With so much innovation and new technology, there are now countless applications competing to be the dominant communication platform. Everyone has WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, many use iMessage, and they shuffle between them all. With so many messaging applications, the communication gets jumbled. Sometimes you might message a person through Facebook, while other times you may email them.

While Hop doesn’t aim to replace or compete with instant messaging such as WhatsApp, it does however aim to simplify the way people communicate. Email was developed over 40 years ago, and it hasn’t changed much since then. Today people’s communication needs are much more demanding, and the primitive thread mode, cluttered inboxes, and limited capabilities of traditional email don’t cut it.

With Hop, emailing people just seems different. Hop turns email into a natural chat like conversation. By including activity statuses such as last seen, and showing when someone is typing, the communication feels more like real time instant messaging, feels more personal, and authentic. We live busy lives, we have goals to accomplish, promotions to earn, and dreams to chase, but in order to accomplish all of these, we need the tools to get things done in the shortest possible way.

This is the reason why Hop was developed. Hop is there to give people the shortest path to done, directly for people who like to get stuff done. By providing an efficient productivity tool that feels great and easy, people will no longer shuffle between multiple email applications anymore. This will ultimately result with people choosing a single and unified application for staying productive, rather than shuffling between several.

The FinancesOnline platform was able to experience these benefits first-hand after they conducted a review of Hop Email. They described our messaging tool as a platform “designed to keep the flow of communication smooth, seamless and efficient, saving workers precious time that they can use for other tasks and priorities.”

In a nutshell, FinancesOnline highlighted a few key benefits of using Hop: “user-friendly messaging that lives on-top of existing email accounts” and transforming outdated email addresses into an “effective communication and productivity tool.” They also praised Hop for removing the clutter from traditional email messaging and allowing users to collaborate with one another, all on a singular platform.

After seeing that their positive remarks on their analysis perfectly aligns with our value proposition, it wasn’t a surprise to see Hop receive two industry awards: Rising Star and Great User Experience awards for email management software reviews. The former distinction is given to software solutions that are perceived by clients as an effective tool for solving their day-to-day work at the office. The latter award is given to software products that offer a remarkably pleasing and intuitive user experience.

On another note, we were also recommended by FinancesOnline as one of the top email management software alternatives. The review experts cited our clutter-free UI, automated filtering and gestures as some of the superior features over our competitor.

One Application to Rule them All was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Professionals working daily hours know the struggle of having to manage all those daily tasks. It’s a burden. Today people rely on so many different tools and services for managing their daily tasks, that staying on top of everything becomes more and more time consuming.

There are solutions to make this easier for people. Most people would be surprised by the average amount people spend working just on email. According to a recent Canadian survey, on average people spend around 17 hours a week on email, both reading and responding. This results for people spending an average of 2.3 hours a day on email while at the office, and spending 1.1 hours while working from home.

With Hop, you save around 30% of the time you spend on email. As the average time spent emailing can be several daily hours, Hop can potentially result in saving a good hour of your day. An hour a day is a very substantial amount of time, just imagine what you could do with that extra hour.

You might ask how this is possible. Well let’s start with the basics: When starting your day, just opening your inbox is overwhelming as it is filled with messages. These messages come from various different sources causing your inbox to be filled with content that’s important such as a memo from the CEO, but also include newsletters and promotional offers. With Hop, your inbox is filtered between priority and non-priority messages with the power of AI. A designated priority mail inbox efficiently saves your time in the morning. By not being notified with unimportant emails, those distractions during a work day will be greatly reduced. And as you know, after each distraction you need 10–15 minutes to get back on topic with work you were doing before getting distracted.

As email was designed as a personal one-to-one communication platform, today the communication needs are much more complex. Hop — for that first time ever — integrates messaging and group messaging into email, so that you don’t have to change from email client to a messaging client. It also offers a very comprehensive search functionality that will save you a lot of time when you are looking for a certain message or attachment.

In fact there are many more reasons as to how Hop can save your time. With features such as quick replies, which save time from writing long written messages, to customized notifications, so you can instantly get notified from a received message. The bottom line is time saved, and a lot of it too.

We developed Hop as a tool for giving users the power to save time. With Hop, you avoid distractions, manage emails much faster, and save 30% of the time you would have needed for the same task. Again: Imagine what you can do with an extra hour each day!

How to Save an Hour a Day was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone is well aware of how outdated, confusing, and unorganized email is. More so, people know about alternatives, however none of which quite match the offering of Hop. With the adoption of Hop, and use of it’s channels, businesses are given the best tool for managing workflow and productivity.

Unlike all the other productivity service providers, Hop is the ONLY one which works on top of existing email. Additionally, these service providers all focus on improving internal communication, however companies today must communicate outside of their walls and with external sources. This is where the use of Hop’s channels differs from anything else, and provides the best solution for all communication needs.

With Hop’s focus on improving both internal, and external communication, now separate businesses are able to connect, and create a workspace for ultimate collaboration. With Hop’s multitude of provided features and capabilities, using channels for collaboration has never been as effective. No more jumping over to other messaging products and asking others to join you there for project work. Just create a Channel, invite members, and in real-time in your inbox you can do everything to keep projects moving forward: post messages, upload files, schedule meetings, edit shared Google sheets, and many more.

Quickly get everyone on board

Joining a new assignment or department can be challenging, as it requires for quick understanding of the groups previous context. Hop allows for easily adding new members to existing channels. Using Hop they get immediate access to discussion history, and a searchable archive for easily finding any content. Sharing project knowledge was never so easy.

Hop users have found many different uses for channels. For example, the growing eCommerce business for selling art, Artistly uses channels for communicating with it’s customer relationship partner, Insightly. In the past, the two used a mix of emailing, Google Drive, and phone conferences, which caused difficulty in keeping up with conversations, and slowed them down. By adopting Hop, and using a shared channel(#CRM-team), the two companies now conduct all their communication in real time, and are able to complete tasks at a much faster rate.

It doesn’t stop there, Artistly’s founder, John Bryce, has around 200 customers. What he wanted, was to conduct a product review, and to include all his clients in an organized platform where he can communicate to all of them in real time. He created a #ProductRev channel, and sent a Hop channel invite to all of them. His clients received a link in their inbox, and by clicking that link they were instantly added to the convo, where they could see all discussion history, and all this without joining or subscribing to anything. In order to actively participate and write feedback, only then would they be required to create a Hop account.

In the very near future, Hop will introduce a fully functional desktop and web interface platform. This will provide users with a fully capable platform, for conducting all communication and productivity tasks.

Real-time Business Communication: With Hop channels was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a CEO of Fiverr, the world’s largest community of freelancers and lean entrepreneurs, we are obsessed with creating the best tools for freelancers to run their business effectively and effortlessly. Email is still the most popular way for business communication, but it is often taking too much attention. Hop is solving exactly that. -Micha Kaufman

When email was first released to the public, it seemed like humanity took a leap into the future. As time went on and with the advancement of technology, the Internet allowed for new services. Services such as instant messaging and social networks, began to take momentum, and emails capabilities began to seem primitive. E-mail is confusing. We aren’t born with the knowledge of what forwarding, CCing, BCCing, attaching, and other email features mean.

However, today email is still being widely used especially for business purposes. In fact, on average, the number of emails being sent per day is 205 billion! Email isn’t going away anytime soon as it is still being widely used for collaborating, sharing files, scheduling, and other business needs.

With the overwhelming amount of communication happening through email, problems are bound to happen. Most people know that feeling of logging into their email and being overwhelmed by the amount of unread messages. The buildup of your inbox is stressful, you can spend hours just sifting through messages, going through useless junk, and wasting valuable time. There are ways to fix all that, and to keep you and your business working in a happier, more productive, and more efficient way: by using Hop.

Your email inbox is flooded with content, and everyone has a limited attention span. Receiving emails such as promotional offers in the same inbox you receive those important business messages doesn’t really make much sense. Rather than logging in and seeing that important priority email first, your time can be wasted sifting through junk. Hop prioritizes your main inbox by conversations, allowing for focus on what really matters. Everything else such as non-priority messages automatically get sorted in a separate inbox, avoiding distractions.

Many businesses have their employees using a company domain for email. Hop includes a feature that allows for the creation of a designated channel for all those users. This will allow for a clean, organized, single folder that includes all those work related emails. With Hop, your inbox is smarter, cleaner, and keeps you focused.

When communicating with email, people tend to change the way in which they express themselves. People can become like robots, communicating in a formal, non personalized way that doesn’t accurately reflect their message. With Hop, your emails become more like real conversations. Hop hides the messy signatures, email headers, and quoted text giving your email a more personal feel.

A study was done to determine the most important needs of small and medium businesses. The results found that interacting with clients as the number one priority. In order to achieve the best interactions, clients need to feel like they are interacting with an attentive human who is there listening to them. This will help develop long lasting relationships between a business and its clients.

Sending an important email can serve as a distraction. Often times when we’re anxious for a reply, there is potential for getting sidetracked and a tendency to constantly check our inbox. This can be time consuming, frustrating, and serves as an obstacle for completing other tasks.

“No one ever got rich checking their email more often” -Noah Kagan

Hop can help with this. Hop enables for instant knowledge of when someone has opened and read your message. In fact you can personally customize notifications to your preference, allowing you to identify each contact with their own unique sound. Hop also includes a feature which lets you know when someone is typing a response in real time. After reading a message, if you want to reply with a quick and simple response, Hop enables you to tap the lighting icon for lighting fast replies.

The Distractions Every Business Has was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Millennials are quickly becoming the most influential generation in our world today. As this generation is now finishing up college and beginning their careers, they are quickly taking over the workforce. When people think of millennials they usually have a conception labeling them as fast thinkers, rapidly changing preferences, boomed with too many online services, and heavy social media users. However this generation is the future driving force of the world’s economy.

The post-war generations who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, had very different expectations from their job. They wanted a steady paycheck, and that was the way companies pulled in talent. Today the younger generation doesn’t just expect a salary, but rather they want meaning and a feeling of engagement in the workplace. This causes a new challenge for companies and employers who are trying to recruit. In fact the average employment tenure for the baby-boomer generation is 7 years, while millennial employees average at only 2 years!

“Instead of complaining about adapting for millennials, it’s imperative for leaders and managers to acknowledge the role of millennial behavior as an indication of the needs of the modern workplace to attract, leverage, and retain modern talent.” -Crystal Kadakia

If there’s one thing that can really frustrate millennial employees, it’s wasting time. A study conducted by TriNet showed how the process of expense reporting caused a drastic negative effect on employees. The results were overwhelming, 73 percent of employees reported a negative effect, with an even higher rate for millennials. In fact millennials were 24 percent more likely not to fill out a business expense, in order to avoid completing the tedious paperwork. We’re living in the age of AI and expense reporting shouldn’t still be a time waster.

Millennials are the most collaborative generation. They strive to work in teams and work better when teams are diverse. They believe a group can accomplish more by working together. Not just teamwork and collaboration, millennial employees tend to network much more than previous generations. They are the most connected generation and will network at any opportunity given.

Multitasking for millennials has become a way of life. In fact millennials tend to prefer working on several assignments concurrently. They can talk on the phone while answering emails, all while working on a presentation. Whether its for email marketing or customer support, their strong technological background allows for utilizing the right technology to their advantage. With all the tasks they have, using productivity services can help with managing everything. However, with all these different platforms out there, shuffling between services can really be strenuous. What they lack is a tool to bring it all together, a tool to unify all their communication needs, while still keeping their attention on track.

With their strong entrepreneurial mindset, millennials are constantly driving innovation. Being open to new ideas causes more openness and a will to join new projects such as startups. A study was conducted researching the biggest needs of small and medium businesses, found that interacting and acquiring new clients is the most important need. And yet, freelancers continually struggle to gain their clients attention.

Today email is the most widely used business communication platform however, it’s outdated and inefficient. It’s not organized, and people constantly shift between multiple different services just to send out a message. Someone might send a message on email while needing to shift back to dropbox to share a presentation, and then have to use their calendar to scheduling a meeting and to inform about it in their FB messenger. Services such as Slack, FB Workplace and others try to bring organization to make email obsolete. However all of them are centered around internal communication only, and thus resulting in many flaws.

That’s why freelancers and small and medium business love using Hop. It takes all business communication services and unifies it together on top of their existing email service. It enables your email to become like real time messaging, giving you more speed and efficiency. It creates an organized workspace, saving the constant need to shuffle between multiple platforms, apps and services. Unlike various available productivity platforms, Hop isn’t just internal but rather open. After all, the most important priority for small and medium businesses is their ability to interact and attract new customers. Therefore using an open service such as Hop seems like an obvious choice. Millennials have also gotten to love and appreciate using Hop Channels for collaborative communication with their clients, colleagues and friends .

“Recognize that millennials’ personal long-term goals may have nothing to do with their organizations’ long-term goals. Discover and facilitate their long-term goals, and they will be more inclined to help their organizations achieve success.” -Bill Capodagli

The world today is rapidly changing, it has become fast paced, highly connected, and very competitive. Allow your business to stay ahead of the curve by utilizing the most efficient business communication platform, Hop.

The Challenge of Millennial Workflow was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In today’s world, businesses constantly are bombarded with emails. These emails come from many different sources, and can really clog up your inbox. Group email is meant to fix that problem, however it isn’t really cut out for the business needs of today.

Fortunately, there is Hop. Using Hop can help you and your business stay organized, focused, and working together.

When customers send an email, that email more often than not, is sent to a general inbox. Whether that email has to do with customer support or not, it all ends up in the same cluttered inbox rather than to the relevant recipient. Luckily there are ways to keep your inbox organized, focused, and free from irrelevance.

When customers sends your business an email, Hop knows where that email should go. With Hop, conversations happen in designated channels. Your business has the ability to create a channel for each department, a channel for each office, and a channel for each group project. It’s in these channels where your group can properly collaborate on tasks, reply to clients, brainstorm ideas, and work efficiently.

New communication tools pop up everyday, whether for file storage, calendar and events, or for customer support. In the future there will be even more, and in order to work better, we need a way to manage all these different services.

Integration is key for saving time and effort. Hop enables you to combine all the channels your business needs, avoiding that constant shuffling through different platforms. Now you can integrate all your calendars (Google Calendar, Facebook, Apple Calendar) allowing for easy viewing, and all on only one screen. You can share presentations, files, and links, with your group using a single platform that integrates all those cloud services such as Drive, and Dropbox. This integration improves collaboration, without the inefficiency of using multiple services for different tasks.

When joining a new department or project, the transition isn’t always smooth and simple. Joining a department requires quick learning, understanding the context, and can cause an overwhelming feeling.

With Hop, adding a new member to your group allows for an easier and faster transition. With discussion history, new channel members are provided with instant context of the group’s previous discussions. Joining a group has never been easier, as you are met with collective knowledge, all organized and sorted by individual channels.

“Email is familiar. It’s comfortable. It’s easy to use. But it might just be the biggest killer of time and productivity in the office today.” -Ryan Holmes

E-mail is the most widely used business communication tool, but it has its flaws. Don’t settle for that mess, but rather give your email a modern makeover with Hop.

Don’t Settle for Inbox Overload was originally published in @Spike on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.