Basecamp’s HEY: A Missed Growth Opportunity (So Far)
Unless HEY changes, I predict it will be a small success
Right now, it has fuzzy market positioning and limited growth potential
For HEY to grow, a few things need to be done
Yesterday, I received my invite for HEY. After onboarding, I saw the home screen and thought ,“Now what”? I closed it. Went back to Gmail. And haven’t opened it since.
The reason why I won’t use HEY (for now), is because I can’t use it. I am midstream in dozens (hundreds?) of conversations amongst my personal and work email accounts. Also, where are my contacts? How do I email someone? Am I supposed to copy and paste email addresses from Gmail? I can’t see a future where I’m not using both HEY and Gmail – which begs the question, “what’s the point?”
HEY will get some initial traction as Basecamp fans and “innovators” adopt it. However, growth will stall unless Basecamp’s designers create a better growth strategy. Here are some ideas on how that can happen.
HEY needs a positioning strategy
There are basically two types of positioning strategies: complement and substitution.
When putting a complement into the market, you think about how to get consumers to shift a portion of their time spent in one product, to time spent in another. Slack is a great complement to Gmail, because the interaction “hey, where’s that file?” is done better in the former vs. the latter.
When putting a substitute into the market, you have two options:
Faster horse. Offer a horse that is 10x faster than your current horse.
Blackberry → iPhone: Offer an experience that is radically different from what came before, so as to make the previous experience irrelevant.
The issue with HEY is that it’s neither a complement, nor a substitute. It’s sort of a faster horse strategy, but it’s neither 10x better than current email clients, nor does it enable me to switch. It’s like Basecamp is saying “Here’s a somewhat faster horse. And by the way, you’re going to have to learn a new language to issue commands… plus it’ll cost more.” It’s also not a Blackberry → iPhone strategy because it’s still “email” under the hood.
Basecamp needs to decide which way it’s gonna go. So far, it seems they’re going the faster horse route. But if they do that, they need to enable seamless migration from Gmail to HEY, and HEY needs to add more innovation. Which we’ll talk about next.
HEY needs more innovation
Amongst HEY’s list of 20 features, nothing stands out as compelling. It seems like they’ve created a specific email workflow, and built a UI for that. I don’t see anything that Google or Apple can’t easily replicate in their existing products. For example, the headline feature (#1) is “Screen emails like you screen calls”. Well, if I get email from a sender I don’t want, I just use Gmail’s “Spam” button to block it. Hey isn’t doing a good job of making a compelling case.
Understandably, HEY is at 1.0. Perhaps more will happen in the future. But for the product to grow, there needs to be something in there that hits the “this is really new” button on shoppers. For an example, look to the recently announced Slack Connect. That one feature has a more compelling story than all of HEY.
The HEY team will struggle to innovate as long as their positioning strategy is unclear. If I were Jason (Basecamp CEO), I would get the team together and say: “Putting a new UI on email was a good first step, but it won’t get us far. Either we’re going to pivot this into a new communication model, or we’re going to offer a 10x email experience over existing email clients AND figure out we can get consumers to seamlessly transition to it.”
HEY needs a strategy to move across the diffusion curve
Growth is engineered. It must be done purposeful. You don’t just “solve consumer needs” and then customers magically show up. You need to plan how you are going to get specific groups of consumers to start buying your products. You also can’t do an averaged survey of demand. You need to break up the diffusion segments, and attack them one at a time with targeted advertising, promotion, innovations, and pricing for each.
Basecamp did a great job of attracting the innovators and maybe some early adopters, but they need to be purposeful in how they will move across the diffusion curve.
I’m hopeful if…
Basecamp’s branding has gotten the ball rolling – which is the hardest part. But now there’s real work to be done. Unless dramatic changes are made, I predict that HEY will be only a small success. Which might be OK with Basecamp, but it would be a missed opportunity.
