Introducing SuperDuper
Because parenting doesn't have to be this hard.
The other night I was telling my wife Arin about Kavya, a project manager with three over-scheduled kids. Kavya is married to Chetan, an engineer who coaches Saturday soccer. Kavya is also imaginary. She’s a persona that was the result of months of interviews I’ve been conducting to learn how parents actually manage family logistics, what breaks, and what keeps them up at night.
When Arin heard Kavya’s story, she started to cry.
Not because it was sad. Because Kavya is her. Kavya is every mom she knows. The woman who reads all the emails — every school newsletter, every coach update, every seventeen-page PDF from the PTA — not because she wants to, but because if she doesn’t, no one will. The woman whose partner asks “what’s this week look like?” and she just answers, because the entire family schedule lives in her head. The woman who, when something inevitably slips — a missed registration deadline, a forgotten permission slip — feels like it’s her fault. Even when it isn’t.
Chetan isn’t a villain in this story. He’s a good partner! He does pickups and packs lunches and handles whatever he’s told needs handling. But he operates on dispatched instructions, not independent awareness. He doesn’t read the coach’s email because, somewhere along the way, both of them just sort of… decided that Kavya would be the one who does. And once that asymmetry sets in, it compounds. She knows more, so she handles more, so she knows more.
Researchers call it chronic cognitive load under conditions of asymmetric accountability. Parents call it Tuesday.
(This post is pretty gendered. I know it. Research shows that 74% of the time it’s a woman who is managing this cognitive load. But it’s the same for same-sex couples, single parent households, and non-binary couples: one person primarily manages the load.)
The problem that won’t stay solved
Shared Google Calendar? Someone has to enter the events. (Guess who.) Cozi? Three weeks of manual data entry before you abandon it. Whiteboard in the kitchen? Um, the marker dried out in October. Parent group chat? Oh great, eighteen parents saying “Thanks!” and burying the one message that actually matters.
Every family planning tool asks the already-overwhelmed parent to do more work. Set it up. Keep it updated. Convince your partner to use it. Manage yet another thing. These tools don’t solve the mental load — they add to it. They’re productivity apps for a problem that isn’t about productivity.
The problem is information buried in the wrong places, surfaced to the wrong people, at the wrong time.
And here’s the deepest cut: every one of these tools assumes all families work the same way. A dual-income couple with three kids in travel sports has completely different needs than a single parent with one child in music lessons. When two parents split responsibilities, you get split-brained information — which is even more work when neither person has the complete picture.
There’s no template for family. So why do all the apps assume there is?
The information gap
In almost every household we’ve talked to, there’s an information asymmetry. One parent knows more about what’s happening — not because they’re better at parenting, but because at some point the household settled into a pattern where one person reads the emails and the other doesn’t. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s barely even a decision. It just happens.
We started calling the two sides of this gap the Keeper and the Chaser.
The Keeper reads the emails. All the emails. They know practice moved to Thursday, picture day is next week, and Friday is an early dismissal. They know this because they spent Sunday night mentally reconstructing the week ahead from forty scattered messages and half-remembered details. Their system is their brain, and it works — until it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, they blame themselves, they blame their partner.
The Chaser wants to know. They really do. But the information never makes it to them — or it does, in a subject line they skimmed past during a meeting, filed under “my partner’s got it.” They’re not lazy. They’re locked out of a system they never built and can’t access. They stopped expecting to know things, and now they don’t.
(Yes, these are simplifications — every family is more complicated than two labels. And yes, the Keeper role falls disproportionately on women, for reasons that self-reinforce and aren’t reducible to individual choices. We know. The labels aren’t the point. The gap is.)
Not every family has exactly one of each, but the gap itself shows up everywhere, and it wears on both sides. The Keeper is exhausted from holding it all. The Chaser is frustrated by always being a step behind. Both people are doing their best. Neither has what they need.
So we built SuperDuper. An app that would bridge this gap and do so much more.
We built SuperDuper for all the different families — two moms, two dads, grandparents who help, nannies who need to know, co-parents navigating shared responsibilities. But we built it with a clear-eyed recognition that in most households, someone is carrying a weight the other person doesn’t fully see. And that person deserves something better than “have you tried a shared calendar?”
What SuperDuper does
The short version: SuperDuper turns the communication you’re already getting into a personalized family dashboard — without you lifting a finger.
The longer version: you sign in with Gmail, and within five minutes, you have a dashboard that knows your family. Not because you filled out a form or configured a widget or told us how many kids you have. Because SuperDuper read your inbox, found the school newsletters and coach updates and camp registration deadlines, and figured it out.
It knows your kids’ names. It knows soccer is Tuesdays and Thursdays. It knows picture day is next week and that the permission slip is due Friday. Nobody told it. It figured it out from your email.
But the real magic isn’t the initial setup — it’s what happens next. When Coach Mike emails that Thursday’s practice moved to Wednesday, your dashboard updates before you open the email. When the school sends a newsletter with a field trip buried on page three of a PDF, SuperDuper extracts the date and surfaces the action item. When the school only emails your partner with the schedule change, you see it too.
(Seriously. It’s wild.)
But it’s not just a better inbox or Gmail filters. SuperDuper groups related information together intelligently. My son’s Scout troop went on a curling trip recently (yes, really — curling! The weather in California is so nice we actively seek out cold in the winter). That single trip generated fourteen(!) separate email items over ten days: the initial announcement, the what-to-wear list, the waiver links (updated twice because the first links were broken), a driver shortage, the driver shortage resolved, a lunch order form, a scheduling conflict with basketball, a pickup logistics thread between my wife and the organizer, and two waiver confirmations. Fourteen items. One thing that matters.
SuperDuper collapsed all of that into a single view: here’s the curling trip, here’s what’s done, what’s not, and what you need to do next. Fourteen emails across two and a half weeks, from five different senders, turned into one coherent thing you can look at and immediately understand.
Oh, and afterwards? The troop leader sent photos from the event. SuperDuper added those to the same view. Because of course it did — they’re part of the same thing.
Your dashboard is unique because your family is unique. Every family on SuperDuper gets a different experience, because every family is different.
What it’s actually like
I stopped reading most of my email. I’ve been an Inbox Zero guy since 1994, so this is no small claim. But here’s the thing: I’m actually more aware of what’s going on in my family’s life than I ever have been before.
Arin and I have been using SuperDuper every single day. I open it in the morning to see what’s on tap for the day. I open it each evening to knock out whatever actionable stuff came in — permission slips to sign, forms to fill, registrations opening soon. It takes maybe two minutes. The rest of the email can rot.
We have a son on two basketball teams, Scouts, tutoring, a paper route, and an active social life that generates its own logistics. The other is in ultimate frisbee, high school robotics, and scout leadership. Two different schools. Multiple coaches, teachers, troop leaders, and parent coordinators. The volume of inbound information is staggering, and the percentage of it that actually matters on any given day is maybe 10%.
Last week, my son Zeke went to a friend’s ice skating birthday party (see above re: Californians seeking out cold). Two hours before the party, a parent emailed a liability waiver to a reply-all list. Who’s checking email two hours before a birthday party? Not me. But SuperDuper flagged it — new action item, time-sensitive, linked to the event. I signed it in the car on the way there. Without SuperDuper, I would have been the dad holding up the line at the rink filling out paperwork while twelve kids waited.
Arin still reads the emails — old habits — but she told me last week that for the first time, she doesn’t feel like she has to. That matters more to me than any product metric.
The deepest value isn’t organizational. It’s relational. When both parents see the same information without one having to be the messenger, something shifts in the household. The Chaser stops asking “what’s this week look like?” The Keeper stops feeling like the only person who knows the answer. The information asymmetry dissolves, and what’s left is two people who can actually share the load.
Why now
Two years ago, this wasn’t possible. Heck, three months ago it wasn’t possible. The AI models couldn’t reliably parse messy, unstructured email at scale. They couldn’t maintain context across dozens of threads from different senders. They couldn’t infer that “Coach Mike” and “Michael Torres” are the same person, or that the email with the subject “Quick update!” contains a schedule change that invalidates three other things on your calendar. Now they can. Really, really well.
But model capability is only half the story. The other half is a new approach to solving problems that requires a new approach to software. We want to throw out the old model and build a new architecture we’re calling adaptive applications: software that observes your data, interprets what matters, and generates a personalized application — then keeps adapting as your life changes.
This is not vibe coding, where you prompt an AI to build you an app and then you’re the one maintaining it. It’s not a template with some AI sprinkled on top. It’s software that figures out what you need by looking at your actual situation — and rewrites itself when your situation changes. Soccer season ends, theater starts. Coaches change. Kids age into new activities. The app notices and adapts.
I wrote recently about the blinking cursor problem. Every app with an empty text field is asking you: what do you want? But what if you don’t know? What if the right answer is: look at my data and figure it out?
The bigger picture
I need to be honest about something: my aspiration is not to just build a family logistics app.
SuperDuper for families is the first product, and we’re going to make it excellent. We live this problem, we care about these people, and the market is real.
But here’s where it gets personal. Right now we’re planning our son Zeke’s Bar Mitzvah. The logistics live in Trello, Google Docs, spreadsheets, email threads, PDFs from vendors, and a group chat with the rabbi. It’s a nightmare. And there is no app for this — because the market for Zeke Stein’s Bar Mitzvah Planner is exactly two people. You can’t make that up in volume.
Except now you can. The same architecture that interprets school emails and builds a family dashboard can interpret vendor contracts and build an event planner. Or look at bank statements and build a personal finance dashboard — one that knows about the Bar Mitzvah budget and the college savings and the aging parents. Not a generic finance app. My finance app, built from my data, aware of my life.
The architecture underneath SuperDuper is domain-agnostic. The same pattern — observe data, infer what matters, generate personalized software, adapt continuously — applies anywhere the information exists but the right software doesn’t. And for the first time, AI makes it economical to build software for an audience of one.
Family logistics is our beachhead. The architecture is the product.
What this isn’t
I want to name something explicitly, because I think about it a lot.
Most of the AI conversation right now is about replacing human labor. Automating jobs. Doing work that people used to do.
Our last startup, Teammates, was that. SuperDuper is not.
This is the thing people actually want from AI: not to be more productive at work, but to have more time for the things that matter. Fewer dropped balls means fewer family arguments. Less time buried in email means more time at the dinner table. A parent who isn’t mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s logistics at 11pm is a parent who’s more present with their kids right now.
The endless administrative overhead that steals hours from every family every week — hours that should be spent actually being with your kids, not managing the logistics of being with your kids.
That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. Not the architecture. Not the market size. Not the image of a parent opening our app. It’s the image of them closing our app so they can go play with their kids.
Come join us
SuperDuper is live and in the hands of real families right now. We’re expanding access through an invite system — if you’re a parent drowning in email and want to try it, you can join the waitlist at superduperlabs.com.
If you’re a Keeper reading this, nodding along, feeling seen for the first time by a product description — hi. We built this for you. You don’t have to hold it all anymore.
And to my Chasers out there — clarity is coming. You’re about to know things without having to ask. No more excuses.
I’m Ben Stein, co-founder and CEO of SuperDuper. I live in Oakland with my Keeper wife Arin, our two overprogrammed teenage boys, and a dog named Soup who contributes nothing helpful to the family logistics and arguably makes them harder, but he’s really cute.
If you want to follow along: superduperlabs.com · benjaminste.in · LinkedIn