Email startup Superhuman lays off 22% of staff
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I find it sus when VCs have to keep overhyping their portfolio companies, especially when they don't even make money.
Anyway, I checked it out and found that this really isn't novel at all (a meeting to use an email client? really?). Just classic marketing and hype to get you to use the product.
It's actually a confusing thing in marketing.
Products that are sold for aesthetic reasons - i.e. fashion - well that's obviously aspirational.
But most products that are sold even on the basis of features - those features are never used. It's the features themselves that are aspirational.
There's a late night infomercial on right now selling hoodies. They make it green, call it the 'tactical hoodie' and use the most ridiculous, masculine/alpha, quasi military language to describe it. All the 'zippers' and 'pockets' and 'the peak on the hood to keep your night vision' etc..
It's just a basic green hoodie ... but described as though it's for Special Forces Operators i.e. aspirational marketing.
FYI that products are sold aspirationally doesn't mean they are bad, they can be good, even better, just that you're probably going to end up paying a hefty margin.
Good example of this kind of positioning:
"You sent a critical email, but didn't hear back. Why? Your message was buried by countless more that arrived later. With Superhuman, you can get back to the top of their inbox. When you send an email, just choose a time — for example, Monday at 8:55 am — and we'll deliver it precisely then. When your contact starts their day, they'll see your message first. No matter when you work, send at the perfect moment. "
It's a ridiculously mundane feature, sadly one that took forever to appear on most clients, but it's now universally available, called out as some amazing thing and contextualized in the locus of the problem i.e. "Your message gets read first!". Smart but a bit hapless.
But their "innovation" and growth was primarily driven by the status you get from having the icon on your homescreen and tweeting about it.
I remember getting as far as, “ok, now you need to go through the onboarding process”. I asked if I could skip but they insisted I schedule time with them, so I just didn’t bother.
This was probably one of the weirdest experiences I had with a SaaS product.
Anyway, I wish them well and I hope they pull through the whatever-is-about-to-happen with minimal damage.
But this presents some big problems for his go to market plan. If he opens it up to everyone with no restrictions he will face tremendous churn. Plus 98% won't see any value at all and will bash the product online perhaps discouraging those who would benefit from even trying it.
By forcing people to answer questions that allow him to only allow those who would potentially benefit from signing up for the trial he eliminates all those problems. As a result from what I can see his users are fanatical in their praise.
You might ask how does he earn a profit on the top 2% of email users? The overall market is so large that even a tiny sliver of those users who willing pay for the product is a pretty large market.
Proponents never call it a niche product, though. They talk like it’s the one productivity tool to rule them all. Such attitude is the problem, not the business’s success.
Funnily I am the one who always said - why do you need Superhuman if you have multiple inboxes in gmail and filters + shortcuts to cater for probably 80% of the functionality free.
But the OP of the comment has a very good point:
>he will face tremendous churn
The pricing didn't reflect the value for mass market. They started with SV execs. Them slowly improved and decreased pricing and released for `privileged mass market` later down the road.
It was a process in the end...
I still refuse to pay for it though :)
>why do you need Superhuman if you have multiple inboxes in gmail and filters + shortcuts to cater for probably 80% of the functionality free.
Yeah that's not a valid excuse.
There are innumerable product categories where such problems exist.
Every product you could imagine is more useful for one group than another.
He is creating a MLM-ish exclusivity club, a bit like with Clubhouse (VC's were early participants, bringing in people who wanted to be in that circle).
And: "The overall market is so large that even a tiny sliver of those users who willing pay for the product is a pretty large market. " is one of the biggest pitch fallacies. Tons of young entrepreneurs use this justification in their pitches. There can be reality to it or not.
The obvious 'hustle' is blatantly apparent right in the name: "Superhuman"
He's literally making a direct appeal to the egos of successful people, who think they are a bit better than everyone else.
It's a hustle to sell something into the most lucrative market of 'monthly revenue' from people who can afford it.
It's a bit like Forbes magazine or something.
I'm sure it has some neat features and it may not even be priced wrong - but the marketing is cheezy.
It's also an example of how so many smart people lack self awareness, how people think they are immune to advertising, even people who design marketing overrate their ability to resist influence. The Ego is the great deluder, it's almost impossible for the Ego to reject incoming information that embellishes it.
I think tech people are among the worst of this - because you have high performing, very intelligent people, probably prone to thinking they are 'better' (in some ways maybe they are), but it's also an industry 'the furthest away' from marketing and communications, with basically no bridge of intuition. The language of tech is completely unhelpful in terms of understanding the language of communications.
I think the years long waiting list and manual selection of who you let in could be an attempt to game these metrics. (I'm not saying that's a valid excuse for doing it, because after 3 (2?) years, the need for such gaming suggests to me that the product isn't in the first category. It might still be OK and a viable business, but it's probably not going to turn into gmail.
??? What, no.
Do the math on what you just said.
You'd have to charge 100x the price to have only the 'beloved customers'.
'Churn' is a normal part of business. 100x the customer based, for 10x churn? I think most people would take that.
'Years long waiting list' - is mostly rubb hype, a marketing tactic.
You are not going to be on the waiting list, if they think you are important.
My 'wait' was maybe 3 months, probably because I have 'some banking' elements on my profile. If I was a founder, probably 1 month.
It's a matter of who they think is willing to pay - and - a 'scarcity' tactic that feeds right into the egos of the kinds of people who would want that product.
Their tactics may be reasonable - it could be optimal for them ...
... but my issue is - they are not rational tactics in a competitive market.
Someone could 'copy the whole thing' and give it away for $1 a month.
'Churn' is not hugely relevant.
Which makes me believe that the features are just not that valuable.
They are trying to be a premium brand product in software.
I think 10% layoff is probably just an excuse to cut some fluff and R&D during a downturn. They can harvest cash a little bit before expanding.
The truly genuine way of doing this, though, is to advertise the product as such and let people decide to sign up on their own will (e.g. « here is a new email system dedicated to power users. »)
It’s cheaper and pretty much the same features without the bugs of Superhuman.
Can you elaborate more on the bugs that you experienced? I used to be a Superhuman customer, but ultimately cancelled because I found Hey's stance on email to be much more attractive. I'm curious what other experiences were, particularly bugs. I didn't find anything that stood out to me as broken, personally?
It took them about a year to send me an invitation. Of course I lost interest in the meantime.
Hard drives have grown in capacity far beyond 3x in the same time period. Even more so if you consider the $/GB value rather than just max capacity.
It's now 15GB, but if you use Drive or Photos it uses the same quota pool.
Conspiracy theory: Google refused to implement an option to disable inserting email quotes in responses, knowing that such an option would make more efficient use of storage space.
Quota is used by attachments, which Google refuses to let you delete, because they want you tomoay for storage.
Storage is 18% full - Using 5.3 GB of 30 GB
I think I have some time until I need to delete or pay.
Would you rather they parse all your private communications for advertising profile purposes and keep it free-as-in-Facebook?
It was basically a decade-plus free trial. I can’t see how that was a bad deal.
I pay for email(Fastmail) because I want to support the team working on keeping my main communication channel working smoothly, and would rather not have my emails parsed by the advertising surveillance state.
At minimum, they do this for internal use.
Is this sarcasm? You know they literally do this, right?
And even if they didn't, not doing it doesn't give them a pass to promise people something and then take it back.
GMail was also in beta for a really long time like > 2 years.
You don't need to generate hype when your product is that good. Same as you don't need to generate power for an electric car powered by an antimatter generator.
Rahul has frequently personally responded to my inquiries about the product as well as recommendations.
They definitely don't deserve all of the hype or that high of a valuation, but I still think they are a great product.
Superhuman had a ridiculously pretentious roll out and by the time I got my invite I didn’t give a fuck anymore.
50 emails does not sound like a lot to me; I’m not sure how I could get through them any faster than I can now using the default MS365 web Outlook + Mail app on my iPhone.
I've seen the happy customers paying $30. I just wonder if they're missing out on 5-10 more happy customers for every 1 of those that's willing to pay $9.99.
1/ Offer licenses to students, or community editions to get people hooked 2/ Professionals hired at a company want to use this, now they're use to it and have their workflow covered. Plus probably best tool for the job in many cases. (Their language support is fantastic). Cheap enough to just get through without requiring finance approval. 3/ Home use is also great, I've been paying since 2014 and am very happy.
It's like the Adobe model (but less evil, IMHO), where in the 90s/2000's every poor student pirated it, now they pay a licensing fee to use it on a monthly basis.
Same as Microsoft, trying to buy an outright copy of Office was an absolute mission and confusing UX once we managed to actually get a physical copy I can see why people get so confused and pay Microsoft money for things they don't need. (It was a grant that was only for outright purchases such as a laptop, printer, harddrive, Office license, not for ongoing licenses).
Superhuman Privacy Policy
> Personal Data We Receive From Third Parties: From time to time we may receive information about you from third parties and other users, including your job title, employer, and location. We may also collect information about you that is publicly available. This may include your publicly available social media information, or your contacts' publicly available social media information. The data we receive is dependent upon your and your contacts' privacy settings with the relevant social network.
> Vendors and Service Providers: To assist us in meeting business operations needs and to perform certain services and functions, we may share Personal Data with service providers, including web hosting, debugging services, email and productivity services, survey providers, data base and sales/customer relationship management services, customer service providers, payment processors; web and app analytics services, and data brokers. Notwithstanding the foregoing, we only share Email Content Data with our hosting provider (Google, Inc.). Pursuant to our instructions, these parties will access, process or store Personal Data in the course of performing their duties to us.
It is a browser extension created by the former lead developer of Google Inbox and reimplements many of Inbox’s ideas.
Works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and more
They probably want people who are desperate — and have an AMEX.
Cancelled…
Great concept. No competitive moat as email clients can copy the features.
Looking forward to the gmail “Focus Mode”.
Are they even competitors? You need a GApps/Office/OtherProvider account to use Superhuman. Superhuman is a value add on top of Gmail/Outlook.
That’s the issue here. When you don’t have unlimited money, you cut spend on value add and use the basics. Superhuman is a luxury product.
One of the psych principles I used to lecture about often in my keynotes was on boundaries as freeing, and discussed an experiment where children clustered around the sandbox in a playground with no fence, but used the entire playground area when there was a fence.
Parity isn't simply the availability of identical features - sometimes it's also the lack of the other features, for both the users and the developers working on the product.
That's not to say this particular instance will be a successful company. Just that the ease of copying their differentiating feature may be less of a big deal than people often think.
Sometimes copying a feature doesn’t have to kill, it’s enough if it cripples another organization.
In both cases there is a boundary condition and distribution is biased towards the boundary. (Sand/Grass transition is a boundary). So the fence is not 'freeing' anything: it is simply demarcating the [extended] 'space of play', and is a stronger boundary condition (physical fence) than the material boundary (sand/grass).
It's marketed like a car, not like utility product.
Cars are sold aspirationally. They make commercials with the Saab car driving on the desert, and then the Saab jet flying above, to make you 'feel like a fighter pilot'. Features and functions are there just to support that.
Nothing detailed about the actual features of Superhuman, just 'how it establishes your status'.
People in thriving communities are always looking to surround themselves with status markers and signals. This is a big part of what they are selling.
America is also good at productivity. I'm doubtful the features could not be duplicated, and if they were, unit cost of software being what it is - it should be commoditized.
Remember that email itself - is just a wonderful, world changing, magical thing. Imagine nobody have it, or SMS etc. !
We live in a hyper competitive world, someone would feasibly absorb aspects and just make a better product, even if it wasn't particularly noticed by others.
Someone gave examples of FB copying 'stories' etc. from other sources, those are slightly different examples, related to critical masses and network effects.
Though email is a network - email clients are generally 'standalone' - not network effect features.
Superhuman is a case study for sure, but in a lot of things people might not realize.
Their 1:1 onboarding was got me hooked. I use Superman everyday multiple times a day.
It’s a pretty amazing piece of product. Their focus on UX speed is impeccable.
I legit loathe using gmail interface even though Superhuman is an extension of gmail data and api capabilities.
I think they had a lot of early adopter VC users who really liked it and let their personal bias overwhelm better TAM analysis.
This product is very niche. From my own experience, performing a single mildly unorthodox keyboard shortcut in front of an average Joe sort of freaks them out. Getting regular people onboard with something like this would be a total nightmare. This alone probably filters down Superhuman's market dramatically (enough to make a VC-backed 100-employee effort seem absolutely ridiculous).
Regarding the merit of Superhuman's ability to actually save time is another conversation others have argued to death about. I'd be interested in what others have to say about this, but I don't think the discussion has been very productive so far.
Sure, throw a couple hundred million at the same problem and you'll overbuild it into a monster. But that doesn't mean it's the right business model.
But hey not a bad idea to recreate it as a solo dev. Get ~10,000 customers, charge $15 instead of 30 and make a few ez millions!
I got in long back during its beta invite, and my feeling was that this is what I was doing all along, save for the additional metadata, which is what Rapportive did. So, I left.
A few months back, I wanted to separate work emails, and I thought I would try it again. I got the onboarding with a super helpful and overly smiling nice guy. Even during the onboarding sessions, I popped up the obvious shortcuts, such as hitting "SHFT + ?" to quickly look for Keyboard shortcuts, and I was already flying around.
This may be personal, but I have long since decided to learn the tool that I use every day to know the ins and out, and I can move around pretty quickly with just two panes on my Apple Mail without ever touching the mouse or clicking on an icon. So, Superhuman wasn't much of an addition except for the extra information and guides that felt good, but I quickly realized that I don't need most of those.
I unsubscribe ruthlessly, while the newsletter I like to read are on separate IDs (gmail) from my primary email IDs (personal, family, work), and I'm not important enough to be flooded with emails. So, my Inboxes are pretty tamed most of the time. Yes, my weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly digital chores do help.
Here is my worry with Superhuman. With that much of a valuation -- I don't see it becoming a standalone self-sustaining mega business but Rapportive in steroid married to a Mail App. Rahul seems to have a pretty emotional solid nostalgia with Rapportive that the idea of Rapportive is everywhere in Superhuman. Nonetheless, I feel Superhuman is super awesome on its own if it does not carry the weight of the "magical wand" that Rahul and team sells everywhere.
I no longer use Superhuman but I will definitely get it for others in my team -- marketing, sales will definitely love Superhuman.
P.S. I usually take shots of my Mail App around early each year. They come in handy while showing it to few people who thinks I've grappled with some sort of a productivity panache in a way and ask me for regular ideas and suggestions. Here are some with Apple Mail Interface, hoping this will inspire someone to experiment;
- https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
- https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
- https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...