HEY's homepage
This is a live page: hey.com, fetched 2026-07-03; every quoted line re-verified live 2026-07-08. HEY is the email-and-calendar service from 37signals. We audited the marketing copy — headline, testimonials, feature sections, and the founder letter — not the nav or footer chrome.
What’s working: more than most pages, and it’s worth being specific about why.
The feature sections are the strongest copy here, because they describe machinery, not qualities. “The first time someone emails you they land in The Screener. You decide if you want to hear from them or not. Yes and they’re in, No and you’ll never hear from them again” — that’s a claim you could test in an afternoon, which is exactly what makes it believable. The Paper Trail and Feed sections work the same way: “Just scroll, everything’s open already” tells you what the screen does, not how to feel about it. When the headline above all this says “We finally fixed your email,” the email half of that promise is substantially paid for by these paragraphs.
The offer copy is clean on the respect axis: “Try HEY free for 30-days. No obligation, no CC required.” Specific length, specific de-risking, and notably no countdown, no fake scarcity, no shame anywhere on the page. The strongest testimonial is a genuine use report with lived detail — “Been using it several weeks and no longer dealing with spam, long lists of ‘unread’ messages, or sorting out annoying but important docs” (Darya Rose) — and every quote carries a real name. The founder letter earns its length by naming the pain in recognizable terms (“Something you clear out, not cherish”), and the privacy claims are stated as checkable absolutes (“No spy pixel tracking,” “No data extraction”) rather than as a mood.
Line by line
"Yes and they're in, No and you'll never hear from them again. You're in control."
The best line on the page, and the pattern the rest should copy. It's a mechanism stated plainly enough to be checked or disputed — a reader can imagine the exact interaction and verify it inside the free trial the page offers. This paragraph is what lets the big headline say "fixed" without floating. Protect it; it's doing the persuading the adjectives elsewhere are only gesturing at.
"Gmail, Outlook, and Apple got complacent and took their eye off the ball."
This is a claim about rivals' internal effort, and nothing on the page — or anywhere — lets a reader check it. Possible spin: if the point is that mainstream email hasn't structurally changed in years, that's a checkable observation and likely defensible; as written, it reads as a verdict on other companies' attention. The fix-direction: claim the visible gap, not the motive — the Screener paragraph two screens down already makes the contrast better than this sentence does.
"Tens of thousands of people have already made the switch from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, and other email + calendar services."
No figure or source appears next to this on the page, and "tens of thousands" spans 20,000 to 99,000 — a reader can't tell which end they're being told. The page proves lower down that it's comfortable being exact when it wants to be ("more than 150,000 people" on the newsletter). The question to answer: what's the actual number? Stating it would convert a crowd-noise line into proof; if it can't be stated, the named quotes below are already carrying this weight.
"Our all-new Calendar is a modern, breath-of-fresh-air take on calendaring."
Every email feature on this page gets a mechanism — Screener, Imbox, Paper Trail, Feed each say what happens on screen. The calendar, twice promised as fixed ("Calendaring sucked for years, we fixed it"), gets only adjectives: "modern," "breath-of-fresh-air," and later "the same magic." Next to its neighbors the section reads as hollow — a verdict with the evidence missing, not necessarily a product with nothing to show. The question to answer: what does this calendar do differently? One Screener-grade sentence would close the gap.
"I just got an early demo of HEY from @jasonfried. I can confirm this will be my new default email…"
Real name, real quote — that part is solid. But several quotes in this wall are, by their own words, first reactions to a demo ("Just got a demo," "I can't wait for you all to play with it soon"): predictions of use, not reports of it. They read as launch-week enthusiasm on a page selling a mature product. Fix-direction: lead with the lived-use quotes — the one describing weeks of use and what specifically stopped being a problem is worth three demo reactions — and let the predictions retire.
The read
This page is what a mostly-honest sell looks like, and the pattern inside it is instructive: every place HEY describes a mechanism, the copy is strong — checkable, specific, easy to believe precisely because it’s easy to doubt. Every soft spot is a place where an adjective or a verdict stands where a mechanism could: rivals judged on effort instead of on the visible gap, a crowd rounded instead of counted, a calendar praised instead of shown. The page already contains its own best editor — the Screener paragraph — and the sharpest revision available is to hold the remaining lines to that paragraph’s standard.
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You own this page? If anything here is factually wrong, tell me and I'll correct it. If you'd rather it come down, ask. Every negative verdict above is an evaluation of the published words, offered as possible — not an accusation, and never a claim about intent.