A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help users triage their overloaded inbox, take action on emails by turning them into tasks, and share availability for meetings—all in one app.
Gmail dominates the email market, making it difficult for competitors to emerge. Recognizing this, Ocean chose to work with Gmail rather than compete against it. While gaining traction as a third-party client is challenging, successful email apps have proven to be lucrative acquisitions. For example, Yahoo purchased Xobni for $60 million, and Microsoft acquired Accompli for $200 million in the past decade.
This market opportunity attracted co-founders Martin Dufort and Scott Lake, an early Shopify co-founder. They founded BigWaveLabs in early 2019 to tackle email inefficiencies, ultimately leading to the creation of Ocean, an app focused on streamlined email management.
Ocean integrates with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to convert emails into tasks and action items to prevent oversight. The app includes its own Task Manager, eliminating the need to copy information into external to-do apps while offering features beyond Google’s native task manager. Users can create tasks with rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to task notes. It can even extract action items from lengthy emails automatically.
For emails requiring follow-up, Ocean lets users create tasks instead of leaving them unread or labeled. The app also includes inbox triage tools, filtering emails by categories like first-time senders, persistent contacts, or misclassified spam. Subscription management tools are also available, complementing standard email functions like composing, replying, and archiving.
Ocean simplifies meeting scheduling by allowing users to set availability based on existing events, block last-minute bookings, and send automated invites. Meeting confirmations can be managed via a web interface, with confirmed events automatically added to calendars.
The Ocean iPhone app is now available, with a Mac app featuring iCloud sync in development. The company operates on a non-recurring membership model called Ocean Blue, priced at $67, with a 14-day free trial that doesn’t auto-convert to a paid subscription.