Making Email Feel Like Chat
Jacob Wenger, CPO at Shortwave, on building a standalone business on email
The core shift is that email stopped being a company’s default place for fast internal coordination, but it never stopped being the system of record for outside communication. Sales replies, recruiting threads, customer conversations, and vendor approvals still land in the inbox, while quick internal discussion moved to Slack and Teams. That split creates extra copying, forwarding, and context loss, which is why products like Shortwave try to make email feel more like chat instead of replacing it.
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Shortwave’s product thesis is not new email demand, but better email handling. It sits on top of Gmail, pulls in an existing inbox, groups related messages into bundles, hides clutter like repeated signatures, and adds real time behaviors such as faster message delivery and typing indicators between Shortwave users.
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The closest company level analogue is Front, which turns email into a multiplayer workspace with shared inboxes, thread level team chat, assignment, and routing rules. The difference is that Front starts with team owned inboxes like support@, while Shortwave starts with each employee’s personal inbox and layers collaboration on top.
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This also explains the contrast with Superhuman. Superhuman is built for individual speed and inbox zero, while Shortwave is aiming at broader team adoption and inbox organized workflows. That makes the prize larger if it works, because a company can standardize one interface for both solo triage and lightweight collaboration around external threads.
The next step is email clients absorbing more of the chat behaviors that pulled work away in the first place. The winners are likely to be the products that let teams stay inside the external thread, pull in a coworker instantly, and resolve work without bouncing between inboxes and chat windows. That turns email from a passive archive back into an active work surface.