(Photo credit @austindistel)
I am surprised/not surprised that during covid19 times, I’m getting less efficient in email. Though I have less in-person interruptions, I’m just so tired of staring at my screen. And being bombarded with marketing messages from ‘caring’ companies doesn’t make me excited to visit my inbox! I’m guessing you’re feeling something similar.
#techtopic
I laugh whenever I see the headline “Is email dead?” Gen Z killed it. Slack is killing it (tho they launched an ‘email bridge’ feature last year so you can now send emails within Slack). Others argue that email is just changing, and that it’s becoming more important for businesses to communicate via email with customers. Ultimately, communication tools continue to evolve but email just hasn’t been replaced yet as the communication mode of (forced) choice.
So when the team from Basecamp announced a brand-new email platform called Hey.com a couple days ago, I started to chuckle. Billed as a way to have complete control over your imbox, Hey is charging a $99/year price and has already gotten strong traction among many techy friends of mine. I am fascinated by the screening feature, which allows you to decide if someone can send you a message or block them forever. And the feature which blocks the email tracking attempts that most marketing firms employ is very cool.
Cue ensuing drama from...Apple?? You would have thought that a company with a real email service (like Gmail or Outlook) might have caused drama. But no, it’s from Apple, who has the weakest email offering, though it’s widely used as it comes pre-installed. (I find Apple Mail is unusable!). Apple is threatening the Hey team with App Store removal for not integrating an in-app subscription option (which Basecamp complains would siphon off up to 30% of their revenue). And it is upsetting a LOT of techies from the Basecamp founder who called them 'gangsters' to this guy, especially as Apple is facing new antitrust sanctions from the European Union.
Will Hey.com surpass the other shiny & tech-popular email platform Superhuman? One major difference: Superhuman is simply a skin that lays on top of Gmail, but provides a lot of added functionality (and makes VCs think you’re super cool). I made it off the exclusive waitlist last year to become a subscriber but it’s not optimized for mobile users, so I quit after a couple of months. Those who check email via desktop receive the most benefit from the added functions.
