Most of those users paying $30/month are trying to figure out how an application with such a mundane use-case could possibly charge that much.
This is a more elaborate version of the "I'll tell you the secret to getting rich if you buy my product" marketing scheme. The secret, it turns out, is to sell people the secret to getting rich.
The fact that this product is invite-only neatly obfuscates that this approach doesn't scale beyond a small niche of users. There's no conversion rate that would show that this product actually performs above-average.
In general, targeting the people who literally don't care about price will not maximize profit. There are of course luxury brands that do target these people exclusively, but they aren't big companies.
Apple is a very strong brand so they can achieve high markups, but even they have price ceilings on what's reasonable, at least for their bread-and-butter products. Moreover, you can not just "decide" to be profitable like Apple by imitating its approach to product design and pricing.
That is not to say that you can't build a profitable company targeting the particular niche of users ready to spend $30/month for an email client. You just can't scale it.
Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox.
The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply.
And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity.
So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time.
And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”.
Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA
I'll stick with Thunderbird, thanks.
I had to read that sentence 3 times, but while charging 30 USD/month the author doesn't think Sublime Text is worth 80 USD?
Here's a bit I wrote previously on LaunchBar:
> LaunchBar popularized many features we take for granted in search user interfaces today, such as seeing search results live as you type, fuzzy string matching, and combining search results of various types, such as apps, bookmarks, contacts, events, and files all into one unified interface.
(I’d argue most search interfaces today are indebted to LaunchBar, and that it has one of the worst influence-to-fame ratios of any app.)
I'm still using it. :) It even works on the M1 Macs with minor tweaks, when I gave the new ones a try.
Should give you a sense if its worth your click.
The only links in the article are to:
- Twitter search for Superhuman, as a citation for a previous point.
- Another tech blogger’s post introducing the term “Superhuman of X", to which this post is a response.
- Various examples of apps the author claims to belong to a category of “Sublime Text for X" apps.
There is not so much as a link to Superhuman’s website in the whole article.
I am sure there are some pro tools for email using emacs/vim setup.
Especially during this Covid era, when the mail volume seems to have multiplied by a factor of 3 for me, search is really important. I don't want fuzzy search, but rather exact search. Strangely enough, the mail client that seems to get it right is also the one that is clunkiest to look at.
It's similar to what I remember Seamonkey (and and the Mozilla application suite that preceded it) having.
Or are you comparing the quick filter feature in Thunderbird with advanced search in Seamonkey?
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I might try Thunderbird again after some time. I am very satisfied with Seamonkey, but am afraid that they might scrap the project at any time.
I thought Hey's $99/year was expensive, but $30/month is ridiculous.
I was invited to SuperHuman during its beta, and I tried it. I didn't upgrade. First reason was of course, the cost. The Second was, it isn't for me. In 2008, the first things I did with Mail on the iPhone was to remove that "Sent from my iPhone". So, the "Sent with SuperHuman" kinda labels do not work with my ways. "This is not the Way."
I have been using emails for just over 20+ years, and I have learned a lot of tricks to manage my emails. Right now, I've reduced to just about 7 mailboxes. I have tried many email clients but I have settled on macOS Mail for quite a while.
My MailBox on Dec 31, 2020 - https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...
Last year - https://public.oinam.com/photos-oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos...
I have no intention of trying this, but I have very little doubt that Mutt is superior in these regards to something that runs in a browser.
“Part of its feature offering includes read statuses, which is useful for executives and sales people who like to keep a pulse on their conversations.”
Seriously?
The article closes with:
“I look forward to a [...] future where everything can be done fast and efficiently through keyboard shortcuts.”
Sounds like the future that I’ve been living in for 20 years, using free software.
The woman I met was very friendly and consumer focused. After the walk through I felt this might be a great product until I stopped and considered what I just had been taught: keyboard shortcuts. Almost the exact same one you can turn on in Gmail.
For the next two months I tried liking Superhuman - partially the hyper, partially I want better email. Superhuman is pretty, has a few nice macros, email open tracking, and of course shortcuts. At the end I dropped it because of the price. $30/mo. for what it does just didn't make sense. If it were $5, easy sell. $10, perhaps.
I know they are trying to make email better, and perhaps they did - a bit. I believe over time email will continue to be made incrementally better, but Superhuman's underlying claim is they have tectonically shifted email, thus the price.
Unfortunately, they haven't.
Also:
"invite-only $30/month email client"
"Take a quick peak"
No thanks.
Right then. That's more expensive than my cell phone plan.
No thanks.
Same with the original paid version of BSD. Lost an ethernet card on a Friday night, had to deal with license BS or just go install FreeBSD.
