I remember when this startup came out, all the VCs, angel investors and tech founders were singing songs of praises (and raises) about how this was going to disrupt email and gating the product an 'exclusive' access to a waitlist.
I find it sus when VCs have to keep overhyping their portfolio companies, especially when they don't even make money.
Anyway, I checked it out and found that this really isn't novel at all (a meeting to use an email client? really?). Just classic marketing and hype to get you to use the product.
It took literally _5 years_ for me to get through the waitlist. I signed up in 2016 and got an automated email “from” the founder in May 2021 excitedly inviting me to fill out a questionnaire in order to gain access… Asking me to do work after waiting 5 years seemed crazy so I ignored it and got another automated email “from” the founder nudging me to take the questionnaire a few weeks later. Strangest set of interactions I’ve ever had with a product. I have no idea whether their product is good or bad and I stopped caring many years ago.
It's classic productivity app bias. You start using a new app and because of the newness placebo, you get a boost in performance. You post about how amazing and cool it is, tell all your friends, then you get that crash back to baseline. At best, it just becomes a regular part of your routine. More commonly you dump it for the next cool productivity tool.
I'm doubtful it's a 'productivity' issue so much as a 'status' issue. The product is positioned as a brand, not a tech.
It's actually a confusing thing in marketing.
Products that are sold for aesthetic reasons - i.e. fashion - well that's obviously aspirational.
But most products that are sold even on the basis of features - those features are never used. It's the features themselves that are aspirational.
There's a late night infomercial on right now selling hoodies. They make it green, call it the 'tactical hoodie' and use the most ridiculous, masculine/alpha, quasi military language to describe it. All the 'zippers' and 'pockets' and 'the peak on the hood to keep your night vision' etc..
It's just a basic green hoodie ... but described as though it's for Special Forces Operators i.e. aspirational marketing.
FYI that products are sold aspirationally doesn't mean they are bad, they can be good, even better, just that you're probably going to end up paying a hefty margin.
Good example of this kind of positioning:
"You sent a critical email, but didn't hear back. Why? Your message was buried by countless more that arrived later. With Superhuman, you can get back to the top of their inbox. When you send an email, just choose a time — for example, Monday at 8:55 am — and we'll deliver it precisely then. When your contact starts their day, they'll see your message first. No matter when you work, send at the perfect moment. "
It's a ridiculously mundane feature, sadly one that took forever to appear on most clients, but it's now universally available, called out as some amazing thing and contextualized in the locus of the problem i.e. "Your message gets read first!". Smart but a bit hapless.
I cannot think any productivity tool that has sticked only sake of productivity. It is always productivity + something where tool shines. Eg using vim at server through ssh.
So many startups these days seem to only have other startups as their customers, and they're almost always due to connections between their investors. Just trading VC money back and forth.
This is why I especially like B2B2C companies. (Companies that sell to other companies a product that customer company somehow packages or delivers to the end user) In this model, there is, at the very least, a “C” somewhere down the chain where value is transferred from a consumer.
I briefly worked at one such company. The vibe was from some sort of alternate reality, it was truly bizarre. I couldn't deal with it and quit after about a month.
I have to disagree with you. The guy built a niche product, an email program that offered productivity benefits just for those dealing with hundreds of emails a day. Maybe the top 1-2% of email users would find it useful.
But this presents some big problems for his go to market plan. If he opens it up to everyone with no restrictions he will face tremendous churn. Plus 98% won't see any value at all and will bash the product online perhaps discouraging those who would benefit from even trying it.
By forcing people to answer questions that allow him to only allow those who would potentially benefit from signing up for the trial he eliminates all those problems. As a result from what I can see his users are fanatical in their praise.
You might ask how does he earn a profit on the top 2% of email users? The overall market is so large that even a tiny sliver of those users who willing pay for the product is a pretty large market.
Proponents never call it a niche product, though. They talk like it’s the one productivity tool to rule them all. Such attitude is the problem, not the business’s success.
Funnily I am the one who always said - why do you need Superhuman if you have multiple inboxes in gmail and filters + shortcuts to cater for probably 80% of the functionality free.
But the OP of the comment has a very good point:
>he will face tremendous churn
The pricing didn't reflect the value for mass market. They started with SV execs. Them slowly improved and decreased pricing and released for `privileged mass market` later down the road.
"f he opens it up to everyone with no restrictions he will face tremendous churn. Plus 98% won't see any value at all and will bash the product online perhaps discouraging those who would benefit from even trying it."
Yeah that's not a valid excuse.
There are innumerable product categories where such problems exist.
Every product you could imagine is more useful for one group than another.
He is creating a MLM-ish exclusivity club, a bit like with Clubhouse (VC's were early participants, bringing in people who wanted to be in that circle).
And: "The overall market is so large that even a tiny sliver of those users who willing pay for the product is a pretty large market. " is one of the biggest pitch fallacies. Tons of young entrepreneurs use this justification in their pitches. There can be reality to it or not.
The obvious 'hustle' is blatantly apparent right in the name: "Superhuman"
He's literally making a direct appeal to the egos of successful people, who think they are a bit better than everyone else.
It's a hustle to sell something into the most lucrative market of 'monthly revenue' from people who can afford it.
It's a bit like Forbes magazine or something.
I'm sure it has some neat features and it may not even be priced wrong - but the marketing is cheezy.
It's also an example of how so many smart people lack self awareness, how people think they are immune to advertising, even people who design marketing overrate their ability to resist influence. The Ego is the great deluder, it's almost impossible for the Ego to reject incoming information that embellishes it.
I think tech people are among the worst of this - because you have high performing, very intelligent people, probably prone to thinking they are 'better' (in some ways maybe they are), but it's also an industry 'the furthest away' from marketing and communications, with basically no bridge of intuition. The language of tech is completely unhelpful in terms of understanding the language of communications.
It seems like it's pretty standard advice that it's better to have 100 customers who absolutely love your product and never churn than 10K customers who have a slightly positive impression of it and 10% of them churn out every month.
I think the years long waiting list and manual selection of who you let in could be an attempt to game these metrics. (I'm not saying that's a valid excuse for doing it, because after 3 (2?) years, the need for such gaming suggests to me that the product isn't in the first category. It might still be OK and a viable business, but it's probably not going to turn into gmail.
"It seems like it's pretty standard advice that it's better to have 100 customers who absolutely love your product and never churn than 10K customers who have a slightly positive impression of it and 10% of them churn out every month."
??? What, no.
Do the math on what you just said.
You'd have to charge 100x the price to have only the 'beloved customers'.
'Churn' is a normal part of business. 100x the customer based, for 10x churn? I think most people would take that.
'Years long waiting list' - is mostly rubb hype, a marketing tactic.
You are not going to be on the waiting list, if they think you are important.
My 'wait' was maybe 3 months, probably because I have 'some banking' elements on my profile. If I was a founder, probably 1 month.
It's a matter of who they think is willing to pay - and - a 'scarcity' tactic that feeds right into the egos of the kinds of people who would want that product.
Their tactics may be reasonable - it could be optimal for them ...
... but my issue is - they are not rational tactics in a competitive market.
Someone could 'copy the whole thing' and give it away for $1 a month.
'Churn' is not hugely relevant.
Which makes me believe that the features are just not that valuable.
They are trying to be a premium brand product in software.
I think 10% layoff is probably just an excuse to cut some fluff and R&D during a downturn. They can harvest cash a little bit before expanding.
Genuine counter-argument: it makes sense to cast a wide net then to filter your customers to try to build a small and loyal customer base.
The truly genuine way of doing this, though, is to advertise the product as such and let people decide to sign up on their own will (e.g. « here is a new email system dedicated to power users. »)
I found the waitlist and onboarding process off-putting, to the point where I just didn’t want to even use it.
I remember getting as far as, “ok, now you need to go through the onboarding process”. I asked if I could skip but they insisted I schedule time with them, so I just didn’t bother.
This was probably one of the weirdest experiences I had with a SaaS product.
Anyway, I wish them well and I hope they pull through the whatever-is-about-to-happen with minimal damage.
I agree: A waitlist on a pure SaaS product is absurd. The only reason why I can think they have it: To require 1:1 onboarding that gives their sales team an opportunity to upsell you. That said, they could have decoupled the two.
Can you elaborate more on the bugs that you experienced? I used to be a Superhuman customer, but ultimately cancelled because I found Hey's stance on email to be much more attractive. I'm curious what other experiences were, particularly bugs. I didn't find anything that stood out to me as broken, personally?
Gmail was invite only at one point. I remember when everyone was clamoring for an invite. I wonder if it would’ve had the same success without that hype.
Invites weren't what got me hyped about Gmail. My Yahoo and Hotmail accounts had 2-5 MB storage limits at the time. Gmail offered a 1 GB storage limit. The idea that I'd never have to delete an email again is what had me hitting up old friends on AIM for an invite.
Is it scumbag of them, or are we the scumbags for refusing to adopt any software unless it’s free?
Would you rather they parse all your private communications for advertising profile purposes and keep it free-as-in-Facebook?
It was basically a decade-plus free trial. I can’t see how that was a bad deal.
I pay for email(Fastmail) because I want to support the team working on keeping my main communication channel working smoothly, and would rather not have my emails parsed by the advertising surveillance state.
My inbox is almost full, so they're hassling me about this. I did some investigation and found that over 1GB of the data in my inbox is email history quotes from a long-running email chain. Of course it's impossible to delete those without deleting each email they belong to.
Conspiracy theory: Google refused to implement an option to disable inserting email quotes in responses, knowing that such an option would make more efficient use of storage space.
People were clamoring for an invite because it was profoundly better than anything else at the time. I browsed the Superhuman site and I can’t personally find anything compelling.
FWIW, I do think it's an excellent email product. However, it is generally not going to be worth the money unless you send a ton of email all the time (exec, sales person, director+ eng leader).
I remember (very lightly) scamming someone for a gmail invite - they wanted a picture of whoever they invited, I send them one I found deep in google images. Was a strange time for sure.
That was because it was a much, much better product than everything else: we forget it today, but most other places would allow you to store only a few megabytes of email, and suddenly here is a service that allows you store several hundreds of times what you could do before.
You don't need to generate hype when your product is that good. Same as you don't need to generate power for an electric car powered by an antimatter generator.
The success came from the fact that it was so much better than competitors (more storage, a better interface and better search. All that matters in email). The invites were just an irritating hurdle to get past to have something good.
Invites were easy to get. There was a site gmailinvitespooler were you just ask for one. I had zero connections and got one from there. And my migration away from the we are evil now company is still not complete :(
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I've been using Superhuman for years and it definitely helps me get through the 50+ emails that are awaiting me each morning significantly faster than either GMail's web or mobile client or Outlook on mobile. I'm quite happy to pay for it as it easily pays for itself.
Rahul has frequently personally responded to my inquiries about the product as well as recommendations.
They definitely don't deserve all of the hype or that high of a valuation, but I still think they are a great product.
+1 for Mimestream! Fantastic client. I'm hoping they'll add support for other services like Fastmail through JMAP but honestly, just Gmail support alone makes the app worth it.
Can you give a sense of how Superhuman helps you get through those emails faster?
50 emails does not sound like a lot to me; I’m not sure how I could get through them any faster than I can now using the default MS365 web Outlook + Mail app on my iPhone.
I wonder what the economics of this product look like at $9.99/month. I'm rooting for them. I think the vast majority of people that would pay for premium software can't justify paying more for email than they pay for JetBrains, Adobe, or Figma/Sketch.
I've seen the happy customers paying $30. I just wonder if they're missing out on 5-10 more happy customers for every 1 of those that's willing to pay $9.99.
1/ Offer licenses to students, or community editions to get people hooked
2/ Professionals hired at a company want to use this, now they're use to it and have their workflow covered. Plus probably best tool for the job in many cases. (Their language support is fantastic). Cheap enough to just get through without requiring finance approval.
3/ Home use is also great, I've been paying since 2014 and am very happy.
It's like the Adobe model (but less evil, IMHO), where in the 90s/2000's every poor student pirated it, now they pay a licensing fee to use it on a monthly basis.
Adobe - every student still pirates it and since Adobe tuned the price to be terrible (its yearly contract only and only buying whole collection makes sense) now people are moving away hard - or pirate it.
Sorry, meant "now those who did (mostly?) mostly pay for it if they use it in a professional capacity". Adobe pricing is absolutely horrendous.
Same as Microsoft, trying to buy an outright copy of Office was an absolute mission and confusing UX once we managed to actually get a physical copy I can see why people get so confused and pay Microsoft money for things they don't need. (It was a grant that was only for outright purchases such as a laptop, printer, harddrive, Office license, not for ongoing licenses).
I know their Privacy Policy is pretty standard but if you look at the background of the founders it all deals in selling data. I would be very careful using them for email.
Superhuman Privacy Policy
> Personal Data We Receive From Third Parties: From time to time we may receive information about you from third parties and other users, including your job title, employer, and location. We may also collect information about you that is publicly available. This may include your publicly available social media information, or your contacts' publicly available social media information. The data we receive is dependent upon your and your contacts' privacy settings with the relevant social network.
> Vendors and Service Providers: To assist us in meeting business operations needs and to perform certain services and functions, we may share Personal Data with service providers, including web hosting, debugging services, email and productivity services, survey providers, data base and sales/customer relationship management services, customer service providers, payment processors; web and app analytics services, and data brokers. Notwithstanding the foregoing, we only share Email Content Data with our hosting provider (Google, Inc.). Pursuant to our instructions, these parties will access, process or store Personal Data in the course of performing their duties to us.
OT: I've been trying recently to find something that works like the old Google Inbox project. Inbox was the only time I've ever reached inbox 0, and it annoyed the hell out of me when they cancelled it. Has anyone seen/used anything that comes close?
Readdle's Spark[1] has been my Inbox replacement since Google killed it. It has pin/snooze functionality and a similar concept of grouping emails by category and letting you easily mass mark-as-read. Plus, you can connect multiple email accounts rather than just being limited to your Gmail account. It's also nice because you can have a "team"; my wife and I use it to share important messages and help each other draft or review emails. They have really nice apps for Mac and iOS, too.
I've been using Spark for years and love it. Snoozing is great though it is not an exclusive feature any more. I believe there are some privacy concerns with Spark but I'm very happy with it overall.
You can effectively get inbox back now. The guy at Google who made it set up on his own and made (very good, paid) browser plugins to restore functionality.
Shortwave, imho, comes really close to the old Inbox experience. I'm not sure that I recommend it, but it was good when I was trying it out compared to vanilla Gmail.
$100 million in VC money and they couldn't hire someone to build a competent website. It's genuinely awful, basically a VC Powerpoint presentation converted to HTML. They don't even say what they charge. I don't know what they are selling beyond the fact that it has something to do with email.
I still remember sitting in a strategy session where the same argument was made for Facebook 'killing' Snapchat with Poke. And then again for FB Stories, with tech news running headlines "RIP Snapchat."
One of the psych principles I used to lecture about often in my keynotes was on boundaries as freeing, and discussed an experiment where children clustered around the sandbox in a playground with no fence, but used the entire playground area when there was a fence.
Parity isn't simply the availability of identical features - sometimes it's also the lack of the other features, for both the users and the developers working on the product.
That's not to say this particular instance will be a successful company. Just that the ease of copying their differentiating feature may be less of a big deal than people often think.
But it did, Instagram Stories immensely limited Snapchat’s growth with now limited upside. Imagine the scale of IG stories today, without it all these people would have used Snapchat instead.
Sometimes copying a feature doesn’t have to kill, it’s enough if it cripples another organization.
Snapchat didn't care about Android, and most of the world runs Android, which is what allowed IG stories to massively limit their growth. Quality shooting yourself in the foot there, Snapchat.
> One of the psych principles I used to lecture about often in my keynotes was on boundaries as freeing, and discussed an experiment where children clustered around the sandbox in a playground with no fence, but used the entire playground area when there was a fence.
In both cases there is a boundary condition and distribution is biased towards the boundary. (Sand/Grass transition is a boundary). So the fence is not 'freeing' anything: it is simply demarcating the [extended] 'space of play', and is a stronger boundary condition (physical fence) than the material boundary (sand/grass).
At least for me, the forced onboarding call - at least until you ignore 5 scheduling emails - is also off putting. Do people with huge email flows really want another meeting? I don’t.
It's marketed like a car, not like utility product.
Cars are sold aspirationally. They make commercials with the Saab car driving on the desert, and then the Saab jet flying above, to make you 'feel like a fighter pilot'. Features and functions are there just to support that.
Nothing detailed about the actual features of Superhuman, just 'how it establishes your status'.
People in thriving communities are always looking to surround themselves with status markers and signals. This is a big part of what they are selling.
America is also good at productivity. I'm doubtful the features could not be duplicated, and if they were, unit cost of software being what it is - it should be commoditized.
Remember that email itself - is just a wonderful, world changing, magical thing. Imagine nobody have it, or SMS etc. !
We live in a hyper competitive world, someone would feasibly absorb aspects and just make a better product, even if it wasn't particularly noticed by others.
Someone gave examples of FB copying 'stories' etc. from other sources, those are slightly different examples, related to critical masses and network effects.
Though email is a network - email clients are generally 'standalone' - not network effect features.
Superhuman is a case study for sure, but in a lot of things people might not realize.
Given the topic, I figured I’d ask: I have been looking for something like Superhuman but considerably cheaper (maybe $5/month is the right price point for me). I need a desktop app for Windows that doesn’t freeze frequently and (most importantly) can recategorize my junk mail better than Gmail or Outlook can (both have had many significant spam false positive failures lately).
Still hiring for Engineering and Product. The cuts were Sales and Marketing to put our heads down and focus on building our next product and growth product.
I think you underestimate how complex email clients are. Table stakes from Gmail: You need to be able to display arbitrary HTML safely, full text search, remove the embedded history in emails, robust sync with Gmail (or insert your IMAP server), a rich text editor, and there are even small things that end up being complex like parsing an email (people send all sorts of non compliant mail and Gmail is pretty darn good at accepting most of it). That's just table stakes, let alone the features that make superhuman distinct.
You misunderstand me. I am saying that I don't think this user story requires a standalone email client. You could replicate most of the key value propositions (if not the specific feature implementation) as extensions to Chrome and Gmail. That would be both a feasible solo dev idea and a more reasonable $5-10 a month rather than $30.
Sure, throw a couple hundred million at the same problem and you'll overbuild it into a monster. But that doesn't mean it's the right business model.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Is Superhuman comparable to Honey? From a tech perspective, maybe??? I.e. could a talented solo dev replicate 80% of Superhuman and then publish it via the chrome app store. Yeah. But from a product perspective? Absolutely not. Honey has a vastly wider market than Superhuman, and almost anyone can use Honey and get something out of it. We can sell Honey as a 'money-saver', in contrast to Superhuman which markets itself as a 'time-saver' (albeit, for an eye-watering subscription). I've seen many people step over dollars to chase pennies, and Honey taps into that behavior, offering a much stronger value proposition than Superhuman (so much so that the two are basically incomparable).
This product is very niche. From my own experience, performing a single mildly unorthodox keyboard shortcut in front of an average Joe sort of freaks them out. Getting regular people onboard with something like this would be a total nightmare. This alone probably filters down Superhuman's market dramatically (enough to make a VC-backed 100-employee effort seem absolutely ridiculous).
Regarding the merit of Superhuman's ability to actually save time is another conversation others have argued to death about. I'd be interested in what others have to say about this, but I don't think the discussion has been very productive so far.
huh? How is building an email client where no interaction is over 100ms a solo dev project? Thats like saying Instagram is a solo dev project because it only has a few screens.
But hey not a bad idea to recreate it as a solo dev. Get ~10,000 customers, charge $15 instead of 30 and make a few ez millions!
We will get through this. We have the whole Series C and some more left. This was a move to put our heads down and get to work without worrying about fundraising for at least the next five years but potentially ever.
First, let me disclose that I like how Superhuman works, and I have copied/followed a lot of the advice from Rahul's writings/talks.
I got in long back during its beta invite, and my feeling was that this is what I was doing all along, save for the additional metadata, which is what Rapportive did. So, I left.
A few months back, I wanted to separate work emails, and I thought I would try it again. I got the onboarding with a super helpful and overly smiling nice guy. Even during the onboarding sessions, I popped up the obvious shortcuts, such as hitting "SHFT + ?" to quickly look for Keyboard shortcuts, and I was already flying around.
This may be personal, but I have long since decided to learn the tool that I use every day to know the ins and out, and I can move around pretty quickly with just two panes on my Apple Mail without ever touching the mouse or clicking on an icon. So, Superhuman wasn't much of an addition except for the extra information and guides that felt good, but I quickly realized that I don't need most of those.
I unsubscribe ruthlessly, while the newsletter I like to read are on separate IDs (gmail) from my primary email IDs (personal, family, work), and I'm not important enough to be flooded with emails. So, my Inboxes are pretty tamed most of the time. Yes, my weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly digital chores do help.
Here is my worry with Superhuman. With that much of a valuation -- I don't see it becoming a standalone self-sustaining mega business but Rapportive in steroid married to a Mail App. Rahul seems to have a pretty emotional solid nostalgia with Rapportive that the idea of Rapportive is everywhere in Superhuman. Nonetheless, I feel Superhuman is super awesome on its own if it does not carry the weight of the "magical wand" that Rahul and team sells everywhere.
I no longer use Superhuman but I will definitely get it for others in my team -- marketing, sales will definitely love Superhuman.
P.S. I usually take shots of my Mail App around early each year. They come in handy while showing it to few people who thinks I've grappled with some sort of a productivity panache in a way and ask me for regular ideas and suggestions. Here are some with Apple Mail Interface, hoping this will inspire someone to experiment;
I find it sus when VCs have to keep overhyping their portfolio companies, especially when they don't even make money.
Anyway, I checked it out and found that this really isn't novel at all (a meeting to use an email client? really?). Just classic marketing and hype to get you to use the product.