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Grammarly acquires Superhuman
- rpgbr 1y agoAlmost all email clients, apps and web, have keyboard shortcuts built-in. That being said, I never understood the appeal of Superhuman, except for being… expensive.
- KevinMS 1y agoI really don't see the fit https://www.youtube.com/@superhumman https://www.youtube.com/@superhumman
- harry2quinn 1y agoThis feels like a pattern of grammarly becoming a holdco / following the Salesforce playbook. Find companies with - solid but not breakout growth (and probably slowing) - a loyal cult following - raised at too high a valuation in the peak era - talented teams - still founder led by strong product thinkers Salesforce did this with Quip, Slack, etc.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoIt's not a bad play, like PE rollups but arguably with more potential for success from a "founder/startup friendly" perspective. PE, historically, is very good at stripping/optimizing/etc (think Bending Spoons), but I think there is magic in startups PE simply does not have that allows for a different, yet more successful, outcome (growing vs cutting your way to financial success). We should see more of this as large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public.
- chii 1y ago> large, profitable startups have grown into long term private companies with no need to go public which i think is a real problem - it prevents "mom and dad" investors from partaking in the wealth creation process, as they are not sophisticated investors and thus barred from being able to invest in these PE investments. Public listing has become a cashing out operation, rather than a fund-raising operation, if this continues to happen more and more. And the public becomes the bag holders.
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- atlantacrackers 1y agoMy history with email clients being acquired is not encouraging. The history is they are effectively abandoned and/or shut down on the order of weeks and months not years. See Dropbox/Mailbox.
- leovander 1y agoI miss waiting in that large invite queue until you were finally let in, what felt like the first inbox zero proponents and possibly(?) introducing the swiping rows with different actions depending how much you swiped.
- atlantacrackers 1y agoAnd, you could reorder the emails inside your inbox!
- diggan 1y ago> My history with email clients being acquired is not encouraging. Ignoring the constraint of "email client", has there been any acquisitions where the acquired product got better post-acquisition? I can think of countless examples where it got worse, but from the top of my head, I can only think of maybe YouTube, but then only in the initial post-purchase period, and same goes for a bunch of other examples. They seem to eventually always turn sour. Maybe GitHub? But it traded "no new features - no downtime" for "some new features - a lot of downtime" after the Microsoft purchase, so I guess it's very subjective, probably at least some people like that tradeoff.
- atlantacrackers 1y agoHonestly...true. Even Rapportive (same founder) effectively died post acquisition by linkedin, no?
- hiddencost 1y agoYouTube. Android. Google maps.
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- anilshanbhag 1y agoGrammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.
- diggan 1y agoFeels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar? What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoI personally used to have a subscription for grammar checking, especially for longer papers. Now, I just use a LLM. I personally don’t see the strategic value of them pivoting to using genAI; there is no way I would pay $30 a month for something that will take at most 100k tokens using other LLMs. They seemed to have heavily downplayed their unique aspect which is the deterministic ruleset.
- nwjsmith 1y agoHarper checks a lot of your boxes and is getting better all the time: https://writewithharper.com/ https://writewithharper.com/
- dr_kretyn 1y ago> Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman follows its recent $1 billion funding from General Catalyst, which gives it dry powder to create a collection of AI-powered workplace tools. Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? I've been here for over 8 years and every month I find some wording that's just bizarre, like as if there was a competition for ways in how to confuse someone.
- abxyz 1y ago“Dry powder” is cash on hand to fund acquisitions. Yes, it is one of the worst businessisms.
- paulddraper 1y agoDry powder as in gunpowder. Perhaps you are familiar with similar phrases “ammunition” and “war chest”?
- dr_kretyn 1y agoYou mean actual objects/entities or other financial terms?
- paulddraper 1y agoAs figures of speech.
- diggan 1y ago> Dry powder to do what?! Is this americanism? No, is financialism, which is basically the same thing but I digress. > Dry powder is a slang term referring to marketable securities that are highly liquid and considered cash-like - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/drypowder.asp Finance seems particularly filled with terms with no real connection attached to the concepts at hand, not sure why. Sounds cool I suppose?
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- chaosprint 1y agoThis is a bit surprising. I even didn't expect Grammarly to have the cash, I used to be a paying customer of theirs when I was writing papers, but apparently with AI I don't even need the free Grammarly anymore.
- gregorvand 1y agoMaybe someone else can figure this one out better than me - it is interesting Grammarly raised $1bn of debt, basically. And now they're using that cash to buy revenue-generating companies, I assume at a knock-down price as others have speculated. I assume this is one big strategic play on both sides where each need the other for various reasons.
- icey 1y agoThey might have a lot more cash than you'd expect: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-announces-growth-financing/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-announces-g...
- swyx 1y agoand superhuman might be worth less than they raised at - https://x.com/pitdesi/status/1940079704423506401 https://x.com/pitdesi/status/1940079704423506401 (or not, we simply do not know)
- solumos 1y agoThe undisclosed acquisition price/terms implies a down-round exit at best, and a fire sale at worst.
- v3ss0n 1y agoYeah localllms replace that job very nicely.
- nicce 1y agoThey produce convincing text but the grammar is not actually that good. A lot of missing commas, for example.
- Fuzzy1000 1y agoSo many unexpected moves lately. AI is really changing how companies assess their trajectory and business plans.
- v5v3 1y agoThey raised $1 billion and bought a small company. If Ai was so good, they wouldn't have needed to buy a company. They would have vibe coded it in 10 minutes.
- apparent 1y agoThey bought the high-value users (CEOs, VCs, etc.). They can then sell to those folks, and perhaps train their tools based off of the way that those folks write/behave (if their privacy policy allows it).
- JSTucker 1y ago> The company claims its users send and respond to 72% more emails per hour, and the percentage of emails composed with its AI tools has increased fivefold in the past year. Is this really a good metric to aim for? Don't we want productivity tooling to result in less email not more?
- cik 1y agoI find this particularly fascinating, given the post email world I live in now. I haven't had an email from a contact in over two years. It sounds like a sales tool, in a world where the goal is to distance from that availability.
- saaaaaam 1y agoWas this “post email world” a choice or something that happened? How do you communicate rather than by email now?
- cik 1y agoIn my country, e-mail is now used purely as a sales tool. Notifications from government and schools are also delivered via SMS, and either WhatsApp or Telegram. So.. yeah, block everyone. Turns out the second you do this you eliminate 100% of the spam in your life. Honestly, if I ever lived in North America again, I think I'd also just stop reading e-mail.
- benhurmarcel 1y agoYou're talking about personal email, they're talking about professional email.
- cik 1y agoPlease do not assume that professional email is used differently. Plenty of companies here simply black hole inbound email unless it's from the same domain or known applications. Frankly, it's refreshing.
- shortformblog 1y agoI, for one, think it’s hilarious that a company that put so much energy into being ultra-exclusive ended up getting acquired by a company with such a mainstream reputation. Grammarly’s target audience is the people who couldn’t join Superhuman in a timely fashion. Superhuman made one of my accounts wait for four years for an invite.
- orliesaurus 1y agoSuperhuman, the most super-email client experience, that only people in the bay area (and some folks in NYC) actually use. How much did they pay for this? I hope not much.
- pickledoyster 1y agoThose are some of the best customers to have in case your business is under threat and you might need a bailout (M&A) in the future.
- iagooar 1y agoYou would need close to 90k customers to get $35M revenue as they claim. 90 thousand customers sounds like a whole lot of users to me. I use it myself and it is by far the best email experience ever created. Is it worth the money? That depends on your needs and work, I guess. CEOs laugh at the cost. Developers might think the price is nuts.
- briandoll 1y agoI've been looking to replace Superhuman recently. None of their AI or Team features matter to me. I just wanted what they originally set out to build -- a super fast, keyboard driven, desktop email client. There are daily paper cut bugs and search issues that have persisted for many years, and I'm not going to stick around through this transition which will surely make the product worse. What do folks like for desktop email that's keyboard driven? At this point I almost want to go back to Pine ;)
- isaachinman 1y agoWe're building what you want: https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io
- michihuber 1y agoare you unifying the inbox across multiple mail accounts? (like apple Mail.app does)
- isaachinman 1y agoYes, that's one of our core USPs. It's possible to view one email account at a time, all at once, or any user-generated combination you might desire.
- presentation 1y agoI’m using Shortwave and it’s nice! They’re also leaning into AI unfortunately but the core email experience is pretty good with nicer notification control and bundling features than Superhuman had.
- briandoll 1y agoAfter a day of trialing many apps, briefly settling on Gmail (iOS, and Unite to make a desktop app), I'm pretty happy with Spark for MacOS and iOS.
- phalgun_g 1y agoSimplehuman for Gmail is what I use. It's a light weight browser extension that makes Gmail work like Superhuman with the same keyboard shortcuts and natural language snooze. https://simplehuman.email https://simplehuman.email
- m3kw9 1y agoNever used of Grammarly and only heard of it in some random feed once a year in the past few years. Is money slushing like water in earth or what?
- v5v3 1y agoAre you a native English speaker? As English as a non primary language speakers globally use it heavily. English is the default business language, so if you are from another country and are not confident in your English, your gonna install such a tool.
- lvl155 1y agoGrammarly has an existential crisis. It can be replaced it with free versions of the top models and they are much better (and I can control the UI anyway I want). In fact, many of these “web 2.0” business models are a few more updates away from getting replaced.
- ignoramous 1y agoGrammarly can cut down their costs if they use those models themselves. The current LLM advancements aren't disruptive but incremental. What's the hurdle you see they can't rely on their existing distribution and expand from there?
- lvl155 1y agoThat’s true but I can replace Grammarly in a few hours with Claude. 99% of the functionality. Then, I can spend a couple more days to add stuff that they can’t add due to copyright.
- StochasticLi 1y agoGrammarly has a function that replaces phrases that are typical for LLM output. Good luck coding that in a few hours.
- lvl155 1y agoLast I read, they run it off of MSFT/OpenAI.
- StochasticLi 1y agoI'm sure they haven't created their own model. Probably fine-tuned it + constantly updating a database of the most occurring phrases from all LLMs.
- roguecoder 1y agoWhy would using a more-expensive technology cut their costs?
- nadis 1y agoHopefully this brings some of the Superhuman product magic to Grammarly. Although both products could improve AI functionality significantly IMO.
- azhenley 1y agoHaving applied to YC this round with an email product, this is very interesting.
- stavros 1y agoThe founder of Superhuman has really got this playbook down. I remember his previous startup (Rapportive?) was another email-improving thing that got acquired by LinkedIn fairly quickly and got shut down. Not a bad gig.
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- blorto 1y agoLooks like Superhuman investors wanted their ROI and Grammarly cant grow on its own that it needs to buy customers.
- voigt 1y ago> Superhuman valued at $825 million in 2021, $35 million annual revenue This is nuts! I used Superhuman for about a year. And honestly, I might still be using it if the pricing weren't so off. It had a couple of nice features, and the keyboard-driven approach was a welcome change for mail clients. But ultimately, Superhuman had nothing that couldn't be replicated in a relatively short amount of time (maybe even with plugins?). $825 million? Maybe I should start a mail client company...
- phalgun_g 1y agobang on. It is quite straightforward to replicate the Superhuman experience with a plugin - www.simplehuman.email is one
- phalgun_g 1y agosimpl.fyi is the other
- saaaaaam 1y agoZoom was worth around $125 billion at the start of July 2021. It’s now worth about $23 billion. So by that logic, Superhuman may be worth around $165 million. More interestingly though, let’s assume they spent the $110 million they raised. That means that each of the ~85k customers they would appear to have based on the estimated revenue cost them about $1300. Though probably more as a proportion of ongoing revenue will obviously be driving sales and retention. I did see something somewhere saying that they have very high customer retention. That matches my anecdotal experience - I’ve been using it for several years as have several people I referred. But yeah… an $800m+ valuation? That feels like Covid-era hype.
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- daft_pink 1y agoSuperhuman user and former Grammarly user here. I'm a big fan of Superhuman as an email client and happily pay the premium price for it. I really hope they don't change what makes it great. I used to love Grammarly until they essentially ruined their product - much like Dropbox did. They took an app that worked perfectly and deprecated it, replacing it with an invasive keyboard replacement that was supposed to work everywhere but performed poorly across most programs and included functionality I wasn’t interested in that is kept nagging me to use. When I complained about the issues, instead of addressing my concerns, they sent form letter responses about their commitment to privacy rather than fixing their intrusive software. This reminds me exactly of Dropbox's transformation from simple, reliable file storage into bloated software that cluttered my computer with pop-ups and background processes. When users complained, their team never seemed to understand why we were frustrated. Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service. I eventually moved to iCloud and never looked back. I hope Superhuman keeps their current excellent email client that I gladly pay for, rather than replacing it with some "next generation" product that nobody asked for and that would likely be inferior to what we have now. I genuinely love Superhuman as it is.
- overfeed 1y ago> Then they started acquiring other services I eventually cancelled as they tried to integrate them into their core service I was struck by a snippet I read recently - I can't remember the organization being discussed - that I'll paraphrase as "The company is the product, and it's being sold to shareholders", and currently, it is very fashionable to sell the story of unceasing growth, so companies will do anything, including turning away existing customers, just to have a shot at growth so the share price can keep rising.
- digital_voodoo 1y ago> unceasing growth As someone with a finance background and job, this deeply annoys and irritates me. Even made me quit a market finance path for something more realistic. As the saying goes, "you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet". I don't know why we need to explain something so obvious to people who (1) have the power to make and (2) are making decisions with large scale impact, every minute. Unless there's something (pure evil, maybe?) I haven't uncovered yet.
- dgellow 1y agoOh no. I love superhuman :( Please don’t change it