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Low-code and no-code platforms have had their fair share of popularity over the past few years. For good reason, too. We’ve seen makers build with no-code and get acquired by Zapier, while others are getting the attention of VCs and raising multiple rounds.

There’s certainly a lot you can do with no-code tools, especially in terms of speed and how easy it is to get started, regardless of how technical you are. Still, certain apps and products require a bit more complexity (and a lot more code). Fortunately, we continue to see makers launch developer tools of all sorts. While they might not do the coding for you, they can help make #devlife less stressful.

Plural is an open-source DevOps platform that helps you self-host applications on Kubernetes without the management overhead.

These Tailwind UI Templates built with React and Next.js by the makers of Tailwind CSS are a great starting point for your next project.

PocketBase is a lightweight version of Supabase or Firebase. The open-source Go backend packs an embedded real-time database, files and users management, admin UI, and REST-ish API.

Wilco helps you upskill using the same thinking behind a “flight simulator.” You complete real-life engineering challenges by going on “quests” and using a tech stack of your choice.

Mintlify is a personal documentation manager that routinely reviews your docs and tells you when you need to update them.

If you’re tired of the same old VSCode theme, you might want to take a look at VSLook and Sequoia Theme.

With the metaverse presumably looming around the corner, there’s one question we’ve seen: what language will it use?

For those who have 24/7 access to the internet and speak highly-covered languages (e.g. English, Russian, French, German), keeping up with a world that relies heavily on technology is easy. The problem? While highly-covered language speakers have benefited from advancements in machine translation, much of the world remains isolated as tech continues to evolve.

Despite only a quarter of internet users speaking the language, most websites are in English. In an effort to combat the issues of linguistic discrimination, FAIR (Facebook AI Research) launched a new AI model that translates between 200 different languages. No Language Left Behind (NLB) is a human-centered project that addresses the growing gap between highly-covered and less-covered language speakers. Researchers kicked off the project by interviewing native speakers of less-covered languages to understand their needs for translation support. From there, they developed a new “ universal speech translator,” a first of its kind. If you speak Python, the code is open-source and available on Github.

Meta’s new system won’t eradicate language barriers overnight. With the metaverse expanding, this new system allows Meta to extend the reach of its own products to less-covered- language speakers, too. It also raises questions about what’s next for existing translation services. Google Translate has long been a popular tool amongst Google users, and software like DeepL and Mate Translate have both provided innovative solutions.

Whether or not other companies follow suit, NBL is likely a crucial next step for Meta. Zuckerberg has pretty much put all his eggs in that basket — renaming the company and spending $10 million on the metaverse in 2021. We hope to see more projects that use tech for good with that chunk of money.

Video gaming has a very interesting and rich history. While a lot of you might only be familiar with gaming in the era of the smartphone, video games got their start in the 1950s and 60s in research labs. They would later see the homes of consumers as the Odyssey (first video game home console) and Atari’s Pong (first arcade game).

Fast forward many decades and consoles later. As technology evolves and trends emerge, companies need to keep up. In 2015, an app developer called Ijji launched Gameflip, a mobile marketplace for gamers, and this week it evolved too, re-launching as a Web3 marketplace for digital gaming items. Gameflip has generated over $120 million in sales since launching, fostering a community of 6 million gamers. Its premise remains the same, except that everything now happens on the Blockchain.

The shift to digital gaming (purchasing games online through your console) has made ownership rather blurry, with items being “locked” within each game you’re playing. That’s what Web3 gaming startups want to solve – allowing gamers to have more ownership and freedom over what they’re trading and reselling. “Gameflip enables gamers to buy and sell anything that they can trade including digital gaming items, digital codes for games & gift cards, and digital gaming collectibles and assets (NFTs) through simple and safe transactions with built-in compliance and consumer protection,” one of the makers shares.

While Gameflip focuses on the buying and selling of gaming collectibles, other startups are focusing on play-to-earn. In this model, players buy NFTs and earn in-game items in the form of tokens or, you guessed it, NFTs. Axie Infinity is one of the most popular but it's been under some pressure as DAUs and token price started dropping.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the play-to-earn monetization conundrum, Peter Yang wrote a great analysis titled “Is play to earn gaming a Ponzi scheme?”

What’s your case? 🐂or 🐻?

Giving objective feedback is hard. More so when most of us are working remotely and have to explain that one pixel on the left side of the website looks slightly off. Which one? That one, right there.

That’s one issue the makers of ruttl ran into, too: “While running a design agency we faced the problem of website feedback a lot. Currently, people use screenshots or Zoom to give feedback on websites. The average time required to review any page using such methods is over 3-4 hours alone.”

So they built ruttl, a visual feedback tool that lets you leave comments on live websites, web apps, graphics, and PDFs. You can also make real-time edits and share detailed feedback with your developers. Other things you can do with ruttl include bug tracking, guest (your clients) commenting, replacing assets, and integrating with tools like Slack, Asana, and Zapier.

Queue and Instacap are similar products that help you review visual feedback on websites and even React-based apps. The feedback you leave using Queue gets added to a workspace so you can keep track of which changes are complete and which are still in progress.

While we’re on the subject of feedback and review, Krock.io caught our attention today with its content review and creative project management platform. The app is aimed at freelancers and creatives who need a place to keep track of progress and communicate with their clients.

Besides traditional project management tools like Gantt charts, Krock offers drawing and visual commenting tools, allowing others to comment on images (png, jpg, .psd, ai), videos (.avi, mp4, .mov, etc), PDF files, and, soon, audio files.

Believe it or not, we’re already halfway through the year. Last week, cap table management platform Carta launched its H1 2022 compensation report. If you’re a big data nerd, you’ll love this. The company utilized more than 127,000 employee records from startups that use Carta Total Comp to paint a picture of where startup compensation is at, what jobs are most in-demand, and which cities are the highest paying.

When it comes to salary trends, it looks like it’s a good time to be in legal, strategy, product, or engineering, in that order. All of these functions have a median salary of over $150,000. Still, according to Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta, “Product actually fares even better than third if you just look at companies worth over $1 billion. Median salaries in Legal and Strategy are high in the dataset because often small startups only have a single lawyer (and they are very senior).”

Product touches so many areas of a company that it makes sense to be so highly valued. If you’ve been pondering switching to a job in Product or are curious about what it takes, we have a few resources for you to check out.

Future of Product Management Report 2022 surveyed 5,000 PMs to provide a deep dive into Product-Led Growth, key stats, and trends to look out for.

Speaking about Product-Led Growth, this book will teach you the importance of PLG, how to showcase value through your product and help you assess which free model is right.

But if you’re more of an audiophile rather than a bookworm, Lenny Rachitsky recently launched Lenny’s Podcast where he interviews product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable and tactical advice to help build, launch, and scale your product.

This Notion Pack for Product Managers includes a collection of curated templates for daily standups, agile retrospectives, and 1:1 meeting planners.

The Microsoft Teams notification sound has become somewhat of a meme for being an anxiety-inducing noise that Gen Z-ers love to complain about. If social media frevor is any indication, tech companies tend to prefer Slack over Teams. One reason could be the plethora of add-ons that makers are building for it.

If the clackety-clack of Slack doesn’t induce horror and terror for you, here are 8 products that make Slack less scary and more fun.

Thanks app for Slack helps you build a culture of recognition in your team by encouraging you to give kudos to your peers and celebrate wins, big or small.

FlyWheel is a Slack bot that provides community managers with intelligent analytics about members and automates everyday tasks. It also allows responding to queries straight from the dashboard.

MicroAcquire App For Slack integrates with MicroAcquire and lets you receive instant alerts when new startups go live for sale.

Scott Bot by Threado auto-generates conversation prompts to help you encourage participation and drive engagement in your community. You can customize any of the 200+ curated prompts and schedule at any cadence.

SpotMyStatus syncs your Spotify music or podcasts to your Slack status.

Org Chart ⚡ by Roots is a free Slack plugin that helps growing teams stay on top of company changes and search for members by skill or department.

Dispatch is like Superhuman for Slack. The app lets you reply, react, @-mention, compose new messages, mark a conversation Done when you’re finished with it, mute conversations you no longer need to follow, snooze them, and use keyboard shortcuts.

Rootly is a Slack app used by the likes of Canva, Grammarly, and Bolt. It automates manual admin work like creating incident channels, Jira tickets, Zoom rooms, and generating postmortem timelines so you can manage incidents easier.

Some of you might’ve gone back to the office but it seems like Zoom meetings are here to stay.

We recently saw Zoom launch its SDK publicly for all developers. This is exciting, as it will likely result in more apps and games added to the Zoom ecosystem. An interesting one recently popped up after one of the makers teased it on Zoom’s SDK launch.

The app in question is called twine for Zoom and it presents itself as “speed networking and matchmaking for Zoom.” twine automatically sorts participants into roulette-style breakout rooms for timed, back-to-back small group or 1:1 conversations. You can also set custom sorting rules for breakout rooms based on any variable you choose – this could mean matching mentors with mentees, HR with new hires, or students with research assistants.

Although the team’s original mission to “end loneliness” hasn’t changed, they pivoted from what they were initially building: “Our first app, due to launch in March 2020, was a face-to-face serendipity app that was somewhere between Sofar Sounds and a Church for the Rest of Us. 🤝 Then Covid happened, and it became clear that the problem of the Moment was how to connect people, meaningfully, online.”

A couple of other cool Zoom-related launches we’ve seen include tl;dv for Zoom, which lets you record, transcribe, edit, and timestamp for Zoom & Google Meet (and had another amazing launch video after winning a Golden Kitty last year). And Unpopular Opinion for Zoom, which gives your team a wide range of hotly debated and polarizing viewpoints that are equally as fun to defend as they are to challenge.

We’re excited to see more makers use Zoom’s SDK. What do you think would make Zoom more fun? Let the makers know.

There’s not much you can say that will hurt a founder who’s gone through fundraising – they’ve most probably heard it all. Pitching and finding interested investors is one struggle, but as one maker put it, the biggest challenge is “staying excited when you hear ‘no’ for 10-20-30 times in a row.” Sometimes, a single “yes” can kickstart it all. But how do you get there?

Funden runs an “assisted fundraising” program for founders who are looking to make the process easier and who would rather focus their time on building. The team creates and implements a fundraising plan that includes investment analysis, pitch deck review, strategy sessions, storytelling, investor selection, warm intros to Funden’s partner network, and progress management.

While it may seem like the fundraising landscape has slowed down given the current state of the tech market, one of Funden’s makers shares that “not a lot has changed. We're seeing a focus on ‘fundamentals,’ meaning valuations have come down to Earth but deals are still being done for companies that have good growth and teams.”

Once your investment plan is reviewed by ex-VCs and operators, Funden helps you put together a pitch deck and matches you with those interested in investing in your sector and vertical. One differentiator the team shared with the Product Hunt community is its ability to make warm intros, rather than using cold emailing. The platform currently features a network of 500+ VCs, angel networks, family funds, and syndicates that operate globally.

If you’re a founder looking to do a little bit of reading on frequently asked questions around fundraising, you can also check out articles from Jason Yeh, an ex-VC and contributing writer for Product Hunt who covers topics like seeking a lead investor and the concept of “alpha.”

These past few years, we’ve seen products tackling remote work in all shapes and sizes. From fun socials with your remote (global) team to async collaboration tools and job search engines, much of it wouldn’t be possible without solid hiring tools.

We first saw Deel launch on Product Hunt in 2019 as a way for companies to hire people from all over the world without needing to create an entity in each country or having to deel with the paperwork. It since skyrocketed into a $12B unicorn that also tackles other parts of the business, like payroll.

Deel's Global Payroll allows companies to manage payroll across 90+ entities in one unified dashboard. This means you no longer have to pay your team using separate vendors, which, as Deel’s co-founder Alex Bouaziz put it, “makes it hard to analyze data, creates more room for error, and adds substantial operational cost, time, and complexity when running payroll each month.”

Regardless of which country your team members work from, Deel’s payroll lets you view and adjust salaries, benefits, bonuses, and expenses in the same dashboard. The product also integrates with HR tools like Workday, BambooHR, and Hibob to remove manual work and manage data inconsistencies.

Have questions about how it works? Leave them here for Alex and the Deel team.

One of the biggest struggles amongst people with a tight budget is coming to terms with how much is actually in their account. The looming possibility of an overdraft means having to always be aware of the peanuts left in your pocket.

That’s why a maker by the name of Jonathan created Cashews.

“The first little seed of Cashews started way back in 2014 in response to my growing anxiety around my personal finances. I had a young family and was feeling increasingly stretched money-wise. We were leaning more on credit cards, less cash was going into savings, and it was literally keeping me up at night.”

So Jonathan started scraping his bank info and texting his balances to himself each day. Over time, with requests and feedback from family and friends, he turned the concept into Cashews.

Unlike other financial tracking and planning apps, Cashews doesn’t offer an “insane level of customization” and is “user friend as f*ck,” according to the makers. It connects with 12K+ banks and shows you precisely how much you can spend to take the stress out of your cost of living.

Those (pea)nuts reminded us that it’s been a while since we checked in on Acorns, the micro-investing app that lets you invest your spare change on auto pilot. The company was planning its initial public offering by SPAC last year, but backed out earlier this year citing volatile market conditions — it feared being lumped in with other companies with inflated valuations. Nonetheless, the team has pressed on, saying the process got them IPO-ready, and instead fundraised $300M, earning its unicorn title as a privately-held startup.

Of course, every penny counts so no judgement if even the smallest investments are causing you stress. Start off by finding out how much you have to begin with.