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Comment by propter_hoc | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is a solid chrome app store kind of solo dev project. 100 employees is absurd.

I think they had a lot of early adopter VC users who really liked it and let their personal bias overwhelm better TAM analysis.

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I think you underestimate how complex email clients are. Table stakes from Gmail: You need to be able to display arbitrary HTML safely, full text search, remove the embedded history in emails, robust sync with Gmail (or insert your IMAP server), a rich text editor, and there are even small things that end up being complex like parsing an email (people send all sorts of non compliant mail and Gmail is pretty darn good at accepting most of it). That's just table stakes, let alone the features that make superhuman distinct.

You misunderstand me. I am saying that I don't think this user story requires a standalone email client. You could replicate most of the key value propositions (if not the specific feature implementation) as extensions to Chrome and Gmail. That would be both a feasible solo dev idea and a more reasonable $5-10 a month rather than $30.

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.

Yeah you're describing of https://simpl.fyi/ which is one person's chrome extension.

So true, its the type of product a person with tons of emails would find useful like VCs

people said that about Honey (just a chrome app store solo dev project) and look how much they got acquired for. Don't underestimate them.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Is Superhuman comparable to Honey? From a tech perspective, maybe??? I.e. could a talented solo dev replicate 80% of Superhuman and then publish it via the chrome app store. Yeah. But from a product perspective? Absolutely not. Honey has a vastly wider market than Superhuman, and almost anyone can use Honey and get something out of it. We can sell Honey as a 'money-saver', in contrast to Superhuman which markets itself as a 'time-saver' (albeit, for an eye-watering subscription). I've seen many people step over dollars to chase pennies, and Honey taps into that behavior, offering a much stronger value proposition than Superhuman (so much so that the two are basically incomparable).

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.

huh? How is building an email client where no interaction is over 100ms a solo dev project? Thats like saying Instagram is a solo dev project because it only has a few screens.

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!

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