Superhuman is the closest thing to a video game that productivity software has ever produced. The first time I used it, I wasn't even getting that many emails, honestly, I wish I was getting more, but just the feeling of J, K, Enter, whizzing through your inbox with that level of responsiveness and animation polish. It set a bar for how software should feel that nobody else in the productivity space was even attempting to reach.
What I Admire
What Superhuman essentially invented is the gold standard for a keyboard-first interface in productivity software. That flow state of ripping through your inbox is addictive in the best possible way, and it demonstrated something most software companies seem to have forgotten: how a tool feels matters as much as what it does. They also pioneered the split inbox, separating email into what needs your attention now and what can wait, which was a genuinely smart design move that reframed the inbox as a workspace you could navigate intentionally rather than a pile you had to dig through.
Beyond the product, what stands out is the conviction behind it. Superhuman decided that email was worth building really well, and that belief, that this particular category deserves craft, deserves obsession, is rare enough in software that it becomes a differentiator all by itself. Just like Linear poured their soul into project management, Superhuman brought that same intensity to email. Most companies don't seem to believe their own product matters. These companies do, and you can feel the difference every time you open what they've built.
Where We're Going Further
The fundamental limitation of even the best standalone email app is that email doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of how a company communicates. You're in this beautiful flow state in Superhuman, answering emails at speed, and then you need input from a teammate. So you have to leave that flow entirely, open Slack, screenshot the email, and paste it into a message. That interruption isn't really Superhuman's fault. It's the structural consequence of email being its own isolated world, disconnected from where your team's internal conversations actually happen.
This isolation creates a meaningful chasm in how companies operate day to day. Sales teams live primarily in email because that's where their customers and prospects are. Engineering teams live in internal chat because they have no particular reason to check email regularly. When a customer reports a bug, sales copies engineering on an email that engineering either doesn't see or doesn't respond to quickly enough, and that gap produces real cultural friction between teams, friction that compounds as a company scales and the stakes of miscommunication get higher.
In Macro, that chasm doesn't exist because email and chat live in the same system. When you share an email, it goes directly into the channel where your team is already talking. Share it with Jackson and it appears in your DM with him, in the same interface he's already looking at throughout the day. This has been transformative for customer support, vendor management, and legal workflows, because the response actually happens where the people are instead of getting stranded in a tool they're not actively checking.
The bigger idea, though, goes beyond just connecting email to chat. Superhuman built the best possible inbox for email, and we took that concept and extended it to everything. In Macro, there's a single unified inbox where emails, channel messages, tasks, and docs all flow together, triaged by priority so you see what needs your attention first regardless of what type of content it is. It's the split inbox concept carried to its logical conclusion, not just “important emails first,” but “important everything first,” across every surface of your work. And because all of this lives in one system rather than being stitched together through integrations, AI has genuine full context across your entire workspace. It can see the email thread, the internal conversation it sparked, the task that came out of it, and the document it references, without relying on a sync layer or hoping some integration held up overnight.
Superhuman also introduced sharing from email, which was ahead of its time, but their sharing still lives in its own system rather than flowing into how your company actually communicates day to day. In Macro, sharing is messaging. Share a document with a channel and it appears as a message, visible to everyone in that channel, with permissions handled automatically. No “request access” emails hours later, no ambiguity about who can see what, no one quietly assuming they weren't supposed to have access when they actually were.
Superhuman showed us the gold standard for how a single application should feel, the speed, the flow, the craft. We're applying that same level of obsession across the entire workspace at once: one inbox, one system, everything moving at that same velocity.