I am building Chief of Staff (getcos.ai), an AI assistant for startup CEOs specifically (and executives with 100+ emails a day in general), because neither Superhuman nor Lindy were working for me.
What I've noticed personally and with founders I talked to is that communication and email triage takes a large amount of time each day, but mostly only needs a quick decision or rerouting the right kind of information. But all this mental overhead takes away time from the really important strategic tasks that you should be working on as a founder.
That's where Chief of Staff comes in. Like a real chief of staff, it gives you a head start into the day: checks your calendar, your incoming emails and messages, prepares meeting briefs and drafts responses.
But it goes further than your typical smart inbox: by sharing your strategic goals it prioritizes and makes sure you are working on the highest leverage items. It also helps you manage relationships by tracking communication frequency and sentiment, so you don't miss when a key customer goes cold.
Both Superhuman and Lindy fell short in key areas of the UX for me: Superhuman makes email triaging faster, but you're still the one doing most of the work. Lindy is highly customizable, but you'll spend a ton of time building and tweaking workflows. I wanted a batteries-included approach to get started right away by just connecting Gmail, Slack, and Calendar without any additional configuration.
A key UX decision for me was also that I stay fully in control. Chief of Staff reviews, analyzes and prepares, but I am the one hitting send.
I'm testing it with a very small crowd right now, but want to open it up soon. If you feel that this is an issue you want solved for yourself as well, feel free to reach out to me and I'll get you on the list for the private beta.
If you have strong opinions for or against this approach, I wouldn't mind hearing this either :-)