Owning the Gmail workflow layer
Jacob Wenger, CPO at Shortwave, on building a standalone business on email
This reveals that Shortwave is not trying to win email by rebuilding the plumbing, it is trying to win by owning the daily workflow that sits on top of Gmail. That lets it borrow Gmail’s spam filtering, deliverability, and account base, while putting its effort into a more opinionated inbox with bundles, pin, snooze, done, chat-like threads, and real-time collaboration features that Gmail does not naturally provide.
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The product strategy is to be complementary first, not replacement first. Shortwave syncs closely with Gmail so a user can move back and forth without losing state, which lowers switching friction and makes adoption possible one user at a time inside a team.
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This is the same basic architectural move Superhuman used, charging for a better interface on top of Google or Microsoft mail instead of running mail servers itself. The tradeoff is clear, faster product iteration and lower infrastructure burden, but dependence on platform owners that can add similar features natively.
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Shortwave’s wedge is broader than pure speed. It is aimed at median knowledge workers, not just keyboard heavy executives, and it is trying to turn the inbox into a lightweight team workspace where shorter, Slack-like exchanges happen inside existing email accounts.
The path forward is to prove that this workflow layer can become the default front end for business email, then widen beyond Gmail into Outlook and eventually hosted mail. If that works, email clients stop being thin wrappers around inboxes and become AI assisted work surfaces that organize, summarize, and coordinate team activity across the existing mail stack.