Hey, is someone here on Superhuman and has a referral available please? 🙏 I am also curious to hear about your experiences of using it. (https://superhuman.com/ for anyone who is not familiar)

Aren't you sketched out at all about the whole "tracking people who read your emails" thing?

Superhuman is not the only product doing this. There are dozens of tools, like Yesware, that track such data. I’m not saying or validating Superhuman, but this concern is not exclusive to them. There are deeper concerns, but nonetheless, it’s all about trust. Even using Gmail is a decision based on trust, yet Google is under a lot of scrutiny for their data collection. Pick your battles 😉

Tbh I hadn't heard this was a feature until you mentioned it. I wonder whether this is something which you can toggle on/off?

I've never used it, but I follow the company because I'm fascinated by the whole idea of a $30 a month email client. Another interesting bit is that every user goes through a 30 minute onboarding session before they can start using it https://medium.com/toyboxsystems/onboard-your-users-lesson-learned-from-superhuman-6db2b73042c2

Their onboarding makes sure you love it. It’s a brilliant idea because you get immediate feedback and make sure the user understands all the features, setups up properly, and has the highest chance of success.

An interesting question Superhuman brings up is what other apps become viable if you can charge $360/year per user? E.g., if Superhuman is a "high-end email client", could you do the same thing with a high-end todo list, or a high-end word processor? And if not, what's unique about email that this approach works for it and not other categories?

Another interesting article on Superhuman https://kwokchain.com/2019/10/24/notes-on-superhumans-acquisition-loops/

@Steve Then that's dozens of tools that are all sketchy and I wouldn't knowingly use any of them. This isn't a battle, it's just hygiene. Most people don't know the extent to which tools like Superhuman are disrespectful of norms, so it bears mentioning when it comes up.

@Scott Anderson Regarding professional tools, I'd say those prices are more for specialized tools, e.g., the number of people who use Maya or the Adobe Suite is far less than say an Office Suite. Supply and demand dictates that apps with less users are always more expensive. (You listed MS Office in your group, above but that's only $70/year for several apps, so that's more inline with traditional software pricing for non-specialized software.) The reason Superhuman is unique is that it's charging specialized prices for a tool that everyone uses.

on the business model front it’s actually a matter of segmenting the market—a chef’s knife is something everyone who cooks uses, but someone who cooks for eight hours a day will pay a lot more

Yeah I agree 100% with the chefs knife analogy! The case I’m making is that that’s new to the software market, I can’t think of any example besides Superhuman that tries to be the chefs knife of its category. E.G., I’d say things like Maya and the Adobe Suite are more like table saws.

i see what you’re saying now! yeah i’m gonna be on the lookout

Web browser feels like a great candidate to get the Superhuman-treatment. Especially with the trend of power user features disappearing to make them more secure.

@robenkleene Thinking about (sorry, all iOS apps, but that’s my home turf) https://www.omnigroup.com/, https://culturedcode.com/things/, https://ulysses.app/, to name just a few — how would you say their business models are different from “trying to be the chef’s knives of their category”?

All of these analogies only work if we ignore free (as in beer) software because free software works differently enough that it ends up warping prices. If you remove free software from the conversation, than the apps you listed are actually priced dirt cheap. For example, Ulysses is $40 a year, compared to Superhuman's $360. Ulysses/Things/Omnifocus for the most part are priced the same as most mass-market, unspecialized, paid software, e.g., similar to MS Office ($70/year). Superhuman is priced closer to the first tier of more specialized expensive software, e.g., something like the Adobe Suite ($600/year), or Ableton Live ($1000+/one time fee plus upgrades $500 upgrades every three years or so).

@robenkleene So what’s the magic number then where it transitions from one into the other business model? Or am I missing something in your argument that it’s not just about the price?

Great question, I don't really think about it in terms of specific numbers, more like on a graph where would the groupings be? E.g., 360 would be closer to 600 than to 40.

@robenkleene Interesting. I didn’t expect you to actually come up with a number. I think I see what you mean with the graph example. However, doesn’t that make it a very subjective metric? And I have a similar feeling about where general ends and specialized begins… I do agree that Superhuman is an interesting phenomenon to watch as they are clearly pushing several boundaries (and not all in a good way). I guess I just don’t find them special in the same way that you do. :-)

The easy objective comparison here is just comparing the price of Superhuman to other email clients, e.g., the easiest competitor I can think of is Airmail which is just $10 a year... the fact that Superhuman is charge 36 times their competitors seems pretty clear evidence they’re doing something radically different?

Everyone uses email but many people don't use it as a professional tool or their primary professional tool. There are a lot of free or cheap photo editors that are widely used, but professionals still pay for Adobe CC. My point was I don't think Superhuman is very different from subscription tools you described as more niche, with the exception that I do think it has a larger addresseable market.

I agree 100% with this statement "Everyone uses email but many people don't use it as a professional tool or their primary professional tool." Marketing Superhuman in that way (and then charging way more for it) is a fair summary of what I'd call new about what they are doing. I also agree photo editing is in the process of being disrupted these days, and that's also an interesting phenomena, but that's the inverse of Superhuman, there a more specialized skill is in the process of becoming democratized, e.g., Apple folded their tool for professional photographers, Aperture, into their built-in photo tool for everyone, Photos.

folks might find this talk interesting, from the founder of Superhuman on how they think about their product development and marketing, which is very tied to their pricing:

Haven’t watched the video yet, but the way you describe it reminds me of Elon Musk’s masterplan strategy for Tesla and SpaceX. See https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

on some level, reminiscent of Facebook's approach of starting at top-tier colleges and only expanding once potential new colleges hit critical mass. except that instead of doing this make sure the social network was densely represented enough to be sticky, Superhuman is doing it for driving their iterative product development. but for sure both examples also have a healthy dose of elitism and FOMO at play.

i think it’s really just a tactical application of the approach in http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html