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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

I got an invite, scheduled a conference call, and the lady said she I need to screencast how I'm using Gmail. I told her that I'm not letting a stranger peek into and record my Gmail inbox and she said that I cannot sign up without this step, so, I refused, and they lost the income from me. Typical overhyped SV crap. Should rebrand to "Subhuman".

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I also told her I couldn’t share my screen or inbox and she said that was fine and walked me through onboarding with voice. Agree it was creepy to even ask.

Lucky you!

I use Superhuman; they didn't ask me to do this in on boarding.

That said....using Superhuman (or any similar third party app connected to gmail) involves giving them access to your entire gmail account.

It's odd they wouldn't let you onboard without that (they used a zoom screen recording with me, and it was fully within Superhuman), but you're not really sending them anything they don't have access to if you signup.

This is bananas. Why would anyone need that in the first place? I can't come up with any remotely valid reason.

Rahul has written volumes on the SH onboarding process. They train you to use the product so you will actually use it.

But anyone can do that without screensharing the person's own screen. It's called good old fashioned coaching and teaching.

I told the lady that I have over 35 years of software development experience and I've used all kinds of software and I don't need guidance and I do, I will reach out to them, but she was stubborn and lost a customer. I tweeted to Rahul and the team, but got no response so far! Well... This is not a scalable business model. But the lady was clear: "Superhuman is not for everybody!" Alrighty then!

Over 15,000 users paying $30 per month. $260 million valuation. Perfectly scalable. If you'd like to learn why you're wrong, I encourage you read one of the many lengthy, sincere, and detailed articles with the founder of Superhuman, starting with this one. https://www.drift.com/blog/how-to-measure-product-market-fit...

When you say it's "perfectly scalable", what are you using as your reference? That is, what other SaaS has $30/month pricing, especially one in a field as crowded as email and work messaging (i.e. Slack). Obviously, SH is far from having, or needing to have, a finished business plan, and it seems likely that the $30/user won't be the default offering or main breadwinner. But that raises the question of why that number is relevant in the first place when assessing SH's viability.

Well, I pay $5/mo for SaneBox as I always forget to unsubscribe and delete it's pathetic labels. Many of us pay for useless stuff. But some point, we stop, and then the company tanks.

You don't need a screenshare to accomplish this. I'm amazed by how much people buy into a companies bullshit and then defend it online.

I literally bought it into, both as a customer and investor. :-)

Well, valuations change. Sell!

And did you update your email signature in the way the OP suggested? Specifically, do you let everyone getting email from you know that you not only track that read it, but when they read it, and even where they were when reading it?

I ask, because that would be the ethical way to handle what this app is doing for you.

I don’t need to be told that an electronic communication may be tracked because I was born after 1980. Why do you?

You should have disclosed that you were an investor in the first comment you made.

Literally, every glowing review I have seen comes from a related party, whether it is an investor, employee, or friend of the CEO.

That's extremely high for an email client that only runs on a single OS, but if that's true, that's 450k/month or 5.4M/year. How do you get to 260M valuation?

Because anyone who becomes an SH customer will be giving them access to their gmail account anyway. AFAICT it is a third party enhancement to one proprietary service (gmail) and SAAS, not a general mail program.

Why? IMHO, and from on-boarding a bunch of folks for my startup, it's because it makes teaching you the software easier and more personal. If you aren't comfortable doing it, that's fine; but I believe it's designed to make the on-boarding of folks better.

If you don't trust them enough to see your email inbox, you probably shouldn't be considering them as your email provider at all.

^ this

Are you implying that everyone should run their own email servers or is there any email provider company that you are willing to screen share your personal email account with?

It's pretty clear: I'm saying if you don't trust an email provider to view your email -- they shouldn't be your email provider.

I trust engineers. I don't trust people who do the onboarding.

Should have signed up for the $60 a month plan…

If you're already using Gmail, how privacy conscious can you be?

Very, apparently. Would anyone care to explain?

I use GMail with the understanding that Google has access to my activity and content. However, I trust Google to not divulge* my activity and content to other email recipients and senders. That's enough privacy for me in my normal email usage.

* disabling the option of blocking image-loading in the iOS GMail app is definitely an aggravating and inexplicable tactic, to the point I'm starting to looking into switching away from GMail as my provider.

haha. op has a point about privacy but this is also accurate.

It's a much bigger company under much stricter rules and regulations. It's well understood that a small startup will have a much more lax security posture around customer data than the trillion-dollar technology company.

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