Good Morning — Your Highrise Personal Assistant

Nathan Kontny
Highrise
Published in
4 min readOct 19, 2015

When Highrise first launched 8 years ago, The Washington Post wrote a very flattering review.

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And they were right. It was a great tool to manage all the notes and emails we have with our contacts amongst our team. But I always felt something was missing…

Since taking over Highrise from Basecamp, we’ve interviewed a ton of customers, watched people use Highrise with various integrations, and most importantly worked Highrise into our own workflow.

Over and over people use Highrise to make sure contacts don’t fall through the cracks. Tracking messages, commenting on progress, etc. But it’s still possible to miss things.

We saw it happening here too. We have our support inbox of course. We were using another tool to manage it, and it worked ok. But I also had contacts emailing me directly and I couldn’t always keep up with all of them. So some things weren’t getting answered.

About a year ago we added an indicator in your Latest Activity to help you know if someone had been replied to:

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You can go through your stream and know if anything is outstanding and still needs a reply. Was a customer left waiting? But it wasn’t good enough yet for us. We found ourselves missing these as the activity in our account got more and more active. So today, we’ve added a super powerful tool to solve this problem.

It’s called Good Morning.

Good Morning helps you organize and respond to incoming activity that needs attention from you or someone on your team.

As you BCC, forward, or auto-forward emails in, the unanswerd ones coming from your contacts will gather in Good Morning — changes to Good Afternoon and Good Evening as your day goes by :) — with the most recent items at the top.

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You can check items off to remove them immediately:

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As you reply to these messages they’ll remove themselves from your Good Morning inbox. This works whether you use your default email client (BCCing Highrise), or if you’ve setup our Gmail integration, and reply to them right from Highrise.

Good Morning is shared across your team in the same way as Latest Activity is (still using the right permissions of course), so you can use Good Morning as a group inbox or helpdesk.

Forward all your support questions into Highrise, and now your team has a focal point for going through and making sure all your customers and contacts have been responded to.

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Exactly, Max!

And there’s a ton of the useful things here. Presence will let you know if someone is already replying to that item. Or create a task for you or someone else to act on that email later, which will remove that item from Good Morning too. You can also use comments on emails to have internal collaboration on these email threads from Highrise.

When we implemented Good Morning for our team, suddenly my backlog of items was addressed. All that email from outside our support queue is getting answered super quickly. The power of a team is wonderful, and now we can take better advantage of that. One step closer to our virtual personal assistant. :) And we think you are really going to like Good Morning in your workflow.

P.S. If you aren’t a Highrise user yet, it’s easy to get started with a free plan that fits a lot of small businesses.

You should give Highrise a try: here.

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Nathan Kontny
Highrise

Y Combinator alum. Created Draft (http://draftin.com). Watch: https://youtube.com/nathankontny. Previous: Highrise CEO, Rockstar Coders CTO