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Big, quiet Zoom classrooms are so 2020.

That’s an exaggeration but LearnTech really is evolving fast. Like MarTech or FinTech, LearnTech is a purposefully broad term so there’s a lot to look at.

One trend we’re seeing is personalization. Large class sizes have always been a topic of debate, remote and in-person. They are a strain on teachers, and one-size-fits-all doesn't work when it comes to learning. SparkStudio.co is approaching extracurricular learning with smaller cohorts. The company launched today with 1:4 live and online extracurricular classes for children.

Growic recently introduced its Customized Learning Platform, where maker Alina Bushlyakova explained the company’s personalized approach — “Growic is a completely new approach to education, where each student can learn exactly what they want, when they want and how they want.”

In LatAm, Filadd is helping students prepare for their entrance exams with 24/7 access to teachers. “We give a personalized experience… by partnering (sharing revenue) with experienced teachers and making them owners of the course, thus generating a high grade of commitment with the contents,” CEO Joaquín Olmedo explained.

Startups are also taking their shot on alternative learning from unconventional teachers. Previously mentioned SparkStudio’s extracurricular courses have curriculum designed by experts/artists. Gura allows anyone to be the teacher. It’s an all-in-one platform for running a live e-learning business. Whether you’re an expert in cryptocurrency or personal development, you can set up a course in minutes.

Learners is leveraging shared knowledge as well with its community of mentors, and today’s launch of Greenwork introduces free online courses for job seekers interested in clean energy positions.

All of these are only launches are just from the past month, and we haven’t even gotten to workspaces yet, like mmhmm (with its recent $100M raise) and Lessonspace, so we’ll leave you with those links.

It may not be tax season where you live but governments globally are asking for something from you all year long — your data.

Today, Kodex launched on Product Hunt. It’s a portal enabling companies to easily process, and respond to, information requests from governments and law enforcement all around the world.

How big is this issue? It’s a lot to dig into globally, but we’ll throw a few stats your way. According to a ProtonMail report, the U.S. government has made more than 163,000 user data requests in 2019 alone. Germany — 38,000 times the same year. ProtonMail itself reported a 510% increase in requests since 2010. Same for big tech, with Facebook receiving 8,241 requests from the UK government in the second half of 2020, according to data from Statista.

Big companies have scaled to deal with the requests. Kodex is working to make it all less of a nightmare for the rest.

“Tech giants like Facebook and Google have spent years and millions of dollars building secure online portals to easily comply with government requests – we built a secure online portal for everyone else. No more manually tracking emails & faxes in spreadsheets!”

Co-founder Matt Donahue was formerly doing Counterterrorism Intelligence for the FBI before he started Kodex. He explained:

“It was very surprising to see how even multi-billion dollar companies often struggled to comply with these legal orders. Currently, companies are forced to rely on manually tracking a complex web of emails, faxes, and spreadsheets.”

Co-founder Danny Mendoza, formerly at LendingClub working on fraud analysis, added that the company end-to-end encrypts each company's sensitive data whenever you send it to government agencies.

If these government requests are news to you, it’s worth noting that many companies already have processes in place for how they will protect your data securely when governments ask for it. Kodex’s goal is to make the process easier for more companies.

If you’ve ever felt remorse looking at racks of new clothing, you might already know — about 20% of apparel each year gets shredded or burned without ever being sold.

In the fashion industry, the most thorough sustainable production includes strategy on both what materials are used, and what process is used to produce. Terms like “made to order” and “circular production” roughly translate to better for the environment.

We were reminded of this with the launch of Rothy’s men’s line (targeting circularity), and Autumn Adeigbo (made-to-order), one of a16z’s TxO accelerator startups. Denim brand unspun counts itself among such highly sustainable brands and has just launched its new mobile app to elevate its experience.

Based in San Francisco and Hong Kong, unspun is a robotics and digital apparel company building custom jeans for each consumer, on-demand. The new app, officially in public beta, lets you 3D scan yourself for a custom-made pair of jeans, which unspun touts will be the perfect fit.

“No two customers ever get the same pants; these are built to your actual waist, hips, thighs, calf, ankles… all unique to you.” — Kevin Martin, cofounder

unspun counts H&M Foundation as one its investors. While that may confuse at first glance, Martin touches on the company’s bigger vision.

“We use our small brand as the concept car… and that sends the big brands... knocking on our door. We then power the same zero-inventory process for them (yes we're a fashion company with a SaaS product lol), which adds some commas to the tons of waste they can divert, their ultimate profits, and, yes— also our revenue.”

Something we’ve heard from makers in this space, including Martin, is that fashion is always at the forefront. unspun has set out to prove that by luring talent from companies like Levi’s. While the production method may be techie, a made-to-order product typically provides a higher quality product. So go ahead and...

A gen Z-style approach to sports viewing has arrived.

This year we’ve seen dating and social launches from makers who’ve recognized that existing technology doesn’t satisfy the way Gen Z prefers to share, consume, and interact. Now ephemeral, short-form (and may we say, more joy-inducing) content is coming to sports.

Over the weekend, Buzzer launched — a new way to tap in and watch your favorite sports moments live.

With Buzzer, people can follow their favorite sports stars or teams. They’ll get a notification when it’s time to catch a buzzer-beater moment and can watch it live. Live broadcast snippets start at 99 cents each. Longer streaming access is made available for specific events as well. Maker Noah Chestnut explained that sports fans no longer have to wait around, glued to the TV wondering what’s going to happen.

In an article posted by the makers, Buzzer CEO Bo Han told Bloomberg:

“We envision Buzzer becoming the discovery and curation tool that brings Gen Z fans back to live sports with simple access to ephemeral moments."

The new approach has gained the startup a $20M Series A with a gambit of investors including sports stars themselves like Naomi Osaka, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky.

Outside of Gen Z, the accessibility of lightning-in-a-bottle moments at your fingertips can appeal to any generation, which is helping NFTs gain early success among sports fans too (albeit, digital ownership and ephemeral content are somewhat contrasting concepts). Today, access to sports viewing is costly, hard to find, or requires an un-personalized subscription bundle. Investors are hoping to claim over $75 billion in value in the live sports market in the U.S. alone (it appears the app is only in the US for now).

Founded in 2020, Buzzer is launching on Product Hunt with partnerships with the NBA, NHL, and PGA. The new funding is expected to help expand such partnerships, as well as grow the team and improve the app’s social features.

It’s been quite a year already.

For many of us, it didn’t pan out as expected. In tech, the silver linings were found in unicorn herds, phoenixes rising from the ashes, and pandemic-made underdogs.

It seemed like every other day, we were talking about a new industry or space that's experiencing unprecedented growth from a new way of living, from EdTech to alts and NFTs.

H2 has already started off with a bang, but before we get too much deeper, we’re recapping the standout top launches from H1.

Contra - A new professional network for flexible work

“I've only been part of this community for about a week and... already I've gathered feedback on my work from professionals, gained access to book, video, and course resources relating to my field, helped people out with their queries, and so much more!” - Aishwarya Agrawal

Ray.so - Turn your code into beautiful images

“This is awesome! Wish it existed when I was building [my company], as we shared lots of code snippets on social and elsewhere. I love how simple and curated it is with the color schemes.” - Danny Halarewich

Audiblogs - Listen to any web article in your podcast player

“[A]bsolutely amazing! If you're anything like me and have a chrome window with a thousand tabs of articles that you'll definitely, absolutely, 100% find the time to read (lol), you need this.” - Nader Khalil

Persona - Identify verification for any use case

“10 lines of code for an entirely customizable identity verification system?? That's a game-changer. Count me in.”- Jake Disraeli

Open VC - Browse 2,200+ funds by investment criteria

"Love this! Such a useful tool for entrepreneurs working on researching their target investors." - Stephanie Rich

The team behind tl;dv may have been nervous about their launch yesterday, but they made a splash and blew a few minds with their introduction video.

tl;dv 1.0 provides a better way to catch up on notes post-meeting.

“[W]e found that it always takes way too much time to repeat and contextualize every important live meeting insight and takeaway, especially without the context, the emotions, or the visuals… in most cases, we still (have to) join too many live meetings out of FOMO.” - Raphael Allstadt, maker

With tl;dv, you can link your meeting minutes to the exact moment in your video recording & transcript. It works as a Chrome extension, and other core features include one-click record, video transcriptions (English so far), and share functions to popular apps and CRMs like Slack, Salesforce, and Notion.

The company is focusing on Google Meet to start, with “Zoom coming very soon.” It’s worth noting that tl;dv has a few competitors in this space, which is white-hot after remote and hybrid workplaces blew up over the last year and a half. For example, Google Meet users may be familiar with Otter.ai, and in Zoom land, Grain has been enjoying a great year and launched an update earlier this year.

It’s also clear from the community response that many people are hungry for better meetings.

“I've been waiting for a product like this for ages! Working in customer success, keeping track of notes in video calls is an absolute mess.” - Andrew Mertell

“It basically replaces the scrubbing bar and changes the game for how to take notes too.” - Daniel Giovacchini

"This is going to be so useful, congratulations on your launch. No more wall-of-text meeting notes!" - Blake Hunsicker

See what all the hype is about.

Referrals — everyone seems to love them.

Referral programs continue to grow in popularity and although there are companies that have been in this space a long time, we’ve seen a few new launches in sectors that are quickly growing.

Digital products

Social Checkout is an API for enabling customers to refer people and redeem group discounts. The idea for Social Checkout came after cofounder Benyam Ephrem implemented Stripe & PayPal payments for his business that provides technical prep for interviewees.

“In [this] niche, many people know others that would want the same product, but I had no out-of-the-box way to tap into this social capital.”

Social Checkout is in beta. The makers are currently focused first on similar customers — digital products like online courses and desktop apps.

Newsletters

If you’re a creator, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve googled referral programs as well. Being in this space ourselves, nary a week goes by that we don’t read a tweet about successful referral programs from companies like Morning Brew and the Skimm.

You may remember SparkLoop, which launched on Product Hunt last year with the tagline “the first referral tool for newsletters.” SparkLoop presented 1-click integration with email provider tools like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, making it easy for newsletter companies to add referrals directly into their product, just like Morning Brew does.

Competitors responded. Viral Loops launched its original referral product five years ago, but recently debuted its own newsletter product, designed specifically for writers and publishers. It follows GrowSurf. Also now a mature referral program provider, GrowSurf launched its own newsletter product earlier this year.

Then yesterday, Sparkloop revealed its latest hand with Magic Links. Magic Links eliminates email sign up forms altogether for newsletters that are cross-promoting with other newsletters — another popular tactic in this space.

It’s all great news for creators — the world just can’t seem to get enough of newsletters 😉.

It’s time to announce our Makers Festival – Green Earth edition winner (who will be collecting a sweet set of prizes!)

Hundreds of makers took part, raking in upvotes in the thousands. Congrats to all the participants — You thought on your toes and took the opportunity to challenge yourself.

The winner and runners up are:

First Place 😺🏆 - Ryan with Grow Feedback

Grow Feedback enables teams to share instant feedback via Slack. As you grow, so does your impact — Glow plants a tree every time you send & receive feedback. Ryan shared:

“Our team used the Green Earth festival as an opportunity to build a new ESG component into Grow. Planting real trees to celebrate our users growing together has been a much bigger hit than we could have ever imagined. Letting people choose where their trees get planted and giving them certificates is icing on the cake - people have even started sharing on social media. How cool is that!”

Runners up:

• Nuke My Email gets rid of useless, unread emails cluttering your inbox and costing the planet CO2. Maker, James Ivings, shared:

"While working on Leave Me Alone, we encountered a number of users who wanted to simply erase their ENTIRE inbox and start again! In our research, we found something surprising. It costs around 4g of CO2 for an email to be sent, read, and stored over its lifetime. Over 250 billion emails are daily, so these [unwanted] emails are having an immense impact on the environment!”

• Green Habit helps you form habits that help the earth, like shorter showers and turning off the lights. It's maker, Nathan, shared:

“GreenHabit solves the problem of people feeling their green habits are insignificant. Too often we give up on green habits because they are simply inconvenient or less comfortable. I set out to make your green habits stick and then amplify their impact by influencing others to do the same.”

Show some love to the makers and our big blue planet today:

We've been talking about “no-code” for a while now. Lately the term can feel like an umbrella that encompasses a whole lot. Our take is that makers are regularly pushing “the limits” of the space. A few new launches demonstrate recent growth.

Today, the team at Glide presented an overhaul to their app builder. Glide 1.0 launched two years ago for creating mobile apps from Google Sheets. With the update, users no longer have to use Sheets. Glide has its own built-in function, Glide Tables, that makes your potential app more scalable. Add features like collaboration tools and action sequences, and you have a quick way to create an app, now with even more power.

Also unsatisfied with leaving makers to string together no-code tools, Noloco launched last week, hyping their tool as a “complete no-code solution for the next generation.” Noloco’s approach to end-to-end app development includes features like a built-in database, design customization, and subscriptions. The last point is one of the main ways Noloco hopes to differentiate itself from Webflow. As one user puts it:

“It's like Webflow + Memberstack + Jetboost + Stripe all in one.” - BD Hoang

Despite the potential of a great all-in-one tool, it’s not uncommon to hear makers say they started with no-code tools until they scaled. In February, we watched the launch of Uiflow Studio, a tool for developers to build UIs and web app logic visually. The company told TechCrunch that its targeting companies at the point in which they begin designing their own UI. Designers can import Figma files, with all visual assets becoming ready-to-use custom components.

“Uiflow also brings enterprise scalability, performance, collaboration, and integrations with lots of APIs and Data Stores. That differentiates us from single-user focused no-code platforms.”

Co-founder Sol Eun also told the Product Hunt Community that Uiflow was heavily inspired by Unity, the game engine, to enable rapid productivity by building both client-side logic and UI/UX visually.

Uiflow gained over 1,200 signs ups after its Product Hunt launch. We’re thrilled to see these new tools gain traction among community favorites. 🙌

Creator tools have been making headlines lately but companies need upgraded video tools as much as ever.

JW Player announced a huge $100 million funding round last week following the growth of its video streaming traffic, which increased by nearly 200% over the last year. You may recognize the company — it’s not a hot fresh startup. It was JW Player that powered YouTube’s first video player back in 2008. Now the company powers video for over 600,000 apps and sites.

Dave Otten, JW Player CEO and founder, told TechCrunch that the company plans to use fundraising to tackle monetization-related features — which makes perfect sense. Monetization needs are not specific to the passion economy. As more companies move to paywall written content on their own sites, so goes video.

The company also plans to expand its live video and on-demand features — its live-streaming traffic, in particular, grew 400% over the last year.

Live streaming is seeing upgrades elsewhere too. In April, Be.live announced mobile streaming on Product Hunt. The company has been enabling 3rd party streaming since 2016 but professional live streaming often involves desktop tools. The new launch enables streaming and easy editing on the go with just your phone.

For its part, newcomer ClearMix is tackling the video-creation process for businesses, beginning to end. In its Product Hunt launch on Friday, ClearMix CEO Ian Folau noted that even though video editing tech has greatly evolved, companies still struggle with video production.

ClearMix takes a 100% remote approach. Customers start by ordering new videos online, a ClearMix producer directs the shoot with their HD webcam and proprietary recording studio, editors handle post-production, and you get your video in a library where you can download it or share as GIF.

Early adopters had this to say:

“Really good for people who want to start a Kickstarter but don't have the money for an expensive pro setup!” - Vagif Aliyev

“Video used to be really hard to do well and was something that only series A+ companies could do. Clearmix made it SO easy.” - Will Drevno

Creators make video look easy, but for marketers and startups that need a hand...