Superhuman is Sublime Text for Email | Hacker News Reader

Superhuman is Sublime Text for Email

growthalytics.com

51 pointsmastermojo59 comments

Sublime Text doesn't have a $30/month fee like this does though. ST is popular not because it's sleek, but because it's fast, uses little memory, never crashes, and restores everything when your computer goes brrrrp

I paid for Sublime Text during its early days, I believe about 10 years ago. I paid for an upgrade again. Sublime Text, iA.Writer, Hemingway App, and Grammarly is my primary writing tool.

I was invited to SuperHuman during its beta, and I tried it. I didn't upgrade. First reason was of course, the cost. The Second was, it isn't for me. In 2008, the first things I did with Mail on the iPhone was to remove that "Sent from my iPhone". So, the "Sent with SuperHuman" kinda labels do not work with my ways. "This is not the Way."

I have been using emails for just over 20+ years, and I have learned a lot of tricks to manage my emails. Right now, I've reduced to just about 7 mailboxes. I have tried many email clients but I have settled on macOS Mail for quite a while.

My MailBox on Dec 31, 2020 - https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...

Last year - https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...

Here's a purely speculative analysis of what's really going on with "Superhuman":

Most of those users paying $30/month are trying to figure out how an application with such a mundane use-case could possibly charge that much.

This is a more elaborate version of the "I'll tell you the secret to getting rich if you buy my product" marketing scheme. The secret, it turns out, is to sell people the secret to getting rich.

The fact that this product is invite-only neatly obfuscates that this approach doesn't scale beyond a small niche of users. There's no conversion rate that would show that this product actually performs above-average.

Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. Increasing the price is often the correct strategy, and the flood of comments on it might be a (vital) consumer defense mechanism against sophisticated marketing and pricing strategies.

> Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost.

In general, targeting the people who literally don't care about price will not maximize profit. There are of course luxury brands that do target these people exclusively, but they aren't big companies.

Apple is a very strong brand so they can achieve high markups, but even they have price ceilings on what's reasonable, at least for their bread-and-butter products. Moreover, you can not just "decide" to be profitable like Apple by imitating its approach to product design and pricing.

That is not to say that you can't build a profitable company targeting the particular niche of users ready to spend $30/month for an email client. You just can't scale it.

I think you’re right that Superhuman is a luxury product. The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software.

LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B.

There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience!

> The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software.

An attempt was made:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

> LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience!

LVMH is a huge conglomerate of brands. I would argue that most of these brands are in fact not targeting the "price-insensitive" demographic, but those buying "premium goods", which isn't quite the same.

If you did a revenue breakdown, you'd probably see that the bulk doesn't come from Louis Vuitton purses, but rather from products that the middle class can afford - similar to Apple.

The problem for them is the “we threw amazing design at this so it’s better” sales pitch stopped being convincing in 2018. Good design is nice yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that email is email and email is broken.

Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox.

The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply.

And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity.

So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time.

And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”.

Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA

Heres an article where Paul Graham in 2012 calls out Gmail for being slow, and stating that he would be willing to pay $50-$1000 a month for a good email experience.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

This is the demographic you're talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw

I think any "Sublime Text of X" should also support offline only use. In my book this rules out apps that only function in the browser, require syncing with some service to function, or are only offered as a subscription service.

I agree. For me, one of the defining features of Sublime Text is that it is a no-brainer purchase. It is inexpensive and a one-time purchase, not an ongoing expense. 30$ per month does not fall in the same category for me.

SublimeHQ is an awesome company. They need to build an email client that blows the pants off of these VC backed luxury tools.

I am sure there are some pro tools for email using emacs/vim setup.

I’d argue calling VC crap “luxury” is an insult to actual luxury.

Actual luxury doesn’t constantly try to upsell you or get in your way in the name of boosting “engagement” or some similarly-disgusting metric.

Good old surveillance capitalism. The cruel irony: the most valuable data is produced by those with the means to buy their way out of data tracking.

I want one of those big master lists made for things you can actually own and not rent - from free or non-subscription software to devices that won't randomly brick themselves if a company's server goes down.

The only sliver of hope is that most of the surveillance capitalism is itself funded by VC-backed bullshit startups that can afford to spend unsustainable amounts of money on customer acquisition in a futile attempt to secure a monopoly or economies of scale and we see that it isn’t really working out in the long term, so eventually this bubble will pop and data about customers with not much money will no longer warrant such advanced efforts to capture it.

Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada would like to disagree with your assessment of what luxury companies do to lure customers...

I like your idealistic view of what luxury should be. But its not like that unfortunately.

I was talking about the products themselves. None of the brands you mention would be popular nor would be able to justify their prices if their products came with an LCD to display ads and beeped at you every 10 minutes to make you look at it.

Hah I see what you mean. That would be pretty annoying!

I jumped on Sublime Merge so fast. No regrets, it's such a fantastic and speedy Git client.

If they did email, I'm 100% buying it the day of its release. Even before, if possible.

“sleek design, responsive speed, and suite of keyboard shortcuts to improve a user’s email efficiency”

I have no intention of trying this, but I have very little doubt that Mutt is superior in these regards to something that runs in a browser.

“Part of its feature offering includes read statuses, which is useful for executives and sales people who like to keep a pulse on their conversations.”

Seriously?

The article closes with:

“I look forward to a [...] future where everything can be done fast and efficiently through keyboard shortcuts.”

Sounds like the future that I’ve been living in for 20 years, using free software.

This calendar screenshot has a 45 minute block scheduled to "Think" on Saturday morning. One wonders how he gets through the rest of the week.

IMHO no Electron app deserves a „Sublime Text of X”

Let them run the term to the ground so it loses all meaning and we can start speaking plainly about plain things.

Sorry, what? $30/m for an email client? That's absurd.

I'll stick with Thunderbird, thanks.

If you live in your email client then it doesn't sound unreasonable. I don't plan to look at it but it doesn't take much imagination to see there is enough value for some users.

Almost nobody lives in their email client, and if you do you should consider reevaluating your life options instead of using the "cool" client. We're only here once

> It’s as thoughtfully designed as I have been shamefully unwilling to purchase the non-trial version for 80 USD.

I had to read that sentence 3 times, but while charging 30 USD/month the author doesn't think Sublime Text is worth 80 USD?

I would pay a flat amount if the product was actually appealing to me (this one isn't, for many reasons), but such a high subscription cost is insanity.

On a Mac the "Sublime Text of email" is probably MailMate, which is well worth its $50 price.

I thought Hey's $99/year was expensive, but $30/month is ridiculous.

With Hey you get an actual email service, not just a an email client. I'd argue that $99 per year for something as important as email is not expensive at all.

I tried Superhuman for over 2 months (and paid). The first experience, beyond the wait-list, was a little strange. You were required to meet with a Superhuman rep to guide you through the app. This was strange because I've bought more expensive software and was never "guided", but perhaps I should have been, so I was open to the process.

The woman I met was very friendly and consumer focused. After the walk through I felt this might be a great product until I stopped and considered what I just had been taught: keyboard shortcuts. Almost the exact same one you can turn on in Gmail.

For the next two months I tried liking Superhuman - partially the hyper, partially I want better email. Superhuman is pretty, has a few nice macros, email open tracking, and of course shortcuts. At the end I dropped it because of the price. $30/mo. for what it does just didn't make sense. If it were $5, easy sell. $10, perhaps.

I know they are trying to make email better, and perhaps they did - a bit. I believe over time email will continue to be made incrementally better, but Superhuman's underlying claim is they have tectonically shifted email, thus the price.

Unfortunately, they haven't.

This is just an ad for their application. First sentence is, "Superhuman is an invite-only $30/month email client."

Should give you a sense if its worth your click.

Unsurprising given the name of the website is ahem...growthalytics.

Is the author affiliated with Superhuman? Despite the domain name, this blog looks to be someone’s personal (independent) blog.

The only links in the article are to:

- Twitter search for Superhuman, as a citation for a previous point.

- Another tech blogger’s post introducing the term “Superhuman of X", to which this post is a response.

- Various examples of apps the author claims to belong to a category of “Sublime Text for X" apps.

There is not so much as a link to Superhuman’s website in the whole article.

Hi, author here. Not affiliated with Superhuman. I don’t pay for it either. Maybe I should make that clearer in the post?

Clickbait headline to advertise for an email client, with some content at the end to justify the headline.

Also:

"invite-only $30/month email client"

"Take a quick peak"

No thanks.

Isn't that the email service that tracks where and when the receiver opens the message? Not sure how that's related to a decent text editor, let alone one that doesn't only come with an invite-only subscription.

different product. those that use superhuman swear by it. I don't have the email load to justify it, but if I did I'd try it out.

It's clearly the same product, but it seems they turned it off after the backlash: https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-03-superhuman-email-pixel-t...

> Superhuman is an invite-only $30/month email client

Right then. That's more expensive than my cell phone plan.

Remember Quicksilver? Concept so strong that even Apple implemented UX in Spotlight. Sublime text/VSCode etc. If this thing was some universal app working on top of popular mail clients with one time license it will be like Sublime. $30 for one year is $360. For a web only app.:)) It's borderline ridiculous. And is actually fake Luxury. Luxury is always associated with long term value and in this context privacy and offline mode are valuable points. This is just expensive toy for SaaS hipster crowd.

“Premium mediocrity“

> Remember Quicksilver?

I'm still using it. :) It even works on the M1 Macs with minor tweaks, when I gave the new ones a try.

I’d attribute Spotlight's UX to LaunchBar[0], not Quicksilver. LaunchBar (1996) predates Quicksilver (2003), and it was one of Quicksilver's influences, likely the most important one. Spotlight's UX more closely resembles LaunchBar's than Quicksilver's.

Here's a bit I wrote previously on LaunchBar:

> LaunchBar popularized many features we take for granted in search user interfaces today, such as seeing search results live as you type, fuzzy string matching, and combining search results of various types, such as apps, bookmarks, contacts, events, and files all into one unified interface.

(I’d argue most search interfaces today are indebted to LaunchBar, and that it has one of the worst influence-to-fame ratios of any app.)

[0]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

I happily accept your correction. It's not coincidence that people with those ideas are makers of Little Snitch (one of the reasons for me to use Mac OS after 2013).

I am really happy with Seamonkey email client. One of these days, I felt sheepish, and went to Thunderbird. Didn't cut it for me. The killer feature in Seamonkey for me is the search. The default works, but so does MacOS mail - but the advanced search in Seamonkey really works. I wonder why so many mail clients make a mess of this.

Especially during this Covid era, when the mail volume seems to have multiplied by a factor of 3 for me, search is really important. I don't want fuzzy search, but rather exact search. Strangely enough, the mail client that seems to get it right is also the one that is clunkiest to look at.

I haven't used Seamonkey in close to 15 years, but how does advanced search in the mail & news part of it in that differ from Thunderbird? I can right-click on one of the folders in my email account in Thunderbird and get a modal window where I can add or remove criteria to search for things based on header contents, attachment presence, junk status, etc.

It's similar to what I remember Seamonkey (and and the Mozilla application suite that preceded it) having.

Or are you comparing the quick filter feature in Thunderbird with advanced search in Seamonkey?

I think this could be it. Perhaps I did not explore Thunderbird enough to find the exact match feature. I was surprised because Thuderbird and Seamonkey should be from the same code base, so they should behave similar.

Anyway, thanks for your reply. I might try Thunderbird again after some time. I am very satisfied with Seamonkey, but am afraid that they might scrap the project at any time.

This is a truly bizarre ad campaign for an expensive email client that’s...invite-only?

No thanks.

This article appears to have been wrongly flagged. It does not, to me, look like an ad but instead a piece about a set of features across a number of productivity apps that the user admires.

It would, if it weren't for the SaaS email client ad at the beginning. And there isn't much of the article itself, it's just a (blogspam) list of a few apps.

well i didn't make it past the first sentence. good luck with this.

The article mentions Linear as the "sublime text of issue trackers". Just in case anyone is interested in this space, Kitemaker (YC W21) is considerably more keyboard friendly. Much like Superhuman, you can do literally everything without the mouse.

disclosure: OP is the CTO at Kitemaker

Indeed! Not intending to be sneaky, just brief.

I find it confusing that the author alternates between saying "Sublime Text of X" and "Sublime Text for X". Is there supposed to be a difference?

Thanks for pointing this out! I've changed them to be more consistently "of X"

by sublime of x, you mean 'no longer as cutting edge as it used to be'? Used it for years, but had problems locating my license when transferring computers. Moved to vscode and haven't looked back.

Same with the original paid version of BSD. Lost an ethernet card on a Friday night, had to deal with license BS or just go install FreeBSD.

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