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One audience capped Superhuman
The founder ceiling
Superhuman was a premium product with an immediate paywall, and its core ICP was founders. The early adopter tech founder is not an infinite audience, and the market was finite two or three years ago. That was the first asymptote, and the same experience appeared at Wispr Flow.
Adding ICPs
The step changes came from adapting the product to more ICPs, like sales, with features such as recent opens, which shows who is reading an email so a reply can follow. Without opening up the layers of the onion, a hyper-focused company hits a ceiling.
Enterprise adoption
Wispr Flow was B2C PLG, but a large part of its ARR was enterprise before it had a single account executive, through self-service adoption and team licenses. Making a product easy for enterprises to adopt is an unlock of its own.
Why do growth curves flatten out?
Everett Rogers's 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations sorted adopters into innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and laggards. Adoption of a new product follows an S-shaped curve as each group joins in turn. Early adopters make up a small share of the whole, so a product built only for them runs out of buyers. Rogers's model estimated early adopters at about 13.5 percent of a population.
How do tools spread inside big companies?
Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom spread through individual employees and small teams signing up on their own, before any company-wide purchase. This route is called bottom-up adoption. Once enough people in an organization use a tool, the company often buys team or enterprise licenses to manage security and billing.
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