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As a community of tech lovers and early adopters, who can relate?:

You discover a new app and you’re thrilled. It sounds like it fits your needs exactly. You download it, register, and after two weeks of push notifications overwhelming your screen, you turn them off. Your usage falls along with your hopes of how it could help. Repeat for cluttered inboxes and unsubscribes.

In many cases, it’s not that you have a bad app on your hands — it’s the notifications. They’re annoying and even stress-inducing.

Yesterday, Courier launched on Product Hunt. In his introduction, founder Troy Goode brought up that episode of The Office where pseudo-entrepreneur Ryan Howard introduced his latest venture, WUPHF.

“Being plugged into every provider is the correct next step, but where they got it jokingly wrong was sending it to every provider at the same time.”

Courier is an API plus no-code studio that enables developers to deliver the right messages at the right time. It integrates with Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, MailGun, Twilio, and many more for quick automation workflows.

Courier’s launch follows a $10.1M Series A closed in September. Goode is ex-Eloqua, a marketing automation company acquired by Oracle, which is where he became frustrated by how many different tools teams were using to communicate with prospects and customers.

Although large companies often end up building their own communications infrastructure in-house, Courier hopes to provide a solution for smaller teams, and for larger ones who don’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel.

On the consumer side, Courier’s concerned with user preferences as well.

“Courier makes it easy for developers to build notifications that allow you to control whether you want to receive those notifications, when you want to receive them, and how you want them delivered.”

Goode also asked for examples of companies who do a good job or "suck extra bad" at sending notifications. See what people are saying and...

The world has started healing. By the world, we mean your social life.

Arts & entertainment has been one the hardest hit sectors during the pandemic. Startups, as well as creators, had no choice but to rethink their approach.

IRL, the social calendar app that launched on Product Hunt two years ago, even thrived. In a pivot of (we assume) desperation, IRL became “In Remote Life,” launched a redesigned app, went heavy on social integration, and re-focused on virtual events.

It worked. IRL just raised a $170M Series C, pushing it to unicorn status, now with a vision to become the WeChat of the West. The company is taking advantage of Gen Z's absence on Facebook.

“They essentially use Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. But there is no groups and events product for that generation,” CEO Abraham Shafi told TechCrunch.

Behaviors are shifting yet again with venues re-opening in many places. IRL is finding a comfortable seat at the intersection of online and offline. The mash-up of events and outing products that we’ve seen leave us predicting your social life will look just as hybrid as your work life. New products are hoping to take advantage of non-homebody fun-seekers like HULA, Hoppout!, and DUNK.

DUNK launched earlier this week — an app that enables you to surprise your friends with secret plans to a secret destination. Early adopters are happy to bite into in-person fun.

“Definitely using this on my next trip with the boys, this looks like a great way to motivate the troops ! ✈️” - James Hyot

"Love the idea 💡After a year or so of not being able to travel, the surprise element of DUNK makes it even more exciting for company events or friends get-together 🤩" - Nicolas

On the other hand, between Gen Z's interest in the metaverse and dispersed teams, virtual spaces are still hot and will keep growing, even if that Memoji audience at WWDC was a little bit creepy. We love to see products like Zen Republic HQ, a blockchain-based VR game park, and Pluto Auditorium, a virtual auditorium, reshape the way we think about connecting.

Steve Jobs famously said, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

It’s normal to try emulating those we admire, but many product makers know to take this one with a Himalayan lamp-size grain of salt. Customer research creates better products. The problem is, the process is usually ad hoc and time-intensive. In turn, makers rely on assumptions and can’t iterate fast enough.

We’ve seen a number of new products tackling customer research, including today’s launch of Great Question which combines the full process into one place. This early adopter sums it up well:

“Very excited to replace 3 apps, 2 airtable bases, a few zaps and a whole lot of headache for managing research!” - Darren Chait

With Great Question you can recruit participants with landing pages, manage and conduct research, and easily share with your team, leveraging interview transcriptions and tags.

A common goal we see among products in this space is to help makers integrate customer research into every new release. In that spirit, here are eight more new tools to help you get there.

User Hero - Store, parse, and analyze your data better with this research repository

UserLeap - Run targeted micro-surveys, powered by AI

Maze Templates - Leverage 50+ pre-built user tests and surveys

Surveys by HockeyStack - Create rich, targeted surveys including NPS and exit-intent forms

BlockSurvey 2.0 - Survey securely with a blockchain-powered alternative to Google Forms, etc.

Akin - Replace assumption-based personas with data-driven segments powered by AI

FeedbackLink - Direct happy customers to share and survey the rest

Viable - Sort, tag, and find insights in your helpdesk and survey feedback with GPT-3

“I think of habit formation as filling a bucket one drop at a time. Building that infrastructure, rather than building yourself up.”

That’s what Twitch co-founder Justin Kan told us about his approach to building healthy habits.

If you have trouble with habits, you’re not alone. It’s a common topic of discussion we see in the Product Hunt community and we all have our own stories to tell. Kan’s story included hitting a rock bottom moment and looking to exercises in meditation to find his way to his way out.

When he was worried he’d fail, he turned to Twitter and asked his followers to help keep him accountable — a kind of building in public, only building on your self infrastructure. That started his journey to launching Kin today, a social habit-forming app.

“I've been on a quest to improve my mental and physical well-being so I can present the best version of myself to the people around me. Amongst other things, this quest led me to start building Kin with @amittm, @damienkan, and @omarjalalzada.”

Kan and Omar Jalalzada, two of the co-founders, talked to us about their own unique journeys to understanding what drives successful habit formation (read more here). Kin’s goal is to help you create long-lasting changes and the makers have wrapped their learnings so far into the app, building off of concepts like breaking down your habits and even self-acceptance. Along with tracking, Kin bakes in accountability with chats and courses to help you learn about habit formation.

Chances are that you’re working on a habit right now, whether it’s reading more, exercise, working on your side project, or something else. Join us on Twitter Spaces today at 4pm PST to ask Kan and Jalazada about their expertise on building habits. Can’t make it? Drop your questions here.

The Kin team has also asked the Product Hunt community for feedback on the app, so don’t forget to share yours.👇

Let's be honest, many gamers are not as calm as the character in that GIF when they lose a game. Hopefully with a teacher, or SenpAI, you'll die less.

Makers Olcay Yilmazcoban and Berk Ozer launched the AI-based personal gaming assistant to the Product Hunt community today. SenpAI (a reference to the Japanese "senpai" which broadly means "teacher") helps gamers learn faster with key insights on how to play better. That includes pre-game setup analysis, in-game support, and after-game performance breakdowns and suggestions.

Yilmazcoban explained that the primary focus is to support low-to-middle level competitive gamers who would like to improve their gameplay. Casual gamers can also use SenpAI to save time and effort in their gaming journey and keep up with meta changes.

SenpAI was developed by Turkish startup, Falcon AI, who started the company to improve AI capabilities and focused on esports after seeing the high demand in the space.

Demand is definitely growing. Esports attracts more than 450 million enthusiasts and viewers, generating nearly $1.1 billion in revenue per year according to research firm NewZoo.

As gaming continues to grow, coaching products have been expanding with different approaches targeted towards both professionals and casual gamers. Voice-assistants like Fridai create a frictionless experience with walkthroughs and screenshots that don’t require you to move a finger. Marketplaces like Metafy match gamers with instructors.

Startups like these and Falcon AI have recognized the demand goes beyond career professionals.

“When I say esports, people may misunderstand me. Our focus includes both professional gamers and up-and-coming gamers who just want to improve their skills,” Ozer told TRT World.

SenpAI currently supports League of Legends and VALORANT with TFT coming soon.

Hugs to that HBO intern — we’ve been there.

On to our regular programming: As we told you yesterday, Spotify officially launched Greenroom this week, its audio room feature. The big tech fight for audio champion of the internet has people placing proverbial bets on their favorite fighter.

We’re experienced enough to know #winning doesn’t always mean getting there first, and that there’s room at the table for makers that find a way to differentiate themselves.

People aren’t over audio. It’s true — audio got a big boost from social distancing (Forbes reported that 60% of audio listening is done at home). Still, audio adoption is increasing. In 2020, an estimated 100 million people listened to a podcast each month, and the number is expected to increase to 125 million in 2022.

We’re cheering on these ten podcasting and social audio platforms, each offering a unique value to listeners.

Castyr - If TikTok and Goodreads had a podcast baby

Bang - Erotic audio story app for sexual wellbeing

Primer Rooms - Interactive audio experiences for kids

Quest - Soundbites with career advice from hands-on experts

Beams - Social podcasting for topics up to 90 seconds

Craphouse - Audio space for debating, brainstorming and any other crap

Reason - Listen to podcasts with friends and discuss topics with each other

Alpe Audio - Audio courses to master new topics on the go

Listenable - Bite-sized courses by well-loved experts

Audiotorium - Hyper local live audio performances

For those of you hungry for face-to-face time, put your headphones down and go enjoy waffles with a stranger.

The newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Masterworks.

We've written a lot about alt investments lately. Fine art is a tried and true alt.

The problem: If you want to own any in your portfolio, you’re going to need a $10,000,000 check.

Why own art at all? Hedge funds do it because that’s where they make the biggest returns. According to Citi, contemporary art prices crushed S&P 500 returns by 174% from 1995-2020, and over two-thirds of billionaire collectors allocate 20% or more of their portfolios to art.

Masterworks started disrupting the art industry in 2017 and has been a leader in this space. The team had recognized that only the wealthiest investors got the jump on the most groundbreaking technologies, like bitcoin for example, and re-invented the game for blue-chip art.

Many think of fine art as the largest un-securitzed asset class (worth $1.7 trillion), meaning the value of a piece of work can’t be pooled into a group of tradeable assets, like a company does with its public stock. That’s exactly what Masterworks did though. The company has purchased over $150M in art and has amassed over 165K users. With their proprietary art Price Database, they took 75,000 data points from 6,000 artists and auction sales to build a comprehensive art database, investment platform, and secondary market for fine art.

Since its launch, Masterworks has become the largest platform for investing in blue-chip art from artists like Banksy, KAWS, and Picasso.

Here’s a preview from the database.

1. Gerhard Richter, A B, Still. Purchase Price $264K, Sale Price: $33.98M. 128x return
2. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled. Purchase Price: $121,762. Sale Price: $29.3M. 420x return
3. Christopher Wool, If You. Purchase Price: $305,000. Sale price: $23.7M. 77x return.

The team at Masterworks has been working to democratize ownership of high-end artwork because they’ve seen the returns for investors.

Now they have released the database to everyone with no strings attached so you can browse artwork for free. The database and matching algorithm make it simple to see the value of the artwork and what your investment can deliver.

Product Hunt subscribers are getting first dibs. You can skip the 15,000 person waitlist by clicking below. See disclaimer.

This writer loves a great salesperson (literally married to one.)

Still, the message in the TestBox launch video rings true. Trying new software, vetting it, and getting your team on the same page can turn into a full-time job. While the tools and techniques around enterprise sales evolve regularly, the process itself has changed little in comparison, especially for the customer.

The makers of TestBox introduced their customer-led buying experience to the Product Hunt community yesterday. Frustrated with their experiences around sales pitches, demo trials, and long wait times, they sought to innovate the buying process.

“TestBox gives buyers a true side-by-side experience of each product so buyers can test if each solution will truly work for their team. It’s also super easy for buyers to track their feedback on each product and collaborate with their teams to ensure that they make the right decision the first time.” Sam Senior

So far, the Product Hunt community is eager to see a new buying model.

“This is epic - I HATE the enterprise sales process from a buyer's perspective and I'm keen to see this problem fixed.” - Rami Kalai

TestBox is launching with mostly Customer Support software available to test, including Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Hubspot. The makers are working to expand verticals and vendors.

Peter, a TestBox cofounder, gave some insight into some of the challenges and obstacles the team is tackling, from securely embedding products into the platform to building environments that serve each user as they try the software.

“Over the coming months, you’ll see us build out our TestBox for Sales, TestBox Insights, and move into more and more verticals.”

If you have any suggestions for the TestBox team, don’t forget to share.

Another crypto trading platform? Why not!

Today Coinrule launched to the Product Hunt community with its own unique selling proposition focused on helping new and hobbyist traders invest in crypto with automation tools — emphasis: no bots.

“We built Coinrule because the world of finance is changing and most markets are managed by bots and run by investment banks. That brings inequality, hobbyist traders have few tools to compete and not much access to good investment opportunities.” - Gabriele Musella, maker

With Coinrule, users automate their trading by setting up a system of rules. Bitcoin down 2%? Maybe you’ll want to create a rule to buy Ethereum with specific conditions set on volume, price, or market cap.

Early adopters have taken to Coinrule’s design-first approach and lack of jargon.

“Power to the people, automated trading designed to fit into your pocket. This is a fantastic venture debunking the idea that you have to be big to win. The truth is you have to be smart to win.” - Steven Hess

“What I like most in this product is how easy it is to setup a rule, test it in a demo account and take it live” - Tiago Santos

Coinrule has launched with integrations to over ten of the most popular exchanges including Binance and Coinbase. Commenters asked about competitors that use two increasingly popular strategies for trading – bots and copy-trading.

The former is generally what Coinrule is steering away from.

“We believe that normal people are able to build automations without needing 'black box' bots running for them.”

In regards to copy-trading, the makers of Coinrule explained to a few interested traders that a feature is in the works. Copy-trading and social trading have been made popular at different scales by platforms like eToro and Public. While social trading often takes the form of sharing or chating about other people’s investments, copy-trading can enable investors to simply duplicate the trading actions of popular investors, or their friends, with the click of a button.

Which strategies work best for traders depends on their level of experience, risk tolerance, and how much time they want to spend on trading. If you tend to be swayed by "buy the dip" tweets, it might be a good time to...

Last month we wrote about the growing space of identity verification with the launch of Persona, which its founders have called “Stripe for identity verification.”

Not to be outdone, Stripe has just launched Stripe Identity. The new product lets businesses programmatically confirm the identity of global users. In other words, Stripe’s making it easier for makers to confirm their users are who they say they are.

Like its competitors, Stripe Identity will make identity verification, which is normally cumbersome and complex to build and execute, more accessible to businesses.

Stripe users get the benefit of having identity tools centralized among Stripe’s other core business operations so they don’t have to hop between payments, subscriptions, and verification. Verification can start with grabbing a link from your Stripe dashboard (i.e. no-code), or can scale to embedded verification using Stripe’s pre-built libraries and SDKs.

Stripe Identity rounds out a number of impressive expansions from the company recently:

Stripe Tax - Calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST with one line of code

Stripe Payment Links - A no-code way to create payment pages in just a few clicks

Stripe Invoicing - Create and send a Stripe-hosted invoice in minutes, without code

Stripe Treasury - Embed financial services in your platform

That’s not including what they’ve been working on over the last twelve months.

Stripe Climate - Direct a fraction of your revenue toward initiatives that remove carbon

Stripe Billing Customer Portal - Let customers manage their subscriptions

This product growth was to be expected after Stripe closed a $600M fundraising round in March at a valuation of $95 billion. Co-founder John Collison explained that the company planned to use much of the raise to invest in Europe, telling TechCrunch:

“Whether in fintech, mobility, retail or SaaS, the growth opportunity for the European digital economy is immense.”

Last week’s release of Stripe Tax was the perfect example of Stripe’s execution. Stripe Tax was built out of Stripe’s Dublin Engineering Hub, and together the products take the company one step closer to Collison’s goal of building a global payments and treasury network that works everywhere.