Although we are well into Q2 already I haven’t shared our Q2 plans with you yet. This is because first weeks of April went into launching Fleep ID and we postponed our Q2 planning until the last week of April. But as usual, let’s start from the review of past quarter – Q1:
- Fleep ID – in the middle of April we launched Fleep ID – an email compatible ID for all Fleep users which others can use to reach out to them in Fleep or from email. I got my Fleep ID in February and forwarded all my emails to it, this has saved me a lot of time and focus as Fleep is grouping emails by participants not by subject. I still use Outlook for Calendar but other then that it’s all Fleep nowadays! If you haven’t claimed yours yet, I’d suggest to hurry up :)
- @mentions – Yep, finally :) Just type @ and a popup with members (that have Fleep ID) appears to select who you want to mention, he will get extra notification and this makes him easier to look into these conversations first where he knows his attention is needed. We’ve been using it ourselves and we like it, but we still want to tune its behavior together with Muted conversations in the upcoming weeks.
- Conversation labels – long waited feature for those who have a lot of conversations on different projects in Fleep. It also turns out to be a crucial necessity when you forward all your email traffic to your Fleep ID. I haven’t used labels too much yet, but I have few labels. I still mostly read conversations from Recents, also I’m planning to start Mute’ing low prio email threads more aggressively and read them every once in a while under Muted label.
- New integrations – In January Helmo joined our team and since then we’ve been busy adding new integrations to Fleep. Overall 6 new integrations have been released by now – Pivotal Tracker, New Relic, Bitbucket, Zapier, GitLab, Confluence – Let me know if you’re still missing your favorite :)
- Inline link previews – Oh boy, if I would have known how different expectations people have on this. It sounds like a simple feature – you post any link / URL into a Fleep conversation and we generate a short link preview for others to show what’s behind the link. Eventually we had to add three different ways to control link previews: 1) You can remove specific preview from the message in the conversation 2) You can disable link previews from all conversations across Fleep for yourself 3) You can disable link previews in a particular conversation for all members. Once all three were done it seemed that everyone was happy again :)
- Conversation link sharing – Again, a long waited feature by those who want to create a conversation and leave the door open for joiners. It works very simply – enable conversation sharing in settings and share the conversation link anywhere you like – everyone with the link will be added to the conversation automatically. Haven’t used it myself too much, but this should be useful whenever you need easy onboarding for your team, group of friends or classmates.
These were the most important improvements to Fleep from January to date, I think we had a pretty good quarter in product development and I hope you still like the direction we’ve taken.
Now, on to our plans for Q2
Our main focus will continue to be improving Fleep experience to become a true replacement for email conversations, for that we want to build the following features:
- Gmail integration – Ability to fetch incoming emails from your Gmail account into Fleep, so you get all your existing conversations immediately into Fleep.
- Send outgoing emails with your existing email address – many of you have said that they like Fleep ID but for outgoing emails they would like to keep their current email identity. This will be exactly about that.
- Show HTML messages in Fleep – Currently we turn them into plain text messages and preserve links, but we would like to preserve more of the messages’ original look and feel.
- Password protected messages – Ability to encrypt your messages with password to gain additional security when posting highly sensitive information.
- Conversations bulk actions – this was already in Q1 plan – add / remove members, add / remove labels etc actions to all selected conversations in a one go instead of doing this one by one to each conversation.
- Team management – Enables you to create „teams“, once created then instead of adding team members one by one to specific conversations you can add the whole team at once. Later when you change the team, membership in all these conversations is adjusted automatically. So adding new team member into all the relevant chats or removing someone becomes one click action :)
- Export your Fleep conversations history – useful for those who want to keep their conversations archive outside of Fleep.
- Dropbox & Google Drive integration – ability to set up integration with Dropbox or Google Drive in a way that all files posted to a Fleep conversation will be copied to a specified folder in Dropbox or Google Drive
- My tasklist – As a next step in our Tasks feature we will be adding combined view to all tasks assigned to you across all your conversations.
- Zen mode – Many of you have asked for a separate, bigger view to a message that you are composing, zen mode will be a solution to this, open in a full screen and lets you focus on writing your message in piece
Hopefully these are in alignment with your expectations. We haven’t yet decided which of them will be part of our Premium subscription, this is something we still need to figure out, but we are happy to hear your thoughts and feedback on it (as always :) )
henn.
