Email startup Superhuman launched an availability-sharing feature for its built-in calendar, allowing users to share their free slots and schedule a meeting quickly. The company’s CEO, Rahul Vohra, said the company is thinking about building out its calendar offering and possibly releasing a standalone app as well.
Availability sharing in the calendar is not a unique feature, as Calendly, Cal.com, Vimcal, Notion Calendar, and Clockwise have offered this feature for a while now. However, despite these tools, Superhuman said that it typically takes three emails on average to schedule a meeting. That’s why the startup decided to build out a schedule-sharing tool.
If you are a Superhuman user, you can click on the share availability icon on the bottom bar when you are composing a reply or use a keyboard shortcut — Cmd+Shift+A (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows) — to open the calendar to share free slots on your schedule. You can then drag the time slots that you want to share and press the return key.
You will see your selected time slots along with a link posted in the reply composer. You can add any details if you want and send the email. The receiver will be able to click on the link and book a time slot.
The feature also lets you look at the availability of your team members if you are scheduling a meeting involving them. You can select free slots that work for everyone, or ignore conflicts if the meeting is important and share all time slots.
Over the past few months, Superhuman has released Instant Event, an AI-powered feature that gives suggestions to help you schedule a meeting instantly based on the content of the email; it also has a feature to schedule meetings through its AI assistant.
The company, which has primarily operated in the email space, is building out its calendar offering. Next year, it plans to offer features like automatic scheduling and meeting briefing dossier to inform people about participants.
In the future, Vohra believes that Superhuman should be able to display a link to the relevant email conversation in calendar view and vice versa.
He has thought about potentially releasing a separate Superhuman calendar app, but he pointed out that he sees use cases for both an integrated calendar and a separate calendar app.
“In the ideal world, you have both a separate calendar and email apps, and the calendar is very tightly integrated into your email. There are certain workflows, like looking at the entirety of next year, figuring out your vacation weeks, or figuring out your conference weeks that you don’t really want to be doing in your email app. However, for the share availability use case, the integrated calendar is perfectly fine,” Vohra said.
He highlighted that many Outlook users don’t often use third-party calendar apps, as Outlook has a calendar app. For them, integrated calendar features are particularly useful for quick scheduling.
