You can now start a blog from Hey, the email app from Basecamp

@maguay

After a couple weeks of hints and early posts from the Basecamp team, Hey just got a new option to start a blog via email.

It’s as simple as it sounds. If you have a Hey email account, open Hey and send an email to world@hey.com. The subject will become your post title, the body your blog post—complete with any images and standard email formatting you include (Hey lets you add lists, bold/italics/strikethrough, links, quotes, and one title size). That’ll activate your Hey blog, which you can find at world.hey.com/email_handle—so my Hey email is maguay@hey.com and my Hey blog is world.hey.com/maguay.

The post will be live seconds after you hit Send on your email, and the sent email inside Hey will show the link at the top of the page, along with an Edit option (imagine that in normal emails!), and a delete button if you want to take the post down.

And that’s it. Once you’ve published a post, you can share it on social, and your fans can enter their email address to get notified when you publish again for a super-simple way to start an email newsletter, too. If anything, that might be the most interesting thing here—for blogging, you might want more features, but if you want a super simple alternative to Substack, this might be just the thing for you.

Email’s long been a Petri dish to experiment with new software directions, and while Hey’s email-powered blogging isn’t fully unique, it is unique being bundled with a paid email service, and for having next-to-no options and settings.