A new personal productivity app called Ocean launches to triage your overloaded inbox, turn emails into tasks and take actions, and share all the availability of meetings with other apps with one app.
Today, Gmail is very dominant in the email market where there are very challengers. Realizing this, Ocean decided to work with Gmail rather than compete with it. As a third-party client, it is difficult to gain foothold in the market, but successful email apps have proven lucrative acquisitions. Yahoo bought the email app Xobni for $60 million, and Microsoft snapped compri for $200 million over the past decade.
This market opportunity attracted co-founder Martin Dufort and Shopify co-founder Scott Lake, who created BigWave Labs in early 2019 and began working on email. This task ultimately led to Ocean, an app focused on more efficient email management. (Scott now serves as many of the app's financial aid and advisors, says Dufort.)
This app works with your Gmail or Google Workspace account, keeping users forgettable so that they can turn emails into tasks and action items.
To do this, the app includes its own task manager that allows you to access the user's email. This means you don't have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while gaining access to features beyond what Google's Task Manager offers to Gmail users.
Ocean lets you create tasks using rich formats, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to task notes. You can also automatically pull action items from longer emails.
Instead of creating a task or applying some sort of label, you can choose to manage emails that mean you'll reply later by creating a task.
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Image credit: BigWave Labs Inc.
For Inbox Zero enthusiasts, the killer feature is Ocean's inbox triage tool.
This app allows you to filter emails by category, such as first time users (first time sending emails), permanent pingers (people sending emails repeatedly), and emails from contacts. You can also surface emails that are marked as spam but may belong to your inbox, so you won't miss anything important.
Ocean also offers baseline email functions for creating, responding, flagging, archive and deletion of emails, as well as a subscription management tool (a recently added feature Gmail).
Additionally, Ocean offers a built-in meeting scheduling tool that allows you to set availability based on pending and reserved events. Here you can set open times to block others from booking those meetings at the last moment. This is a handy trick.
You can also send an automated email invitation to recipients, view meeting proposals through the web interface, and automatically add confirmed meetings to the calendar.
The Ocean iPhone app has just been released, but the new Mac app is working. This includes iCloud Sync. The team hopes to start this by the end of the year. The company aims to generate revenue through Ocean Blue, a non-repeated membership model. Membership includes a year's worth of renewals with new features and features. It also provides access when the Mac app arrives.
“I think people get bored of repeating subscriptions,” explains Dufort. “We wanted to leave from now on, but we still offered a sustainable model for us. So we decided to define this Ocean Blue membership. The app is basically a freemium model.[The membership] It also puts pressure on us to provide value to this app as we move forward,” he adds.
Blue membership also includes AI email summary capabilities and email insights.
Interested users can first test Ocean with a 14-day free trial.
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