Email startup Superhuman has launched a built-in calendar availability sharing feature. This allows users to share available slots and quickly schedule meetings. Rahul Bohra, the company's CEO, said the company is considering enhancing its calendar offering and possibly releasing a standalone app as well.
Sharing free time in your calendar is not a special feature as Calendly, Cal.com, Vimcal, Notion Calendar, and Clockwise have offered this feature for some time. But despite these tools, Superhuman says it typically takes an average of three emails to schedule a meeting. That's why the startup decided to build a schedule sharing tool.
If you are a Superhuman user, click the shared availability icon in the bottom bar when composing a reply, or use the keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+A (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows)) to open the calendar to share an open slot in your schedule. Then drag the timeslot you want to share and press Return.
The selected timeslot and the link posted in the reply composer will be displayed. You can add details as needed and send the email. Recipients can click the link to reserve a time slot.
This feature also allows you to check the availability of team members if you have scheduled a meeting to attend. You can choose an open slot that is available to everyone, or if the meeting is important, you can ignore conflicts and share all time slots.
Over the past few months, Superhuman has released Instant Events. This is an AI-powered feature that provides suggestions to help you instantly schedule a meeting based on the content of your email. There is also the ability to schedule meetings through the AI assistant.
The company has primarily operated in the email space, but has expanded its calendar offering. Next year, it plans to offer features such as automatic scheduling and meeting summaries to let people know about attendees.
In the future, Vohra believes Superhuman should be able to display links to related email conversations in calendar views, and vice versa.
He was considering the possibility of releasing a separate Superhuman calendar app, but noted that there are use cases for both integrated and separate calendar apps.
“In an ideal world, you would have both separate calendar and email apps, and your calendar would be tightly integrated with your email. You could look at your entire next year, calculate your vacation weeks, and your email app. There are certain workflows, such as calculating a week of meetings, that you don't really want to do, but for shared availability use cases, an integrated calendar is perfectly fine,” Vohra said.
He emphasized that many Outlook users don't use third-party calendar apps much because Outlook has a calendar app. For them, the integrated calendar feature is especially helpful for quick scheduling.