Spike Email turns business communications into simple conversations, so professionals can work and collaborate seamlessly with clients and team members.
The best part is that users can still see the same professional emails even if they are not in Spike. It simplifies the needs for internal and external communication of the company. Spike is like the combination of the email itself and other apps for transmitting important messages.
This App Features the Following:
Conversational Email
Spike looks and feels like chat, without repeating threads or signatures. Have a conversation, not just an email exchange.
Email that puts people first. Conversational email removes stiff formalities, letting you communicate like a human again. No more confusing threads – just natural, flowing dialogue for an improved workflow. It’s email, but as easy as chatting.
- Talk to People not Threads – Repeating headers, signatures, and threads make email hard to read. Clear the clutter and transform your email into a real time chat that’s easy to read. Save time and get the best of mail and messaging in one.
- Smarter Inbox – Spike’s intelligent Priority Inbox removes distractions so you can stay focused. See important messages first, while low priority messages are moved to the side for later.
Notes & Docs
Collaborate in real time, right from your inbox. Your docs and notes are always right there and easy to find.
Not just another Note app. Create, edit, collaborate and share dynamic Notes without ever leaving your Inbox. Stay organized, be inventive, and get things done – together. It’s a space as versatile as your ideas.
- Live collaboration – Save the time and stress of useless meetings. Create a note, share your thoughts as a team – edit, comment, chat, store files and manage Tasks in real time. Work smarter—together.
- Chat: a sidebar conversation – Edit and bounce ideas around without ever leaving the Note. Whether your team is in the same office or across continents – instantly view real time feedback alongside your document, helping you get it done as one. Collaboration has never been so simple.
Tasks & To-Do’s
Create everything from complex tasks to simple to-do lists in seconds. You’ll always be on top of everything!
The quickest way to do it. Organize and prioritize your Tasks, projects, and even your grocery list. Get things done faster without breaking a sweat, making your To-Do list a Done list.
- Plan, track, complete – No matter the nature of the Task, Spike’s Tasks keep you on top of everything. Easily see when a Task is completed thanks to instant notifications. Updates, edits and feedback appear at the top of your Inbox as work progresses so you never break your workflow.
- Never forget a thing – Stay on track and organized with reminders. Easy reminder scheduling lets you be kind to your time, helping you prioritize your To-Do list in seconds. You have enough on your plate. Leave remembering the little details to us.
Group Chat & Video Meetings
Create Group chats for any project or team, and launch multi-person audio or video calls right from your inbox.
Team chat built-in. Everything you love about messenger, built into your email Inbox. Spike eliminates the repetitiveness of email. Quickly chat with Spike’s email chat and get back to work. Say goodbye to multiple tabs and apps, and hello to seamless collaboration.
- Chat with anyone, anywhere – Create a Group chat for any team, project or client. There’s no need to download new software or team communication apps – it’s all right here. Anyone with an email account can join the conversation—even if they don’t use Spike.
- Real time chat, real time results – Real time replies keep you on track and informed and keep the conversation moving. Get up to speed in a glance and access all files ever shared with ease. Questions, comments, replies, and files are right where you need them at all times, on every device.
All In Your Inbox
Spike combines all the tools you need to take on your day in one supercharged Inbox. Emails, messaging, collaboration tools, calendars, and more are all in one place.
Access all your work and personal email accounts with one simple, unified Inbox. Spike helps you keep it together—literally.
View and manage your time on one single screen. Spike consolidates all your calendars (Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, other CalDAV calendars) right into your email so you can view your appointments in a glance. Go ahead, cross off one more headache from your list.
Start or join a video meeting or audio call seamlessly, without ever leaving Spike. Choose a contact, start a call. It’s all built-in. Let’s see your old email client do that!
Clear out your Inbox in seconds. Unsubscribe in 1 tap, mark as read, delete, and archive thousands of messages with one touch.
Spike’s whole “Conversational Email” is really smart. They are flipping the Gmail and Slack paradigm as the product works both with and without a team.
Spike Product Review
Spike is a really interesting tool for communication and collaboration. They say “Spike helps teams stay connected with conversational email, chat, video calls and collaborative tools built into a seamless, powerful inbox.” — It’s kinda a mashup of Slack and Gmail and I immediately saw the utility of using just those solutions.
The Website
First let me say I’m quite impressed with Spikes website. Like their app, it’s very clean and well organized. But more importantly, they have a ton of content there to help new users see the actual benefits of their product vs. simply listing out features. This approach “benefits vs. features” is obvious and well known to SaaS marketers, but like most things, easier said than done. I’ve struggled with showcasing benefits over features while still articulating the feature itself on many occasions.
They have a section on their site called Resources, which outlines some key how-to’s and comparisons to products people are already used to.
I was particularly impressed with this article that doesn’t slam Google Inbox, but elegantly shows how Spike fills gaps where Google Inbox is lacking. As an example, I did like the in-line replies of Google Inbox, but continue to be frustrated with scrolling and expanding, even in Gmail directly. The idea of a Slack or iMessage style interface has always been appealing.
Of course, Spike does have a features section which effectively intertwines the benefits into the feature — and to somehow get a Pulp Fiction reference in there without getting an R rating is impressive!
The use cases are quick reads and organized by role — although you have to scroll to the bottom nav to see the roles. Maybe include those on the use cases page at the top as well.
The Product
Let’s get into the product now shall we. First, the Spike team has done a great job making the product universally accessible — web, mobile and desktop. I’m pretty partial to desktop apps on my Mac so I immediately downloaded that.
Installation
The install process was seamless and it looks like the app is signed by Apple so I didn’t get that annoying and concerning developer security popup that most people don’t know how to get around.
Once installed, I had to connect an email. I went with Gmail and this part can be a bit concerning for people.
WOULD BE COOL IF: Maybe the Spikenow guys can figure out a way to let people play with the product in a demo account format of some sort first to get them comfortable.
The Messaging Client
The tool does indeed look like an email client and messenger client combined. The first thing I noticed was this toggle between what they call “Priority” and “Other”. I’m guessing they have some logic that suggests certain conversations should be included in priority, but not exactly sure how it works. Note that I’m using my catch-all email for this test, so I wouldn’t say anything is a priority over another email address. But it does look like it pulled out emails from yesterday from actual contacts of mine vs. sites like Soylent or Restoration Hardware. The “Other” tab seems more like a traditional chronological view of emails.
When you actually click on a message it loads to the thread to the right as expected. I particularly like how the open and collapsed states work compared to Gmail. I always find it hard to locate a particular message from a thread in Gmail. Is it at the top, the bottom, some threads show a little bit of the message, some just say expand.
BEAUTIFUL: Spikes interface is clean and bubbly and very easy to navigate.
LOVE THIS: I like the distinction between “PIN” and “STAR” as that suits my workflow. Star is something I’m tracking for days or weeks. Pin is something I’m tracking for minutes or hours.
Another little gem I found is clicking the form name on the top of the thread panel to load all messages from that user. You can of course do this in Gmail either by searching or right clicking the message and saying find emails from Sender. Spike Now handles this much more elegantly. Plus, you instantly see threads and files grouped separately, which is really nice.
One thing I couldn’t find at first was some of the typical email functionality. Things like Folders: Sent, Archived, Scheduled, Drafts, etc. and a variety of settings. Most of this is found in the main menu of my avatar, but I’m guessing that’s by design because the philosophy I’m starting to feel from Spike is not to think of it as an email client. So those typical folders I’m used to going to in Gmail, while still there, are not front and center.
Search
Searching in Spike is fast, faster than Gmail even. Results are generally as expected, but two aspects stand out. First, there are 3 quick filters for “Files”, “Priority” and “Starred”. These adjust the results instantaneously. Second, the results are automatically grouped by “People”, “Files” and “Threads”. Comparing the same search in the same inbox on Gmail, you can see the results are completely different. From my perspective, Spike results seem way more useful. In particular, even when completing the search on Gmail you get some additional filters like “Has Attachment”. But actually showing me attachments (Spike) vs. emails that have attachments (Gmail) is more logical.
WOULD BE NICE: Spike doesn’t seem to show a recent search history; I actually find this really useful so it would be cool if they added it. At least the last 5 searches to start.
The “Conversation” Philosophy
Spike hammers home this idea of “conversational email” which is their term for merging email/chat. So far my experience with the product has been in a silo so generally Spike has felt like a very well organized email client that looks more like Slack. But I don’t think that’s exactly how the company wants people to see their product. My sense is that while my testing of Spike thus far has felt slightly more “conversational”, the real power comes in when the product is used with teams.
Final Thoughts
There is a lot more to Spike, it will surely take me time to get to all the nooks and crannies. But on initial testing, it does fill a lot of gaps in my workflow which is largely Gmail and Slack right now. Moreover, they’ve integrated the Google Calendar into the application in a much slicker way than Gmail does, but you can download and test that for yourself to see how.
The whole “Conversational Email” is really smart. Clearly Slack tapped into a huge pain point with team based messaging vs. using primarily email or other fragmented tools inside an organization. But Spike is flipping that paradigm a bit and I really like how the product works both with and without a team. For millions of us that aren’t 9-5 with one company for 20 years straight with the same people, in the same company with one email — Spike offers a great way to communicate in a multitude of ways with many different teams, freelancers, friends, companies and more.
Source: Spike Product Review (https://markuphero.com/blog/gmail-slack-imessage-or-just-use-spike-product-review/)
(Spike Email: All in One Messaging App, September 2021)
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