I'm a big fan of Superhuman as an email client and happily pay the premium price for it. I really hope they don't change what makes it great.
I used to love Grammarly until they essentially ruined their product - much like Dropbox did. They took an app that worked perfectly and deprecated it, replacing it with an invasive keyboard replacement that was supposed to work everywhere but performed poorly across most programs and included functionality I wasn’t interested in that is kept nagging me to use. When I complained about the issues, instead of addressing my concerns, they sent form letter responses about their commitment to privacy rather than fixing their intrusive software.
This reminds me exactly of Dropbox's transformation from simple, reliable file storage into bloated software that cluttered my computer with pop-ups and background processes. When users complained, their team never seemed to understand why we were frustrated. Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service. I eventually moved to iCloud and never looked back.
I hope Superhuman keeps their current excellent email client that I gladly pay for, rather than replacing it with some "next generation" product that nobody asked for and that would likely be inferior to what we have now. I genuinely love Superhuman as it is.
I was struck by a snippet I read recently - I can't remember the organization being discussed - that I'll paraphrase as "The company is the product, and it's being sold to shareholders", and currently, it is very fashionable to sell the story of unceasing growth, so companies will do anything, including turning away existing customers, just to have a shot at growth so the share price can keep rising.
As someone with a finance background and job, this deeply annoys and irritates me. Even made me quit a market finance path for something more realistic. As the saying goes, "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet". I don't know why we need to explain something so obvious to people who (1) have the power to make and (2) are making decisions with large scale impact, every minute. Unless there's something (pure evil, maybe?) I haven't uncovered yet.
Then, after they’ve enjoyed some amount of success, they try to flip the script: now they start with what they want users to do, and build software that encourages, annoys, cajoles, or insists that users do that thing, even if they don’t want it!
So much software falls down this pattern and just endlessly begs the user to change their behavior, rather than simply addressing the users’ actual needs.
I actually used spark mail for a while, because it would export to my crm, but eventually I wrote a script that converts all my emails to pdf to drop into my crm.
Coda has some great folks leading it, so let's hope that now they are really running grammarly, they can hold out against this.
The answer will depend on how well they do at taking care of the $1B line of credit used for the purchase.
Grammarly’s value is not in having a replaceable product, it’s in the network, distribution, customer acquisition channels and integrations with tools. Like bottled water, it’s about being in the customers face at the right place and the right time.
My favorite function of the UI is that, on any website, pressing TAB just fixes/improves what I just wrote before.
What do folks like for desktop email that's keyboard driven? At this point I almost want to go back to Pine ;)
Now to figure out iOS ;)
Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
The inbox->outbox flow turns into the way to clear the inbox. It's not about better communication, it's about speedrunning their way to inbox zero.
The worst case was a person who would respond to everything with a one-sentence question, then respond to the response with another one-sentence question, and repeat all day long. He could turn a brief e-mail into a thread with 15 one-line responses that could have been avoided by spending more than 10 seconds thinking about it.
> The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise...
I'm hesitant to call the email-skimming workflow that you mentioned a "reasonable decision," but I think the point still stands about how one person speedrunning their inbox can make everyone else's inboxes that much worse.
I think you're looking a little too strictly through that Cal Newport quote.
There's another big problem that isn't external: The people who speedrun their e-mail like this (which isn't every Superhuman user, to be fair) are also harming their own understanding of those e-mails.
From what I've seen in a few people, it turns into a false sense of being productive while they self-sabotage their own communications. Inbox Zero becomes the goal and they think their job is done when those e-mails are all gone.
Turns out the second you do this you eliminate 100% of the spam in your life. Honestly, if I ever lived in North America again, I think I'd also just stop reading e-mail.
read: spam has increased 5 fold!
For those people this would be a great outcome. The question is should this be the goal of most people? Probably not. But most people are not their ideal customer. They explained their ideal customer in depth in an episode of the Acquired Podcast.
Why do their customers even need to send 72% more email?
Excited to see what they are doing now after the "acquisition" of Coda (seems like a bit of a reverse acquisition or acquihire since they buy Coda and have Coda leadership take over Gramarly.
This is nuts! I used Superhuman for about a year. And honestly, I might still be using it if the pricing weren't so off. It had a couple of nice features, and the keyboard-driven approach was a welcome change for mail clients.
But ultimately, Superhuman had nothing that couldn't be replicated in a relatively short amount of time (maybe even with plugins?).
$825 million? Maybe I should start a mail client company...
So by that logic, Superhuman may be worth around $165 million.
More interestingly though, let’s assume they spent the $110 million they raised. That means that each of the ~85k customers they would appear to have based on the estimated revenue cost them about $1300. Though probably more as a proportion of ongoing revenue will obviously be driving sales and retention.
I did see something somewhere saying that they have very high customer retention. That matches my anecdotal experience - I’ve been using it for several years as have several people I referred.
But yeah… an $800m+ valuation? That feels like Covid-era hype.
Harper - 10 ms LanguageTool - 650 ms Grammarly - 4000 ms
What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
so it should be a matter of time to have a replacement extension using this local API. However the built-in model is Gemini Nano.
How much did they pay for this? I hope not much.
90 thousand customers sounds like a whole lot of users to me.
I use it myself and it is by far the best email experience ever created. Is it worth the money? That depends on your needs and work, I guess. CEOs laugh at the cost. Developers might think the price is nuts.
Salesforce did this with Quip, Slack, etc.
We should see more of this as large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public.
which i think is a real problem - it prevents "mom and dad" investors from partaking in the wealth creation process, as they are not sophisticated investors and thus barred from being able to invest in these PE investments.
Public listing has become a cashing out operation, rather than a fund-raising operation, if this continues to happen more and more. And the public becomes the bag holders.
Superhuman made one of my accounts wait for four years for an invite.