Jesse Pujji shows how to reach inbox zero by blocking three 30-minute email sessions daily and using Superhuman's keyboard shortcuts and AI features. He sorts messages with a 4-D system (Do, Delegate, Defer, Delete), filters for VIPs and investors, and keeps replies short to avoid bottlenecking as a leader.
Chapters
So thanks everyone for joining. You know, the— this topic that we're about to talk about is one that's near and dear to my heart. And anyone who's ever worked with me knows how important it is to me. I've at this point, I guess I've started close to 7 companies. You know, we started 6 inside of GatewayX, started Ampush, and anyone I've ever worked with in leadership, this is the first thing I ever teach them. And the idea about it is, you know, it's quote unquote inbox zero. But I think there's a lot more thinking and view behind it as to why I really emphasize it as a critical thing for, for any founder, any leader inside of an organization. And so let's start with why I actually think it's important, and then I'm actually going to get in and demo, you know, specific examples to you guys to show you how I, how I, how I do this in my day to day. I assume everyone here is super busy and got a ton going on and is having trouble prioritizing. Me too. You know what I realized as soon as I became a founder and CEO and I was like 26 or 27 years old, I was like, man, there's so much coming at me and I don't want to bottleneck people and I want to make sure that I'm seeing all the things that have to happen. And so the first thing I realized was, wait, I'm getting a ton of inbox. This is before Slack even. I was like, I'm getting a ton of communication and I can't be behind on that communication. I need to be kind of in front of it and leading with that communication. And so even before Superhuman existed or any of these other products existed, I had like Google with 5 plugins, with all these various ways to try to get myself to be faster on it. And I'll show you guys a couple examples. But the first thing I realized was I don't ever want to be the bottleneck and I want to see everything in my organization every single day or as often as I can. So there's a couple of things I would do to start. One is in my calendar, I have at least 2 times a day, if not 3 times a day, blocked for a 30-minute window of email. So that's usually maybe 9:30 in the morning, Sometime in the middle, you know, in like 4 or 5 p.m. and then like 10 p.m. before I go to bed. And in my opinion, it has to be blocked, otherwise it doesn't take place. Just like anything else in your calendar, if you're not— if it's not actually— you don't make it a thing you do in between meetings or while you're in the middle of a meeting. Make it something that actually gives you dedicated time where you can go get it done. The second thing that I think a lot of people miss on email, and I'll show this in a second, is The idea is not to get everything done in your inbox. I think this is where a lot of people fall down. They go, well, Jesse, I have 50 emails. There's no way I'm going to be able to even in 30 minutes. I can't get it all done. My goal within a 30-minute session is to turn around and be able to know everything that's going on so that I can then prioritize. And the system I use, some of you may be familiar with, is called the GTD system. So there's 4 Ds basically. It's due. Delegate, defer, or delete. And it's a productivity system that was invented actually prior to email. But the idea is if it takes you less than a minute or two, just do it. If it's, if it's not for you, then delegate it, send it to the person and say, hey, you do this instead. If it's not, now's not the right time, defer. And that's a really, really important one we'll talk about with regards to reminders. And then last but not least, delete. And delete is like the best feeling in the world. If something you just don't want to do, you're just like, hey, I'm done with this, I'm going to move forward on it. What you'll find is that if you approach your inbox with that system again, within 30 minutes, most of the time you can get to the bottom of your inbox and everything is sort of in those categories. And then from there, especially for the, for the meatier things, I start to use defer as a way to prioritize my time. So oftentimes I will defer emails to a specific time and I'll say, oh, I'm going to put time on my calendar to get that thing done that needs to be done vis-à-vis this email. So that's kind of the last part of it. And then I think the last, you know, last thing I'll say for anyone who's a leader in an organization or wants to be a leader, you know, there's no better way to drive accountability for yourself and your team than to be on top of everything. Like Andrew knows every day if there's an email that he hasn't responded to, he's going to hear it. I'm like, hey, what's going on with this one? Because it's still sitting in the inbox. I don't see that you've responded to it. And, you know, it's not, it's not a mean thing or something where you're gotchaing people, but It just kind of sets the tone for a certain culture of, hey, we're going to orient ourselves and get back. Last but not least, I'd say for anyone in sales, recruiting, most functions outside of maybe product engineering, there is, I always say there's money in the inbox. There's always some kind of action happening in the inbox. And I think it's important to stay close to it so you can drive forward on it. Andrew, before I demo, anything that I missed?
Nope, you're good.
Okay, so let me pull up, I'm gonna share my screen. Let's see.
While you're doing that, I'll ask people who are watching, mentors, Shishir, and everyone else, what is it that you wanna make sure that he includes in the session? I want us to cover as much as is helpful for you. So let us know in the chat. I'm watching it live.
So this is a live view of my Superhuman inbox, and just for fun, I wanted to show everyone this. Like, this is an article from 9 years ago about email productivity, and it's— guess who talks about getting to inbox zero? So this actually predates Superhuman, and it's something I've just been obsessed about, and basically, you know, going through a lot of these different things. And Superhuman then just came And basically when I dreamed of a product, they, they came and built it. So it's not that, you know, Superhuman is a sponsor and stuff, but it's not that. It's that they genuinely— I've been looking for their solution and somebody finally built it. So I thought that was just a fun thing to show. So here's my inbox. Let me show you a couple of really important things just as a setup kind of for, for the power of this. I'm all about the keyboard shortcuts. So Excel, PowerPoint, even, you know, I was teaching my son yesterday, Command+T is how you open a new tab. Forward slash, even in the browser, is how you get into the browser window. Like, I'm always using the shortcuts. So the first thing is understand and learn the shortcuts. So here you can see some of the big ones. Command K, I was just using to search. Forward slash, you know, navigating your inbox is super important. So, you know, I'll use J and K to move up and down. I'll use E to archive. I'll hit G and I. So G is kind of like go inbox or sent is GT. Um, I'll use these ones like, you know, Shift+C, uh, Reply All is A. Um, so, you know, again, there's tons here. So I, to navigate the inbox, I'll say them as I'm going through them just so you guys can follow along. But it's a critical thing if you don't get the shortcuts, like, you know, a lot of it is not that valuable, let's be honest. And they, they exist in Gmail, but Superhuman is super fast about them. And, and in general, the experience in, in Superhuman's way faster than, than Gmail. Gmail—
Jesse, for anyone who's listening to us who does not have Superhuman. If they email me, I will personally get them 2 months for free of Superhuman with AI. And I know that we've got a couple of people in the chat who've asked about AI. Jesse will be showing that. So all you have to do is email me. It's a, my first initial, at bootstrappedgiants.com, a@bootstrappedgiants.com. And I'll get you both that and even a recording of this if you want to be able to watch afterwards. So a@bootstrappedgiants.com. Giants.com for 2 free months.
So I assume everyone can still see my— so the other thing about Command+K is like it, it also reminds you what these— what all these shortcuts are. It's also like if you don't remember a shortcut, like sometimes I don't remember the shortcut for snippets, I'll just type in snippet and then I remember, oh yeah, it's Command+Colon. But you can just also type in stuff into this command center. And so it's super, super helpful to, to use. Um, a couple other things. Recent opens. I love if anyone who's in sales or recruiting, again, like Hey, this guy Manish, you know, somebody we're trying to sell at AUX, like he, he just read this thing. So you can start to quickly see who just opened your email, who looked at it. And I'll talk about opening emails here in a second, but that's like a fun one for me. Some other things, you know, I'll use my wife. You know, there's— she doesn't have— she has her LinkedIn. But the other thing that's really cool is this little center that shows you who's the person, what's their name, what's their contact information. Oftentimes I'll just jump in here and I'll call someone on the phone because I'll see their contact here. I can quickly jump to other emails that I have with them. And there's a really cool syncing feature with HubSpot that I use a lot. So that's a couple of the preview things. Let me actually show you how I triage my inbox. So a couple of things. So we have 63 here. We have 4 that come through Bootstrap Giants, which is the personal brand, kind of all the newsletter subscribers and then other. So here's how I do it. I start with other and other is quite good. It finds most of the stuff. I generally don't read the emails in other. So I will scan the subject lines to see if there's anything like stuff from my doctor, random newsletters, requests of different kinds. And I'll look, okay, this email from Brian, I think I want to look at so that I quickly archive all of these. So I just, I did a full-on selection, then I hit I, then I was like, this is cool. Does my agency have, you know, and maybe in this case I want Andrew to take a look at this. So I just hit F and then I'm typing Andrew's name in. I'm, I'm not touching my mouse. Go down, tab, tab, tab. Please look into this. And then tab and enter. And then this disappears from the inbox. Now I, I went back, I hit GI, I went back to my inbox. If I hit GO, I go back to other. And again, I'm gonna do the same thing. So I'm going through it. These are like flights. I already looked at this investment opportunity this morning. You can see because it's red and I don't think I want to do it. And I'm just kind of like looking at all these things. None of these are that important. None of them require me to open them. This one I read on my phone yesterday between my wife and my, my son's teacher. And I'm just, you know, just processing this information. Got some Amazon orders. Okay, so I'm done with this. I went through all the subject lines. None of this stuff. I know this Bootstrap Giants team. Yeah, this is all. So then I hit E, I archive it. And for whatever reason, this makes me feel really good because I got one whole inbox to zero and it's my least important inbox. It's the one I'm not really going to spend time on. Then I'll go to GI and here's where I start to actually triage these emails. I don't know if I'll get through all of them during this time, but I will see how many I can get through. So this is where I hit enter. A lot of email again is just stuff like this. It's garbage. It just needs to be archived. And move quickly through it. So in this case, move quickly through this. This is Nate Silver talking about the election. You know, maybe I want to read this on Saturday morning. So I'm going to hit H, which brings up my reminders, and you're going to see me use reminders a ton and say, you know what, Saturday 9 AM with my coffee, I'm going to read this Nate Silver thing because I'm not going to read it right now. These are some notes from a meeting that we just had. You know, maybe sometimes I'll just archive this, sometimes I might forward it. So I might say Forward it to NAC, and I might say, you know, test just so he knows. This was a really great meeting. Look at this. This is a lot of times as a leader, you're just looking at emails happening between people. But again, they're really valuable. Okay, something Rachel followed up with. I'm archiving it. I don't really want to read this. By the way, when I'm scrolling down, I'm hitting spacebar, and then Shift spacebar takes me up. So I'm not touching my mouse, right? So you'll just notice I'm not slow. This is another one. I'm just, is there anything interesting here? No, this is fine. I'm going to move that forward. There's that tuition bill we were just looking at. Again, I don't need to look at it. I'm archiving, archiving. This is actually something that requires my attention, but under the Do Framework, this is going to take me less than a minute to respond to. So Thomas wants to know where to meet. No one else has responded, so I'll just respond and say 7104 Manchester. Looking forward to it. Done. This lady's pitching me on a podcast. I'm going to delegate this and guess who I'm going to delegate it to? Andrew, what do you think of this? Your call. This is an end. I'm going to archive this. I don't know who— I'm good. I'll reach out next month. Okay, so this person— okay, they're gonna reach out, so I'm actually not gonna— sometimes I would remind myself if it's important to me, but if it's— if it's they're wanting to talk to me, I'm gonna be like, you wanna reach out to me, go ahead and reach out.
By the way, a few people have been, uh, emailing me, including Ben and Anthony, asking for the link. I've been emailing it back to you as you've been asking. If you want a link to use Superhuman for free, A at bootstrapgiants.com.
So this is someone I'm going back and forth with. Again, doesn't really require my response. I might say something like, that's awesome. This is another calendar invite. This is a meeting. Maybe I want to read the notes that took place. This is my HOA. You know, here's a cool example. Some HOA dues. I didn't see a credit that I was owed. So I might say to my, you know, H Friday at 9 AM. Now I have 2 options here. I can say if no reply. So the value of that is if this guy does come back to me, this is not going to bump back into my inbox. And, and so in that case, I think that's appropriate. Sometimes I'll say no matter what, I want to make sure that this comes back to me so I can look at it. So in this case, I'm going to say if no reply and hit enter. So again, it's left my inbox but with peace of mind that I know it's going to come back at at a future time. That was another calendar thing. This also looks good. This is just some information that Casey wants me to look at. Okay, this is a scorecard. I'm not going to look at it now. I'm in the middle of a webinar with you guys, but I think I'm going to check my calendar. And I'm trying to remember, there's a superhuman way to look at the calendar.
Fed.
And there we go. See that? So I just looked at my calendar. Oh, look, I have some time at 1 o'clock. I don't know why it says 5, but in this case, I'm gonna go back to Casey's email and I'm gonna schedule it for 1:00 PM today to review. And 'cause I know I have time and my wife sent me something for the Fox. So I'm going to pause here just to go back for a quick second. So I had 60 emails, I think, at the top of this, and now I have 40-something emails here. And so you can imagine, I mean, I've been doing this live on a webinar. Like, it would take me 15 minutes to get through the rest of these emails. Now, it doesn't mean, again, I'm responding to everything, but I'm processing it. I'm triaging it and figuring out what needs my attention. And I could— Andrew, if you think I— if you want me to keep going, I can keep going.
No, I think that's, I think that's helpful. There are a couple of things that are unique to Superhuman that—
Yeah, let me— I got those. I can, I can start to go through those.
But before you do, one, one thing that I've noticed about you is you, you send short replies. What are your thoughts about short replies versus longer ones?
Yeah, I generally have moved away and some of this is my position and so it might not be the right thing for everyone. Right. I've got several companies I'm working with, mostly CEOs. I don't. I, as a person, I am a talker out louder. I'm not like a deep thinker and writer, and it just depends. I think it depends on who you are and how you communicate. I tend to abhor back and forths. Even though I'll just show you this funny email. Like I said to Nicole here on the team, I said we can chat for five tomorrow if you have questions versus getting to a big email chain. Like I don't like big long email chains. I prefer to pick up the phone and call someone. And so most of my responses are short and to the point. And the point of email is not to get into a discussion, in my opinion. It's to like move the ball forward on things. And that's— have a phone call, have a quick meeting. Say that again, Andrew.
That's helpful to hear philosophically. And I do know that there are times when you do send really long emails, like we just had people join our sales accelerator. They've asked you questions before we officially started, and at times you do multi-paragraph detailed responses that we can turn into even email newsletters. When do you do those? That's not part of this triaging system.
No, I think it's usually when I have a specific thought where I like want to get some— like I actually do have the— I've sat down and I have a thinking about— I don't think that's appropriate on Slack. I think it's better on email or sometimes even better on a Google Doc as a memo that you're going to share with someone that becomes something more formal and more official.
Okay.
Let me show a couple other really important things. So when you're selling, if you hit GT, that takes me to my sent inbox. And let's just say I want to know, you know, did Mikkel read this thing I sent him? I can see that he opened it 18 hours ago. I can also see how many times he's opened it.
I love that feature. That feature is so helpful. Sometimes you send a message out to someone and you don't know if they've actually even received it. Do they understand what you've said? Super helpful.
And yeah, so we use it in all kinds of sales outreach and sometimes you want to see how many times they looked at it. They look at it a second time, you know, you're just getting data and information as to what they've done with it. Another example of something valuable, like I'll use it for this. This is David who works in our office. And if I hit— oh wait, whoops. What's the shortcut for the AI summary?
Oh, it's I. They just changed it from M. So if you hit the I key, it's not working on that email for some reason.
Here, I use it on— here's a September finance.
Do that right at the very top. There you go. So you hit it and then it expanded. But there's always a summary at the very top. If you hit I, it's right there. I hope people can see it at the top of your screen.
At the top, you basically, you know, if you don't want to read a whole email, you can kind of quickly understand what's going to be there. And in this case, it does the whole chain. So you can see this entire chain. We can find another long chain if you're super busy. Again, I just want to look— I, Andrew shared some stuff. Okay, minimizing. That just kind of gives me a quick summary as to what needs to be said here. So I find that super valuable in terms of just getting information.
Okay.
You know, last couple of things I'll show that I think are super valuable. That we use all the time. One is when we're doing, anytime you have an external communication going on, what I used to do at Ampush actually was change the subject line. So if there was an example of this, let's say, let me see if I can find a good example here. So yeah, here's an actual example. And You know what I used to do if there was an email, say you've got Charlie now and we wanted to kind of fork off the email, you can see Nack did that here. What I used to do is I used to say, I used to take someone off the subject line. So I'd go in and I would say, intern, pull Charlie off in this case, because I don't want the email going to him and I only want it going to Andrew and Nack. And I'll just tell him it's a test. Showing the old way. And the new way that's amazing now is instead of that, I can just hit, go down to this comment and essentially can comment. You can also do it, there's a shortcut for it, but I just say @Andrew if I only want to go to Andrew and go, I'm not feeling great about Charlie. That's not true.
It's just not true, Charlie.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I get it privately. It is super helpful. I see it right here. Watch. I'm going to respond back to you. I'm going to respond right now. And Charlie doesn't get to see this. The other people don't get to see this. It's just you and me who are seeing this. And it's helpful because we're talking about a conversation that we're having externally. And if the external conversation gets updated, Our chat automatically has an updated version of the email at the very top of it, and we get to privately have a conversation about it. I don't want to hog this conversation, Jesse, but this has been super helpful as we have been selling a new product. And I want to know, is this the right customer for us without accidentally telling the customer? Are we making the right move here? Super helpful. Right.
And then if you go— if I, if I hit GI again, then I can also see— you can see that little graphic of where the comment, you know, where the comments are. Inside the inbox. So that's super, super helpful as well. And then, you know, I was talking earlier about forward slash, you know, there's search. And if I say like the Ask AI feature now is super cool, so I can say stuff like, when is my next flight? And it'll search my inbox.
Yeah, no, if you, if you ask it again or just hit When is my next flight? If you just do a down arrow, that's the way I get to it. And I know there are multiple ways to get to the AI. And now you get to ask the AI that question.
And it has my entire inbox. My inbox is kind of big, but it'll, it'll run through it and basically give me a feature. I can't find any upcoming flights.
When was my, when was my last flight to wherever? It'll get that.
That they had. Uh oh, Shipman went offline. There you go. My last flight was September 13th, and I went to LaGuardia, and I had a day trip to New York. And then it gives you tags the sources. And I've obviously played a ton with this, like. I've done like, look at old Ampush emails and tell me who we worked with at Starz Entertainment. And so obviously, like all AI, you can play with it and try to see, kind of push the envelope to see how far it can go. And I found it to be pretty good at these different things. And I think it's obviously getting better constantly. So now it's like, okay, cool. It's reminding me the names of people, Lauren and Robin Chaco. Okay, yeah, that's who I worked with. So it just becomes like this amazing assistant where you can find all these awesome things. And then last but not least, when you're doing high velocity anything, I've got a lot of these different companies, I'll often find myself Again, let's see if I can find a real life example. David, again, a company I've invested in, and let's say I want to pitch him Growth Assistant. I know he's just, he, in his update back, by the way, he said he just hired a head of growth. So he got a head of growth. I'm like, oh, David, it's time for you to get a growth assistant. And then I'll say, here's the blurb. And I actually can just use a snippet. So I just do Command semicolon. And I have the blurb saved right here, and I might just say a joke to him. Are you ready to step into the jungle? And, and that's it. And then there's a blurb that automatically posts there.
Now let me say this too, Jesse. One of the cool things about Superhuman is you create that blurb. I can use it too. It's shared if you want it to be shared across the team with other people. So if I want to use the blurb that Jesse uses to describe his company, I've got it and I'm able to share it. Super helpful, very unique to Superhuman, and allows us to speed things up. Because if you find a good quote, a good snippet, I'm able to use it and so is the rest of the team.
Yeah. So that's kind of the 101. And again, like if I— if you wanted to watch, sit here for 10 or 15 minutes, I could get through this entire inbox and it would get it to zero. And then I would be able to kind of decide where to spend my time and how to prioritize. The most important feature I'd say, again, remember, do, Again, this just to go back to it. I'm going to reinforce it. Okay, this I just need to sign some document. It's going to take me less than a minute. I'm just going to do it. Right? I know it was flagged for me already. I know I need to sign it. Okay, cool. So some tax thing, and it's just going to get done. Right? So let's just go back through that again. This one delegate. Right, Andrew? Can you make the decision? Here, please. And then I'm going to archive it and move it on. This is just delete. I saw it. This is a delete. This is a delete. This is a delete. This is— yeah, I'll read this as a defer. I'll use this. I want to read this later tonight. 9 PM before I go to bed. I want to read what the universe said to me. This is a delete, or I might just respond to this and say awesome. So it's really, again, mentally you're putting into all that. So Tuesday afternoon, this is a delegate. And that just told me to do comments. Thank you. So I'm going to do that as a comment to my assistant instead. This is a delete. This is a long thing from my financial advisor. I'm going to— this is another defer. I want to read that on Sunday morning. I'm going to send it to myself on Sunday. So again, you get the idea. Now I'm at 31. And so the idea is like I can get through— I just got through 10 emails in 2 minutes and not in a way that again is like too crazy. Like, again, the deferral is the key thing where you're setting aside certain times where you're going to get the work done that's in the email versus feeling like you have to get it done this moment. I don't know, Andrew, are we set up to take questions? It feels like a good time to take questions.
We are. We actually, if anyone wants to ask a question on Twitter, we're taking questions right now. St. Michael's asked, can you ask the AI what subject lines you fall for most often and which you leave unread, like pattern recognition? So I get your point, Michael. And no, what the AI can do is search your inbox like a smarter Google search and give you answers based on the content that's in there. And that's really helpful. The other thing that the AI can do— and by the way, everyone, just keep asking your questions here and I'll do my best to get to them all. The other thing the AI can do is write email for you in your voice. It is so good at mimicking your voice because it has read your email, if you give it permission to, from years of inbox usage, and it can figure out how you respond and do things in your voice to the point where my wife doesn't know whether it's me telling the AI to respond to her or if it's me typing an answer out. And it doesn't matter because it's getting the answer that she's looking for and it's letting me do it as fast as possible. So that's one of the things that has come up. The other thing that people have asked before is why Superhuman? Why is it worth investing in that when Gmail and others are already adding a lot of the shortcuts that Superhuman has pioneered?
Yeah, I think—
what do you like about it?
Gmail, I think Gmail does a good job. I think the couple things that matter to me, I think that are really game changers, I think one is speed. And so I think the speed at which I've found everything gets pulled up, everything gets rendered. I don't know if you use Gmail. When I used to use it, at least you sit there for 5 minutes just getting it to load and it just, it's just slow. And Superhuman is crazy fast because they have some system where they're downloading all your emails locally into the browser, into the app. I also find the app experience way better. It's just cleaner, it's faster. There's a— I don't know if Gmail has— again, I haven't used Gmail in years, but Offline is a critical feature for me. So if I'm sitting on an airplane and they go, oh, Wi-Fi is not good, or the Wi-Fi is just not working, or it's intermittent, it has— you have no disruption of experience for Superhuman. You use it just like your normal inbox, and emails come in and go as they happen. And I think in Gmail that's not the case. And then the other big thing is like they just— the feature, like to me, again, for $30 a month, these guys come up with new features so fast. Every time I think of a feature, I feel like they're already building it. And I'm like, why would I Again, this is— I'm not sure. I think if I look at my tabs or I look at my time usage on my phone, I can actually look at it live. Like, I spend the most time in my email, so why would I go cheap on the thing where most of my time goes to? Like, I want it to be the thing that I spend the most money on.
Superhuman did do a test. They showed how much faster they are than Outlook and Gmail, and they just ran a bunch of experiments. They said, you do this, here's how much faster it is doing it on Superhuman versus Gmail. And that's— that is true. Off— offline support is incredibly helpful for them. You asked— you mentioned new features. Can I give you a new feature that I've been loving that they added?
Sure.
You know how we use Calendly to send people calendar options to book time with us? Well, those are for everybody. Sometimes I'm on an email with someone and I just want to give them 3 options for today that are unique to them. Well, with Superhuman now, I can— I can just go on my calendar, and pick 3 different times for them, pick a location, and it sends it to them in the email and makes it easy for them to book with me. Super helpful. It's like a whole other company's feature set that they just made into a quick, quickly accessible, unique thing in Superhuman. Love that feature.
Yeah. So my phone messages, the number 1 user, Superhuman's number 2, Slack is number 3. I mean, again, why wouldn't I spend the money on, on that thing? It does to me. It doesn't make any sense. And again, Gmail I find to just be Too finicky and too slow. What other questions do people have?
Mentoris is asking, can you highlight emails from potential investors or VCs? Can you give a prompt like that that would allow you to find messages like that? And I think if you can come up with the right prompt, you can absolutely find those.
Yeah, I think that would be quite easy. Like you can, you know, for example, you can create these multiple inboxes. Let me reshare real quick.
And I do see the other questions coming in, folks. If you're watching us live, just go into the chat and ask your questions. We're going to be able to get to them.
I think Command+K, create a filter, create an inbox. Yeah, let's see. The short answer is, you know, what I would do is similar to how I have this Bootstrap Giants inbox. Basically anything that has Jesse of Bootstrap Giants goes into this inbox. And it automatically gets pushed in this way so that I have them all separate. Otherwise, all those emails come to the same place. You do the exact same thing with anyone who says investor. Here we go, split inbox settings. So you can do it for VIP. You can define the rules you want. Again, this is a rule where Jesse Bootstrap Giants or notifications go here, but I could add like You know, the definition could be anyone who says investor in their, in their subject, in their signature, or anyone from this list of firms. And then it has its own inbox that pops into that. It's the same thing with your most important customers. Other things you can say, anyone who's emailing me from Uber or whatever, my most important customers, they're going to get their own inbox so I can quickly see it. Part of the reason I don't use that, by the way, and I would tell you not to, is get to inbox zero. That's just a To me, that's just a, uh, a hack to not get to inbox zero every day. And I would say no, just get to inbox zero every day so you don't have that worry. Uh, the only reason I use it specifically for this is just because sometimes this email inbox gets inundated and it's just not a priority. And I'm not— and these also take longer responses. There are people who follow my newsletter who, who want like specific responses from me, so they just take me a longer time.
If, if someone out there is listening and they do have a separate email account from a separate company, separate organization priorities. You can absolutely do it and you can separate it completely so that the inboxes are not at all merging. It's, it is possible. And Mentors is asking about AI search for email from potential investors or VCs. You can absolutely do that. Jesse had this question recently where he said, what's the name of the person who ran the COO organization that we talked to recently? And boom, you get that answer. It, I do find that you do have to do a little bit of prompt engineering when you're asking it to find something that's unique, like potential investors. As opposed to what are the VCs that I spoke with? That's a very clear thing. Potential investors, you're asking it to make some kind of judgment call on them. And for that, I would take a few different attempts at the prompt until I found the right one that got me the answer that I'm looking for. Okay. There's someone else who's asking, how does it compare to some other email app? I do see that there are other email apps. I don't know this one that you're talking about.
Minkowski.
The thing is, Superhuman is so far advanced that I do see that there are some people who are attempting to do the AI version of this, or some people who are attempting to do email and calendar. There's some people who are attempting to do this and that. Mm-hmm. They just can't get it all together. And if you're someone who just likes the latest tool to mess around with, there are lots of latest tools to mess around with. But if you're trying to close sales, if you're trying to get to inbox zero, if you're trying to respond to people quickly, You just want the tool that does it and does it all well and it's all together. And if you can tell me, uh, Mikalski, like I said, I actually don't know, uh, Philip Mikalski. I don't know that app. If you can tell me what feature you like about it, I'll tell you if it's in here and I'll be honest with you and tell you if it's not in Superhuman.
Yeah. And again, I like, to me, the, there's a, the system behind it is actually more important. You know, no offense to Superhuman or Gmail or anyone, but the system is the most important thing. And like, I wrote this Twitter thread where I talked about some of these key themes of shortcuts, these different things, and then obviously all these different shortcuts. But then the system of read the email— does it require action? No. Delete it? Yes. Does it require your action? No. Delegate it? Yes. Will it take less than 2 minutes to do it? Either do it or defer it. This is the system, right? You can apply this. I mean, the original system for this was the guy like writing like things down on his desk and he had like a physical inbox sitting on his desk. And so the system is the most important thing. And then I don't want to offend any Android people, but to me that it's like I just want the best thing out there. It's like, this is why I buy an iPhone. Like, I don't want to think about it. I just want the best solution. It's not that expensive relative to anything else I do. And, and it's just a kind of a no-brainer for me. And so that's more of the way I would make the decision. If you're comparing features of email stuff, like, it's just not that— like, do this system and you'll be fine regardless of the email choice you make.
All right, he was saying, um, by the way, that had to go. You had to pick on Android. Android people have such great phones that like fold and stuff. Don't start, don't start a holy war with them. Um, but coming back to, to the point he was asking, does it have a Kanban board? No, it doesn't. It really is about getting you through inbox zero as fast as possible. If you need a CRM to manage your sales pipeline, it will connect into HubSpot and others. This is not about that. This is about getting people answers quickly. not managing your, your Kanban board. And so I'll be open with you and say that. The other thing I'll say is Jesse had mentioned that they're a sponsor of ours, and we do like to be open with you and let you know when people are sponsors. They actually are no longer a sponsor. They just gave us this link before to give you free access to Superhuman, and we're still allowed to give it to you. I don't know how much longer it'll work. If you do want to get free access to Superhuman, um, I'll give you the link. It's easier if you email me and I'll send it out to you like I did with everyone else. All you have to do is email me. A, which is my first initial. My name is Andrew. a@bootstrappedgiants.com. a@bootstrappedgiants.com. And if you're listening to a recording of this, we'll have that link below in, in the comments somewhere. All right.
Any last questions?
I think we're basically there. The questions that have been coming in are, can it do this? Can it do that? It can do things related to email. The answer to can it do things that are unrelated to email? Is no, it will, it will delegate those to your software that does that. Like I said earlier, if it doesn't do Kanban board— oh, we did get a question. I'll get it in a second. It'll let you do it in HubSpot and make it easier for you to handle it there. Do you have a whole team or on Superhuman, or can certain individuals you collab with regularly? Yes, you can either have your whole team on or you can allow individuals to come on. Our writers at Bootstrap Giants do not need to have access to Superhuman. They're not answering email in any special way. But anyone who's doing anything customer-facing, we want them on there because we want to be able to send them emails from our customers with private notes in them so that they could give us answers so that we can all work together to service our customers. So you can do your whole team, you can allow individuals to come on and you can have some kind of mix of them. One thing Jesse didn't show is if you have an email that's coming in from someone and you want to share it on Slack or some other method, you can get a URL to that. to that email and share it on Slack. And everyone who clicks that link will see not just the emails that have happened already, but as new emails come into the chain, as new issues come up into that email chain, they will get updated with that link. There's so many features. I don't want us to go through all the features. I just want us to get to the clear point, which is this is the software that Jesse uses to get to inbox zero. It's a software that we all use to get to coordinate and close sales. It's a software that he has recommended and I have used long before they worked with us. And they're no longer a sponsor and we're still highly recommending it and showing it. It's the first thing that Jesse teaches people who are working at his companies. If you want to, if you want to respond to your people fast, this is the tool to use.
All right. All right. Well, I hope this was valuable. Let us, let us know. And I think, hey, Bootstrap Giants, but let us know if it was valuable and helpful to kind of share all these and get into the actual tactics of how I run my inbox.
All right. And I do see Shashir has messaged me. I see Ro has messaged me and others. Thank you. I will get, uh, I will get you a link to it right now. Happy emailing. Thanks, Jesse. Bye everyone.
