(2020-06-26) Baschez Will Hey Work

Nathan Baschez: Will HEY.com work? Will it work? Almost certainly.

HEY’s founders’ stated goal is to attract 250k paying customers (~$25mm ARR), and it feels inevitable that they’ll get there

HEY gets a lot right, but I think there’s a big flaw in their strategy: it looks like one product, but in reality it’s actually two different products (an email service, and an email client), which will resonate with two distinct but overlapping audiences. Here’s the problem: Given their current product architecture, they’re only able to serve the intersection of those two audiences — the middle of the venn diagram. I suspect this artificially limits their addressable market by quite a lot.

HEY’s first product is an email service, and it has two primary growth loops. The first is the “@hey.com” email address their customers use, a nice viral mechanic. The second is a lot more interesting: controversy.

It’s also an extremely opinionated email client with a lot of rough edges. Tying these two value propositions together destroys more value than it creates.

If HEY built an API or support for existing standards like POP/IMAP, and allowed any user to use a custom domain — or, if we’re really getting crazy, use their existing email service provider — then all of a sudden their market would grow to include the union of the two sets

But obviously Jason Fried and DHH are no dummies. They are probably already aware of this. So why tie them together, and limit their market?

*First, maybe the only way to build the email client that people want was to also own the email service? Sometimes the only way to solve certain problems is to integrate multiple layers of the stack.

But I don’t think that’s the case here.*

Second, maybe their philosophical objection to Google is so strong that they are totally willing to forego revenue in order to avoid depending on their Gmail platform?

Third, maybe this was their plan all along, and it just wasn’t in scope for version 1. I think this is the most likely, actually.

*still, it raises the question: it’s hard to create a good email service, and doubly hard to also create a good email client.

If you only need to do one to be successful, why do both?*

Here’s what I think: HEY created both an email service and an email client not because they thought it would maximize revenue, but because it would be fun.

Speaking as an engineer, I can tell you that messing around with IMAP/POP is not very fun. You’d get bogged down debugging little problems for ProtonMail users all the time, instead of building fun new features. It’s a lot more fun to control the whole thing end-to-end.