How Superhuman Got it Right

A quick thought on the hot, popular-with-VCs email startup, Superhuman:

Here’s their homepage, with one big, sexy headline: The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made

Superhuman: The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made

Now, imagine if that heading said any of the following, which I copy and pasted from deep inside their engineering blog:

• Written in OCaml wrapped in an HTTP API, and with some extra javascript-regex features

• We find workarounds by reading private variables, swizzling property changes, and watching the right parts of memory.

• With a custom solution that detects false positives and handles partial connectivity, with a single process responsible for persisting all modifiers, implemented with a Chrome extension.

How many people would sign up for an email service (paid, no less) with a value proposition like that?

Tell them about what matters to them, not what matters to you.