The e-mail has become an indispensable tool for millions of users. Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo are just a few of the email services for free in the market. In a context in which to manage the emails can be done manually, and without having to pay anything, a startup that charges 30 dollars —about 27 euros a month for help to make it faster it has become fashionable in Silicon Valley. It’s called Superhuman and promises “the e-mail experience faster ever created”. The service, which is only accessible by invitation, has a waiting list of more than 220,000 people, according to its founder, Rahul Vohra.
The key to Superhuman is that it has keyboard shortcuts that allow the user to perform multiple actions without having to miss even a second of holding the mouse. The startup has recently received a round of funding – $ 33 million from Andreessen Horowitz, the influential venture capital firm that since its creation in 2009, has backed Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many other major companies.
Vohra began to create Superhuman in 2014. Before he founded Rapportive, a company email that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. “I realized that the market of the e-mail had adopted a unique model. Everyone had to use Gmail or Outlook, regardless of whether you send one or 100 emails a day”, explains to this newspaper. This led him to create a service for “people living within the e-mail”. That is to say, “the people for whom the e-mail is work and work is e-mail”.
in order To reduce the time it takes to write emails, Superhuman has implemented snippets. This is keyboard shortcuts which allow the user to automate the writing and write quickly pre-written sentences, paragraphs, or even complete emails. Also used to attach files, bring in a copy to someone, delete a sent message, schedule emails, or cancel a subscription. Vohra put as an example an email in which a user asks for access to Superhuman. It is a message that you receive on a regular basis, so that, with the press of a key, you can ask the issuer to complete the survey of incorporation.
A user uses a keyboard shortcut to attach the address of your office in an e-mail.
“If you ever think that you need to move the mouse to do something, it will appear a suggestion at the bottom of the screen that will explain how to do it faster from the keyboard,” says a journalist of The New York Times who has been able to test the service. To reduce the time it takes to check your e-mails, the user can switch from one to another quickly with a keyboard shortcut as if it were stories of Instagram. And to open them in order of importance, you can establish a series of contacts VIP and prioritize the emails of all the tools that you use like Asana, Trello, GitHub, or Google Docs.
When you send an e-mail, the system also allows you to choose the period of time in which you would like to receive a response. If in that time you have not obtained a reply, it will remind you to perform a follow-up email. In addition, users can know when people are reading your emails. This is already possible to do so free of charge with different extensions, but Superhuman has received criticism for this function, because it provides additional information of the recipient, without his consent.
Mike Davidson, technology expert, explains in this publication as the system informed of the approximate location of those who received the message due to “tracking pixels hidden within the emails sent to their customers.” “Superhuman calls to this function ‘read receipts’ and active by default for your customers, without the consent of their recipients,” he says in the entry. After the criticisms received, the startup has ceased to register information on the location of the recipients, and despite the fact that maintains the function of states of reading, turned off by default. “The users who want it should explicitly activate it,” explains Vohra in a blog entry from the startup in which it responds to criticism.
Users of Gmail or Google G Suite
The company has not specified the precise number of users who use this system today. To use Superhuman, it is necessary to have an account in Gmail or Google G Suite, although in the future the company plans to offer this service also to users of Outlook and Exchange. It is also essential to have an invitation and fill in a questionnaire about the habits of e-mail and the workflow. Vohra explains that this is because a worker of the company makes mandatory a video call with each user to teach you in detail how to get the most out of the service.
Radicati, a research firm that studies the trends of messaging, claims that are sent and received almost 300,000 million emails every day. Now Vohra presumed that the users of Superhuman can access your inbox two times faster than before, take less time to respond to e-mails important, and many see their inbox without any message is waiting to be read for the first time in years. The service, which is run from the Chrome browser, it stores in its memory the emails instead of on an external server to speed up the search and the delivery of the same. The user can read and write emails even without connecting to the network and, once connected, are updated of the actions you’ve done.
“The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, had a rule: every interaction should be faster than 100 milliseconds. Why? Because 100 milliseconds is the threshold where the interactions feel snapshots. In Gmail, the interactions can take a second, and a search can take many seconds. We have taken the rule of 100 milliseconds to the next level, and constantly we were about 50 milliseconds or less,” says Vohra.
The founder of Superhuman explains that at present around 50% of the emails sent are of a single line, and that “each time will be shorter”. In the future, he argues, the platforms of email will provide more collaboration features. For example, it will be possible “to assign emails to a co-worker, or do you compose an e-mail to you.” In addition, he points out that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be increasingly present in such a way that one day the majority of the emails from usuarios will be written fully automatically”.
