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What’s up with the browser extension with 1,500+ upvotes that had people saying this yesterday:

“Trust me on this...Bardeen is the #nocode tool of the year 💥.”

Bardeen is an automation tool to replace your repetitive tasks in just a click. These days, a lot of startups like Bardeen are working on solutions for context switching and SaaS sprawl. One way companies tackle the problem is through internal hubs. Another is search. There’s automation, too.

Robotic process automation goes further. RPA uses AI to program software to do basic, repetitive tasks across applications. While a tool like Zapier lets you connect apps to automate your workflows, Bardeen is working to use RPA. RPA for personal use is still very new. As Matt Turck, Managing Partner at FirstMark Capital and Bardeen investor, put it:

“Over the last few years, enterprises have poured billions of dollars into Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) to automate their backend systems. But, if you look at what we all do at work every day, we’re all badly in need of our own RPA. We spend so much time and mental energy on simple tasks that could be automated.”

With Bardeen, users can deploy an automation workflow, right in their browser with a click. Two hundred “playbooks” give users pre-built automation, or they can create their own (similar to Zapier). Machine learning helps users identify which tasks can be automated and recommends playbooks. Founder Pascal Weinberger also shared with one commenter that Bardeen runs “entirely on the edge (so in your browser). That comes with all sorts of privacy, security, and cost advantages...”

Yesterday’s launch was Bardeen’s public debut from stealth and came with an announcement of its $3.5M seed fundraise. Weinberger and co-founder Artem Harutyunyan are accomplished engineers. In a limited snapshot: Harutyunyan spent 8 years as lead developer at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), and Weinberger worked at Google Brain on various ML projects and led the AI team at Europe’s first moonshot factory.

Harutyunyan shared on the launch page:

“I started moonlighting on.. a slack bot that would… take away most mind-numbing and repetitive tasks… A while after, I talked to Pascal. I was really surprised when he literally pitched me my own idea! 🤯… Fast forward a few months and a bunch of us quit our jobs and we're working on Bardeen with some old friends.”

Sounds fun!

As you may have heard, Neil Young plans to leave this world with no regrets. He removed his music from Spotify in protest of its continued stance on letting Joe Rogan do Joe Rogan (with the exception of adding a warning message about Covid misinformation to the platform).

If you’re a podcast listener who, like Neil, thinks Spotify is really “F*!#in’ Up” (okay, last lyrical reference), you’ve got new options.

Today Callin launched, a social podcasting app from David Sacks and Axel Ericsson. Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal and Yammer founder, teamed up with Ericsson to bring his vision of an all-in-one social creation and listening platform to the people. Sacks really got into podcasting over the pandemic when he started his “All In” podcast. Like many creators who want to give podcasting a shot, he was amazed to find that the process required six hours of post-production.

Callin combines multiple audio experiences into one. Creators can open up a public or private room, start recording, and immediately start editing audio as a podcast after completion with AI-powered tools. Podcasts can be found on the app, or exported for sharing on other platforms. Within the app, the playbacks maintain their interactivity meaning users can click on avatars to browse profiles.

Callin’s community guidelines indicate that it will “host any user-generated content that won’t get booted off of Apple and Google stores,” explains Amanda Silberling for TechCrunch. So, to be clear, we’re not saying we know how Callin would approach Rogan, but as it so happens, you can listen to more of Sack’s view on the matter in the latest “All In” episode.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban has been working on his own app called Fireside which emphasizes interactivity. The app has been discussed as a “next-gen podcast platform” and “hybrid between Spotify’s Anchor and Clubhouse.” Fireside targets both listeners and creators with a hub for creating and monetizing their work.

Despite their founder celebrity, Callin and Fireside will go up against tough competition and Spotify isn’t the only giant to face. Amazon owns 13% of the music-streaming market and wants to bolster that with podcasts. It’s been making deals to bring shows, like Guy Raz’s “How I Build This,” to the platform. With Audible and Alexa speakers under Amazon’s wings, Protocol’s David Pierce speculates that Amazon may be the company to watch in this space.

Before we go, we wrote yesterday about preference for all-in-one products versus those that focus on doing one thing really well. If you generally sit in the latter camp, podcast creators can check out Golden Kitty winner, Podcastle, while listeners can check out popular new products, Podopolo and Moonbeam.

Yesterday, the Invision team launched The New Invision, a collaborative workspace where you can unite your team and tools into one location. It sparked an interesting conversation: Do we need more tools that do it all?

“Why would a tradesperson use a hammer that’s tethered by string to a saw when there may be a better hammer out there?” posed commenter Simon Gabriel. Chris Messina also questioned the product thinking: “[H]ow do you avoid bloat while encouraging the production of best-in-breed product experiences?”

“Best-in-breed” is one cause for questioning. Invision is a popular tool used by independent designers and global corps alike, with 9 million users including 100% of Fortune 100 companies. The startup is a unicorn with $100 million in annual recurring revenue. No doubt: people may feel protective of what might be their favorite prototyping tool.

Another catalyst for debate – we’ve seen this a lot lately. Google, Monday.com, and Zoho are some of those consistently branching out to offer all-in-one collaboration. Is this update from Invision a moat to try and keep customers locked into one ecosystem, or something else?

Invision’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Olmstead, responded to ponderings (we’ve piece parts of responses together for a concise read):

“...I think we actually agree with you on this front. We see this more as a platform that brings unity to best-of-breed tools, not drives them apart. The key is for the system to get out of the way of [these] tools, not to try and eat them. That's our goal here.”

He also notes: “The paradigm shift here (for me at least) is the infinite canvas.” That infinite canvas is Freehand, working together with the new Spaces hub. Freehand is an Invision feature that has evolved from collaborative commenting to a robust whiteboarding tool over the last few years. Invision reported a 130% increase in Freehand’s weekly active users towards the start of the pandemic. It built out and improved on Freehand in response to a surge in new non-designer users.

Spaces adds a secure, single source of truth for projects, enabling teammates to easily organize and locate documents. Olmstead illustrated: “What would it do to my workflow if, instead of having a Google Doc, Google Sheet, design file, etc in separate tabs that I can only view one at a time, I had them in all in one place (one tab) as editable docs to work with lots of different types of stakeholders.”

The New Invision also introduces smart widgets (e.g. convert a sticky note into a live Jira ticket), deeper meeting integrations with Microsoft (Zoom on the way), collaborative presentations, and over 100 new templates.

All in all, we think the new features seem to match up with Olmstead’s perspective on bringing out the best of tools, versus certain tech giants that want to eat them all.

Are you team all-in-one?

Who doesn’t love to choose their own adventure? The genre became a hit when the first interactive book launched in 1979 and continues to be popular as it stretches its leg in modern entertainment, like when Netflix's “Bandersnatch” was the talk of the internet in 2018.

While media companies were pouring millions of dollars into creating interactive content for themselves, Devo Harris says he was quietly creating a low-cost, cross-platform solution for everyone. It’s called Adventr.

Harris isn't your average indie maker or tech founder. He’s a “serial media executive” whose resume includes co-founding GOOD Music with Kanye West, discovering and signing John Legend, and winning a Grammy Award for Best Rap Song (Ye’s “Diamonds (from Sierra Leone)”).

“I taught myself a few lines of basic code, then created and released an interactive music video on the web,” wrote Harris in today’s launch. Adventr “lets anyone easily create fully interactive, actionable videos and share them practically anywhere — we don’t believe this capability should be reserved for deep-pocketed companies.”

The browser-based, no-code platform lets users storytell with features like drag-and-drop elements, branching narratives, and integrations with text messaging, email, and phone calls. Harris and team have also been working on a feature called SmartListen that lets creators build media content that can change based on voice commands.

Adventr’s had a solid start in tech startup world. It was one of five finalists in Tech Crunch’s 2021 startup competition, Startup Battlefield, and went on to raise $5M in seed funding. The company said then it planned to use the funding to grow its team.

New hires will also join Peter Gerard, the product lead. Gerard is a former Vimeo GM and VP of Entertainment. It wasn't long ago that we saw the maker launch another one of his products, Welcome, an AI-powered travel app for discovering “the best places from your favorite people.”

All of Adventr's tools can be leveraged by creators of all kinds, from social media teams to filmmakers, and the Product Hunt community has started taking note. Give Adventr a try, drop Harris a question, and share your thoughts:

Even if your country celebrates Valentine’s Day, today is a divisive day for many people. We get that. Maybe it serves as an unwelcome reminder. We know how many emails are in your inbox right now with last-minute Valentine’s Day offers, too. Of course, we do love a good product discount, but they don’t always set the right mood.

That’s why we love projects that enable you to do something truly thoughtful for someone else, even if that’s a stranger.

HeartMail is giving you the tools to send a Valentine’s Day letter to other internet humans today. You can choose from a shortlist of interests too if, for instance, you want to include your favorite uplifting quote for another movie-lover out there.

We also rounded up a few more unique options for quashing loneliness with loving vibes today.

Koya: Send thoughtful, timely messages and micro-gifts
Okel: Connect with people over meals at local restaurants
HeyBuddy: Find a buddy to train and exercise with
Thousand Face Club: Creators, find peers and seek mentorship
Daffy: Choose from 1.5M+ charities and contribute cash, stock, or crypto

And for those of you looking for a last-minute gift for your crush or significant other, Poolsuite just launched Suities. Tell them you want to HODL forever with a virtual playlist.

Happy Valentine’s Day to the best community on the interwebs. You’re ameowzing and we truly love you.

Perception of AI: Let’s build an app that recognizes photos of birds.

The reality: “AI is f*cking hard.”

A few new products have reminded us that there’s still much to do about making AI coding systems accessible and usable, but these makers are on it.

Nyckel is a product built by engineers with backgrounds in APIs, machine learning systems, and high-scale cloud computing platforms. It helps makers build AI into their tools and apps and can be used to do things like tag appropriate versus inappropriate posts, categorize photos, or predict whether a customer is likely to purchase. The startup hopes to help companies avoid having to hire a machine learning team or build costly ML infrastructure.

You can watch the launch video (narrated by one Nyckel maker, and Personal Finance Club creator, Jeremy Schneider) to see a demo of Nyckel in action as a model is trained to identify bird photos.

Then there’s Riku, a platform where makers can use multiple AI providers. As maker Stuart Lansdale points out, OpenAI has been growing in popularity, but there’s more technology than just OpenAI. There’s just “no central place to create prompts, swap out the tech to see different outputs or see what the best prompts are from the community.”

Riku lets makers build AI prompts with OpenAI, Cohere, AI21 or GPT-J. “Switching between tech couldn't be easier and is as fluid as hitting a dropdown.”

And TagTeam is the one serving the realness that opened this newsletter. AI is hard, and “developers haven’t been able to fully utilise the AI-driven solutions that exist… [while they’ve] been guarded by dominating organisations with specialised data scientists,” maker Hannah O'Connor shared.

TagTeam is an NLP API, or a software interface that lets makers extract information and insights from the contents of text and documents. Common NLP language tasks are sentiment analysis, classifications, tokenization, text summarization, and text generation. In the demo video, you can see how TagTag extracts information from a receipt.

If you’ve been sitting on questions about building with AI, now’s a good time to ask a few makers who are working to make AI easier and accessible.

The rebels are back.

No, we’re not talking about rapping bitcoin thieves. We’re talking about Malala Yousafzai, Frida Khalo, and RBG, to name a few.

Yesterday, Rebel Girls launched its app filled with audio stories of the adventures and accomplishments of women from around the world and throughout history.

Rebel Girls got its start in 2016 when founders Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo launched a Kickstarter campaign for a book called “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.” The book featured a collection of one-page stories from the past and the present, illustrated by 100 female artists from all over the world.

With a background in journalism, Favilli had moved from Italy with Cavallo (who has since left Rebel Girls for other pursuits) to start a publishing company. She began writing a newsletter with text, images, and stories about famous and unknown women and it began generating interest and subscribers. Her next step was launching her concept as a book on Kickstarter, which could be seen as a bit rebellious itself given traditional publishing models.

The book blew past its funding goal. Within weeks the makers raised $675,614 in pledges on Kickstarter and $1.2 million in total with funds from IndieGogo.

Good Night Stories went on to become a New York Times bestseller and sell over 3 million copies. The Rebel Girls media and publishing company has published several more books and a podcast that features stories narrated by modern, influential women.

The new Rebel Girls app carries its award-winning storytelling, eye-catching illustrations, and narrations from admirable women into a new digital format. As an example, you can listen to the story of Simon Biles, the Olympic gymnast tied as the most decorated gymnast of all time, read by decorated alpine ski racer, Lindsey Vonn.

“Every story in the app is filled with inspirational messages and highlights various socio-emotional needs,” shared Rebel Girls Cheif Product Officer, Melissa Mazman.

Rebel Girls has a number of stories available to listen to for free, from Beyonce to Maya Angelou.

Longevity goes hand in hand with fantasy and science fiction in entertainment, though it’s not all make-believe. You’ll find tech startups in this space working to hack human biology. Case in point, Altos Labs, a biotech company focused on cellular rejuvenation programming that Jeff Bezos reportedly invests in.

Hearts Radiant is in the longevity tech business but its app, Rosita, is centered around practical methods to help people extend their lives, and perhaps more importantly, enjoy that extra time.

Co-founder Clara Fernández Porta introduced Rosita to the community along with her co-founder (and husband) Juan Cartagena, and CTO David Gil. Fernández Porta is also the founder of a “longevity school” or “longevity summer camp” at Balneario de Cofrentes in Spain. The school has developed a comprehensive approach to education for seniors that looks at their lifestyle, prevention of diseases, and the newest scientific discoveries in the field.

For these founders, longevity is not just about fitness. Cartagena told TechCrunch that fitness is “limited in scope. And we are trying to go beyond that — it’s just the starting point [for reducing frailty].”

The Rosita app includes tests, over 10 daily live sessions with healthcare specialists, and 600+ hours of fun content and chat groups with top longevity experts. Users can learn about topics from biology to pharmacogenetics, and participate in things like metabolic boot camps.

The launch comes timed with the app’s US launch and a second seed round. The first funding was used to develop a personalized AI coach and conduct research into whether coaching can yield tangible reductions in frailty through a digital experience. The app currently has around 2,000 “very active” users.

Rosita is interesting because of its focus on enjoying that last inning of life. This writer can’t be the only one who’s heard their aging parents say “I hope I don’t live THAT long.”

“Life expectancy (LE) in Western Countries is 85, but healthy life expectancy (HLE) is only 65. Our loved ones live 20 years with pain or a disease that could be prevented in most of the cases,” Fernández Porta explains. And Rosita’s 10-year longevity plan isn’t about just living longer, but reaching “the top Range of Excellence.”

The team is offering a 50% discount, so now is the time to try the app or pass it on to a senior in your life.

In December, we did a roundup of startups that are reinventing spreadsheets. Products like Actiondesk empower users to pull data together and gather insights so they can answer questions on their own (i.e. without having to wait on engineers or the BI team.)

Clay is a new launch today in that space, offering a tool that “creates spreadsheets that fill themselves.” Perhaps the best way to understand Clay is through sample workflows that users can create without code. A marketing or sales representative, for example, can directly pull in LinkedIn data, add emails and phone numbers from sources like Clearbit and Hunter.io, add their formula for determining qualified leads, and then sync those qualified leads back to the CRM.

“I love the integrations, especially that they work out-of-the-box without the need to enter my own API keys,” wrote early adopter Luca Rossi.

Clay lets you scrape data from the internet to turn any website into a data source. It may not be the only scraping tool, but Clay's Chrome extension is generating interest from the community.

Maker Kareem Amin explains: “​​For more adventurous hackers, our Chrome extension makes it possible for anyone to 'map' a webpage so that eventually when every page on the internet is mapped, no one will have to waste time scraping data again!”

What if the data falls out of date? Amin explains that mappings can be edited, so when someone sees data that is out of data, they can simply update it and help the whole community. The team plans to define a way to reward users who do so.

Maker Yogesh Agarwal adds:

“IMO the beauty with the extension is that it's insanely easy to reconfigure the scrapers so that whenever someone sees something that's broken they can update it themselves in a few seconds.”

You add your feedback for the team by clicking through below, or go ahead and help your fellow internet goers and...

We know how this community loves an open-source alternative. Medusa’s launch today may strike a chord with those who run or support a business on Shopify, as it did for this commenter:

“This looks great, I'm a huge fan of Shopify and ran a store for nearly 8 years. I agree that I've written some horrible code to get Shopify to do what I want…” - Simon Barker

Maker Sebastian Rindom explained that he and his cofounders were motivated to create Medusa, a headless commerce platform, after often finding themselves hacking together solutions that left them “cringing while writing the code.”

If you’re feeling bad for Shopify, we’ll take a moment to remind you that they’re doing well. Shopify enables 1.75 million businesses to sell to their customers in 175 countries worldwide. The tech giant also consistently explores new partnerships and features to support sellers, making it a favorite tool for businesses and makers.

While Medusa’s solution offers out-of-the-box building blocks for your store along with plug-n-play integrations, similar to Shopify, the startup promises more customization that developers can leverage (“when you need to you can take full control over any part of Medusa and make it your own.”)

Anyone can checkout Medusa’s code (as open-source goes) and at least a couple of makers already took a peek under the hood and are feeling good:

“I'm really impressed by the architecture and code quality,” Cristian Toba commented.

Head to the link below to check out Medusa and leave feedback for the team.

Or, if you clicked on this email hoping to see a lot more open-source, we direct you now to Open Source Alternatives, a resource to find open-source tools by topic, from newsletters to observability platforms.