Freelancer, Jozsef, uses Spike to communicate efficiently with clients

Freelancing is demanding because you need to do the work and keep things running all on your own. Jozsef uses Spike to stay on top of both elements.

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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.

“I tried to introduce other group communication apps and collaboration tools, but however easy they were to use, sooner or later clients reverted back to their inbox. When I'm forced to use traditional email, it's hard to keep everything together for a project.”

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.

“When I use Spike, I can let my clients live in their inbox while I transparently keep all communication one click away, including all files we ever exchanged. It's effortless and saves a lot of time. It’s genius.”

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.”

 

 

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Super Search

Spike’s lightning-fast Super Search is another time saver, which shows resulting files, people, and messages. It’s another way we humanized Spike.

“I love how files are sitting at the top of a search result. I can open the document I was looking for after a few keystrokes, without going through the trouble of finding the correct email first.”

Another focus point of solo-businesses? Sales and leads. Spike’s read tracking and real-time email helps Jozsef stay on top of lead generation in a smart and effortless way, so he can focus his energy where needed.

 

“I use read tracking every day. It’s very important when dealing with sales. I can see if the recipient hasn’t received the email and I can figure out why (like spam issues). I can call the client right after they opened the email and win a business by hitting the iron while it’s hot. Or, I can wait to follow up until they read the email and avoid unnecessary calls, saving time and hassle. It’s the only way to work now.”

 

With all the time saved and extra visibility into leads, Jozsef can worry less about sales, and more about the work. He stresses less because his inbox is set up in a calmer, more efficient way. And with less busy-work? He gets more family time with his wife and children.  

 

Spike helps keep Jozsef organized, informed, and calm— so he can keep his one-man business running smoothly and efficiently.

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