Diving into solopreneurship 🚀

From side hustle to main gig: why I'm focusing on advising startups

TLDR

Personal update: I'm diving into solopreneurship 🚀

The focus: advising startups on growth as my main gig, not a side hustle.

After nearly a decade scaling Superhuman from day one, and advising a dozen startups over the last 2 years, I'm hearing more and more from startups who want to grow. I'm riding that wave and going all in.

The plan:

• Last 2 years: Leading Growth and other teams at Superhuman while advising 2-3 startups in my spare time.

• Now: Advising up to 10 startups + building connections, creating content, learning, and prioritizing health and family.

If this is as far as you read, thanks for your attention, and follow the journey by hitting “Subscribe now”!

If you want to learn more: read on 👇

Why growth?

Just like picking a startup lane, picking an advising lane must satisfy two questions:

1. Is the market big enough?

2. Can you win?

Considering these:

1. Demand for growth is vast. Nearly every company on the planet wants to grow. But only a small fraction know how. Meanwhile, AI continues to create new opportunities every and VC investment should continue to pick up steam. This creates a crop of ambitious new companies that want to grow now more than ever. And puts pressure on existing companies to stay sharp.

2. Growth blends systems thinking, analytical rigor, wild creativity, and refined taste. I've devoted my entire career to these skills. Either I've gotten genuinely good at it, or nobody has the heart to tell me otherwise.

I considered several other lanes: analytics, personal productivity, and more.

In early 2023 I even ran a split test — launching a pure-play analytics gig at the exact same time as a growth gig.

I liked the growth one more 😉

While I won't stray too far from those topics, I view them as inputs to driving growth.

Why advising?

Empirically, the feedback so far is good 🙏

Founder & CEO:

A few months in, you've already over-delivered:
- gave a lot of guidance on right areas
- connected with great people immediately (saved tons of time and $)
- raw, straightforward, no sugar coat bs, which I like and founders need
- I respect you and your expertise (which is important)
- helped with company culture which has been extremely impactful

Founder & COO:

Overall I've been really impressed by the way you think about things:
- the speed and clarity of communication
- how you support and push simultaneously
- how quickly you'll make intros and support publicly

It goes a long way, and is really appreciated

VC:

- The CEO was super impressed and enjoyed the chat
- Our lead investor also loved the convo
- Whatever you're doing in the convos is helping

More fundamentally, here is what I uniquely enjoy about growth advising. I put this together to remind myself why this path makes sense for me. I assume I'll revisit this in the future, and hopefully it's useful to anybody else considering this path.

• Rapid problem diagnosis
  I run every problem through two lenses: breadth and altitude. Breadth is figuring out if the 'real' issue lies in product, marketing, or somewhere else. Altitude is determining whether there's a big-picture problem, a devil-in-the-detail, or both. Pulling this off requires wide prior experience.

• Rapid problem solving
  I enjoy blending first-principles reasoning with pattern-matching through experience, expert input, and literature. It’s especially fun spotting common threads in problems and solutions — to be distilled into general frameworks.

• Connecting
  You won't have the answer to every problem. But it's your responsibility to build and maintain a network that can solve basically any problem. Or, as I prefer to think of it, a crew of homies. “Your network is your net worth” goes the cringeworthy saying, but more fundamentally, meeting and staying connected to hundreds of talented and ambitious people is just… fun.

• Trust and rapport
  Advisor value lives or dies by whether you can influence critical decisions. This only happens when founders genuinely trust your input. Many factors drive this, but several I've found to be especially important: responsiveness, active listening, not being afraid to challenge.

• Sales and marketing

  Pounding the pavement. Every day. Client demand generation can easily absorb to 50% of my focus. Unless you naturally have inbound, in my view, you need to actively enjoy sales and marketing, or you will burn out. Fortunately for me, a career in growth makes this feel less like work and more like play.

Which companies?

My sweet spot is a slop of acronyms: PLG B2C & B2B SaaS.

Tell that to my 10 year old self.

In simple terms, I enjoy helping founders grow revenue to $1M, $10M, $100M, and beyond.

I especially enjoy it when the product plays a big role in the company's growth, and when I dig said product.

I'll opt out when I feel too distant from the space or its growth. For example, social media or enterprise sales targeting a handful of giant customers. At least right now, there are people better suited to advise those companies than me.

How long are you going to do this for?

Some of the greats whom I admire in this space have been at it for years, and proudly declare they're never going back to full time.

Some find themselves full time employed within a year.

Like with any career evolution, my plan is to commit for at least 6-12 months — and frequently assess how it's going. If someone comes at me with an incredibly compelling opportunity, I'll consider it.

What about Superhuman?

At the time of writing, I'm wrapping up my latest project. Or, as a friend charmingly put it, "I'm shit at leaving".

My journey at Superhuman has been one of scaling a new function from scratch, getting it to maturity, then giving away that lego — again and again.

Now, there isn't a new team that needs founding. I can step back and appreciate the hard work. Company, product, and customers are doing great, and growth is up and to the right! Building this thing with my brother has been a joy.

On top of our positive impact on our customers, and their positive impact on the world, I'll forever enjoy that hundreds of products, and thousands of people in tech have adopted Superhuman patterns, serving hundreds of millions of people.

Notice the recent addition of Cmd+K to ChatGPT?

What's next?

Beyond the 5 companies I'm currently working with, I'm setting some big, hairy, audacious goals, devising my content strategy, and spinning up additional revenue streams.

More on all these topics in a future post.

How can I help?

I would be delighted if you wanted to follow along!

To do so, hit “Subscribe now”. You will get an email when I share new content, as well as my unending gratitude.

You also have the option of a paid subscription. Right now this doesn't provide much beyond even more gratitude. In the future it'll unlock exclusive content, older posts, merch, and more.

Last but not least, if you want to share an idea, think I should meet someone interesting, or just want to say hi, drop me a note!

Can you advise my startup?

Maybe! You can get in touch using gauravvohra.com or LinkedIn DM — see you there.

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Last but not least, there is a long list of people who have helped me with this particular chapter of the journey.

I'd be remiss if I didn't express appreciation to those who have shared advice, helped me develop and express ideas, and made valuable introductions at just the right time. Thank you: Adam Fishman, Alexa Grabell, Allyson Letteri, Andrew Michael, Annie Warner, Ashish Kundra, Austin Walker, Ed Sim, Elena Verna, Eliot Durbin, Eric Sung, Gururaj Pandurangi, James Evans, Jane Portman, Kate Syuma, Kristen Hayward, Leah Tharin, Michael Sippey, Paul Teyssier, Phil Vander Broek, Rahul Krishnan, Rahul Vohra, Ruchin Kulkarni, Tarik Sehovic, Yuriy Timen, and, I'm sure, many more.

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