Superhuman
a16z.com
a16z.com
In fact, the "hype-factor" and unwillingness to describe in simple terms what the product is makes me more skeptical than I was to begin with.
> And that’s why I am excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading the Series B financing in Superhuman.
But you're right, the linked story reads like ad copy.
It's very clever for Superhuman to target that group. They're wealthy, influential, and will come in handy when its time to raise.
Outside of the VC segment, seems like most first-hand accounts I've read -- startup CEOs and journalists -- report that they've ended the subscription because the $30/mo. fee wasn't worth it, given the number of free alternatives.
This makes me wonder: does Superhuman have a target demographic outside of the ultra-rich?
If you're making $80k / year you're being paid $41/h assuming 48 weeks worked a year. Superhuman is worth paying for if it saves you 45 minutes a month, which, in my experience, is extremely likely.
1. It's fast as hell. I've tried all the OS X Desktop clients and they're all slower than they should be. Email is a task - only a masochist would spend more time doing email than necessary. This focus on speed means the interface is super snappy. Keyboard shortcuts are nice, but the real win is the Slack-style CMD-K menu that lets me change contexts quickly. I don't know why every app doesn't have this.
2. The interface is super clean and minimal. It displays only what's necessary on screen.
3. They've paved many of the key workflows that I care about:
- I type a date and they pop up my Calendar in the sidebar (but ONLY if I type a date).
- Undo send is critical to any email client I use and they have it. But I can also "accelerate" a send to skip the ability to undo it. Useful if I'm e.g. trying to get an email with some key info to discuss with a client that I'm on the phone with right that moment instead of waiting 10-20 seconds for the Undo Send window to close.
- Archiving an email displays the next email (granted so does Gmail) but the point is to process the inbox as quickly as possible.
- Copying an email from the list view and pasting it opens up the exact same email (recipients, subject, and body) - this is super useful when I'm sending a variation of the same email to people.
- Split Inboxes are great for filtering emails into a "Sub Inbox" for processing in a way that I don't process my main inbox. When I archive emails from there they disappear (unlike labeled emails which are labeled forever). An example is emails from Freelance gigs lists. I want to keep them out of my main inbox and scan them e.g. weekly, then have them go away forever.
- The "Escape" key is a back button. It keeps history so you can get back to the inbox very quickly by hitting Esc a few times.
That’s about it.
And to understand the back story you have to listen to the founder/CEO speak. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/
He's very charismatic - has a fabulous radio voice and when he speaks you feel like you need to listen. He does alot of podcasts and I get the impression he speaks to alot of the most influential people in Silicon Valley (conjecture). So lots of influential people are pulled into the orbit of what he talks about, which is Superhuman of course, and also the way he goes about business.
I'm not saying anything here except that I think highly charismatic leaders are able to generate a large amount of interest in what they are doing - they speak, people listen and want to hear more, and buy what they are selling. That's why if you pay much attention to the tech scene, you'll have heard about Superhuman from a number of sources in recent times, and you'll read articles like this one that are very positive. If you are highly charismatic then people want you to know you, be around you, hear you and give you what you want.
Paul Graham believes that the person who wins the U.S. election tends to be the most charismatic http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html and I think that's exactly true as well of getting funding, and generating buzz for your company/product.
Unfortunately if you're not born with the voice, the ability to listen or the X factor that gives you that charisma, then you're going to have to develop that success and interest some other way.
Of course it's not only about the founder charisma, the product must also be there - and if you've got both then you're probably, well, Superhuman.
Paul Graham is an interesting example -- he's not a great speaker. He's not smooth. But he's obviously smart and interesting in a less polished way. In a way this makes me believe what he's saying more, because I don't think I'm being sold.
Have you ever heard Elon Musk speak? Or Mark Zuckerberg in the early days? They almost have the opposite of polished charisma. And yet they're extremely successful entrepreneurs.
History is loaded with highly charismatic people and those who, for want of a more positive term, "fall under their spell". Steve Jobs is an obvious one. Google "reality distortion field".
Also, there's more to charisma than just speaking ability. pg's an excellent, and I would say charismatic, writer. In the modern age where companies are more distributed and things are becoming less physical in general, there are other ways to spread ideas and inspire others than being magnetic in-person.
He has the Hugh Grant voice.
My bet is they are trying to position themselves as a 'luxury good' of software.
Given there's no unit cost for software, that's always going to be a weird one. It makes more sense for supposedly 'exclusive' social networks (remember those?), but email doesn't quite have the same network effects.
Their 'laser focus' maybe going to be on people for whom $30/mo is an irrelevant expense, but more importantly they want 'status' individuals, who will personally market the product to those within their 'status' circle.
There's a class of higher-net-worth individuals who almost define themselves by specific things: their school, their car, their address, their job title, their activities, the club they belong to. To be fair, in some ways, it's important they do that because in some career trajectories, appearances are everything.
But key to building any kind of luxury brand is scarcity (or, it usually is, there are some that defy this), and of course brand, so they want the 'right people' to be using this.
If regular plebs use this, well then it's not much of a status signal.
All of this seems very cynical, but the reason I believe this might be the case is that the marketing collateral doesn't focus on anything materially relevant.
Yes - it's fine for companies to talk about very high level things like 'getting things done faster' - but ultimately, there has to be some kind of material translation there: what features etc. actually drive that productivity?
I don't see anything at all.
In fact, the screen shoots that we can kind of see in the marketing collateral provide not much information at all. I don't see the 'there there' - at least not from those shots.
Many startups make the opposite mistake - tons of features which they don't map well to 'problems solved' (and sometimes it's not bad communications, it's often features that actually have no value) - but the article in a16z - and the Superhuman website are just way too limited in terms of any details, to the point where my 'red flag' is raised.
About 50% of office workers spend '3 hours a day' in email. Maybe more. And so yes, any 'improvement' in email is worth something, possibly even $30.
But my 'spidey marketing sense' is telling me this is all about selling a 'decent' and 'nice looking' email client to aspirational people who are desperate to signal their status.
Possibly not for HN types, possibly not even for true, email warriors.
Either this, or they could really trying to pull the exclusivity/insider thing to the max as a launch strategy.
Should note 'The Information' is a $50/month news site - which has really set the bar for this kind of stuff. But the difference there is 'The Information' does get really juicy 'insider' kind of stories. The $50/month is probably easily written off as expense by every subscriber, there's materiality there.
Anyhow - the level of curation going on here is a little odd.
They say 'Superhuman' - that's totally fine, good on them, but I'll wait to see it to draw any conclusions.
I actually applied for a Superhuman account a few months ago (I am guessing before they went 'invite only'). Went through the questionnaire process then received an email from one of their staff saying I wasn't a good fit because I had more than one (I have 6) G-Suite email accounts, whereas their product only supports one email account for best results.
I was upset for a few seconds, but then that was replaced by grudging admiration that they had a clear focus of their ideal customer and onboarding expectations and were prepared to say 'no' to some people to filter them out.
But I really do wonder how many people have just the one email address these days? Startup founders especially would have a plethora. Would be good if they stated up front that they only cater for people with one email address - that would save them a lot of vetting time, and also make it clear up front for people spending time trying to get an invite that won't make it past the first gatekeeper.
I believe this has changed now. You can certainly add more accounts to Superhuman and it has keyboard shortcuts to swap between them. I use it daily like this. If you're really interested, you could reach back out and I'm sure they'd let you jump on board now.
No thanks.
( from https://superhuman.com/privacy )
There are several other businesses that specialize in doing just this, so even if they wanted to continue doing the exact same thing it wouldn't necessarily make sense to continue using their own in-house technology.
That said email is insanely difficult to wrap your head around, I've been doing it full time for several years and don't pretend to be anywhere near close to fully understanding it. So just having experience in the space and having tried out some different approaches to similar problems would surely help a ton.
Also see: https://money.cnn.com/2010/10/21/technology/rapleaf/index.ht...
From the article (10/21/2010): "Rapleaf knows your name, your age and where you live. It knows your e-mail address, your income and what social networks you use. It knows your likes and dislikes. And it makes money by selling much of that personal information to advertisers."
(Reference 1):
https://dataweekapiworld2014.sched.com/speaker/vivek_sodera....
"..Previously he(Vivek Sodera) co-founded Rapleaf, a consumer data company that was acquired in 2013, and spun out LiveRamp, a data onboarding platform."
It would be great to hear what A16Z's position on consumer privacy is, as I am sure this is just a misunderstanding.
At $30 / month for a webclient I would hope it comes with full iron-clad private hosting of your stuff with an strong privacy-based agreement to boot. I pay half that for my mail for a few mailboxes about maybe 50 gbs of storage between them.
Don't get me wrong, it works well for what it sets out to do, and the stagnation is understandable given how Thunderbird was always treated by Mozilla as a sort of red-headed stepchild before they cut it loose altogether. This is a project that has been operating in survival mode for a long time now. But it does mean that there is space in the market for an email client with a modern UI and some fresh ideas on how to interact with email.
That's something Outlook and Thunderbird don't do, is give you convenient features to hide information. Sure, you can organize things into folders or labels, colorize things for follow-up, sort emails, etc., but you're fundamentally limited by their model of "emails should be in a list, like a database. And they should be in chronological order. And you deal with them in chronological order, or you colorize them."
After reading the article there is still a dearth of details other than saying users “experience joy”, and that it is fast. Nothing about what generates the joy, of what exactly is fast about it. Avoid!
They pretty strongly adhere to "The Collision Installation" [0] in that they want to give you an in-depth product overview in a consultation before they give it to you.
> Nothing about what generates the joy, of what exactly is fast about it.
There's a keyboard shortcut for everything, and the UI actively trains you if you somehow don't use a keyboard shortcut to do something. It sounds intrusive, but it's not. The actual performance in terms of latency between user input and action is optimized too, which makes everything feel super fast. They also optimize some types of actions so that some specific workflows are faster (like reading every email with auto-advance). It's the combination of these things that make it fast.
[0]: http://www.startupengine.org/2013/08/the-collision-installat...
Interface seems reasonably fast, but not surprising for native clients. Does anyone know whether it's actually native? Or just electron that doesn't suck?
The TL;DR of this whole 1500-words post is "we think this will change everything about email, so we invested in it", and you wouldn't have missed out on any details.
Having tried and used almost all email clients that have been around, the best thing about Superhuman, until now, was that it made money by charging me a monthly fee, so I knew they can stay alive and continue without being sold to a bigger company and killed like many others before them.
Taking money from a VC is a bad sign for me. Call me old fashioned, but I would like to pay for what I use so they can build a business that lasts. VCs change the trajectory of businesses and usually what it means is getting bought by someone like Google and then being killed 18 months after that, leaving me holding the can.
Although VC money is worse, you don't know that at all about profit-based models. Any profitable company can sell out or cease operations at any time. One that I got burned on recommending was FoundationDB that was selling an awesome database for good prices with steady growth. After Apple bought it, they shut it down. Of all like that, it was one of only ones to get resurrected into an open-source product. Most just disappear with the big company transitioning the paying customers into their own, crappier offerings.
This is why I push for anyone trying to create products with longevity and good practices to use an open core model in a public-benefit corporation or non-profit. Best example in recent times is probably Ghost:
Note: I don't use Ghost. Just loved the business model they're trying. One of only trustworthy models out there.
But does anyone know whether or not the macOS version is an Electron app? The screenshot on the website makes it seem like it might be. If so, most of my interest is lost: it's probably still better than Gmail, but not better enough to be worth switching to. Non-native widgets are annoying to deal with, especially since they tend to not work properly with keyboard navigation/shortcuts (also a problem with Gmail). And while I believe they've gotten their client faster than Gmail, probably by a large margin, if it's Electron it probably isn't quite as snappy as a native app, while also taking up a lot of memory. I could be wrong, and I'll probably still try it if I get the chance, but I have yet to find a single Electron app that didn't struggle with this.
Edit: Their GitHub profile lists a bunch of Electron and JS repos, so I'm guessing it is indeed Electron. :(
I switched to FastMail for this exact reason and have not been happier. And its not a company backed by VC.
It's as snappy as a native app to me, and I have said that about no other electron apps.
Key quote for me: "Mr. Vohra said the app was targeted at people who spend three or more hours a day checking their email. “When you’re doing three-plus hours of email every day, it’s your job,” Mr. Vohra said. “And every single other job has a tool that makes you do it faster.”"
I didn't see a single screenshot, or informative comment on the feature set, just a bunch of meaningless hype "if Gmail was built today it would be this."
I absolutely hate that stuff, but marketers do this all the time anyway. Definitely adds one more creep factor if you know the sender is using Superhuman and can tell if you have or haven’t opened their email.
I thought a long time ago this was the default behavior to not open external images but it seems this has changed. I don't know who decided on changing that default, as pixel trackers can also enable stalking behavior.
Once you lock onto that way of working, everything else seems substandard. That of course includes yet another centralized “service” that I have no control over.
The founder raised $750k initially. Spent 20% buying superhuman.com and $45k hiring a design agency to turn wireframes into high fidelity mock. Very bold 2nd time founder
So not only is it a recurring $30/m but it only works on macOS. Seems to me this could have easily been Electron or a cross-platform web app. Not sure why email needs native performance.
Stop discrimination against Linux users!
> If you have ANY (literally ANY) sort of problem that you need solved, contact me. I mean seriously, literally any problem, even the one you think I can't help you with. The harder the better.
How do I work at a Silicon Valley startup that wants to hire me, if I'm an EU citizen with no degree and 5 years of work experience?
It'll be tough for sure. And depends on what the startup is prepared to do. Have you spoken to an immigration attorney? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=proberts does AMAs on here regularly and it might be worth contacting his firm for advice (also take a look through his AMAs).
Things I've seen work:
- Work remote, visit SV regularly for work. To be frank, I think that can be the best of both worlds. But YMMV.
- If you work for an overseas subsidiary for over a year, you can try for L-1 to transfer to the US. Generally the "startup" needs to be big (big) for this to be practical. You don't outright need a degree, but 5-years experience is probably on the lower end. If SV is your dream, it might be a case of finding a bigco startup that is prepared to do this. A stepping stone might be working for one of them in the EU first (e.g. Dublin in particular has plenty of satellite offices for SV companies).
- There are other options like the O-1 and H1-B, but these are extremely competitive. Again, immigration lawyer would have a better idea.
In all cases I'd probably give Peter a try first.
Remote work with visits is a great option in the meantime. L-1 I'm not too comfortable with as I'd be entirely tied to that company. O-1 seems like the easiest path, I'll try to find a book deal to start out with.
I think I'll refer only above 500 HN karma. And I'm honestly sorry, I really don't mean to be elitist or anything.
Also - aren't we past the 'false scarcity' thing these days?
If you're going to talk about it publicly, why can't I try it?
"Ooh, you can use it sooner if you know someone who is using it"
Sorry that I'm not already in your club, but I was excited to look at it, now, I'm a tiny bit miffed, but most importantly I may not remember to come back.
...
The author lamented 'decision making' 'getting back to someone' etc. which we can all empathize with.
The marketing collateral of Superhuman talks about 'speed' i.e. not having to wait 100ms for anything ...
I'm not sure how the two are deeply related. Yes, a refresh and speed will be great, but I personally don't think that's the issue.
It's a rather difficult thing for orgs to try to magically organize information, Google seems to be trying a few things and while novel and impressive, ultimately I think they are futile.
Anyhow, I'm stoked that people are trying to re-invent old things, excited to try it. I guess when my 'klout' score gets high enough?
Seriously? Once-in-a-lifetime founders? For an email client? That's how you know this is marketing garbage.