Superhuman & Enterprise Software

I was thrilled to see Superhuman announce a $75 million Series C last week. Superhuman is a $30 per month email application that sits on top of Gmail that promises to get you to inbox zero in half the time. Paying for email sounds like a crazy idea these days, but this product is worth it. Superhuman is easily the best software product I've ever used. They've created keyboard shortcuts that effectively "gamify" getting to inbox zero. The product makes it easy to get into a flow state and plow through emails in a flash. I'd talk about the features I like here, but there are too many to list.

With the funding, Superhuman plans to build a version for Outlook and other email applications, build calendaring functionality, and build integrations into apps like Grammarly and Salesforce. I'd also expect that they begin to go deep into B2B, which will be great for the larger enterprise software industry.

I've written at length about the broken, top-down incentives that exist in enterprise software procurement that allow bad products to get widespread distribution. Superhuman has taken the opposite approach. It's a consumer app that costs $30 per month and competes with many other high-quality, free email applications. The only way that works is if the software is of extremely high quality. That's what Superhuman is. They overinvest in design and user experience and have a hard ROI around time savings.

Increasingly, employees are demanding that the software they use at work be of the same quality as the software they use in their personal lives. Superhuman's expansion into the enterprise will only help accelerate that trend.