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Learning from others firsthand is essential. We watch and learn from all of you launching every day. But there are some questions and situations that require a little more context and personalization.

Mana helps you find advice from builders, creators, and professionals who have been where you want to go. This happens through 1:1 video calls and live-streamed office hours and workshops. You also have access to resources like guides, templates, and toolkits and can join chat communities with others on a similar path.

When founders James Lo and Bobby Tang left their jobs at McKinsey and Apple, they realized many of their peers wanted to switch careers or start something of their own. What stood in the way was a lack of tactical advice from others who were in the same situation. That’s why they built Mana. Tang says that “people have raised entire funding rounds, made critical career transitions, and even decided their college major” on the app.

Scrolling through Mana’s catalog, you’ll see experts ranging from start-up founders and investors to yoga instructors and music producers. They’re also accepting applications for new mentors, in case you or someone you know might be interested.

How do you make big life decisions like changing careers?

“In shows like Billions, really wealthy people have advisors following them around, helping them optimize every single decision - that's what this feels like. Elite guard rails and life hacks.” reads one of Uprise’s testimonials. Billions? Life hacks? Color us intrigued.

Uprise looks at your full financial picture and provides advice on your tax strategy, the best accounts (i.e. credit cards) for your use case, and how much to save and invest to hit your goals. It also analyzes your employer benefits to ensure you’re taking full advantage of them. After sharing your situation, it uses automated processes as well as human experts to make sure recommendations are viable for you.

The makers behind the product have backgrounds in finance and payroll, which makes them particularly mindful of security and privacy issues, sharing that they “retain only as much data as needed and only for as long as is required to provide our services.” Jessica Chen Riolfi previously worked at Robinhood, Wise, and Earnin, while Chris Goodmacher was employee #2 at Justworks.

A few days ago we also saw Claritus launch, with a focus on those who are actively investing and looking to organize and track their assets. The tool provides automatic integrations with over 17,000 financial institutions and dynamic reporting, whether we’re talking stocks, crypto, or options.

But if you’re simply looking to move away from spreadsheets, see where your money goes, and manage it, Habitual Money and Avocado Finance are worth looking into. Or, get some inspiration from the community.

Plant parenting is no joke. A lot of effort goes into keeping those babies alive and thriving, let alone healthy enough that you can have them on your dinner plate. Farmer’s markets and organic options are great (albeit rather pricy), but there’s a certain level of pride and satisfaction that goes into growing your own food.

MULTO is one project that’s working to bring that to the everyday consumer as a compact shelf. The technology behind MULTO, called “ebb and flow,” is similar to tides in the ocean where the water level rises and falls at regular intervals. With MULTO, this happens thanks to an automatically activated submerged pump. This creates a continuous circulation around the roots, enriching them with nutrients and oxygen with each cycle. Mael Thomas, GM of Prêt à Pousser (parent company) shares that “the special sun-mimicking grow lights and our own liquid nutrients will get up to 200% more yield than other traditional solutions.”

The personal indoor farm allows you to grow up to 60 plants, ranging from standard vegetables and herbs to root plants like radishes. The team has surpassed its initial crowdfund campaign goal which ends on Sunday and is currently at $340k+.

If you’re not ready yet to go all-in and have a fully-fledged shelf, take some baby steps and learn more with these products.

🪴 Plant Care provides care instructions, identifies plants using AR, and sends you watering reminders.

🌿 Notion Plant Manager is a Notion template that helps you track plants room by room and remember your dead ones in a dedicated cemetery. Equally cool and creepy.

🌾 DOOT is a plant monitor which tracks various metrics essential to plant/crop growth, allows users to see these metrics over time, and be alerted when they are out of range.

Scroll through LinkedIn for a couple of minutes and you’re bound to find one of those crazy corporate anecdotes and a bunch of variations of the “I’m pleased to announce…” post. While the platform is still one of the most efficient ways to find opportunities, some of you feel it’s “lost its purpose” and “has become more of a social network than being a top-notch professional network.”

That’s one of the areas Peerlist is hoping to improve. The community-led professional network has work profiles at its core, which are aimed at designers, developers, indie hackers, and creators. This means it enables you to showcase your work directly from Github, Dribbble, Substack, Medium, DEV, Hashnode, YouTube, and Product Hunt. You can also add custom projects and credentials.

As far as the social element goes, Peerlist helps you discover people based on the skills and work they are doing. You can keep your network organized by adding connections to custom lists. This kind of organization also extends to the feed, where you can contextualize your posts as opportunities, books, URLs, and events.

Social apps are notoriously difficult to build and grow. Peerlist’s focus on the utility of building a profile to showcase your experience is an interesting growth strategy. We’ve seen this in past successful companies – think filters on Instagram and video creation on TikTok.

Other similar platforms include Golden Kitty Award winner, Contra, which gives freelancers flexible, commission-free opportunities, and Showwcase, a professional network built for people who code. Polywork (backed by Youtube founders, among many others) is another popular LinkedIn alternative.

We constantly see and write about fascinating makers building cool stuff. As a founder, you often have to be an expert at most things: product, design, talking to your users, and fundraising, just to name a few. Luckily, a lot of you have picked up on the struggles of founding a company and realized it’s not a zero-sum game.

Downturns like the one we’re going through make early-stage building that much harder. Here are some great resources to make life a little bit easier, whether you’re starting out or have been in the game for a while.

Startups.fyi, which launched today, is a curated directory of free tools and resources for startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. The website currently has 50+ tools that range from scheduling software to design tools and famous pitch decks.

Accelerator Hunt is a categorized collection of startup accelerators. YC also recently launched Startup School Live 2022, its 7-week online course where YC Group Partners and YC founders teach you how to build a billion-dollar company, through in-person meetups and talks at YC alumni offices in 30+ cities all over the world.

For the ones in a hurry, Startup 101 offers bite-sized lessons for entrepreneurs who are looking to start a company or are in the process of building one.

At Product Hunt, we also have Founder Club, a monthly subscription that gives you access to deals from 32 different companies (Stripe, Brex, Deel) and savings of over $100,000 in discounts and credits. Lurking our Discussion tab can also be useful. Partner Up helps with finding co-founders, mentors, or teammates, while Ideas and Validation and Growth are great for getting input and advice on your product.

You got the tools, now go break things! 🛠

Moodboarding is the grown-up version of cutting up magazine images and creating collages, right? That’s if you don’t consider the formatting, sizing, and background removal.

Those were some of the troubles this maker went through that made her decide to build set.new, a moodboarding tool for creatives of all sorts. “I was working on an interior design project and collating my ideas in... Google Slides! It certainly was NOT fun seeing how much time I was wasting,” she shares.

What’s really cool about set.new is it lets you create right away. No sign-up or unnecessary onboarding. The tool offers an infinite canvas where you can upload images. It also tidies up your boards with three automatic layouts: cluster, rows, and columns.

The background removing option seems to be popular as well, just like the many tools we’ve recently seen launch – ClipDrop and Magic Retouch to name a few.

If our spec-cat-ular moodboard got your creative juices flowing, here’s a few more new design tools that you might want to consider:

Miro Two-Way Integration lets you sync Miro cards to tasks in other apps like Asana, Trello, Jira, automatically.

OpenGrph is a lightweight canvas for creating cover images and open-graphs for your blogs and videos.

Visily helps non-designers create web and mobile app mockups using templates and components.

If you’re looking for your next creative challenge, we’ve covered 3D design tools here and alternatives to Canva and Figma here.

Talking about remote work is so last year (and the year before that, too). Spend enough time looking at operating principles of tech companies and you might see this more and more: “We default to asynchronous work and tools.”

We don’t blame them. We do it too. The discourse around the topic is also interesting. While most in this thread agree and embrace the flexibility of async work, striking a balance and finding the right tools to do it can be a challenge.

That’s where products like Werk come in. Werk acts like an OS for remote and hybrid teams that want to have their asynchronous communications centralized in one place. The tool allows you to record and share your screen for others to see later. You can also add tasks into a customizable task manager, create docs, and use thread chats so you don't miss a topic while chatting.

Claap, which got a lot of love from the community, focuses on the video aspect of async collaboration. The platform helps you get contextual feedback with annotations and time-stamped comments that others can add to your recordings.

Async workflows can help us reach that uninterrupted focus time to actually get $#*% done. That does mean work can get lonely and isolating sometimes. There are things we can do, though. Virtuelly curates, manages, and delivers team events and off-sites to help build connections across distributed teams. You can choose from 150+ experiences, including dumpling making, interactive Bollywood parties, and murder mystery challenges.

What’s your async tech stack? Let us know.

What do chipmunks and penguins have in common? This time, it’s founders and early employees. We’re talking about sunsetted travel metasearch engine Hipmunk and its recently launched successor, Flight Penguin.

If you’ve been around the tech space long enough, you might remember Hipmunk and its distinct flight search design. The service got acquired by corporate expensing platform Concur in 2016 and shut down four years later, in 2020, after co-founders Steve Huffman (Reddit CEO) and Adam Goldstein tried to buy it back.

Flight Penguin launched yesterday on Product Hunt as a browser extension. Similar to Hipmunk, flights are shown visually over a timeline, each color representing an airline with layovers in-between. They can be sorted by pain (think long layovers), price, and convenience. The community seems to be particularly excited about the launch: “Some of us were dying a little inside every time we booked a flight without Hipmunk. Flight Penguin may just revive us,” someone commented.

News about Flight Penguin appeared last year when access was limited by a waitlist. Now that it has been lifted, the team is running a crowdfunding campaign for early users that kicks off today at 12 PM EST. “Adam and I were both extremely frustrated that Hipmunk was shut down. There's no one else out there with as compelling of a user experience. We figured out how to address the failures of Hipmunk while building on the great legacy of successes in building Flight Penguin,” Max Morlocke, co-founder and CEO of Flight Penguin shares on Wefunder.

With flights sorted on Flight Penguin and several new options for unique stays on the new Airbnb, all that’s left is to decide on a location. Shepherd’s hut in the British countryside? Vineyard villa in Tuscany? Sign us up.

It’s… complicated. You might’ve seen a NonFungible report sparking discussions in the community in the past few weeks. The report looked at recent NFT data, claiming the explosive growth we’ve seen in 2021 has leveled off, and may even be in decline. Other sources are reassuring crypto enthusiasts, highlighting that “despite fluctuations in transaction volume, the number of active NFT buyers and sellers continues to grow.”

While the cause of these fluctuations is multifaceted, there’s one thing we know for sure: makers are making. Since our Web3 feed debuted less than a month ago, we’ve seen over 600 new projects added to the category.

Rarify is one of them. The NFT Data API provides Web3 developers with NFT data on pricing history, trade performance, volume, authenticity, and ownership across all marketplaces on Ethereum and Polygon.

“We understand that NFT data is the foundation for anyone trying to build in Web3. Without these data points easily at hand, it’s challenging to make key decisions such as investment and appraisal. Our API provides a robust data infrastructure that enables developers to build with ease and empowers users to make smarter decisions,” maker Lasha Antadze explains.

Another interesting launch from the past week is Highlight. In plain English, Highlight allows people to create exclusive-access communities with no code. When you join a new community, you get ownership of an NFT that gives you access to updates, photos, videos, and music from the community creator. If you’re a creator and want to go the extra mile for your community, Rove can also help you build a metaverse for it.

What’s your take? 🐂 or 🐻?

Deciding what to eat can be easy, but it can also be really tough. Some of us spend what feels like hours scrolling through food delivery apps and restaurant reviews, some look inside the fridge for inspiration, while others have their life together and meal prep. And let’s not forget about the meal-kit delivery services fans.

If you’re looking to cut down on costs, get inspiration, and enjoy more wholesome home-cooked meals, that’s where an app like Manna Cooking comes in handy.

The app takes users through the meal lifecycle: from search and discovery to shopping, cooking, and sharing. You can swipe on recipes that you’re interested in making, save them for later, or swap out certain ingredients to fit your eating requirements – think gluten-free, vegetarian, or lactose intolerant. This takes away some of the work that goes into finding the ingredients of that delicious-looking meal you saw on Pinterest or Instagram.

One of the problems that prompted the makers to start working on Manna is shopping for ingredients. According to a recent consumer survey, 80% of American shoppers use recipes as their starting point for online grocery shopping. Often that means searching for each and every ingredient and manually adding it to your cart. The app bypasses this by automatically adding ingredients in the right quantities of selected recipes to your Amazon Fresh cart. The team is also working on adding new vendors.

The food-tech space seemed to be quiet for a while, but some interesting products are launching nonetheless. Take yhangry, for instance, which launched a couple of months ago as a marketplace where you can book a private chef for your dinner party for $40pp. Instacart also recently confidentially filed for an IPO, despite seeing declining sales compared to the pandemic growth it experienced.

One disclaimer: swiping through the app might make you hungry. If you’re willing to take a chance, let the makers know which recipe you’re trying out tonight.