Good morning, Product Hunt
I’ve been part of Product Hunt since the beginning and we launched our new Highrise iOS app here earlier in the year, but I’ve been dying to show off the ways we’re changing the foundation of the product.
Highrise was created 8 years ago by 37signals, now Basecamp. I got involved about a year ago as the CEO. When approached, I decided to take it over because for years I had already depended on Highrise to help build the startups I was taking through Y Combinator: Inkling and Cityposh=>Draft. We used it to do fundraising, customer development, prospecting, and recruiting. But I still wanted it to do more. So today, we’ve added something that transforms how people can use our product.
People have been syncing Highrise with customer support tools for years using integrations and all sorts of hacks. Today we’re announcing a huge piece of functionality that completely changes Highrise from just CRM software, into a full fledged helpdesk and group inbox that makes it simpler for our users to manage a queue of email, messages, and more. We call it Good Morning and there’s more details of its creation and how it works below.
We’ve still got a lot to do and improve, but I think you’re going to like these changes we’ve made to our tried and trusted app. And just for ProductHunters, we’re offering 50% off Highrise for 3 months on any of our plans. Just use the coupon code PRODUCTHUNT50 if you signup or signup to our free plan and use the code in the next few weeks if you decide to upgrade. There’s a ton you can do with the free plan as a new business getting started. I know, I’ve been there :)
I hope you get a chance to use Highrise, and if there’s anything I can do to help you start your own company or product, please reach out. I’d love to help any way I can.
Nathan Kontny
nate@highrisehq.com
(832) 953-5276
When Highrise first launched 8 years ago, The Washington Post wrote a very flattering review.
And they were right. It was a great tool to manage all the notes and emails we have with our contacts amongst our team. But I always felt something was missing…
Since taking over Highrise from Basecamp, we’ve interviewed a ton of customers, watched people use Highrise with various integrations, and most importantly worked Highrise into our own workflow.
Over and over people use Highrise to make sure contacts don’t fall through the cracks. Tracking messages, commenting on progress, etc. But it’s still possible to miss things.
We saw it happening here too. We have our support inbox of course. We were using another tool to manage it, and it worked ok. But I also had contacts emailing me directly and I couldn’t always keep up with all of them. So some things weren’t getting answered.
About a year ago we added an indicator in your Latest Activity to help you know if someone had been replied to:
You can go through your stream and know if anything is outstanding and still needs a reply. Was a customer left waiting? But it wasn’t good enough yet for us. We found ourselves missing these as the activity in our account got more and more active. So today, we’ve added a super powerful tool to solve this problem.
It’s called Good Morning.
Good Morning helps you organize and respond to incoming activity that needs attention from you or someone on your team.
As you BCC, forward, or auto-forward emails in, the unanswerd ones coming from your contacts will gather in Good Morning - changes to Good Afternoon and Good Evening as your day goes by :) - with the most recent items at the top.
You can check items off to remove them immediately:
As you reply to these messages they’ll remove themselves from your Good Morning inbox. This works whether you use your default email client (BCCing Highrise), or if you’ve setup our Gmail integration, and reply to them right from Highrise.
Good Morning is shared across your team in the same way as Latest Activity is (still using the right permissions of course), so you can use Good Morning as a group inbox or helpdesk.
Forward all your support questions into Highrise, and now your team has a focal point for going through and making sure all your customers and contacts have been responded to.
Exactly, Max!
And there’s a ton of the useful things here. Presence will let you know if someone is already replying to that item. Or create a task for you or someone else to act on that email later, which will remove that item from Good Morning too. You can also use comments on emails to have internal collaboration on these email threads from Highrise.
When we implemented Good Morning for our team, suddenly my backlog of items was addressed. All that email from outside our support queue is getting answered super quickly. The power of a team is wonderful, and now we can take better advantage of that. One step closer to our virtual personal assistant. :) And we think you are really going to like Good Morning in your workflow.
P.S. If you aren’t a Highrise user yet, it’s easy to get started with a free plan that fits a lot of small businesses.