I also told her I couldn’t share my screen or inbox and she said that was fine and walked me through onboarding with voice. Agree it was creepy to even ask.

Lucky you!

I use Superhuman; they didn't ask me to do this in on boarding.

That said....using Superhuman (or any similar third party app connected to gmail) involves giving them access to your entire gmail account.

It's odd they wouldn't let you onboard without that (they used a zoom screen recording with me, and it was fully within Superhuman), but you're not really sending them anything they don't have access to if you signup.

This is bananas. Why would anyone need that in the first place? I can't come up with any remotely valid reason.

Why? IMHO, and from on-boarding a bunch of folks for my startup, it's because it makes teaching you the software easier and more personal. If you aren't comfortable doing it, that's fine; but I believe it's designed to make the on-boarding of folks better.

Because anyone who becomes an SH customer will be giving them access to their gmail account anyway. AFAICT it is a third party enhancement to one proprietary service (gmail) and SAAS, not a general mail program.

Rahul has written volumes on the SH onboarding process. They train you to use the product so you will actually use it.

I told the lady that I have over 35 years of software development experience and I've used all kinds of software and I don't need guidance and I do, I will reach out to them, but she was stubborn and lost a customer. I tweeted to Rahul and the team, but got no response so far! Well... This is not a scalable business model. But the lady was clear: "Superhuman is not for everybody!" Alrighty then!

You don't need a screenshare to accomplish this. I'm amazed by how much people buy into a companies bullshit and then defend it online.

I literally bought it into, both as a customer and investor. :-)

And did you update your email signature in the way the OP suggested? Specifically, do you let everyone getting email from you know that you not only track that read it, but when they read it, and even where they were when reading it?

I ask, because that would be the ethical way to handle what this app is doing for you.

You should have disclosed that you were an investor in the first comment you made.

Literally, every glowing review I have seen comes from a related party, whether it is an investor, employee, or friend of the CEO.

Well, valuations change. Sell!

That's extremely high for an email client that only runs on a single OS, but if that's true, that's 450k/month or 5.4M/year. How do you get to 260M valuation?

When you say it's "perfectly scalable", what are you using as your reference? That is, what other SaaS has $30/month pricing, especially one in a field as crowded as email and work messaging (i.e. Slack). Obviously, SH is far from having, or needing to have, a finished business plan, and it seems likely that the $30/user won't be the default offering or main breadwinner. But that raises the question of why that number is relevant in the first place when assessing SH's viability.

Well, I pay $5/mo for SaneBox as I always forget to unsubscribe and delete it's pathetic labels. Many of us pay for useless stuff. But some point, we stop, and then the company tanks.

But anyone can do that without screensharing the person's own screen. It's called good old fashioned coaching and teaching.

If you don't trust them enough to see your email inbox, you probably shouldn't be considering them as your email provider at all.

I trust engineers. I don't trust people who do the onboarding.

It's pretty clear: I'm saying if you don't trust an email provider to view your email -- they shouldn't be your email provider.

^ this

Should have signed up for the $60 a month plan…

It's a much bigger company under much stricter rules and regulations. It's well understood that a small startup will have a much more lax security posture around customer data than the trillion-dollar technology company.

haha. op has a point about privacy but this is also accurate.

Very, apparently. Would anyone care to explain?

I use GMail with the understanding that Google has access to my activity and content. However, I trust Google to not divulge* my activity and content to other email recipients and senders. That's enough privacy for me in my normal email usage.

* disabling the option of blocking image-loading in the iOS GMail app is definitely an aggravating and inexplicable tactic, to the point I'm starting to looking into switching away from GMail as my provider.