BEST products of the year so far 🏆

This past month was filled with hundreds of product launches, from companies big and small. Y Combinator launched their free online Startup School, Stripe launched a toolkit to create, control, and distribute physical prepaid cards, and you too can Make OS X Great Again. 🍎

Tools built for Product Hunters are all the rage:
🔍 Preview Hunt lets you preview your post page before launch
🚫 Hunted or Nah is an extension that checks if a site has been hunted
✔️ We launched Makers, an online community to help you get stuff done

And if you're feeling nostalgic about what technology was like a long time ago, check out the Best of January, February, March, April, May, or June.

As for the the most upvoted product of the year, it's a close race between Robinhood's cryptocurrency trading platform, Google's slightly creepy AI that can schedule restaurant reservations, and a magical organization tool from a small startup here in San Francisco. 👀

Best of 2018

Highlight

Last week, Slack swallowed their biggest competitor: HipChat.

Instead of attempting to compete with Slack, an estimated $5B behemoth in the office communication space, parent company Atlassian agreed to:

discontinue HipChat and Stride, their inter-company messaging tools, and sell all related intellectual property to Slack.
help all HipChat users transition over to Slack.
invest a "small but symbolically important" in Slack.

Slack, in return, will more deeply integrate Atlassian's other products, like task-management tool Trello and bug-tracker JIRA.

Even if you've never tried Slack (or spend all day in it), we've compiled a list of the community's favorite Slack Bots, or apps that live inside Slack, just for you:

🎨 Make your Slack pretty with custom, with Slack Themes
💌 Crush your inbox directly inside Slack, with Astrobot for Slack
😂 Turn your teammates into Slack stickers, with My Slack Emoji
🔍 Search for the best custom Slack emoji, with Slackmoji
💪 Get in shape with this robot personal trainer, with Slackbot Workout

Check out the full list of Slack Bot Fun. 🤖

If your AI product has an onboarding step that says "tell us about your business" — your users are lying to you. Not maliciously. They just write whatever sounds good in the moment, skip half the fields, and click next.

Brandfetch's Brand Context API gives you structured brand data for 50M+ brands in a single call: voice,mission, positioning, audience, competitors, all of it. Pre-fill your onboarding before the user types a word.

Ground your AI features so they stop hallucinating about the brands your LLM barely knows. It's the scraping pipeline most teams never get around to building, already built. 100 free calls, no credit card.

Try the API

The Roundup

Every Sunday

Everything you missed this past week on Product Hunt: Top products, spicy community discourse, key trends on the site, and long-form pieces we’ve recently published.