| The reason they gave you might be an excuse. If they were worried about '6 integrations' they could limit you to one. My bet is they are trying to position themselves as a 'luxury good' of software. Given there's no unit cost for software, that's always going to be a weird one. It makes more sense for supposedly 'exclusive' social networks (remember those?), but email doesn't quite have the same network effects. Their 'laser focus' maybe going to be on people for whom $30/mo is an irrelevant expense, but more importantly they want 'status' individuals, who will personally market the product to those within their 'status' circle. There's a class of higher-net-worth individuals who almost define themselves by specific things: their school, their car, their address, their job title, their activities, the club they belong to. To be fair, in some ways, it's important they do that because in some career trajectories, appearances are everything. But key to building any kind of luxury brand is scarcity (or, it usually is, there are some that defy this), and of course brand, so they want the 'right people' to be using this. If regular plebs use this, well then it's not much of a status signal. All of this seems very cynical, but the reason I believe this might be the case is that the marketing collateral doesn't focus on anything materially relevant. Yes - it's fine for companies to talk about very high level things like 'getting things done faster' - but ultimately, there has to be some kind of material translation there: what features etc. actually drive that productivity? I don't see anything at all. In fact, the screen shoots that we can kind of see in the marketing collateral provide not much information at all. I don't see the 'there there' - at least not from those shots. Many startups make the opposite mistake - tons of features which they don't map well to 'problems solved' (and sometimes it's not bad communications, it's often features that actually have no value) - but the article in a16z - and the Superhuman website are just way too limited in terms of any details, to the point where my 'red flag' is raised. About 50% of office workers spend '3 hours a day' in email. Maybe more. And so yes, any 'improvement' in email is worth something, possibly even $30. But my 'spidey marketing sense' is telling me this is all about selling a 'decent' and 'nice looking' email client to aspirational people who are desperate to signal their status. Possibly not for HN types, possibly not even for true, email warriors. Either this, or they could really trying to pull the exclusivity/insider thing to the max as a launch strategy. Should note 'The Information' is a $50/month news site - which has really set the bar for this kind of stuff. But the difference there is 'The Information' does get really juicy 'insider' kind of stories. The $50/month is probably easily written off as expense by every subscriber, there's materiality there. Anyhow - the level of curation going on here is a little odd. They say 'Superhuman' - that's totally fine, good on them, but I'll wait to see it to draw any conclusions. |