Ocean’s New App Launches Inbox Triage, Task Management, and Invite Features for Gmail Users

Meet Ocean, an innovative personal productivity app designed to simplify your crowded inbox, convert emails into actionable tasks, and share your availability for meetings—all in one unified platform.

Gmail’s stronghold on the email market presents a daunting challenge for emerging competitors. Recognizing this, Ocean has chosen to partner with Gmail instead of competing against it. Entering the market as a third-party client can be tough; however, successful email applications have often led to lucrative buyouts, such as Yahoo’s $60 million acquisition of Xobni and Microsoft’s $200 million purchase of Accompli.

This promising landscape inspired co-founders Martin Dufort and Scott Lake, an early collaborator with Shopify, to establish BigWaveLabs in early 2019, launching the development of Ocean. The app is crafted to optimize email management efficiency. (Scott now primarily serves in a financial and advisory role, per Dufort.)

Ocean seamlessly integrates with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, empowering users to convert emails into tasks and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

To achieve this, the app boasts a proprietary Task Manager that links directly to the user’s email. This removes the need to transfer data to a separate to-do app while offering advanced features that exceed those of Google’s task manager for Gmail users.

With Ocean, users can create tasks featuring rich formatting, set due dates, categorize tasks into folders, and associate emails with notes for each task. Furthermore, it can automatically extract action items from lengthy emails.

You can effectively manage emails that necessitate a response by converting them into tasks, instead of leaving them unread or labeled.

For those aiming for inbox zero, Ocean provides sophisticated email triage tools.

The app allows filtering emails by categories like first-time senders, persistent contacts, and messages from your network. It even identifies emails marked as spam that might be important, so you won’t miss out on vital information.

Alongside fundamental email functionalities such as composing, replying, flagging, archiving, and deleting, Ocean also incorporates subscription management tools, akin to a recent feature from Gmail.

Additionally, Ocean features built-in tools for scheduling meetings, allowing users to define their availability based on upcoming and confirmed events. This capability helps block last-minute bookings, providing a practical solution.

You can automate the sending of meeting invitations, confirm proposals via a web interface, and have scheduled meetings automatically added to your calendar.

The Ocean iPhone app has recently launched, with a Mac version expected soon, which will feature iCloud sync set to release by year-end. The company intends to monetize through a one-time membership fee for Ocean Blue, priced at $67, which includes a year’s worth of updates and access to the upcoming Mac app.

“Users seem to be increasingly frustrated with recurring subscriptions,” Dufort states. “We aimed to move away from that while building a sustainable model. Therefore, we introduced the Ocean Blue membership. The app operates on a freemium basis, ensuring core functions remain free indefinitely,” he adds. “[The membership] also keeps us accountable for consistently delivering value as the app develops,” he mentions.

The Ocean Blue membership will also include AI-driven email summarization and insights.

Prospective users can enjoy a 14-day free trial of Ocean, without automatic enrollment into a paid subscription.