Ocean’s new app brings inbox triage, tasks and invites to Gmail users

A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help you triage your overloaded inbox, take action on your emails by turning them into tasks, and share your availability for meetings with others, all in one app.

Today, Gmail so heavily dominates the email market that few challengers emerge. Understanding this, Ocean made the decision to work with Gmail, not compete against it. As a third-party client, gaining a footing in the market can be difficult, but successful email apps have proven lucrative acquisitions. Yahoo bought email app Xobni for $60 million and Microsoft snapped up Accompli for $200 million in the previous decade, for instance.

This market opportunity attracted co-founders Martin Dufort and Scott Lake — an early Shopify co-founder — who created BigWaveLabs in early 2019 and began to tackle email. This work ultimately resulted in Ocean, an app focused on more efficient email management. (Scott now functions as more of the app’s financial backer and advisor, Dufort says.)

The app works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items so they’re not forgotten.

To make this work, the app includes its own Task Manager that has access to the user’s email. That means you don’t have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while instead gaining access to features that go beyond what Google’s task manager offers Gmail users.

With Ocean, you can create tasks using rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to your task’s notes. It can also automatically pull out action items from longer emails for you.

You can choose to manage the emails you mean to reply to later by creating a task as well, instead of leaving them unread or applying a label of some sort.

For inbox zero enthusiasts, the killer feature will be Ocean’s inbox triage tools.

The app lets you filter emails by categories like first-timers (people who emailed you for the first time), persistent pingers (people who email you repeatedly), and emails from your contacts. It can even surface emails that are marked as spam but might belong in your inbox, so you don’t miss anything important.

Ocean also offers subscription management tools — a feature Gmail recently added — in addition to the baseline email functions of composing, replying, flagging, archiving, and deleting email.

Plus, Ocean offers built-in meeting scheduling tools that let you set your availability based on your pending and booked events. Here, you can set your open times and block others from booking those meetings at the last minute, which is a handy trick.

You can also send an automated email invite to meeting recipients, confirm meeting proposals from a web interface, and automatically add confirmed meetings to your calendar.

The Ocean iPhone app has just launched, but a new Mac app is in the works, which will include iCloud sync. The team expects to launch this by year-end. The company aims to generate revenue via its non-recurring membership model, Ocean Blue, which costs $67. The membership includes a year’s worth of updates with new features and functions. It will also offer access to the Mac app, when it arrives.

“I think people are kind of getting tired of recurring subscriptions,” explains Dufort. “We wanted to move away from this, but still provide a model that would be sustainable for us. So we decided to define this Ocean Blue membership. The app is basically a freemium model — you get the base functions for free forever,” he continues. “[The membership] puts pressure on us also to make sure we deliver value to this app as we’re moving forward,” he adds.

The Blue membership will also include AI email summarization features and email insights.

Interested users can first put Ocean to the test with a 14-day free trial that doesn’t automatically convert you into a paying subscriber.