Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I am always interested in the back story.

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.

I wonder if charisma is actually an anti-pattern.

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.

You don't need charisma for "success", but charisma can bring success to the charismatic.

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".

I think it's more that charisma (as traditionally understood) is sometimes inversely correlated with engineering ability.

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.

By way of example, check this out https://youtu.be/IdYGpiRZIgg?t=101

He has the Hugh Grant voice.

The reason they gave you might be an excuse. If they were worried about '6 integrations' they could limit you to one.

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.

It's a digital version of Supreme.

Rejection of status games is a status game.

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