Hey, an email service from Basecamp promises to bring the world
a better email experience not just by putting a fresh UI
on top of another email service provider like Gmail,
but by building an entirely new email service from the ground up
and charging users $99 a year to use this service.
As we continue to explore the future of email on our channel
Hey is probably the best example right now of an upstart service trying to
change the world of email. So let's dive into what makes Hey
different and why i think it's a game changer. Now
it's impossible to talk about hey without first mentioning
how unusual of a launch this service had. Basecamps's two most prominent figures:
Jason Fried and David Heinemeyer Hansen are quite well known in both the tech
and business world for the many books they've written
including Rework and Remote office not required, a very timely book
for a lot of businesses right now during COVID. So when they planned to launch this
new service they were able to book high profile appearances
like on Kara Swisher's podcast, foregoing a lot of marketing spend a company of
their size would need to do to be able to generate the splash that
Hey did. Plus right before the launch of the service,
Hey submitted their app to the App store, Apple approved it, then they submitted a
bug fix version of the app right before launch to the App store
and Apple denied it. Apple basically told Hey that...hey
you know what, we noticed your app doesn't use our
payment system and you actually need to implement the payment system
in order for us to keep approving bug fixes on your app.
Now what that would mean is that Hey would actually have to give Apple a
30% cut for all first year subscriptions and then any
subscriptions after, that so any subscriptions after the first year,
Apple would then receive 15% of those additional year subscriptions. Obviously
Hey did not want to do this. Hey was in the news now more than ever thanks to
the free publicity that Apple gave the company,
but what got a bit lost in the process was what the Hey product actually did
that made it so different. I've been using Hey for the past several weeks as
my personal email service and i can tell you it is
quite different from any email service i have used before.
The setup process is quick and i really like how it guides you through the
different parts of the service. The first part of the service that the walkthrough
brings you to is one of the biggest departures this
service has from other email clients and that is the
screener. With Hey, every time a person or company emails
you for the first time that email goes to the screener where
you can choose whether or not you want to see
emails from this person or company. If you decide to screen in a contact you're
then faced with your next decision, where in Hey do you want emails from
this contact to be sent? You see with Hey you don't have to send
everything into an inbox, there are three areas that you can
send emails: the Imbox and no that is not a spelling
mistake, The Feed and The Paper Trail. With this
approach Hey is building on some themes started by other email services like
Inbox by Gmail that said really only important stuff
should be left in your inbox and that's of course
likely why Hey named it The Imbox. The Feed
is a really neat concept and one of my favorite things about Hey.
it turns emails into an endless news feed perfect for email newsletters,
updates, and things you don't need to respond to but just want to read through
your email. The Paper Trail is for things that you want to keep a record of but
don't actually need to see right away things like receipts, order confirmations,
etc This makes sorting your email incredibly easy and make sure that only
the important things that you care about actually make it into The Imbox. Another
radical but necessary departure that Hey makes with their service
is that notifications for all emails are turned
off by default, you actually have to manually go into the contact
and turn on notifications for them. This radically reduces the number of times
i've been checking my email throughout the day,
as well as reduces the amount of email notifications that make it to my phone.
Now previously i was using a service that would sort out
things like email newsletters and promotions from
notifying me through notifications on my phone,
however i was still ultimately getting a lot of email notifications.
what i really like that Hey does is it forces you to look at
all the emails you're getting and then makes you decide
which one of these are important enough to get that coveted email notification.
and for my case it's almost none like i almost get no
email notifications and i love it. One other
major departure with this service is the idea of archiving emails.
Other email services tried to promote you to get to what's called
inbox zero, basically to the point where there's nothing in your inbox.
Inbox by Gmail was also one of these services and would give you a little
nice graphic when you cleaned everything out of your inbox.
Hey takes a different approach you don't archive emails it just shows you the
emails you haven't seen versus the ones you already have in your
inbox there's also a really cool view where you can view all of your unseen
emails all in one view and then mark all of them as seen. By skipping actions
like archiving and trashing emails that other email services
encourage their users to do, Hey is actually saving its users time
and hassle. Now given the fact that the Imbox in
Hey is just a long list of emails, The Feed is a
endless scrolling feed of emails andThe Paper Trail is also a list of emails,
it does beg the question how exactly do you find anything in Hey? Luckily this
service has a pretty extensive search option,
you can search for a specific file or just use the files area
of the service which will pull all of the files anyone has ever sent you.
From there you can even sort by the person who sent you the file
or the file type so if you know if it's an image or a pdf
you can sort by those categories. Also if you need to look for an email that a
person sent you, Hey has a built-in contact page so
just search the person's name then you'll be taken to their contact page
which will show you any recent files that the person has
sent you and also a list of all of the emails that they're involved with.
It's in this view that you can change whether or not you get notifications
when you get emails from them and if you want to
automatically apply a label to their emails. Now the last major departure that
Hey takes from other email services that i want to mention
is with email trackers. Lots of companies as well as people use email trackers to
see how many emails that they sent out have
been opened, when did people open their emails, from
what location, and what device did people use to read
those emails. Hey considers this information an
invasion of a user's privacy so they block spy trackers on
all emails coming to your inbox. While it's too early to tell
what impact Hey's service will have on the broader email
ecosystem, i think it's clear that it presents a lot of interesting ideas that
haven't been tried before, and it's pushing the envelope on what an
email service should be. We'll have much more on Hey in the
coming months we didn't even get to talk about
some of the other features of this service in this video and we will be
doing a long term six months later review of
this service. Because the service has such a high up
front cost at $99 compared to what most people are
used to with email services which is free, I think
it's important to really test a service like this out
for the long term to be able to determine whether or not
it's worth it. Now if you like this video and found it helpful,
make sure you hit that thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel to
see our six months later review of the Hey email service as well as
other tech videos like this one. Well that'll do it for me,
for 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks
for watching.