Our Startup Bus 2019 competition entry: Hyve!

Sometimes the best apps simply take a tried-and-true manual process, automate it, and make it easy to use. That’s the general idea behind Hyve, the project that I’m working with my team at Startup Bus 2019.

The general principle behind Hyve: disposable email addresses

Hyve is based on a tried-and-true technique known as disposable email addresses. It’s a pretty simple idea — instead of connecting to everyone using just one email address, you use a different email address for each contact or purpose. For example, you’d use one email address for Amazon, a different one for your bank, a different one for your friends, a different one for the newsletter you subscribe to, and so on.

The power of disposable email addresses is that if a contact gets too spammy, all you have to do is simply close or stop using the email account associated with them.

Some people create disposable email addresses by creating a whole new Gmail or Hotmail email account for each purpose, but that means managing a number of email logins and inboxes. This approach gets pretty unwieldy very quickly.

The better approach is to create virtual disposable email addresses. These are things that behave like email addresses, but forward email sent to them to your real email address. If you have access to your mail server and some technical skill, you can configure your own. For the rest of us, there are virtual disposable email address services, but most are difficult to use and pay almost no attention to user-friendliness.

Hyve makes it easy

Click the diagram to see it at full size.

Hyve gives you the power of disposable email addresses, but without the tedious mail server configuration work or user-unfriendly interfaces. With Hyve, you can create a new virtual email address in seconds, and then use it to connect to whatever you want: an online store, a subscription service, or even a person.

Any email sent to one of your Hyve email addresses gets sent to your real email address. Hyve is a true double-blind system, which means that you can also use a Hyve email address to send mail that appears to come from your virtual email address.

If you want to keep communicating with someone via Hyve, you don’t have to do anything. If you need a temporary break from someone who’s linked to you via Hyve, you can mute them. And if you need to never, ever again hear from someone connected to you via Hyve, just delete the virtual email address. You’ll never hear from them again, and they’ll won’t be able to reach you.

Sign up for Hyve today!

Despite the fact that Hyve came into being over a three-day trip on a bus taking a zig-zag route through the southeast U.S., we have a working product that we’d love to have you try out! Come to our site, Hyve.email, and sign up for the cure to spam and other email bad actors.