Hello folks, welcome back to the Keep Productive YouTube channel, so today's video
We are diving into the email application spike. Spikes in its second edition
They released a new update the new update it mainly focuses around the tasks and notes
you can add not too much changes around the
basicness of the tool in terms of its basic functionality
But in today's video we're gonna be diving into how it works in the pricing
all of the details that you need to know and hopefully find out whether it's a suitable email application before you
So without further ado folks, let's dive into today's video
So as you can imagine
There's a lot of conversation about email applications in a moment. We actually checked out. Hey from the folks at Basecamp
The stand this week the kind of Peter Aquis who is another fellow
YouTube creator who sent me an invite, so I will be doing a tour of hey calm
And we also doing a lot more on superhuman as well
So there's this conversation among email at the moment. A lot of people looking at sort of paid email and things like that
The difference between spike to some of those is that is is what's called
Conversational email so it blends the aspects of a group chat with your email
So as you can see here
it sort of looks like a got like
Facebook messenger open because of the way that it's structured and it doesn't feel like an email which is one
Nicer if we're chatting with people
On a regular basis and - it is easier to communicate in terms of like you sending a regular
Message to someone it just feels a bit nicer
So as you can imagine we're gonna dive into the how it works and all the overview
I'll touch on the notes and tasks abilities about midway Farooq's I want to convey the basic concepts to you
But let's touch on the pricing first because that's sometimes the most important thing rules out whether you want to use it or not
Now the pricing is actually a little bit better than some other applications. They have a free plan
and that does include that all of their applications or their apps available on desktop mobile and
Web I'm using the web version on this video today
But they do in that free plan up to 100k messages searchable
Which does limit you but at the same time
It's probably about six months of search
so again if you have some past that
Then that history is going to not be available unless you pay the free plan
Sorry the paid plan
If you pay the you have to pay the paid plan
And then you have some limitations when it comes to the group chat and notes and tasks so you can see there's five gig storage
Five made by upload limits, but they do have in the free plan
The automated rules that includes like the snoozing the pinning the blocking which you'll see in Gmail as well
But they do have encrypted emails voice messages video messages and basic support
So the free plan is I'd say fairly reasonable and apparently they do include ads inside. So that's even better as well
Something that Gmail does to help support the platform
They do have a pro plan which naturally gives you unlimited of all of this sort of jars, like unlimited file upload unlimited notes
Unlimited searchable access and that's five dollars ninety nine per active account per month. So I believe
say you had
Like it on monthly that was the annual plan at seventy nine
$7.99 a month
And I believe that's like per active account. So if you connect it would say like
You can connect to a gmail outlook
yah-hoo hotmail iCloud office outlook 365
honest mail to GoDaddy exchange IO and all IMAP type which is fairly good actually and something that a lot of people like to
Include in their app. So as I said spike is a conversational email
So when you're sending messages to each other, this is my conversation with the founder. I actually had a video call with him last week
Maybe just an overview there and get my questions answered about spike and their second version
And naturally give a bit of an overview
and you can see here that it looks like I'm messaging his face messenger and you can actually reply into things and
Open up messages have longer string messages
So we'll get into the email posing in a bit
But you can see here that all of your messages will appear on this side you then have a way to connect up your calendar
you can connect up Outlook calendar Google Calendar and much more so you can see my
Google Calendar has just been imported in so that's fairly good
This plus button allows you to add events and actually begin connecting them to your Google suite in this case
I'm G Suites connection and over here. You can create a group for example study group family personal vacation, etc
and once you start those conversations
You can have real time communication with them so you can actually start a spike chat
Which essentially if the others get spiked as well will become a real-time conversation
So you don't just have your emails you'll have your calendar and your group chats
Potentially in one place and can even see a list of people that have spiked
Anyone with the green dots next to them and all of their email addresses in access there
so now I've got the sort of basics out the way the the new feature that
is being touted inside of spike to die is something called spike notes and tasks and
essentially, they're collaborative notes that can include
To-do lists, you can embed files. You can embed documents and sign there, but you can also
Connect up and share it with other people which makes it much more like a Google Doc and much more suitable for teams
collaborating on it
So they have an example here. You can embed video you can embed
Gifts you can even embed files and start to-do lists
and as you can see here down at the bottom, it will operate in the same way like a
notion document in some extent
For example, you can create some of the basic
formatting and some of the tables and
Code etc
Now up here you can add people and you can share that you can copy link. You can even see a revision history as well
And also you can start conversations on this right-hand panel
I think Devere just sent me a document that we can collaborate on together as an example, and you can see here
this is document and
if I'm sort of like typing
way
he would be able to jump in and
Edit this in real time together
So there is some benefit to it
I think a lot of people would like to see obviously the notes and the tasks in the same location and
Also the starting those notes can be a lot easier
so say if you're you know powdering through your email or inbox you can get to inbox zero and
Then constantly keep notes and tasks for the day
If someone who spends a lot of time inside of that sort of platform, then this can be useful
now one of the things that was one of my concerns when I started out was
In regards to what this looks like on the other person's end because obviously you're seeing it like a conversation
How does the other person see it? I actually looked at what it looks like inside of Gmail and to be fair
It actually looks pretty smooth
You get whenever you create an account the ability to have this signature they create for you, which is quite cool
Which is a profile photo and then you're sending it via chat and spike
But you can turn that off if you go over to the settings area
So there is ability to play around with this and make it a little bit more fine-tuned
A lot of people ask about the dark theme they do have a dark theme too
but as you can imagine
It's quite handy and helpful. So let's get into some of the nitty-gritty stuff
so the thing that I mentioned before is apparently
Their security side of stuff they say we are ant free. Never but never
Never been never touch access manipulate reuse data and all is fully encrypted in
Addition got full audit approval by privacy and security via an external company suggested by Gmail
So that tends to be quite good when you're looking at security
Side of things now. The other thing they do have is this sort of filtering system
So you'll see emails coming in separately and this box called priority
so you have some a comprar rity and other so other basically filters out stuff that
is actually outside of you know
The regular emails you're sending
And naturally will filter it down in its own area as to not interrupt these stuff that you interact with most
So this is the real-time collaboration. I was mentioned and see the
Is mentioning in this Forbes article here, but you can see here that this is him in real time
So that's quite cool in the fact that you can collaborate with others
but this is again reliant on them having spike, which sometimes
You know can be a little bit of a hard sell if you're trying to get somebody else on an email platform
So, let me show you a few of the other items up here
You can open up that
Person's thread and you can see any threads that you've started and even start what's called a spike call or spike video chat
essentially video meeting and voice meetings
Which is quite cool and up here with these three dots you can change it to unread things. You traditionally do in an email
You know move it to tomorrow today star it and even mute it and you can even move it to the other area
Which is means that it will go into this least priority area in this case. I may want to move this back
but then the system learns because for example if you're using something like SaneBox, which I use
it actually
Replicates some of these abilities in helping to clean out unnecessary emails make the inbox a little bit smarter
So down here as I said, you can start sort of subject lines. So if I was to say, you know compose a title
You can write the message down here
And if you want to you can open it up into its own window with all of the sort of regular sort of
Composing stuff that you'd have down at the bottom. Now, you can add a range of things. You can add a spike call
And just get started on the call straight away
Or you can even browse your files or send recent files that you've uploaded to spike
Now if you click this smiley face, you can actually add gifts and now embed inline which is quite a nice addition
Especially if you're trying to someone quite regularly
that is a bit more relaxed and happy to accept them now inside of all of the
Emails that you send although it doesn't feel like an email you can do a range of things for example replying to it
Trash it star it forward it even snooze it for later so you can move that one for later and that will naturally
Remind you later and you can do that Perth spread
So if you wanted to archive the entire chat the chat should come back with that specific item
Highlighted and coming back to this point. This is how the conversation works on this right hand side
and you can actually do a range of things with each of the documents create so you can edit the tags so you can actually
Star it or save it for later. So if you for example wanted to start listening out some of the tasks you've got for tomorrow
Go ahead and do that in saving a new note. So let's call this one
tomorrow's
Tasks
If I could learn how to spell I can then start say listening out some items so I could say edit YouTube
Plan week ahead and clear in box to zero
so maybe there are a few tasks for me to do tomorrow and then I can go up here and actually
To save it for tomorrow
Which means that that will pop up in my inbox at the right time tomorrow
So you can go to a specific view of certain say notes or tasks
And if you want to go ahead and create your own task, you can do a quick task
so for example, if I said edit YouTube save task and
Natural it should fall into this area. There we go
So you can actually change the status of it by going to done here and that's perfect because you'll get a notification
Or a little tick to say you've completed that item now
If you go back it actually still appears in the main thread
But if I wanted to I could go to settings and I could see all of the modification so I can actually organize
conversations by
Inbox, or I could organize them through subject
Maybe the title of the subject or all recent activity and then by people as well
You can change the modifications to disposing like how does later by today plus three hours
Is that something you can modify like is your later today? Five hours time? You can modify the shed drilling of descend
so for example
if you wanted to change what that looks like and you can even set the
Zoom, for example if you wanted it to be zoomed in a little bit
you can also change some of your calendar settings to
At like connecting the specific calendars that you have now
If you go in and modify some of the tags the signatures and the aliases you have created
And you can modify the way that your picture and profile appears
so if you're wondering what like
Newsletters look like this is how a newsletter will appear you can open the messages up and naturally newsletters will appear as a regular email
But a lot more sort of refined I'd say I guess if you're looking for a specific one, you can find it there
So what's cool is if you select an item and you say wanted it delete it
It would trash all 90 messages that are inside of it
So if you're deleting one of the items, you can move all of them as well or previous email features
So there is some filtering abilities
So for example, you can filter which ones have been unread and you can even mark them all as red
You can actually go to search and specifically find priority based stuff and starred files and also attachments and things like that
So a few of my final opinions on this application. I'm looking at the conversational email sign stuff
It's it's something that I actually sort of rejected to start out with
I remember seeing the product maybe a year and a half ago and going
You know what? It doesn't feel right because I feel like emails are much more formal process
But whereas when playing with it
It feels more natural and it seems to work
In the other end like it seems to do the job and be able to send quick messages
So I do like the conversational email aspect of it
I think that's actually changed my mind and I think if you're somebody that
Spends a lot of time on email is much more relaxed in your communication with people
So say use it for personal or use it for
You know personal branding or I don't know but in a way that you feel comfortable with your email recipients and sending stuff to them
Then I think this is quite a nice application for you
especially because of the the prioritization
Of certain emails and also filtering out all those newsletters
I think that's a really nice sort of ability and also the ability to connect your calendar as well
And that's something a lot of emails don't necessarily always have inside of them the calendar abilities
So that's always nice to have now when it comes to the newer features the note-taking and the tasks
I think this is really for many people probably an optional experience something that is nice add-on
But won't necessarily blow you away
If you're someone that takes regular notes to yourself an email, maybe sends them to yourself or you want to combine
Your email with your regular note-taking on a regular basis
You spend a lot of time in email and you don't necessarily want to move out then this might be for you
so some of the collaborative abilities if you were able to convert your teammates of
Over to this application. It does make it easier to be able to send those messages and communicate in real-time
So what I'm saying here is I like the conversational email. I think that's pretty cool
I think it makes a lot more of a relaxing experience for email
but what I'd say is the the more tasks and notes are nice to have versus a
Necessity for some people so it's really up to you how you view that but at the same time, I think they're built
Well, it's just not necessarily a core component
I know what they're trying to do bring everything in one place
But at the same time, I think it's a nice to have so folks
I hope you enjoyed my future of spanked 2.0. Again. This is of growing applications
and from what Devere was saying I can imagine it is going to be very
Popular as time goes on and how people will do it. So I hope you enjoyed this feature
I include all the relevant links and details in the comments below, but I hope you enjoyed today's video
So if you're new to this YouTube channel, please do subscribe
We do regular features like this and would love to have you here in the community
But if you want to share your thoughts on Spike, whether you've used it or not, please do use the comments below
Alright folks. I will see you all very soon. Cheerio
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