Freelancer, Jozsef, uses Spike to communicate efficiently with clients

As a solo web designer and developer, Jozsef Juhasz works with local small businesses creating beautiful custom sites, for businesses like event planning, general contractors, skincare, nonprofits— you name it, he can create it.  Since many of these businesses are also run by one person, both he and his clients are constantly busy and have limited time to communicate, so he has to be conscientious with communicating— both for himself and his clients.

Throughout a project, Jozsef sends and receives a bunch of files, like images, documents, and mockups. Collecting feedback and sharing updates through email can be, in his words, “beyond frustrating.” In fact, in a recent survey of freelancers, about 44% of freelancers say they need real-time communication software to stay connected.

That’s a problem for Jozsef because with traditional email, important information can get lost deep in email threads. If you think of all the time you’ve wasted searching for an attachment somewhere in a thread, the content of a conversation, or that one sentence of information that you need to grab, it adds up to a lot of dead time. That’s important time you could have spent staying focused and producing output.

To get around this, we designed email to look more like conversations, cleaning up old email formatting to reveal just the messages, plain and simple. We call it Conversational Email.

“I like Spike’s fresh and modern take on communication. It’s a great blend of email and messaging, like a business chat app, which is what I need as a solo business. It strips away the unnecessary parts of traditional email, and has added bonuses that save me so much time, while retaining ALL traditional email features. It’s the best organization app for me.”

While Joszef’s clients use their standard email, he uses Spike as a chat platform and document organizer, all in one.

In People Mode, you can quickly find files that a person sent you, without having to find the thread it lives in. More than building Spike to be a robust email organizer, we wanted to build Spike to be more comfortable and easy, with things exactly where you would expect to find them.

“Organizing emails by people is just so much more intuitive than grouping them by subject. One click on the contact and I can scroll through the whole history without creating smart folders, using tags, or search. It’s great for email productivity.”