• Startup Archive
  • Posts
  • Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra on the secret to product virality

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra on the secret to product virality

March 24, 2025

After his first startup Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn, Rahul reported directly to LinkedIn’s Head of Growth Elliot Shmukler. Elliot was responsible for scaling LinkedIn from 25 million users to north of 250 million by the time Rahul joined.

In their first 1-on-1, Rahul asked Elliot to teach him everything he knew about virality. Elliot responded:

“I hate to burst your bubble, but there is no such thing as a truly viral product… No app has sustained a viral factor of greater than 1 for any real period of time. Even Facebook in its heyday had a viral factor of about 0.7, and that lasted for only a year — one person was creating about 0.7 new users.”

Rahul then asked Elliot about LinkedIn’s infamous address book import that invited all of a user’s contacts to LinkedIn. Surely that had a viral factor greater than 1? Elliot responds:

“That’s an amazing feature, but you have to remember that not everyone is going to use it all the time. So even that feature had a lifetime viral factor of about 0.4, and that’s considered good. 0.6 is great. And 0.7 is incredible — you’re in the stratosphere up with Facebook.”

Given that all of these viral mechanics eventually asymptote, Rahul asks: “What then is the true secret to virality?”

Elliot replies:

“It is word of mouth. It is the virality you can’t measure that isn’t mechanic or feature. It is when one user spontaneously tells another user about your product.”

Elon Musk offers similar advice:

“I think that really the way to sell any product is through word of mouth. The key is to have a product that people love… If you just like something and it’s ok, you’re not gonna care that much. But if you love it, you’re going to talk about it. And then that generates word of mouth. And that’s basically how our sales [at Tesla] have grown. We don’t spend any money on advertising or endorsements.”