Hello and Goodbye to Hey
I was invited to Basecamp’s Hey email beta on June 16, and finally got around to playing with it this week. It’s a fascinating effort which I applaud, but doesn’t deliver enough value for me to pay the $99/year asking price.
Before diving into Hey, it’s worth explaining my current email workflow.
Let’s be honest - most email is cruft. Beyond old-fashioned spam, the vast majority of email is low priority: newsletters, coupons, status updates, etc. Reading it is neither urgent nor important. All such emails I receive are filtered into an “Updates” folder which does not create any notifications. I’ll get to it when I get to it.
Important email, like direct notes from family members, enter a “Primary” folder which creates notifications.
That’s it. All email is divided into “Updates” and “Primary” - a river of cruft to be viewed whenever I can, and high priority emails to be read and dealt with.
This is consistent with Hey’s perspective on email, as described by David Heinemeier Hansson on a recent Basecamp podcast: treat most email as a “river to be dipped into”, rather than fretting about the “Inbox Zero” goal of acting upon every email that arrives. This philosophy has been distilled into Hey application itself, which very much follows the Ruby on Rails approach of convention over configuration - it’s opinionated on how email should be handled.
The Hey Client
The iOS client is neatly designed and has well-written copy. The introductory emails are sensibly put together. Much of Hey’s secret sauce is requiring use of optional structures from other email services. To compare to the obvious competitor - Gmail:
| Hey | Gmail |
| Imbox | Inbox/Priority Inbox |
| The Feed | “Promotions” category |
| Paper Trail | “Updates” category |
| Set Aside | Archive |
| Reply Later | Reminders |
Recommendation
If you struggle to create and maintain an email workflow, so would appreciate a guiding hand, Hey is worth trying. I do not so the $99/year asking price is too hard to justify.
The Venn diagram of “has enough email to overwhelm,” “lacks strong workflow today” and “would pay >$99/year to fix” is much larger for work than personal email, which makes Basecamp’s decision to initially focus on personal email (no custom domain support) a little strange. I understand there is a business version (referred to as “Hey Us” internally) in the works.