Emails are an essential tool for workplace communication. They allow us to easily and quickly exchange information, communicate with colleagues and clients, and manage projects. Despite numerous technological advancements, the email platform has remained relatively unchanged since becoming common in the mid-1990s. While other software applications for work progressed to enhance productivity, email remains a basic form of communication that has not seen much advancement.

The number of emails sent and received per day in 2023 is estimated to reach 347.3 billion — a 4.3% increase from 2022 when the number of emails sent and received registered at 333.2 billion. This figure is set to increase further by a similar margin in 2024, hitting 361.6 billion. Despite being a 50-year-old technology, email hasn't evolved much since Gmail's launch in 2004. Email is used around 2.6 hours per day by the average full-time worker, which comes to 676 hours per year on average. As consumer software becomes increasingly polished, consumer expectations from business software are rapidly evolving. But despite their centrality to productivity, email has remained largely insulated from that evolution until recently.

Enter Superhuman, an email client that is focused on helping users become more productive and quickly access important emails. It promises the fastest inbox experience in an attempt to help users achieve inbox zero. The Superhuman email client was initially released as an exclusive, invite-only email client in 2017. According to a 2021 survey by Superhuman, 30% of remote workers reported that their biggest distractions were from work-related communications. Superhuman aims to help the average worker cut down on time spent in email to help them reclaim their time for more productive use.

Superhuman was founded in 2015 by Rahul Vohra (Founder & CEO), Conrad Irwin (co-founder & CTO), and Vivek Sodera (co-founder), and is based in San Francisco. Prior to founding Superhuman, Vohra and Irwin worked together at Rapportive, a startup founded by Vohra. Rapportive was an email add-on which displayed social media information about contacts inside users’ inboxes. Conrad joined Rapportive as the first engineer on the team. Rapportive was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. After the acquisition, both Conrad and Vohra spent time working in-house at LinkedIn. Meanwhile, prior to helping found Superhuman, Sodera had co-founded LiveRamp, a data connectivity platform acquired by Axicom for $310 million in 2014.

While he had been working on Rapportive, Vohra observed that the everyday user experience for Gmail users had been worsening steadily, which was the spark that eventually led to Superhuman. Vohra first bought the domain for Superhuman in February 2014, when he started to think about the concept of a modern email client; however, he didn’t start to build it until 2015. Two years later, the team had reached 14 people and while building the product, had yet to launch publicly. Instead, early users were put on a waitlist and onboarded selectively, with guidance from an onboarding specialist. As of 2021, Superhuman customers were still being onboarded manually with a 30-minute live session before being able to use the product.

Email Client

Source: Superhuman

Superhuman is an email client that, rather than acting as a standalone email provider, as a user interface that connects to an existing email provider, like Gmail or Outlook. Superhuman attempts to offer teams and individuals the fastest email experience through its email client. Superhuman is meant to be an intuitive tool that cuts through the noise and helps users better prioritize their inbox. The email client is minimalistic and aspires to provide a comforting user experience. In addition, the company says its email client is 3x faster than Gmail with a latency of 32ms.

Superhuman comes with a built-in command palette. By pressing cmd+K, users can see a list of every keyboard shortcut Superhuman offers, or find the shortcut they need by searching for features or actions. This is intended to make it faster and easier to learn how to navigate Superhuman using only a keyboard.

Other features include Split Inbox, which allows users to divide their inbox by priority, Instant Intro automatically starts a reply on BCC, and Snippets are customizable templates that help save time in the inbox by inserting templates into a message with a keyboard shortcut.

Superhuman brings data from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter into the inbox so that users can have more information about who they are corresponding with. The platform uses the same technology as spam filters to build an AI-powered triage to detect and highlight users' most important emails.

The Superhuman email client is currently only available for Mac and iOS, and the company has started testing on Android. According to the company, it will release the app by the summer of 2023. As of early 2023, users can only connect Gmail and Outlook to Superhuman. In addition, new Superhuman customers can schedule a white-glove onboarding call where they learn features and keyboard shortcuts that will be most helpful to them.

Calendaring & Scheduling

Superhuman provides calendar access so that, when discussing a specific date in an email, users can see their own calendar in a sidebar next to their inbox. Through integrations with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, users are able to schedule events with video conferencing information automatically added. When a Superhuman user is connected to a Gmail account with multiple users, they're also able to view their teammates calendars for availability.

Team Collaboration

The product provides team members with read statuses and reply indicators, which is meant to allow teams to collaborate more easily. Read statuses show users when another team member has read their email so they can communicate more efficiently. Reply indicators show team members when other members have either scheduled a reply or are actively writing a reply.

Team Administration

Superhuman allows team managers to administer access to the platform, allowing them to assign roles, invite new team members, or remove members. Also, Superhuman purports to make it easier for managers to manage billing by providing centralized billing.

Security

Superhuman’s email client is SOC II Type II compliant, meaning that it follows the relevant measures and does internal controls on safeguarding and handling sensitive customer data. Superhuman also provides custom compliance needs for enterprises, in which their team works with their client to meet them. Superhuman Enterprise utilizes Google’s Advanced Protection Program to protect sensitive customer data from targeted online attacks.

Customer

In its early days, Superhuman targeted individual customers. Superhuman found its home in the startup world, becoming popular with venture capitalists and founders. As the company grew, however, it started offering enterprise plans for small and large teams. Superhuman’s focus is on teams and individuals who receive large amounts of emails daily and want to make their workflow more efficient and productive.

Market Size

The number of emails sent and received per day in 2023 is 347.3 billion—a 4.3% increase from 2022 when the number of emails sent and received registered at 333.2 billion. This figure is set to increase further by a similar margin in 2024, hitting 361.6 billion.

The email client space is currently dominated by Gmail and Apple Mail, which combined have more than 88% of the email client market. As of 2019, the email client software market was around $10.8 billion, expected to grow to $56.3 billion by 2030. Superhuman also offers a scheduling and calendaring solution, which taps into the appointment scheduling software market, which as of 2022, was valued at $393.4 million.

Gmail: Gmail is Google’s email client created in 2004. This product offering is quite similar to Superhuman’s but free and integrated through the Google Workspace suite of tools. Gmail also offers integrated chat for teams making a more attractive offer to enterprises. In 2022, Gmail had more than 2 billion active users stretching across the globe, making it the most-used email provider. In addition, Google is embedding generative AI in Gmail to help users generate email summaries, reply to emails, and compose new emails.

Spark: Spark Email is an email client that unifies inboxes by collecting emails and automatically categorizes them for easy processing. Spark is part of Readdle, a privately held company behind popular productivity apps like PDF Expert, Scanner Pro, Documents, and Calendars. Spark Email automatically categorizes some emails into bundles, like “Newsletters” and “Notifications,” and lets users recategorize anything they want. Like Superhuman, it offers some keyboard shortcuts. Spark Premium, which includes most of the app’s newest features, costs $4.99 a month. Spark for teams is more expensive than the individual plan and includes other collaboration and messaging features. Superhuman, by comparison, more expensive than Spark.

Newton: Newton is a subscription-based email service developed by CloudMagic. It was founded in 2010. It has the same capabilities as Superhuman and native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. In 2020, Newton was acquired by Simform, a software development company based in San Francisco. Like Superhuman, Newton offers read receipts, snooze notifications, and templates. It costs $50 a year and is cheaper than Superhuman.

Spike: Spike transforms email inbox into a chat-like interface, bringing messaging, collaboration, tasks, and video/audio calls into one place. It was founded in 2014 and has raised $30 million. In June 2022, the company raised a Series A led by Insight Partner and companies such as Wix and Mozilla. Depending on the plan, it costs $5-10 a month.

Hey: Hey is an email product from 37 Signals, creator of productivity software Basecamp. Hey's email "Screener" separates unread messages into different mailboxes based on importance. Hey's sorting puts newsletters and similar emails into a scrollable feed. Hey has a workflow that allows for fast labeling and sorting. Hey offers some hotkeys, but its offering is not as comprehensive as Superhuman’s. Hey is also harder to learn without assisted onboarding or a command palette. It is, however, cheaper than Superhuman and costs $99 a year.

Superhuman has a subscription business model with three different tiers:

1. The "Starter" plan is targeted at individuals and small teams, priced at $30/month/user.

2. The "Growth" plan designed for groups larger than five accounts, priced at $45/month/user.

3. The "Enterprise" plan, which is focused on larger teams with over ten accounts (custom pricing).

All three plans offer identical product accessibility; the differences lie in security measures, billing timelines, and support preferences. In terms of security features, the enterprise tier offers "Google Advanced Protection" and customization to specific compliance needs by the company. With support and training, both the Growth and Enterprise tiers offer personalized support with private productivity coaching, private webinars, success planning, and value reviews with Superhuman's team.

Source: Superhuman

In 2019 Superhuman had around 15K users paying $30 per month with a waitlist of more than 220K users. In 2020, the company had grown to around 50K paying users and was reportedly making $20 million in revenue. Superhuman said in August 2021 that customers had sent more than 100 million messages to triage more than 335 million conversations. Some of Superhuman’s clients include organizations such as Spotify, Netflix, Uber, Notion, Dropbox, and Harvard.

Source: Superhuman

As of March 2023, Superhuman had raised $108 million from firms such as IVP, a16z, Tiger, and First Round and from celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Will Smith, and The Chainsmokers. In August 2021, the company raised a $75 million Series C at an $825 million valuation. Its Series B took place in May 2019, in which the company raised $33 million.

User-Led Growth

Since early on, Superhuman's was fueled by user-led growth. The company asked users questions like:

• “How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?”

• “What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?”

• What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman?”

• “How can we improve Superhuman for you?”

These questions helped Superhuman build its product find its way to product/market fit. Continued focus on user-led growth having served the company well in the past will continue to be an opportunity for differentiation.

Product Expansion

Superhuman can benefit by providing tools to help individuals and companies become more productive. This way, it can focus on building tools beyond email, making it stand out from competing email clients. At the moment, Superhuman only works with email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. Expanding their email provider compatibility could help them attract a broader user base. Also, Superhuman only offers apps for Mac and iOS. Expanding to Android and Microsoft could help them reach more users.

Another opportunity for product expansion would be to integrate generative AI to improve the email experience and boost user productivity with auto-complete and auto-draft features. In a highly competitive sector, it is important to keep innovating and finding ways to add value to users with the newest technology.

Competition

Low barriers to entry are a common risk for startups in the productivity space since existing companies may build similar products or even newer startups with a more compelling value proposition. Companies such as Google and Microsoft already offer products such as Gmail and Outlook that highly compete with Superhuman for market share and offer customers a bigger set of productivity tools.

Consumer Behavior

Shifting consumer preferences might pose another risk to Superhuman’s growth. For example, companies might change their preferred external and internal communications technology to solutions that provide a more personal chatting experience, such as SMS and chatbots.

Superhuman is an email client for businesses and individuals focused on productivity. Superhuman worked and built relationships with users to find out where the main pain points of old email clients and iterate on that. Moving forward, the company will need to innovate to stay ahead of incumbents in the space like Google and Microsoft which are making notable changes to their email products with AI integrations.