People often use throwaway accounts to post sensitive information to HN, but that mechanism is easily abused as well. Given the information in the replies you've received, as well as details of and about your comment, I'm leaning to the explanation that you've made this up. I don't know that, of course, but moderation is guesswork. Until we get substantiating information to the contrary, I'm guessing that this is fabricated and am going to moderate accordingly.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20337178 and marked it off-topic.

This anonymous comment is definitely not from a person with knowledge of the company. Here's some evidence to show that they're just making things up:

1. The comment says open tracking was added as a last ditch act of desperation...here's a 2017 article that talks about the feature: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/18/rapportive-founders-new-st...

2. The comment says the high-touch onboarding was also added out of desperation. here's an old-ish tweet talking about it: https://twitter.com/josephcohen/status/1034189170003070976

3. The comment also claims that the company is floundering and desperate....they literally JUST closed a $33M round from A16Z...obviously they have a ways to go, but the claim that they are lost and helpless is simply absurd...here are pages upon pages of people begging for invites: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=super...

There's probably a healthy debate to be had about email tracking, but this comment is not contributing to that.

With friends like that, Rahul hardly needs any enemies!

So the company chooses to build email. EMAIL! Ok. What about their engineers or product concept was SOO different that building EMAIL would draw customers? Looking at their first page, the ONLY item that is unique here is "ENSURE YOUR EMAILS ARE READ". This almost seems like a parody sight - like it's not even real. Something is seriously fishy.

> They end up in sketchy territory i.e. the pixels, forcing people to reveal how they use gmail in order to sign up, tracking every-single-aspect of how users are using their site, hyped up bullshit etc.

You're passionately asserting a strong claim, but when you get to the "evidence" part of your comment, it seems you haven't added any supporting evidence beyond what's in the parent discussion.

It's a tough business. What email app has ever had a real business model? The opportunity for acquisitions seems to have closed with Accompli being the last big one (bought by Microsoft to turn into Outlook on iOS).

Also the founding team is from rapportive and rapleaf which are part of the shady data brokers that HN discusses often. It's best to assume good intentions first but there is precedent here.

I'm sure glad you're not my friend.

This doesn't read as accurate at all. Nobody has copied Superhuman's features. I'm sure you can't name another app that has. It's substantially faster to use than other email apps.

I have strong doubts you're who you claim to be.

While I don’t know about the company traction, or sales tactics, I think it is fair to assume the feature set on email can be fairly easily replicated by the big players if they want to. Gmail added a lot of the Boomerang features as well as suggested autocomplete, etc. pretty quickly IMO.

1. It looks years for gmail to copy boomerang

2. Gmail has no desktop app. It's reasonably fast, but not as fast as Superhuman.

3. Superhuman is a niche app, gmail caters to everyone. They can't reorient gmail around a tiny, high revenue portion of users

4. Gmail's iphone/ios apps lack the vast majority of desktop gmail's customizability features

The competitor to Superhuman would be a similar niche app, not gmail itself.