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India is on track to overtake China as the world’s fastest-growing major economy next year, according to World Bank projections.

So far 33 startups have joined the unicorn club this year — 5 in just the last two weeks. Compare that to 40 Indian unicorns minted in total from 2011-2020. Over $23.5 billion in funding has been collected from Indian startups so far this year, which is nearly double the last two years, per PitchBook data. Analysts credit regulatory reforms that make it easier to do business, rising incomes and consumption, and new habit formation emerging post-pandemic.

It’s a huge bounceback after the Indian economy had contracted 7.3% in 2020. Now it's a much better time and place to be in starting a company. Makers are all-in:

“In 2020, I left the USA for India to build products for the Global Indian Diaspora,” Prateek Swain wrote as he launched last month — his startup Swadesh Capital is a platform for comparing real estate products for investment in Indian real estate.

Here are six more recent and noteworthy VC-backed Indian launches.

👸 Leap.club is a community-led, professional network for women that launched last month. It just raised $810K in seed funding.

✏️Peppertype.ai is a GPT-3-powered content generator. It's got $4.2M in the bag from a Series A earlier this year.

💸 Razorpay became a unicorn last year and recently added Salesforce to its cap table as a “strategic investor.” It launched its Payroll Slack tool in August.

🤝Mint was launched by Cred, which is the youngest Indian startup to be valued at $2 billion+ at two years old. Mint enables CRED users to lend to one another at an interest rate of up to 9% annually.

💼 Relevel is a hiring platform from Unacadmeny, the Edtech startup that just raised $440M. Job-seekers can showcase skills through tests and apply to multiple companies with one score.

₿CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn last month. The makers launched the second iteration of the exchange and global cryptocurrency aggregator a year ago.

And for fun, we’re also highlighting today’s launch of Ramayana Capital.

“Today is the auspicious Hindu festival of Dussehra. It signifies the victory of good over evil. To commemorate, we're launching a fun little game we made,” Swain of Swadesh Capital (mentioned earlier) wrote.

Canva is having a big year. The Australian-based company announced a $40 billion valuation last month after raising $200M. We also found out that two of its three founders — husband and wife team, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht — gave away more than 30% of their equity (around $13 billion) to charity through the Canva Foundation.

Now it's back to buzz. Canva makers just launched Canva Video Suite, officially entering the video space.

The product is an end-to-end creation tool that includes the ability to re-order scenes, lengthen or split them, and add multiple audio tracks or effects. Creators can also record themselves or their screens within the tool. Similar to Canva's image-based tools, users can choose from customizable templates and a media library to create ready-to-go ads, plus workplace videos or educational tutorials.

Canva’s charge from its start has been to empower anyone with the ability to design. While their tools aren’t exclusive to non-designers, it doesn’t see itself competing with professional design tools like Adobe or Figma.

We’re not sure where that leaves specialized players in this space like Kamua, but if anything, we think more pertinent competitors might be other “democratizing”-focused startups with expansive suites like Squarespace.

Squarespace made a big step in its mission to democratize the web for entrepreneurs and creators when it went public in May. Flying more under the radar this time, it launched eight new updates last month and among them was a new video studio app. The video editor also includes templates and the ability to record voiceover, plus an AI-powered voiceover feature.

Canva is on track for $1B in annualized revenue this year with 60 million monthly active users. It admittedly has a broader audience base than Squarespace with tools like Video Messages, so with Canva eyeing acquisitions with its new funding, we’re interested to see if it extends more into the entrepreneurial, creator, or office tool spaces next.

What do you want to see from Canva's video suite? Let the team know.

You don’t see many companies squaring off to take on Amazon these days, but Bolt has been cooly assuming the position.

The “Amazon-like payments stack for everyone else” first launched on Product Hunt three years ago, after working for almost three years in stealth. Despite entering a very crowded space, it differed from products like Stripe Checkout.

“That's more of a lightweight way of collecting a credit card vs. this which is a robust enterprise-ready platform. Tax/shipping/discounts/platform-integrations… While also built to be super developer-friendly, this is built for retailers / e-comm companies first and foremost,” founder Ryan Breslow wrote back then (to its credit, Stripe has expanded since then).

Then earlier this year, it dropped Bolt One Click, a one-click checkout experience for shoppers, across anywhere where Bolt is used. Shoppers can save their passwords, personal information, and card details and check out instantly if using Bolt — even if they’ve never been to the shop before.

“Bolt One Click gives independent retailers a fighting chance... by enabling them to provide a return-like experience to millions of first-time shoppers. Shoppers get a fast checkout anywhere across the growing Bolt network, and retailers benefit from higher-converting shoppers. Everyone wins!” Breslow wrote on Product Hunt.

While “Buy Now” functionality might duplicate the success of tech goliaths, Breslow has set himself and the company apart from portrayals of Bezos and Amazon. He’s pursued creating a “conscious culture” which drives the way Bolt conducts business (with concepts like “conscious selling”) and manages its team members (Bolt introduced a 4-day workweek last month.)

That might attract burnt-out workers looking for new jobs. Meanwhile, investors note liking Bolt because it's focusing all its efforts on a 10/10 customer experience of the payments solution, rather than trying to do too much at once. The new $393M Series D drives the company's valuation to $6B.

Bolt is planning to use its new funding to expand beyond the US (you can expect to see Bolt debut in Europe in the first half of 2022). It does face competitors, including Fast — a Stripe-backed startup that wants to bring fast login to everything — and UK-based Checkout.com.

Can two apps join forces to upend TikTok? TikTok did just reach 1B monthly active users, so maybe not. But as they say, if you can’t beat them, join them.

We first met Clash on Product Hunt a year ago. The new app took a creator-first approach to social media. The expectation was that the makers understood what creators wanted more than anyone. Co-founder Jesse Leimgruber is a digital marketer and content strategist, and co-founder Brendon McNerney is a creator and former star on Vine, where he had amassed 700K followers.

Meanwhile, Dom Hofman, founder of Vine, was launching byte, another Vine-esque video app and social network. byte had a strong community from the start, with over 1.3 million downloads during the first week of its launch. But TikTok had simply grown too large by that point. Ryan Hoover’s comment on the launch page could have spoken for millions of others:

“Ooh, I've been looking forward to this, although TikTok is already sucking too much of my attention. 😅”

You know where this is going even if you didn't catch the news. At the beginning of the year, Clash acquired byte for an undisclosed amount. Mr. McNerney told the New York Times it was “more of an I.P. acquisition” to take over byte’s community.

Now Clash App has re-launched today with a larger community, $9.1 million in funding from investors like Alexis Ohanian, and a new focus which is to be a sort of supplement to apps like TikTok. McNerney and Leimgruber expect that creators will grow their fanbase across a host of platforms — Clash is meant to be the place where they manage and monetize them.

With the launch, the makers have made good on the promise they made to the Product Hunt community last year and delivered Drops, a feature where fans can send tokens to creators right in the main feed. Tokens are purchased by fans through the App Store and redeemed at 2,500 ($25), similar to Twitch. Another feature called Fanmail lets fans unlock message sending to creators, who can respond back.

Clash may have pivoted from Goliath (TikTok), but it is still entering a crowded space. We’ve seen plenty of competitors with community management tools start to gain traction — Orbit, Geneva, and just-launched, Kommunity, to name a few.

Clash is worth calling out still. For better or worse, the app skirts feelings of being a SaaS-type tool for creators and is built upon short-form video instead, with fingerprints of the makers’ Vine past.

ICYMI, the meme token Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD) surged 51% after Elon Musk tweeted a pic of his new pup last week.

All investments come with risk but the volatility of cryptocurrency — which can rise and fall drastically with one tweet or puppy — has been a barrier to entry for more cautious investors.

The Mudrex Coin Sets launch today offers a new way to diversify your cryptocurrency investments through crypto bundles. Individuals select from bundles like “Web 3.0: Top 6 tokens changing the way internet works” or “VC 6: 6 tokens that VC and hedge funds have invested in.”

“No need to browse through 100s of coins, no need to make multiple orders, no need to manually manage,” maker Edul Patel wrote.

Theme-based bundles of assets isn’t a new idea. In fact, mutual funds and ETFs have been growing in popularity as a way for stock market investors to diversify their portfolios, simplify their work, and even back a space they believe in (like cannabis or sustainability-focused ETFs).

Unlike actively managed ETFs, it’s important to note that Coin Sets don’t offer active trading or actively hedge your position. They’re just there to help you chose what to invest in. Mudrex said it does monitor and change the bundles monthly, and handles rebalancing using “human intelligence + rules.”

The Mudrex launch comes at an interesting time in the U.S. Companies (like the Winklevoss brothers’ crypto exchange, Gemini) have tried launching Bitcoin ETFs for years but have been turned down by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Recently, the SEC did approve a few bitcoin “lite” equity ETFs though. These funds don’t invest in cryptocurrency itself, but in companies that engage in crypto activities like mining, trading, and infrastructure (80%), balanced by traditional stocks (20%).

With crypto ETF applications piling in, some speculate that broader approval from the SEC is on the horizon, which would have a big impact on crypto’s pervasiveness into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, startups like Mudrex look to fill gaps that exist globally for crypto investors.

Might as well face it, you’re addicted to Slack (looks in mirror).

Power users send out more than 1,000 Slack messages per day. That little tidbit comes from productivity analytics startup Time is Ltd. (via Recode), which announced a late-seed funding round of $5.6M in June.

Deep work is hard to do when Slack’s blowing up, but we’ve seen plenty of new tools to help you find peace beneath the pings.

Superpowered is one of them. The makers launched its menu bar calendar app on Product Hunt earlier this year, but alas, “​​we always wanted to be more than a calendar widget,” maker Ibrahim Irfan wrote.

The new Superpowered integration adds Slack to the menubar alongside your calendar. If you’re like many Slack users, one ping turns into half an hour of bouncing around channels. The goal here is to allow you to manage your inbox more easily and keep your focus, as well as make it easier for you to quickly shoot off messages, like when you’re running late for a meeting.

Since context and app switching are known productivity killers, the makers behind Twake approached a similar problem with an entirely new workspace, launched with updates earlier this week. Twake combines team chat, task management, team calendars, and more into one tool that’s 100% open source. You can think of it as an alternative to Slack, Teams, Trello, and Google Drive in one.

Our community loves a good open-source alternative and Twake is filling a nice space for makers seeking a big tech alternative.

“It's open-source, well-designed, easy on the eyes and has plenty of efficiency tools for small businesses like mine - and it won't break the bank.” - Todd Peckham

For a little more help on context switching, take a look at:
Pause: A tool to support team planning when an employee takes time off
Motion: A Slack command tool that finds a meeting time for you
Paco: A Slack assistant that helps you track and compile to-dos

The good news: It’s getting easier to build great mobile apps.

Just look at FlutterFlow, a low-code platform created by two ex-Google engineers. The platform enables makers to build mobile apps with Flutter (the Google-made SDK for cross-platform apps) — visually with a drag and drop UI.

A feature that early adopters in our community have enjoyed most in FlutterFlow is the ability “to export code and fine-tune it without limitations.” Now Flutterfly has launched one-click deploy to the App Store and the ability to add Google maps, search (powered by Algolia), push notifications, and more.

If low-code makes you nervous, co-founder Abel Mengistu explained to one commenter, “You don't need to know programming. There's a learning curve that might be a bit steeper, but most of the apps in the showcase were built by our amazing designer who's not a developer.”

Still, no-code launches you can check out for building apps include Bravo Studio, Adalo, and Glide which enable no-code web app development, too. While you're at it, see no-code testing platform Waldo for creating and automating mobile tests.

And back to the bad news: Once your app is built, you still have to learn how to market it amongst the millions of apps in the Google Play and Apple App Stores.

There are resources to help new makers there, too. There are Udemy courses and SplitMetrics’ AppGrowthLab — even MailChimp has app growth courses. Today, a group of makers from Mobile Action have also launched Mobile Growth University, a nonprofit initiative and free resource for learning about mobile growth. Courses cover topics from app store search ads to monetization, and users can earn a certificate to demonstrate their proficiency in mobile app marketing.

“An awesome overview of what is arguably the hardest part of growing any business,” wrote one commenter.

We’ll leave you with one more applicable resource to help with your app marketing – AppLaunchPad. The design tool helps you create marketing assets for the app stores and launched new features in July.

Now, go and see what kind of apps you can build without much code.

Yes, newsletters are hot right now, but does Gen Z care?

Research from Reuters Institute shows that only 3% of people under 35 prefer email as their primary gateway to consuming the news, compared to the 34% who prefer social media.

“Most publishers are drifting towards newsletters to appeal to our attention deficit. But we're going backward by having to wait until the next day to get 5 articles when we have memes on current news within an hour,” maker Shannon Almeida wrote on Product Hunt.

Volv is a real-time app for consuming the news in 9-second reads (with links to the full piece when you want them). Those bite-sized reads are written to be digestible and non-biased.

Today, Almeida and team launched the app’s second iteration. Since the first launch, Volv has expanded its coverage on topics like crypto and hype trends and added features like timeline view and upvoting. Its biggest update is its writer platform. Recognizing that writers aren’t usually video-first creators, Volv is now hoping to attract new writers who want to increase their discoverability without “having to resort to dancing on TikTok to share their insights.”

The move follows another startup in the bite-sized news business, Listle, which opened its platform to creators last year. YC-backed Listle first launched with short audio news clips before pivoting to video.

Listle and Volv recognize that younger generations are increasingly concerned about misinformation. Articles and podcasts about going “down the rabbit hole” regularly raise red flags about big tech algorithms (in fact, Facebook whistleblower and former product manager, Frances Haugen, just testified before the Senate on the subject yesterday). Early adopters in our community like both new apps for their efforts to combat biases — Listle only uses trusted new sources, and Volv uses AI to flag biased words, opinions, and check for a left or right slant.

Ultimately, news readers already have plenty of news apps to choose from: there’s easily-accessible Apple News and Google News, ultra-customizable RSS-based readers like Feedly, and ML-driven apps like Newsadoo which uses a bundling function to combat biases.

Still, Reuters Institute also found that, among all the younger respondents in its 2019 study, no news app (except Reddit) was within the top 25 of apps used. We’re watching to see if the fun-sized approach hits the mark for these generations.

Did you know that Facebook et al. was down yesterday? Thought so.

We hope you felt prepared. After all, we just told you about apps that aren’t Instagram Kids, introduced you to the Anti-Instagram, and explored ways to make social fun again.

The downtime across Facebook’s apps didn’t just cause boredom though. Some felt the moment was a wake-up call about how much they rely on Facebook’s apps to stay connected. Since businesses and health care providers have started using WhatsApp, going offline for hours at a time may have increasingly more serious consequences in the future, too.

When Facebook went down, millions of users reportedly rushed to privacy-focused messaging apps like Signal (which received a tweet endorsement from Edward Snowden) and Telegram. Telegram even reported slowing of its own app because of the surges.

Outside of Facebook shortages, Telegram users are often swayed to migrate because the company uses multiple data centers distributed worldwide and focuses on message encryption. Telegram’s latest iteration launched last month, bringing with it features like live streams with unlimited viewers, the option to remove captions from media, and the ability to hide sender names when forwarding.

The app has grown to 500 million monthly active users despite regularly receiving bad press, largely due to growth in misinformation on the app and Telegram’s moderation policies (it's sparked respectful debate in our own community, too.)

On the other hand, there are those broadly advocating for decentralized social as a Facebook alternative. We wrote about the concept of decentralized social with the launch of DeSo and Bitclout, but there are other players in this space.

Uhive is a creator-first social network, like Bitclout but with a metaverse layer, too. Similar to Bitclout, Uhive says its mission is to support its users, not a centralized entity (i.e. the company or makers who built it). Two of its features have appealed to users most of all: the ability to mint your user profile and its moderation protocol, which allows any user the opportunity to become a content moderator.

Uhive also uses its own token to enable the economy within Uhive, but unlike Bitclout, tokens are built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Twitter has weighed in. How are you getting ready for another outage?

So you vanquished burnout and survived another week.

Or maybe you didn’t. Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend report showed that 41% of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current job before next spring. It’s been called The Great Resignation or the Big Quit and motivations stem from things like changed priorities, turning side projects into careers, and pursuit of new skills or academics.

If so, we love that for you. Others can’t call it quits as easily or even choose a “work to live” lifestyle while pursuing hobbies in their free time. No matter who you are, stepping up to your desk on Monday can be tough. Even if you’re an entrepreneur, you may regularly need motivation to push yourself to your goals.

Work is a grind — but if it was a game too?

Make Work Fun is a “companion app for Notion” that gamifies your work so you can celebrate your wins in a way that’s trackable and fun. The makers at Co-x3 (a community of co-creators) first launched a tool to help you gamify your life back in July.

“[T]hat was a HUGE success... We knew we were onto something…The combination of adventure and community pushed me to level up faster and help my friends,” maker Conrad Lin wrote.

Now the Make Work Fun app enables you to gamify any Notion database and works with all templates. You can compete with others in the community, embark on quests, and build streaks to earn random rewards and top spots.

Reviews show early adopters are having a great time.

“By far the most elaborate productivity and gamification app I've come across. Most apps I've tried fall short in the aspect of tracking and visualizing progress over time… it never ceases to amaze me how these integrations work seamlessly.” Aaron Chong

“This genuinely takes the multiplayer experience for personal productivity to the next level. The onboarding is so easy & the experience after that is even better.” Nihit Khandelwal

Lin and the other makers have made Make Work Fun available for free. They’re also open-sourcing the code in another week, with a hacking session coming up on Saturday, October 8.