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Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimized by feedback surveys. They pop up at the most inconvenient of times and tbh, usually don’t give that much context to product teams either. As it turns out, there are right ways and wrong ways you can approach usability testing and collecting feedback.

Sprig seems to have figured out a solution and amassed over 1,000 upvotes on its Sprig Concept & Usability Testing launch yesterday. If you need a little refresher, Sprig used to be called UserLeap. It since rebranded and consolidated all of its offerings into one platform that helps you through the product research process, from start to finish. You can conduct video interviews, target specific users for microsurveys, and use AI to analyze findings.

Sprig Concept & Usability Testing takes concept testing a little further. The new tool allows founders, designers, and product teams to test ideas and prototypes before writing any lines of code. Testing happens in-browser, so participants can review concepts, complete recorded usability tasks, and provide feedback via text, voice, or video without downloading plugins or extensions. Say you want to validate a feature name. You can do so by embedding your Figma prototype and asking users questions like “What do you expect clicking on X would do?”

According to a TechCrunch interview with Sprig’s founder and CEO, Ryan Glasgow, what’s different about the product is its ability to enforce surveys depending on very specific trigger points, like not using a particular feature. This allows teams to save time and cash, instead of spending it on building “an in-house survey tool, which requires a dedicated team of engineers to operate and maintain it.”

Glasgow, who was also Weebly’s first Product Manager, shared that the company recently closed a $30M funding round from the likes of a16z, Accel, and Figma Ventures.

The Internet is probably one of the best and worst human inventions. While it’s made life easier for many (no more hauling yourself to the library just to research something), it’s also introduced layers to already-complicated things. Writing is one of them.

Content optimization isn’t a new concept—a 1940s New York Times columnist likely understood the need to create compelling content that garnered lots of attention. With the development of online publications and the ability to discover anything with a simple Google search, your content is now just one tiny fish in a vast, barely-discovered ocean. As interesting as your blog may be, have you optimized it for SEO and speed?

If you have, it probably felt like 100 steps. As a longtime blogger and technical maker, Sai Krishna dealt with this without a lot of experience in marketing, which is why he created Superblog— an alternative to WordPress and Medium.

“It is very painful to optimize WordPress or any other blog installation every time because the blog is not my core product but still my products depend on the blog,” says Sai.

Superblog is an SEO-focused blogging platform that automatically optimizes for SEO and speed, taking the hassle out of hiring someone new or using another platform to optimize content. It fits somewhere between Medium-style blogs, which keep readers on their own platforms, and website builders that allow for optimization and supporting users with things like hosting on your subdirectory, server performance, and integration without branding.

If you want to try out more tools to help you create SEO optimized content in just a step or two, check out GrowthBar, Frase, and ContentPro.

While most creator platforms out there seem to be going all in on video (ahem, Instagram and then not Instagram?), it looks like Pinterest is still placing some of its bets on good ol’ photos. The image-sharing decacorn soft-launched Shuffles yesterday, an app that helps you create collages and moodboards. If you think about Pinterest’s early user base (mostly DIY lovers), the company’s move in this direction makes a ton of sense.

Shuffles comes out of Pinterest’s recently created in-house incubator, TwoTwenty, and is currently available by invite or by joining the waitlist on its home screen. Although the company’s been rather quiet about its new app, the App Store listing notes some of its features and uses cases. You can use Shuffles to cut out objects from images, add animations and effects, and share your creations privately or publicly. That’s not to say Pinterest doesn’t care about video anymore. In fact, last year it announced Pinterest TV, which gives shoppers and sellers a glimpse into live shopping.

Despite the current state of the ad market, Pinterest’s deep push into eCommerce and advertising seems to be paying off. “Pinterest achieved 9% revenue growth year over year in Q2, or 10% revenue growth on a constant currency basis” Bill Ready, Pinterest’s new CEO announced in the company’s Q2 earnings report.

If your creative juices are overflowing and you can’t wait to get your hands on the new collage-making app, we recently covered some great alternatives for moodboarding. Check them out here.

Have you tried Shuffles already? Let us know your thoughts.

Along with learning how to create a profitable business, community-building is at the core of almost every entrepreneur’s priorities today. The presence of a strong community one can make you the star of your own show (see Beyoncé and her Beyhive — or Gru and his #gentleminions).

We’ve seen many makers leverage their communities to help skyrocket growth, from D2C brands like Glossier to Apple’s die-hard fanbase, and Notion reminds us regularly that even workplace SaaS can bring people together socially. You may be asking “How do I do that?” Many makers have shared their secret sauce. There are also a host of tools that empower current and prospective community-builders.

Threado launched today as a “command center for community builders,” founded by Pramod Rao who was formerly a VP of Marketing at Zomato (India’s food-delivery unicorn turned public company). Nowadays, makers use so many different platforms to create online communities — and Rao recognized that as a pain point for community managers trying to manage their followings. They're often overwhelmed with trying to dissect engagement data across platforms.

So Rao and his co-founder, Abhishek Nalin, created a way to get actionable insights, automate workflows and activate members across channels including Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, and GitHub. The goal is to help community-builders effectively measure member needs and expedite community growth.

Threado launched its first product back in November, a workbook of community tools on Notion. Today is its big debut follows a $3.1M fundraise. The makers say they power over 260 communities so far.

Backspace is a new addition in this space as well. It helps creators build and monetize their online communities “without having to use an overwhelming stack of tools and platforms.” Backspace and Threado join a growing number of community management tools, like Orbit and Geneva.

Feeling inspired to build your own Beyhive?

We’ve covered all kinds of tools recently, from no-code tools to AI tools. Depending on where you are, today might mark the first day of the last month of summer. We’re taking this chance to do something a little more laid back and fun, like a round-up of recently launched music apps.

The celebration of International Friendship Day over the weekend reminded us of last week’s Spotify launch, Friends Mix. The new personalized playlist allows you to discover new tracks based on Blends you’ve created with your friends. According to TechCrunch, “Spotify says there are more than 11 million user-generated playlists with the word “friend” in the title. The company also notes that there has been a 35% increase in streams of these playlists in 2022 in the United States, compared to last year.”

MD Vinyl has skyrocketed on the App Store charts, becoming #1 in the US, overtaking TikTok and BeReal. The iOS widget connects to your Spotify or Apple Music app to sync the song you're playing and display it as a vinyl in the widget. Pretty retro, huh?

sona’s music-based digital therapeutic app is aimed at helping relieve anxiety symptoms. The music is created by Grammy-winning producers and artists, using a composition process backed by leading neuroscientists.

If you’re feeling brave and want to create the music yourself, Chord Genius helps you learn songs on the guitar, using chords and lyrics that move along. You can stream music from Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube and change the playback speed so you can learn at your own pace. You can’t rush art, after all.

Inspired by Mother Nature, earth.fm is like Spotify for natural soundscapes. Its interactive map takes you from listening to birds in the Congo basin rainforest to albatrosses in the Indian Ocean. Bonus points for partnering with charities focused on creating jobs, protecting ecosystems, and helping mitigate climate change.

Finally, ICYMI, check out Limewire’s comeback.

Is a recession looming? If only we could get experts to agree on a definitive answer. What we do know, however, is that consumers and businesses are buying less due to high inflation. This also has ramifications for big tech companies, like Meta’s struggle with declining revenue.

What does that mean for most people? For one, it might mean that we’ll be looking at cutting down on non-essential purchases and trying to be more conscious about what we spend hard-earned cash on. If being more financially aware has been on your adulting bucket list for a while, this turn of events might be a good opportunity to achieve that. We’ve curated a few recently launched products that can help you.

Monse connects all of your accounts to automatically categorize all of your expenses. It also sends you a summary of all your transactions, either in a daily, weekly, or monthly email.

Cashews acts as your smart personal accountant. It connects with 12K+ banks and shows you precisely how much you can spend to take the stress out of your cost of living. We wrote more about it here.

Uprise looks at your whole financial picture and gives recommendations on how to optimize it – what accounts to use, tax strategies, how to use your employee benefits, and more. You can read more about its founding story here and how the team wants to help add $1.5M to your lifetime net worth.

Habitual Money uses a smart-rule engine (similar to Gmail filters) to auto-categorize purchases, track your true take-home income and savings, and integrate with your Venmo and Amazon accounts.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to have cash lying around and prefers to invest, there are tools you can use to make sure you’re making data-backed decisions and minimizing risk.

Claritus’ ​​personal wealth management platform lets you view all of their assets and investments in one place, providing personalized monthly and weekly digest reports.

Gainy helps you ​​discover unique investment ideas based on your interests and risk/reward profile.

How are you preparing for a downturn? Join the conversation.

We’re all influencers. No, really. It might not be on the same scale as others, but whenever someone asks you “where did you get those” in the comments of the picture you just posted wearing your new kicks, you’re influencing them to get a pair.

TikTok’s been the darling of the Internet these past few weeks, even more so than usual. We, too, recently discussed the TikTokifying of Instagram and how that seems to be affecting people’s sentiment towards the app once known for photo sharing. It's not surprising to see makers bet on the future of influencers and TikTok while Meta is struggling with ad demand and declining revenue for the first time in history since IPO.

But what if non-influencers could get paid for casually showcasing their purchases? That’s the idea behind Swaypay. You search through participating brands on the app and post a TikTok video sporting your purchase. You then earn based on post performance and cash out via Venmo or Paypal. No follower count required.

The reason this may work is because much of TikTok’s recipe for success stems from its ability to make regular people famous easily. Think of the overwhelming number of creators who quit their regular jobs to become influencers. TikTok's algorithm doesn’t recommend content based solely on existing follower counts. Instead, it takes into account a multitude of factors like interests, how users similar to you engaged with a video, and how long you’ve watched similar videos for. So if a video you make for Swaypay is engaging enough, you could make money regardless of how well-known you are.

“Brands prefer rewarding their real shoppers for TikToking stuff they genuinely bought and love, regardless of how many followers they have,” the makers share as their unique insight. Investors in Swaypay include makers you might already know, like Not Boring’s Packy M and Deel’s Bouaziz, among many others.

The best part about this launch? The team sings their landing page and it’s pretty catchy.

“Dropped out of school, now we dumb rich.” - Drake, circa 2016.

A college degree was once the pathway to financial freedom for many, but it looks like things have changed.

Students nowadays are plagued with mounds of student loan debt, with the ROI sometimes never “PEMDASing” it. With an economy changed by a global pandemic and now, the looming threat of a recession, it’s no wonder that people are seeking alternatives to higher education. Digging yourself into thousands of dollars of student loan debt only to find out that the job market is full of underpaying jobs that require years of experience isn’t exactly fulfilling.

Makers Tarlon Khoubyari and Naomi Thomas picked up on a “mass exodus” from higher education and created their own solution—Infinity Careers (∞edu). From self-paced certifications to bootcamps, there’s a whole new world of possibilities that don’t require a college degree. ∞edu taps into that world, and seeks to answer the burning question many have—”how do I get into tech?”

“The real tea,” as Tarlon puts it, is that you can have a lucrative career without going to college. In partnership with LinkedIn Learning, Skillshare, and Coursera, ∞edu “hand selects” the best courses for you to break into the tech world.

The course creators take a brand approach to the curriculum, dissecting job descriptions from top startups to learn what you’d need in order to land a role there. Want to become a Video & Animation Producer at Spotify? ∞edu matches you with courses that may help you achieve that.

Alternatives to higher education may not be the right fit for everyone, but products like ∞edu are likely not going anywhere. We’ve seen other types of products in a similar space— from networking tools based on skills to indie hacker guides — the options grow with the desire for a tech career.

What do you think—is it easier to drop out of school and become dumb rich these days?

Is Instagram’s new update just a test? That’s the billion dollar question as the social media app soft-launches a new user interface, continuing its Tik-Tokification that started with Reels.

Many users already received the update and the response has been full of uproar and dismay. Critics feel the new UI makes it difficult for users to see pictures shared by friends and family. Instead, it focuses on full-screen videos that prioritize discovery (and even ads) from accounts you don’t follow.

On Monday, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian shared a “Make Instagram Instagram again” post to their stories. The plea, which garnered over 1.1 million likes, calls for Instagram to ditch the new UI. Many are reporting it as a red herring. When Kylie Jenner told the public she no longer uses Snapchat, Snap’s shares plummeted, costing the company $1.3 billion. A nail in the coffin? Maybe not.

It doesn’t look like the pressure will make Instagram crack. Adam Mosserri (Head of Instagram) and his team addressed user feedback in a video Tuesday morning, noting that the update is “not yet good.” Mosseri claims that the full-screen UI is a test for a “few percent” of users. And if you’re most upset by Instagram’s prioritization of videos — we’ve got bad news. While photos will continue to be supported, Mosseri said that the team won’t stop leaning into data indicating videos are the future of the platform.

For those of you who are “evolving” with Mosseri, here are 5 tools to help you lean into video:

• FineCam enhances your iPhone and Windows cameras with unlimited filters, effects, and backgrounds.
• Canva Video Suite has seamless editing tools and customizable video templates.
• Make your videos more accessible with an Auto Subtitle Generator tool.
• Turn long videos into optimized short-form content with Snackable AI.
• This Caption Generator helps brainstorm cool captions for your Instagram posts.

If you’re not feeling Instagram’s video transformation, Glass is an interesting new member-supported photography platform and community.

If Product Hunt ever made a game, it would likely be something like Stray.

The third-person indie adventure game that took the Internet by storm last week follows the story of a homeless cat roaming a robot-filled cyber-punk world. If this isn’t enough to whisk you away, the cat is cute (but equally ferocious) and ginger.

Without giving away too much, it seems like some of the game’s popularity stems from it catering to both hardcore gamers and those of us who can only think of The Sims when we hear video games. The endearing story has players exploring a post-apocalyptic city, as well as completing missions and tasks. Still, you don’t feel the same sense of impending doom as you do with most adventure games. You also get an unlimited number of lives, which leaves you time to take in the enthralling visuals.

Stray was developed by BlueTwelve Studio, an indie game team from the south of France, who spent six years perfecting the storyline, graphics, and meows. Reviewers are raving about it on Metacritic. So are critics. Alyse Stanley, Editor at Washington Post’s Launcher shares that “‘Stray’ is an enrapturing experience, the kind of game that doesn’t leave your brain after the credits roll.“

Maybe one of the best things to come out of Stray’s launch is the number of feline pictures we’ve seen on Twitter. The cat puns, too. Knowing the Internet, seeing an account dedicated to real-life cats being mesmerized by Stray wasn’t that much of a surprise.

Have you played it yet? What did you think? Let us know.