, they've been successful at doing and then apply it to where we're going. I'm not going to name necess names necessarily, but we also looked at a couple companies that were this like this product moved too fast to the Enterprise. And actually, you know, I will name a name because I love this as a marketing team and you guys are going to. You, you probably resonate with us. Optimizely is a great example. You remember Optimizely?
Stephanie Postals
Yes, I do.
Harmony Anderson
Like landing page testing, dream of a product for marketers, super cheap, super easy to use. You could rapid fire AB test, you could build landing pages overnight. Not even overnight, like in five minutes. Excellent solution. And then they said we're just going to move into the enterprise and they changed their pricing where like the minimum was 60 or 80k when before we were paying a hundred bucks a month. And they just left, left their SMB businesses and their startups behind. And I know someone who worked at the time and like they're, they weren't able to pivot fast enough. They were trying to land whales. They ended up getting acquired. And when was the last time you talked about optimizely?
Stephanie Postals
I was say, are they even around anymore? What happened to them?
Harmony Anderson
So I have no idea. Yeah, but the point is, is like great example of a company that was like just in an awesome spot and growing so fast and then they just forgot about the people that got them there. And so that was a good example of don't forget your end users, don't forget your startups, don't forget the community who got you here. Continue making sure you're fostering that you're building solutions for them while also making your way up market because that just takes a lot longer. There's a lot more at risk when you do that. So I did have a call with a company who that is, has basically built, I think the next best version of Optimizely. And I'm like, thank God. I literally told her. I was like, you guys remember Optimizely? Because I've been asking for this for like 10 years and finally you're here.
Stephanie Postals
So I'll have to get that name from you. You test it first, then someone else. I will, exactly.
Harmony Anderson
I have not gotten my hands on it yet. But I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm optimistic about it.
Stephanie Postals
So I love these kind of examples because like you said, there is so many companies already to learn from. And I mean I even think about Adobe and how like one second it's super expensive and the next second now you got cloud and you can just pay like $10 a month and then no, you're back in a contract for a year and just like getting jerked around and being like, like, I just want one piece of software. Can you not put me in all of them. Now I'm stuck in a contract, you won't let me out. I mean, just watching them try and bump their way through it. I don't know where they're at now, but yeah, it's just like, don't do that.
Harmony Anderson
That's another really great example. That's my, usually my second example of this. You were talking about attribution. Do you remember Visible? Visible was bought by Marketo, bought by Adobe. Right. Bizzible was an incredible solution. Back in like the early attribution days, we had like, we were super users of it at outreach and it really fueled everything we did. And great customer support, beautiful product, like, relatively for attribution, relatively easy to set up. They were bought by Marketo, kind of started going downhill. And then Marketo was bought by Adobe, really started going downhill. And we ended up churning and moving to a new partner because of, of that whole shift. So you do have to be careful, especially in acquisitions or in big, you know. Yeah. Strategic shifts of like, where the, the product and market is going.
Stephanie Postals
Yeah. When thinking about moving up market and scaling quickly. I know you've been at a lot of companies where you've gone from a $20 million AR company to 200 million, which is fast growth. That happened very quickly. How do you think about building it out Playbooks for that level of scale?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah. So it's a really great question. And this is why I love this phase of growth. It's so exciting and things are changing so fast. And one of the biggest areas that I think businesses don't invest in early enough is revenue operations and marketing operations. So really thinking about what is the infrastructure that you need to build to get you from 20, 25 million to 200 million, it looks so you can basically, you can run your business in Excel spreadsheets or Google spreadsheets if you needed to, like manually up until that 20 million mark. But then after, your teams can start breaking down almost overnight. If you're not actually like building that infrastructure as you go. That infrastructure, that data powers everything your marketers are doing, everything your sellers are doing. It makes your processes and your teams more efficient. You'll see bigger outcomes, better conversions. And so that's the piece that like, I think about all the time is if I want to build a really amazing customer journey and I want it to be personalized, I want to be making sure my sellers are reaching out to our customer accounts at the right time, I am prompting this specific activity in our product based on their other actions that Week. Like, that is all driven through operations, and that's all driven through data and infrastructure. And so when I've joined companies at 25, 20, 25 million, the first thing I'm doing is hiring a really strong operations team to make sure that we're building for the people on the front lines for our marketing program managers, for our sellers, for our SDRs, to ensure that they can be successful in getting us to 200 million. I mean, we could take that in so many different directions, but there's. It's just so critical.
Stephanie Postals
I mean, I. My first question is, like, what when you bring someone in, in this role, I. Is there typically a playbook that you're kind of also watching over them or that you're watching many of them roll out, where it's like, we need this, this, this, and this to make sure that we're able to scale to 50 to 100. Like, is it pretty typical things that they're doing that you think are so crucial for that, that period?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, I mean, if. I mean, if we're thinking about. So if, like, this seems so basic, but every. I'm not kidding. Every company I've gone into can't do it right. Is my salesforce or CRM instance talking to my marketing technology? Is it talking to my sales technology? Whether it's outreach or it's sales loft or it's gong or, I don't know, nooks, any of them. So talking to them, is it is product integrated into those systems? Do we know how many touch points each customer has gotten by a seller or marketer? And every single company I've joined, it is either impossible or nearly impossible to get that visibility into that data. And so my question always is, okay, then, how do we run plays and scale programs and ensure that we're not making our customers mad because we're emailing them 80 times in a day. And so that's the biggest thing is one, and one, is your tech stack, Two, is it integrated appropriately and are they all communicating? And then three, do we have what we need to take it From I'm running three playbooks to I'm running 20 segmented playbooks against all this. These new buyers, these new markets, these new industries, as you move up market, it gets bigger. There's different narratives, there's different positioning. You just can't do that without a solid foundation and solid infrastructure.
Stephanie Postals
I would love to hear about your tech stack right now. If you have any tools that you're loving, or maybe I think you already brought in this rev Ops leader.
Harmony Anderson
Right.
Stephanie Postals
I mean, they've been there for a little while now that they may be brought to you and they're like, look, here's one that you need that you didn't even know about.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, we're, I mean we're still in the pretty early stages, I would say, of building our tech stack. But I mean I'm like a, I'm a Kool Aid drinker of outreach. So I've been an outreach user for literally 10 years or longer now. So anyway, the sales engagement though is like so critical. But there are some new ones that have come up more recently. Nooks is a, is a, it's kind of a sales sdrae product that is just like skyrocketing in terms of usage. And like their business, we're specifically using them for dialing and like running plays. We use a company called Pocus for segmenting our user database and running like real time plays through Pocus for both marketing CS and sales. And then we just implemented qualified aisdr. That's literally three weeks. We're three weeks in. All right. My head of demand gen is from outreach and she did it there. It's a lot of success. And so my biggest priority is how do I take all of these plays I've been running for a long time and make them smarter through AI. So whether or not they're technology partners that never had AI but are building it or brand new AI partners qualified as one of those where we're really trying to make that work and I'm incredibly optimistic about it. So that's a really fun one.
Stephanie Postals
1.
Harmony Anderson
On the, on the sales and marketing side, you know, it's kind of both.
Stephanie Postals
Is there any gaps right now where you're looking for tools to do something?
Harmony Anderson
I'm desperate for design. Tell me you have a great AI focused design tool because I've asked every marketing leader and they all say nope, just it's not there yet.
Stephanie Postals
It's not there yet. I still use designers. Yeah, I mean it's crazy to me that we already have AI buy sales like SDRs or you know, like we already have that where they're able to come in close deals, answer all the questions and we don't have a good design tool yet. When I'm like midjourney came out a long time ago. I feel like we should by now have lots of great tools. What is the holder here? I'm unclear.
Harmony Anderson
It's like the chatgpt, like OpenAI joke that like you're still gonna get people with, with you know, way too many fingers or like too many arms or like something weird is happening. Like, especially if it's people driven. But that's. I think there's so much disruption that could happen within that market soon. Or even Camp Canvas, such a great example. Where is Canva's like auto AI design?
Stephanie Postals
I know Features I know. I tried because they had it, they had it plugged into ChatGPT and I tried it and I was like, no, this is not working for me. Me, this should be your thing. Canva or Adobe's is still too complicated. They just need to have a baby and just make something in between that. Let's tell them that's a big one.
Harmony Anderson
The other fun one though too for me is I am trying so hard and this is like, I. Hopefully this doesn't get taken the wrong way, but I'm saying trying so hard not to ever hire content managers anymore.
Stephanie Postals
Tell me more about that and why.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, because I look at like all of the different LLMs and AI providers out there. Like the, the easiest thing to leverage them for is drafting content.
Stephanie Postals
Oh, you mean written content?
Harmony Anderson
Written, written, yeah, written content. So like, or taking unwritten content or webinars or virtual events or podcasts and building, you know, 20 different assets from it. I don't have any direct content owners on my team right now, FTEs. And I'm trying to keep it that way as long as possible. And I'm getting close. Like I think I'm gonna be able to scale without it. We'll see. But I do have some, I do have some part time editors just to make sure content we are producing and writing is good. But I'm partnered, I'm working with a new company my good friend started called Growth X and they're basically building like all these really amazing workflows for all this different type of content, whether or not it's blog content or it's SEO content or it's taking your podcast and making thought leadership posts or it's webinars like we'll see. But to me that was one of the lower hanging fruits when it comes to leveraging AI and how that would impact full time headcount.
Stephanie Postals
Yep. Yeah, I mean we saw a similar thing with admission too. Like, but the, the more complex pieces. Of course we still need writers for those, like some of our narrative podcasts, but a lot of our other written content, we just don't need someone sitting there cranking away all day anymore. And that's, yeah, a lot of things. I mean we see it happening in the video space as well. Although that's still not there either yet to come probably. And yeah, just a lot of places that are becoming, becoming really efficient, which is really fun.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, it is fun. It's like, it's, it's, it's a shift. Right. But my product marketers, like, my product marketing teams generally have changed a lot in the last 10 years. Like the product marketers I used to work with or lead were very like, we're taking the product, we're, we're building the position messaging for it, we're building the roadmap, we're working at the product teams to make sure we have a go to market plan. But then I'd have campaign owners, then I'd have content owners. Then like there's like five other teams that would help me get it into market. They could be small or large, but like a lot of people doing that. Now my product marketing teams, they own the roadmaps, they partner with product, but they also do the campaign strategy. They write the narratives, they do the briefs for virtual events and for thought leadership and for decks, et cetera. And then my program owners will take it and build what they need from it. But they're taking, doing way more that's broader than what traditionally I've had them do. I think it's because AI is like helping them do more with less time and less resources.
Stephanie Postals
So yeah, that's way more fun too, being able to play in different areas and yeah, that's awesome. So looking ahead, are there any big experiments you're running, campaigns, you know, types of content you're playing with, big bets or things that you're not even sure if they're going to work out because they're so big and hairy and you're just trying it. I'd love to hear about that.
Harmony Anderson
Oh my gosh. I mean, still, there's a few things I think with I, I've been learning from a lot of marketing leaders too where they're, they're just automating and personalizing at scale with AI, with qualified, with clay, like with intent based, you know, prioritization for target accounts. Like it's all automated. Like they're building so much pipeline through just like automating their SDRs and their BDRs. So that's a big piece where like it feels hairy to me because there's a lot of technology, there's a ton of data and we're trying to build it as we go. So that's one where I'm like, I, we're going to get it there. I'm like determined. But between where we're at now and like the vision, there's a lot, there's a lot of steps in between. And so much of it is infrastructure like we've talked about. We're also, I mentioned earlier we're like leaning really heavily into UGC content creator type of plays and programs. And I've been getting a lot of great feedback too. And I've seen this firsthand that like a lot of the influencers, influencer tech out there is just not quite hitting the mark. And so I've been, you know, so what we're doing and I got some feedback on that. So like, just don't go with any partners to do this. Like, you just need to have someone on your team building this pipeline of influencers and creators. And so now we're like, we're a couple months into that and it's, it's finally starting to hit. But I need to now I want to see if I can actually get their content to drive us this business that I, I, I deeply believe in, but will take a couple months for sure to do and like really get moving. And then the biggest surprise to me from a superhuman side is like marketing is, it's like fashion. It's cyclical. It goes around like a couple times every handful of years. One of the things with that is virtual events. Like during COVID virtual event, we obviously went from like in person to virtual only. Everyone was running virtual events. We got super excited the first six months and we all got tired of them. I kind of like started dying and, and so then we started going back into person post Covid or in this like post Covid world, which we love. So I'm, I'm actually starting to like, I'm going to start ramping events again. And now this year for Superhuman. But we're, we launched a virtual, our first big virtual event in January with this campaign I was talking about earlier in the segment. And we drove, we're driving, driving thousands of registrations. Like the average is 2 to 4,000.
Stephanie Postals
Registrations from what, Tell me more about this.
Harmony Anderson
What is this? For a webinar.
Stephanie Postals
I'm not kidding for like webinar for.
Harmony Anderson
Like literally virtual events and webinars is like, there's no chance, like it used to be so hard for me to drive demand for webinars, but like, if I got 200, 300 reg, I'd be happy. And the very first one we did, granted it was with this like very seasonal, amazing campaign, but it was like, learn how AI. You can be more productive in the new year with AI. And we drove thousands of registrations, thousands of attendees, and better yet, we had a ton of customers on there and they were giving us real time feedback during this webinar. They were like, I love this product. I can't believe what you're building. I have just screenshots and screenshots of customer feedback, both positive and constructive. And so not only did it help fuel our roadmap map, but it drove demand, it drove reasons for our CS and sales teams to reach out to them. It drove sales, managed pipeline, it drove thought leadership. And so we're now doing one a month. We're putting more of our, you know, time. Not we don't want to do a million because I don't want to, like, burn out my audience. But we just did one. I think it was our biggest one this week. We had a few companies. Amplitude and Speechify. Linear join is like AI thought leaders. We had, I think over 4,000 reg and a thousand attendees. And like, they're just still going. So now we've done like six of them. And wow, I'm gonna go as long as possible.
Stephanie Postals
Coming back.
Harmony Anderson
Who knew? Yeah, seriously, who knew? I.
Stephanie Postals
It's. That's. How do you come up with. I mean, for these webinars, I have so many questions, like, how do you come up with a topic that people care about? Like, how. How do you think about? Or how do you even research enough to be like, yes, this will draw in 4,000 people to register? And then like, how do you make sure it's good and not a corporate webinar? Cause I've been on some where I'm like, yeah, no, no, I'm not here just to learn about how. I mean, yeah, some. Some of Clay's webinars, I'm just like, all righty. It's just all you all day. This is not any. But thought leadership. And I get it, that's probably what it was for. But like, yeah, how do you do the research, execute a good one and then. Then what ROI have you been seeing for some of these?
Harmony Anderson
I think that's the value in AI. It's so new. People don't really understand it yet. And so if you position it of like, let. Let's. Let's talk about what the. The, you know, visionaries of AI are doing day to day. What are they using? What. It's like, it's like this podcast. Like, what are they using? What do they want to use? What's not out there. How are they seeing success? Success is everyone wants to learn that. And there's no shortage of topics like it. Honestly we don't spend that much time doing topics. We're just like, hey, I think we should probably do an AI webinar. And like what would make it interesting? Who can we get on? But I think it's because there is literally so much out there. What is AI native? What do you mean you can use it in email. And so we're really going back to, okay, there's no shortage of topics. How do we do it broad enough though that like you could learn, really learn from it. And, and the, the content itself is very much, it's. We try to get it as tactical as possible. So some of them are a little bit more product centric. We're like, we're showing you how you will save four hours. Like let's put it on your screen, make it easy so then you can literally go do it the minute we're off. Or insertx company is like, here's one of their big wins that they have done with AI, like hear about it during this event. So there's just no shortage of, of thought leadership and content. People want to see it because they don't get it. They just, the mainstream just does not get it.
Stephanie Postals
Yep, yep. And then are you, how are you advertising to get people there? Are you on LinkedIn? What are you doing to get awareness around this webinar to get those signups?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, we do LinkedIn, we do email, of course. Like we have a pretty heavy database, of course of a pretty large database of like super users of our brand and our product. We'll get our evangelists to share it. We'll share it it. The more people you can get onto that are your of course existing customers who also have great audiences. Like I'm a huge proponent, especially in startup marketing, to partner with as many people as possible. Build your community that way. It's cheap if not free. And you are taking, you are basically capitalizing on someone else's community and their brand. And so we're trying to do that. I've done that also at every single startup and we're trying to do that as much as possible here too.
Stephanie Postals
Okay. So you're just blasting it out to your partner's community and saying, hey, we've got this webinar, please be on it, please share it. And maybe incentivizing them sometimes it's a cool topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Harmony Anderson
And you'll get, we will give people really Great offers after too. Like, hey, join our. Like if you're on it, here's your three months free or whatever it could be. And it's just, it's fun. I just, I'm still shocked. Trust me. Like every month I'm like, I, like I told my executive team in January, I was like, don't get used to this. I'm not gonna be able to keep this up. And then we keep having really great ones. And I saying, still don't get used to it. It's still probably gonna go back down, but do it as long as I can. Yeah.
Stephanie Postals
Hot Tips by Harmony. Old school tactics. Working, working strong.
Harmony Anderson
I like it. Direct mail. Come on. People love direct mail these days too.
Stephanie Postals
They do, actually. Yeah, I know. That's a good one. As long as you do it well, it's a good one.
Harmony Anderson
Yeah. Yeah. So it's fun.
Stephanie Postals
So when it comes to the, this startup evangelist role that you are hiring for, for how do you think about the KPIs around, you know, this person and if they're doing a good job or not?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah. So I, there's, there are a bunch of programs we have that are either active or we want to pilot and launch for startups in general. So we have our Superhuman for startups program and, and that's like we have a website for it. You can sign up. There's a workflow I am tracking actively now tracking and will be tracking how many new accelerators are signing up for their portfolio companies. How many startups are coming in and requesting access or requesting access to the offer or to our product. And then so that's like the program itself. And then there's okay, are we, how many events do we have, how many happy hours, who's attending? Are we seeing them come in and take advantage of the offer, are they not? So it's really this like still programmatic type of approach and the traditional KPIs that you would imagine. But it's less like my teams are so held accountable for revenue. I'm more going to be looking at some of the leading indicators of success to revenue versus direct revenue. Since our offer is big, it's free basically, right. For a year. So it's how many new startups can we onboard. What is the percentage of companies in Y Combinator that are using Superhuman and some of the those more programmatic type of KPIs and if you know anyone, send them over. If you're listening to this podcast, get.
Stephanie Postals
On in here, find Harmony. If you're a good fit, it Sounds like a dope role.
Harmony Anderson
I mean, it'd be really fun, honestly. Yeah. Like, even if they're, like, a past founder and they just don't want to be a founder anymore because it's hard to be a founder, then find me, because I will just pay you to schmooze and host cool events and, like.
Stephanie Postals
You can have multiple, like, city locations, one in each city. Have one in Austin. I'll do it for fun.
Harmony Anderson
I love that. Yes. You're hired.
Stephanie Postals
All right, thanks. Here's my new job. It's a done deal. It's official.
Harmony Anderson
Perfect.
Stephanie Postals
Well, Harmony, this has been such a fun podcast episode with you. Thanks for coming on Marketing Trends. Where can our listeners, our viewers, everyone find out more about you and Superhuman?
Harmony Anderson
Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, please. The more the merrier. Reach out. I love connecting with the people and. And having coffee, having virtual coffee, whatever. So please don't hesitate to reach out. And you can find Superhuman as Well as on LinkedIn and X and all of the fun social profiles, too. So thank you so much for having me. It's been such a fun conversation today.
Stephanie Postals
This was really fun. Thanks for coming, and we'll see you for the round two sometime in the future.
Podcast Summary: Marketing Trends
Episode: The Secret To Scaling From $20 Million to $200 Million ARR (Extremely Fast)
Host: Stephanie Postles
Guest: Harmony Anderson, Head of Marketing and Growth at Superhuman
Release Date: July 9, 2025
In this compelling episode of Marketing Trends, host Stephanie Postles sits down with Harmony Anderson, the Head of Marketing and Growth at Superhuman, an AI-native email productivity tool renowned for its rapid ascent within the entrepreneur and founder community. With a wealth of experience scaling companies from $20 million to $200 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Harmony shares her invaluable insights on rapid growth, moving upmarket, leveraging AI, and maintaining brand integrity during exponential scaling.
[05:01] Harmony Anderson:
"I've been in tech startups, B2B SaaS for the most part my entire career. I've been really lucky to work with some really amazing growth companies..."
Harmony outlines her extensive background in B2B SaaS, highlighting her tenure at Thousand Eyes (acquired by Cisco), Outreach, and several startups before her current role at Superhuman. Her journey underscores her expertise in demand generation, revenue marketing, and scaling operations effectively.
One of the standout topics discussed is Harmony's approach to rapid scaling. Unlike many CMOs who advocate for a measured ramp-up period, Harmony emphasizes the importance of "launching huge campaigns as quickly as possible."
[00:00] Harmony Anderson:
"Launch a campaign as fast as possible. Just get into it. There's no better way to learn and to see what's happening..."
This aggressive strategy allows teams to learn swiftly, identify strengths, and iterate rapidly, ensuring that scaling efforts are grounded in real-time feedback and performance metrics.
A significant portion of the conversation delves into the complexities of moving upmarket—transitioning from serving startups and founders to targeting larger enterprises.
[25:10] Harmony Anderson:
"It's every single company I've started, every single company I've worked at is doing the same thing. Yeah, you're starting with SMBs or founders because those are your people, they're early adopters, they have high intent..."
Harmony explains that while startups provide a solid foundation and influential advocates, scaling to $200 million ARR necessitates targeting higher-value enterprise clients. This shift requires reallocating 70% of time and resources towards upmarket strategies without alienating the original customer base.
The discussion highlights the underinvestment in brand-related activities over recent years, leading to diminished presence in modern search results and thought leadership spaces.
[00:30] Stephanie Postles:
"There has been a big underinvestment in brand related things for the past couple years..."
Harmony compares content marketing to fashion, noting its cyclical nature and the resurgence of influencer and content creator programs as the new PR paradigm. She cautions against micromanaging attribution in these programs, advocating for a broader, brand-centric approach to truly harness their potential.
[00:44] Harmony Anderson:
"Content marketing is, it's like fashion. It's cyclical... brand is the new pr."
As an AI-native company, Harmony addresses the challenges of positioning Superhuman in a saturated AI market.
[19:27] Stephanie Postles:
"When it comes to this fast moving market, how do you think about positioning an AI first AI native company..."
Harmony envisions AI becoming as ubiquitous as the cloud, advocating for clear communication of AI-driven outcomes rather than relying solely on AI jargon. She emphasizes outcome-centric messaging, showcasing tangible benefits like saving time and enhancing productivity.
[22:27] Harmony Anderson:
"Your solution is still driving and I've said outcomes a few times, but the more you can get to outcomes as you know, the better it's going to be..."
Building a robust tech stack and revenue operations infrastructure is crucial for scaling efficiently.
[44:35] Harmony Anderson:
"One of the biggest areas that I think businesses don't invest in early enough is revenue operations and marketing operations..."
Harmony underscores the necessity of integrating tools like Salesforce, CRM systems, and marketing automation platforms to ensure seamless data flow and process efficiency. She highlights the importance of hiring a strong operations team to support front-line marketers and sales teams.
[46:48] Harmony Anderson:
"Every company I've joined, it is either impossible or nearly impossible to get that visibility into that data..."
Harmony shares Superhuman's success with virtual events, initially skeptical about their efficacy but later leveraging them effectively post-COVID.
[56:56] Harmony Anderson:
"We launched our first big virtual event in January... drove thousands of registrations and a thousand attendees."
These webinars serve multiple purposes: driving demand, fueling product roadmaps with real-time feedback, and establishing thought leadership. Regular monthly events have significantly boosted engagement and pipeline development.
[57:00] Stephanie Postles:
"How do you come up with a topic that people care about?... What ROI have you been seeing for some of these?"
Maintaining the startup community that initially propelled Superhuman's growth is a delicate balance during upmarket transitions.
[28:26] Stephanie Postals:
"Yeah, but it's like what you mentioned earlier, there's a lot happening that you can't tie back to. Yes, it's this community that's helping drive it..."
Harmony discusses hiring a Startup Evangelist to foster relationships within the founder community, ensuring that growth doesn't come at the expense of the loyal base that established the brand.
[62:25] Harmony Anderson:
"If you're listening to this podcast, get in here, find Harmony. If you're a good fit, it sounds like a dope role."
Drawing parallels with industry giants like Canva and Optimizely, Harmony highlights both successful transitions and cautionary tales.
[39:50] Harmony Anderson:
"Optimizely... moved too fast to the Enterprise and left their SMB businesses and their startups behind..."
She emphasizes the importance of learning from others, avoiding pitfalls like abandoning the original customer base, and ensuring that scaling efforts are strategic and inclusive.
Looking ahead, Harmony outlines ambitious plans for Superhuman, envisioning it as a comprehensive AI-powered productivity suite encompassing email, calendaring, task management, and more.
[37:01] Harmony Anderson:
"What if you could log in to this one instance of Superhuman, and AI has read your emails, calendar, and chats to prioritize your day?"
These innovations aim to revolutionize personal and professional productivity, underscoring the company's commitment to continuous evolution.
To support its rapid growth, Superhuman is expanding its team, particularly in roles that bridge marketing and community engagement.
[62:25] Harmony Anderson:
"We're actively hiring for a second startup evangelist... find me, because I will just pay you to schmooze and host cool events."
This strategic hiring ensures that both upmarket expansion and community nurturing are adequately supported.
Harmony Anderson's insights offer a blueprint for accelerated scaling, emphasizing the balance between rapid growth and maintaining core community values. Her strategies around content marketing, AI positioning, and operational infrastructure provide a roadmap for marketers aiming to propel their companies to new heights. As Superhuman continues to innovate and expand, listeners gain valuable lessons on navigating the multifaceted challenges of scaling in today's dynamic marketing landscape.
Notable Quotes:
Harmony Anderson [00:00]:
"Launch a campaign as fast as possible. Just get into it. There's no better way to learn and to see what's happening."
Harmony Anderson [00:44]:
"Content marketing is, it's like fashion. It's cyclical... brand is the new pr."
Harmony Anderson [19:27]:
"Your solution is still driving and I've said outcomes a few times, but the more you can get to outcomes as you know, the better it's going to be."
Harmony Anderson [25:10]:
"If I want to hit 100 million or 200 million, I have to move up market."
Harmony Anderson [46:48]:
"Every company I've joined, it is either impossible or nearly impossible to get that visibility into that data."
Harmony Anderson [56:56]:
"We launched our first big virtual event in January... drove thousands of registrations and a thousand attendees."
Harmony Anderson [62:25]:
"If you're listening to this podcast, get in here, find Harmony. If you're a good fit, it sounds like a dope role."
Learn More:
To connect with Harmony Anderson or learn more about Superhuman, you can reach out via LinkedIn or follow Superhuman on their social media profiles.