Jason Fried deserves to have a billion dollar business with Hey. He and his business partner are super smart - they have brilliant design ideas thinking from First Principles
But the vast majority of people will never know about it because Hey is hard to switch to.
With Spike email if you have any of the popular email systems you can try in 30 seconds without giving up your existing email client.
But with Hey you have to switch to Basecamp’s servers. So everyone I know who knows about Hey has been too reluctant to try it.
So Hey will end up like Bitkeeper or Betamax. Shame - it is a beautifully thought out product - it deserves to be much more successful.
If you know Jason and you care about his work - please bring this to his attention. Basecamp is a beautiful gem of a company which deserves to be more successful.