🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Super

✍️ Notes from the Editors

Today's article is brought to you by Fidelity Private Shares. Managing your equity and investors should be simple—Fidelity Private Shares is the solution.

What a week! We had a great time in SF alongside some of the most promising founders we know (including several past Unicorner covers).

FYI, our next dinner is on March 20. We’re bringing together a small group of VCs in SF for an emerging managers dinner. If that sounds like you, join us!

In today’s article, we’re going back to the first principles of Unicorner’s purpose: to discover the next unicorns before they make it big. But you’ll notice immediately that Super is already at a Series C funding stage—unheard of for our weekly newsletter!

We’re exploring something new today: understanding what steps a startup has to take to get to unicorn status, coming from a startup a small step away from achieving it. Be sure to read the full article for a special section on becoming a unicorn, straight from Super’s co-founder, Henry Shi.

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Helping people save and earn

Super is a centralized hub where customers can save and earn money. The platform lets users book hotels and other travel services with a price guarantee and rewards accrual. It offers a standard Mastercard which helps users earn rewards and get cashback on spending while building credit. In addition, it has a premium membership, called Super+, which offers exclusive benefits beyond its card and travel program such as greater cashback, premium customer support, and early deal access. 

🔗 Check it out: super.com

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💰 Business Model

Super has a variety of offerings tailored to different customer needs, delivering a well-diversified revenue model, including advertisements and affiliate marketing, membership fees from Super+, interchange fees, and transaction margins.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

📖 Founder Story

Super board member Henry Shi and CEO Hussein Fazal are both repeat entrepreneurs who met through “co-founder dating,” the process of networking vigorously to find a co-founder whose goals, skillset, and values, among other things, are a good fit. Fazal previously founded an ad optimization company, while Shi was the founder of a local discovery social network. Shi had experience working in big tech (Google), but found himself more interested in building his own company. While neither of them were committed to a specific idea, both knew they wanted to build a company. 

After rapid testing and iteration, they launched Snapcommerce, a travel concierge chatbot, in 2016. However, when COVID-19 wiped away travel in 2020, the company lost 80% of its revenue and was forced to pivot. The team realized their true customer demographic was people looking to save money, a bigger pain point for lower income, lower credit consumers. For these users, being able to incrementally save is a game-changer beyond the realm of travel. Furthermore, customers would now have more opportunities for saving beyond the infrequency of travel. So, the team pivoted toward what Super is today, helping users save and earn more with everyday expenses. Today, 80% of its transactions are non-travel.

A few months ago, Shi decided to transition from CTO and COO to a board role, while Fazal remains the CEO.

💼 Opportunities

🔮 Our Analysis

Normally, we cover early stage companies that we believe are on the way to Unicorn status. In today’s edition, we’ve decided to do something different—we’re covering a company that is more mature, and will soon achieve the coveted Unicorn status. 

It’s clear what Super has gotten right. It’s identified a customer profile (want to save/earn more, lower income/credit) that is not only common, but also one that experiences a primary pain point (to buy or not to buy) very frequently. And while “helping people save more” is fairly broad and certainly has a lot of competition, Super has been able to execute and build out a comprehensive suite of offerings to build a truly “one-stop shop” type of hub. In addition, the motivation to save money or earn more doesn’t decrease once you’ve done it. As a result, once a customer is in Super’s hub of products, they’re likely to stick around, and it's unsurprising it’s been able to grow to 50 million users.

Having started with travel, but being led by experienced entrepreneurs and builders capable of executing and pivoting quickly, Super now has a whole ecosystem of features to help customers save money, earn more, and build credit. As it approaches Unicorn status, it’s clear that it tackles a real pain point and has demonstrated incredibly strong momentum as a result. In addition to strong metrics around profitability and total number of users, its founding team has shown an ability to execute and adapt, which is paramount for any scaling business. With all that in mind, we think Super is primed to become a go-to solution for saving and earning.

🚀 Insights from a (soon-to-be) unicorn

As Super is approaching Unicorn status, we asked Henry Shi (co-founder), about the journey, lessons learned, and reflections he has.

On the importance of co-founders: Shi and Fazal were meticulous and took their time meeting their match, given how paramount co-founder compatibility and alignment is. When asked, Shi said he was very intentional, and the process of finding a co-founder took months. In his words:

Being repeat founders: As repeat entrepreneurs, Super’s founders had perspective and experience with building a company, and that helped them identify a problem, solve it, and monetize their solution before growing.

Pivoting: Not being married to a given idea and knowing when to pivot is a superpower that is arguably more important than building. The company that they started is significantly different from the Unicorn of today, but those early phases were necessary stepping stones. Notably, getting into the space of finding savings/good deals within travel helped them pivot into a broader mission of helping with saving and earning. The lesson? Listen to your customers.

Heads down building, to a limit: When Super pivoted during COVID and eventually raised a Series B, it hired 100 employees and spent about a year and a half just building out a suite of products. Looking back, the team doesn't recommend heads down building for that long without looking up to get feedback. 

Being novices to an industry: Shi told us that:

Sometimes, being new to a space is actually an advantage.

Power of compound growth: When reflecting on Super’s journey, Shi observed:

So, what’s next for the team and Super? Shi emphasized doubling down on their current execution strategy. Shi said, 

And finally, is the Unicorn status worth the hype? 

📚 Further reading

Written by Matthew Huo

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