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Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

I am a Superhuman user and really enjoy using it.

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.

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Fastmail and Protonmail also don't commodify your data, and they're a lot cheaper than Superhuman.

"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."

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:

https://ghost.org/about/

Note: I don't use Ghost. Just loved the business model they're trying. One of only trustworthy models out there.

This is their series B; they have had multiple funding rounds already: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/superhuman#section-f...

weren't they VC founded from the start? If I remember the story correctly, they didn't release a product for (1-2?) years while having multiple developers in the bay area.

Another endorsement that doesn’t talk about the product, and seems like it was written by an investor or someone who works there...

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