Last week, Anupam shared a glimpse into an early prototype of Soar, an email inbox app that dynamically restructures, sorts, and prioritizes your emails. This week, we shared Soar with over 30 people.
Key takeaways from our testing Soar:
- Sumukh and Eliza expressed excitement for a more joyful email experience, but Sumukh finds Superhuman sufficient and Eliza was unwilling to pay for our product
- Wells and Harry are the only people we talked to who are exceptional at processing their email inbox; their inboxes are organized, they respond timely, and they handle many high-value tasks through their inbox
- They both have worked with virtual assistants in the past, but do not currently use one
- Austin’s inbox is full of low-level tasks that needed to be sorted & completed; i.e. send Jane a Docusign, schedule a meeting with Peter, pay rent for office space, ignore status updates, etc.
- Austin has a bar, and these tasks are below his bar; however, Austin recognizes that cumulatively, these tasks are still very high-value
- We offered an automated workflow in Austin’s email client to help him track, queue, and complete these small tasks for $100/mo → instant yes
Austin’s instant yes was almost too positive. Were we charging too little? Is Austin insane? Are we insane?
To find out, we shared this opportunity with more people: A “software tool” to manage your inbox for you (surface, prioritize, and complete low-level tasks) for a flat monthly fee. We tested price points ranging from $100 to $5000, and signed a design partner for $1500/mo with the same pitch / service offering.
In less than a week, we have 4 design partners and a waitlist with ~dozen verbal commits.
Today, we onboarded 3 of our 4 partners to the first version of our product, Beam.
Right now, Beam consists of:
- Gsuite + 1Pass + Superhuman + ChatGPT
- For each partner:
- We make an @withbeam.xyz Gsuite account
- gives them an email to send request’s to
- when John needs assistance, John will email john@withbeam.xyz from any of his self-managed inboxes (me@john.com, john@company.com, etc.)
- We make a shared 1Pass Vault
- gives them a way to securely share app credentials
- when John needs assistance that requires access to a specific account, our workflows can take action on his behalf
- We (what our clients perceive to be automated software) log into all of their inboxes in Superhuman so we can intermittently scan their inbox to preemptively queue tasks for them
- We make an @withbeam.xyz Gsuite account
How does this help us?
Beam is a context-aware, action-first email inbox.
Today, email clients are focused on triage → read → take action - when most categories and actions are repetitive and consistent.
Our design partners struggle to translate their emails into actionable, prioritized tasks that they can easily process. Though they spend 25%+ of their day on email, they find that low-input, high-impact tasks can be delayed or fall through the cracks.
Though we are hacking this together with filtering, tagging, forwarding, and drafting manually, we believe a premium, progressively AI (start human, automate repetitive tasks) email client is the ideal experience.
So far, we’ve begun to validate a willingness to pay for these tools. In the coming weeks, we’ll relentlessly gather feedback and turn our ‘Wizard of Oz’ prototype into a technical Proof of Concept.
Up Next
Next week, we plan to:
- Onboard our 4th design partner
- Setup an inbound task stream to aggregate requests
- Build a “daily summary” feature
- Automate meeting scheduling