The Leaderboard

Music lovers could argue that a data scientist working on better song recommendations is doing a public service. We get that.

It's something Adam Bly worked on as the VP of Data at Spotify — improving data discovery to inform anything from product strategy to playlists. Bly stepped into the role after Spotify acquired his company, Seed Scientific, which conceived and built data products for companies like Beats and the United Nations. His resume is dusted with more accolades and accomplishments, too. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard Kennedy School and founded an award-winning science magazine called Seed.

Recently, Bly has turned his sights back towards the public good (in the traditional sense) with System, a website that aims to explain how anything in the world is related. Think of System like Wikipedia in that it is free, open, and a public resource for knowledge. System gathers statistical evidence of relationships between topics and then organizes and visualizes it.

At a glance, System looks like a web of knowledge graphs, but those are based on semantic relationships (e.g. coffee is a beverage) while System is based on statistical relationships, Bly explained.

“A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is.”

Bly founded System after recognizing that the biggest global challenges, like COVID and climate change, are systemic while data and knowledge are organized into silos. System was designed to show how the world actually is, so we can change it.

This is the beta 1.0 release and the team has much planned, including soon allowing anyone to contribute evidence of relationships to System. For now, you can start exploring relationships like unemployment and social distancing.

Amie is off to the races today as it launches into beta.

The product started gaining interest two years ago as its founder, Dennis Müller, left his job as a Product Manager at N26 (the Berlin-based neobank that’s gearing up for IPO) to work full time on productivity tools. Müller and an N26 colleague, Lukas Klinser, also launched Productivity.so, securing Product of the Day with their library of productivity hacks that highlights hidden shortcuts in your favorite tools.

Amie then picked up $1.3 million in funding from the European VC, Creandum (an early Spotify investor), and other angel investors to kickstart hiring and development.

Now, it launches today with its four-in-one app, combining your Gcal, to-do lists, scheduling links, and a personal CRM under the headline of joyful productivity. Overlapping tools enable you to do things like drag & drop to-dos into your calendar, or multi-select and color-code your meetings. Joy can be found in things like seeing your Spotify sessions in your calendar, a birthdays widget on mobile, and “emoji explosions.”

There is so much high-quality competition in this space (see: Cron, Vimcal, and Hera for starters), but maybe we don’t have to tell you that. A lot of you have already taken interest in Amie's launch video and chimed in with support, and to ask: “how do you compare to the rest?”

Müller responded that Amie is overall built to focus on how you engage with your colleagues. Its stand-out features include “advanced link sharing [with a] booking page that is really beautiful,” drag & drop to-dos with “way more power to be added soon, a mini personal CRM, [and a] really great mobile app." More integrations are coming soon, too.

Amie is slowly onboarding users into its beta. We’re told that Google API limits are the culprit, but the Product Hunt community gets to skip to the front of the list, with the first 200 people getting access immediately.

Today’s newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Mercury.

Mercury, the banking stack, made a splash with its debut back in 2019 as an early business-focused challenger bank.

Co-founder Immad Akhund started working on the company after reflecting on his own banking difficulties while founding Heyzap (acquired in 2016), and on the experiences of the 200+ startups that he had invested in too. At the same time, he had been impressed with the consumer-focused neobanks that had risen across Europe (think Monzo, Revolut).

European neobanks are known for their modern UIs and super fast onboarding, so the entrepreneurs who knew what they were missing were excited to see Mercury’s launch in the US. Mercury carried on the concept that banking deserves a better UI. An application can be completed in minutes, enabling companies across the world to get an FDIC-insured checking account, debit card, and savings account often within a few hours. You can see the dashboard experience in a new new demo the team shared last month.

The API that Mercury launched next was a part of the company’s vision from the start, Akhund shared. Startups can use the read & write API to customize their banking experience, for example, automating Slack bots to send custom notifications to their teams.

While Mercury has continued to evolve into a full business banking stack (debit cards, currency exchange, and wire transfers were built in after launch), it’s also expanded its focus to providing new offerings that help startups access the capital they need to grow. The team put together an Investor Database, a tool that’s filterable by industry, type, and check size, so that founders can find an investor and get in touch. They also created Mercury Raise, a program that puts startups in front of seasoned investors. Think of it like a founder-friendly Shark Tank.

Now, Mercury has launched Venture Debt to help founders get quality capital without sacrificing too much equity. Minimal dilution and founder-friendly terms can help companies extend their runway, supercharge growth, and even reach a higher valuation.

Mercury is a financial technology, not a bank. Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust®; Member FDIC.

Digital advertising is overdue for disruption. The pandemic gave digital ads a boost for a while, but they haven’t been able to weather longer-term issues like changing tastes for privacy and oversaturation in the D2C markets.

Facebook is feeling it as its ad revenue growth shrinks from year to year. Looks like Zuckerberg was right to be worried when Apple made it easier for iPhone users to stop apps from tracking them. The kinds of D2C companies that used to thrive on Facebook aren’t faring well either. Companies report tripling ad prices and poor results.

The question that remains is “How do you fix it?” Plenty of founders have turned to subscription models instead of ads. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for every vertical, like D2Cs, plus many consumers are finding that subscriptions are getting costly and hard to manage.

Comrade introduced its solution today — an extension that pays you, the internet surfer, when you engage with an ad. Your browsing activity is used in real-time, while advertisers are bidding on keywords and URLs behind the scenes. Then your activity is discarded immediately after. According to Comrade, there’s no data collection, data sharing, or user profiling.

Comrade flips cost per click advertising around, paying the user for their data, and limiting its use. “Since 1994, when we were still browsing on Netscape Navigator, the cost per click has been paid to advertising platforms only. With Comrade, a large share of that cost per click is finally shared with users for their time and attention,” wrote Comrade co-founder Sami Baddar.

How much users can earn will vary. Baddar explained:.

“It depends on the industry. Since it's a CPC auction, advertisers can bid on the same keywords and URLs, putting the price up considerably, even all the way up to $50 and more.”

What do you think — would you use the extension?

“Tesla is not cool enough anymore,” wrote Jasmine Sungu with the launch of Olympian Motors.

Sungu started the new electric vehicle company with co-founder Eren Canarslan upon realizing there is a demand for alternative EV designs and experiences. Sungu had previously worked at IBM and EY as a managing consultant in the automotive and mobility industry. Canarslan's career started at Ford as an R&D engineer and, prior to Olympian, the founder had been working on automotive, mobility, and augmented reality at Qualcomm Strategy & Ventures.

The founding team set out to create an experience-first consumer segment in the auto industry, prioritizing aesthetics over horsepower, user experience over torque, and simplicity. In practice, that looks like a "radically minimalistic" cockpit experience, swapping out tons of button and switches for an augmented reality HUD (heads up display) with voice-assistant and head/eye-tracking applications.

Olympian says it has the first fully fabless production model in the US, meaning the company designs its cars and microchips, but contracts out production rather than owning a factory. According to Canarslan, the model keeps Olympian asset-light, enabling it to have a product-development cycle that’s 300% faster than the U.S. average. The team is currently building prototypes for its Olympian O1 (Sedan) and a Model K1 (SUV) with the first shipment scheduled for November 2022.

Whether you agree with Sungu or not about Tesla’s coolness, it will be nice to have new options, faster. Elon Musk also said that Tesla won’t be rolling out any new models in 2022 because of the global chip shortage. Its most recent consumer EV launch was the Cybertruck in 2019, and production won’t start on those until 2023.

Still, think Tesla is pretty damn cool? Check out this new Cyberbackpack while you wait. Otherwise...

Last month, Flutterwave became Africa’s highest-valued startup with a $3 billion valuation after raising $250 million in a Series D round of funding.

The six-year-old company started out as a payment processor, headquartered in San Francisco and based in Lagos. Over the years it’s grown to serve 900,000 businesses, with investors believing it’s building one of the most consequential fintech businesses in the world as Flutterwave expands its offering. For example, it launched a new remittance product last year, Send, for sending money to local bank accounts, mobile wallets, and cash pick-up locations across various countries around the world.

Ambitions reach beyond finance too with products like Flutterwave Grow, which provides business incorporation services. Flutterwave says it can help you can register a business in the US, UK, and Nigeria in 3 to 5 business days.

The funding announcement instigated recognition of funding growth for African fintech overall. Crunchbase data shows that Africa-headquartered fintech companies raised $2 billion in 2021, up from $230 million in 2020, and that doesn’t include Flutterwave since it’s based in the US.

Here are some of the latest startup fintech launches we’ve seen serving Africa.

• Bloom launched yesterday. It offers students and young professionals in East Africa US Dollar banking so they’re not subject to the volatility of their home currencies.
• OyaPay is a digital wallet platform for paying merchants, in-store and online, with your phones instead of cash or through a POS.
• Union54 is an API that helps makers build debit card issuing into their products.
• Suplias is a B2B marketplace for mom & pop stores to buy inventory. Maker Michael Adesanya wrote: “Building a product that allows African women with minimal/no formal education, like my mother, run their businesses conveniently and profitably."
• StartWeb Africa is a drag and drop website builder for building e-commerce stores in minutes.

With Flutterwave seriously shooting for the moon (its mission is “to create endless possibilities for customers and businesses in Africa and emerging markets”) and a ton of funds, expect acquisitions. More of them. The company already recently acquired Disha, another eCommerce store builder, and payment gateway CinetPay.

To dive more into Africa’s tech ecosystem, you can check out Built in Africa, a platform sharing stories and connecting African trailblazers.

To some, it looks like Zuckerberg has abandoned Facebook’s roots, between the re-brand and the $10 billion Meta is spending on AR, VR, and related hardware.

Over the past week though, we saw two innovative new social products from Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE) Team. Facebook isn’t new to side projects, but it launched its NPE Team in 2019 to officially dedicate makers to experiments.

The first, Recess, helps remote teams connect. Aman Jain said that the four-person team behind Recess had never met IRL, and they couldn’t recreate the camaraderie you get from lunch chit chat or coffee runs no matter which products they tried.

Recess says it’s different in a couple of ways. The tool delivers conversation prompts through Slack, but the algorithm mixes meaningful questions with lighter-weight ones (whereas “many other apps focus on more frivolous prompts,” Jain wrote). Another difference is the way Recess uses your answers. The Recess bear “automagically surfaces commonalities” and “organizes the team’s responses into a memory vault” for newcomers to assimilate quickly.

Adorable animals indeed prompt conversation over here on the Product Hunt team. But can an alpaca get you to check off your to-do list?

Move, the second recent app launch from a Facebook NPE team, helps groups organize and get things done through social tasking and alpaca avatars. Groups, in this case, means friends, students, nonprofits, and so on (i.e. not enterprises). Matt Gabor explained that his team wanted to help empower grassroots organizers & non-profits but found during testing that any small group can benefit from the app.

How it works is the fun part. Users earn points for completing their tasks, which they can use to “drip out” their alpaca avatars. The implications of that can be anything from social pressure (your alpaca's naked!) to social competition (could your alpaca BE wearing any more clothes?)

Move is currently free (and only in the US, sorry) as the NPE Team hopes to gain more learnings from this release. We can see these alpaca avatars following you into the metaverse one day (after all, we’ve seen llama NFTs before) but how Meta decides to use any learnings remains to be seen.

We’ll end this newsletter with a couple shoutouts to non big tech makers, too. For a gamified to-do lists for yourself mixed with cute birds, Habit Bird just launched. Or if you long left social apps behind, check out Circles.

Apple’s cleverly-named launch event, “Peek Performance,” unveiled new products yesterday and this time new colors are the footnote.

In fact, we asked Twitter which were the best updates and you told us you're most excited about the new Mac Studio with the new M1 Ultra chip.

Let’s start with chip. Apple found a way to package two M1 chips together to create a new, powerful System on a Chip (Apple calls this packaging UltraFusion because everything must sound as cool as if Tony Stark made it).

Apple says the M1 Ultra is nearly 8x faster than the M1. With a bunch of graphs, it illustrated just how powerful the processor is compared to others on the market — “the world’s most powerful chip for a personal computer.” It supports up to 128GB of memory with a 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU. The 32-core Neural Engine covers up to 22 trillion operations per second “to accelerate the most formidable machine learning tasks.” All kinds of professionals are excited to see Apple “serving its pro users again.”

You’ll have the option to choose the M1 Ultra inside the new Mac Studio, which is already generating affectionate memes as a thicc version of the Mac Mini. Powered by the M1 Ultra chip, the visuals on your computer should be drool-worthy too. The Mac Studio can play back up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video “— a feat no other chip can accomplish.” Despite its size, Apple says it will fit under most displays and stay quiet.

Speaking of visuals, you can pair these with the new Apple Studio Display, a 27-inch, 5K Retina monitor that can reach 600 nits of brightness. Above the screen is a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, and the six-speaker high fidelity system incorporates spatial audio.

Other key announcements from yesterday included a new iPad Air with M1 chip and 5G, an iPhone SE that can give you a similar experience to its pricier iPhone 13 models, and an alpine green option for your iPhone.

If you’re planning to run out and pre-order a whole new environment around the M1 Ultra, it will set you back at least $5,600 — the Mac Studio starts at $3,999 and the Studio Display at $1,599, but you’ll have to shell out more if you want a height-adjustable stand, etc. Just make sure to send your pics to Ryan Gilbert’s Workspaces Newsletter when it arrives so we can see it.

Each International Women’s Day we celebrate the cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements of women, but progress can’t be celebrated without acknowledging the road ahead. Today LunaJoy’s launch turns our focus to women’s mental health.

The good: “The silver lining of the past two years is that we have gained tremendous flexibility and insight around our previously narrow definition of work schedules, location, and environment,” LunaJoy cofounder Dr. Sipra Laddha told Forbes.

The bad: “Women are 2x as likely to experience mental health challenges and COVID has only accelerated this,” Laddha shared. Reasons may be tied to how women have disproportionally had their work/life balance impacted. For example, 42% of women in tech took on more housework versus 11% of men.

Beyond COVID's timeline, women, in general, are 3x more likely to experience sexual, physical, emotional trauma — a predictor for mental illness. Physiologically, women are also vulnerable to mental health issues during times of transition and hormonal fluctuation, such as during puberty or pregnancy.

With 15 combined years of experience as board-certified psychiatrists, Laddha and her cofounder, Dr. Shama Rathi, took notice of how mental health challenges have impacted women disproportionately. They also found that women-first therapy was hard to come by and expensive.

So they founded a digital mental health clinic for women called LunaJoy (YC W22). LunaJoy delivers affordable (in-network) counseling and therapy, medication management, and genetic testing. Women start by filling out a short form, noting anything they’re experiencing. They’ll get matched with a counselor in about 24 hours, and will meet with them 1:1 virtually.

Since LunaJoy is currently serving 14 US states, we rounded up a few more support networks for women everywhere.

• Elpha launched Talent Pool to connect you with companies that match your cultural values and skills
• leap.club is a professional network that helps women build their social-professional networks through 1:1 connections and micro-communities
• Diem is a knowledge-sharing platform and digital safe space built for women and non-binary people

Sorry Dunkin’ but America’s not runnin’ on your coffee. It’s running on XaaS.

Same with the rest of the world. The global anything and Everything as a Service market is expected to grow from $419.02 billion in 2021 to $2,384.12 billion by 2028, according to Fortune Business Insights.

XaaS refers to the subscription-based business model of offering all sorts of products and tech over the internet, but we probably don’t have to tell you that. Harvard Business Review notes that over 84% of global smartphone users already know what it is. The pandemic increased our love of XaaS and there’s plenty to love as it speeds up progress on anything from sustainability to AI.

As techie nerds, we’re always eager to see which services startups are tackling now, and we thought you would be too. Here are 10 unique problems being tackled by XaaS:

• Snippyly and Liveblocks help devs build real-time multiplayer experiences into their software
• Identance, Persona, and Passbase simplify the complicated process of identity verification
• Terra connects users' wearables and sensor data to apps with an API or widget
• Convoy built an open-source webhooks service to combat fragmented implementations
• Duffel Payments helps travel companies sell flights from their products
• Nyckel and anon let companies integrate machine learning without ML experts
• Climatiq makes it easy for companies to calculate their carbon emissions
• Subspace introduced low-latency, real-time internet for verticals (like gaming) that need fast speeds
• Angle Audio helps makers add audio rooms into their product with ease
• Asserto lets devs add authorization capabilities in a fraction of the time it would take to build it by hand