HEY World vs. Substack & Twitter‍

In late January, Twitter acquired the newsletter publishing platform Revue & made it totally free! This seemed like a direct threat to Substack and the fact that the newsletter-cum-blog publishing space will see keen interest & strong competition.

Now just a couple of days back, Basecamp launched a private beta for a platform in the same space called HEY World.

What is HEY World?

The exact details on how HEY World works for publishers is still unknown but here's what we know for sure:

- As a creator, you can host your own blog/newsletter with a custom URL (currently a sub page on world.hey.com but I am sure they would allow custom domains in future).

- Users can subscribe to your posts and it seems logical that as a creator, you will have access to all subscriber stats.

- Publish process is simple: You write the post as an email (from your HEY email account) and send it to [email protected] to share it with all your subscribers.

What's so special about HEY World?

It's from Basecamp & currently a feature of their email service, HEY. So you can expect some great marketing & packaging for an otherwise commonplace product.

In the launch post, Jason Fried talks about HEY World as your 'emails to the world & not necessarily shared with a single person or group'. He goes on to say that Twitter is a great platform to write but you end up fighting more, than writing.

However, the great thing about HEY World is the engineering of this product - simple & robust. No Javascript & no trackers - they have built their custom alternative to Javascript: Hotwire. It has a perfect 100 pagespeed score for both mobile & web! Anyone who runs their own blog knows how important this is.

Anyway, there's nothing revolutionary here. THAT'S THE POINT. We just needed a simple way to write for an audience, without any of the cruft, trackers, or bloat. Some times all you need to find the joy of writing again is to peel the onion 😄

— DHH (@dhh) February 22, 2021

For now though, it is just DHH, Jason Fried and a handful of HEY users trying out this product. We will see in the coming months if it has the potential to disrupt Substack or Twitter Newsletters.