The Leaderboard
Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Sometimes simple actions are the most satisfying.
Checking Google Calendar in a click.
Snipping highlights to Notion from anywhere.
Pasting copy and formulas from an arsenal of your creation.
Collapsing your tabs — you’ll need them later.
Telling YouTube ads to f*ck off already.
Here are eight highlights from the world of extensions over the last year.
Hijack Your Feed - Replace Twitter ads with eye-catching to-dos.
“The personal feed is one of the most influential inventions in computation to date… We were curious what a product that allows you to hijack your feed to work for You, instead of advertisers, looked like” - Jason Yuan, maker
Raindrop.io 5.0 - Bookmark everything, with full-text search.
“This cuts out so much effort in the post-bookmarking "processing" [that] nags me constantly.” - Nida Nizam, commenter
Button for Google Calendar - See your schedule and join meetings in a click.
“Saves me extra time on typing and less 1 click - might seem small, but it’s not for someone who uses calendar a lot!” - Alex Zhezherov, commentor
CSS Scan Pro 2.0 - Hover, get CSS, copy and export.
“I launched [CSS Scan Pro] with the vision of re-imagining the Devtools for web design.” - Guilherme Rizzo, maker
compose.ai - Turn bulleted lists into emails.
"I waste so much much time going from that 'bullet point' version... to something that sounds like reasonably coherent english!” - Brian Sierakowski, commenter
Trove - Create highlights and comments across the internet.
“Context switching sucks. There's so much interesting information out there that I want to collect... saving highlights on any page is now just a click away.” - Akshath Sivaprasad, maker
Text Blaze - Eliminate repetitive typing with saved snippets.
“You can start saving hours of repetitive typing, ...create dynamic snippets using formulas, and form fields and collaborate with your colleagues on shared snippets.” – Dan Barak, maker
Wardrobe for Chrome - Keep tabs tucked away.
“I love how my browser is not cluttered anymore” - Lyviama Uguaynh, commenter
Don't forget to tell those YouTube ads to F*ckOff (no revenue or makers are harmed in the use of this product).
A new app called Superlocal is here to help you connect with your local area — but differently from how Nextdoor does it.
“The closest we've seen a social platform come to connecting people locally is Nextdoor. You could argue that, while their product does get people nearby communicating more, it often drives people further apart. Superlocal exists to help us feel better connected to where we live, making us happier and more empathetic towards our community." - Alex Kehr, CEO of Superlocal
Superlocal wants you to love where you live. It’s focused on creating more positive social interactions with:
- Images requiring location tags. Kehr says this subconsciously promotes showing off where you live.
- Requiring tags based on current location with the goal of making tagging authentic and casual.
- The ability to follow people in other cities to stay connected to your old hood.
Meanwhile, Nextdoor has been working on Craigslisty features. It noticed buy/sell listings on the app increased by 80% since the start of 2020 — 25% of the listings advertised free stuff. Last week, Nextdoor launched a Free Finds feature to browse free items in the neighborhood. You don’t have to be a member to scroll through free listings, but you will have to sign-up to actually contact the seller (the growth hackers are watching).
Facebook? It wants a bigger piece of what Nextdoor built (It must be doing plenty right with whispers of an IPO are in the air). Facebook launched Neighborhoods in Canada last month which is essentially a Nextdoor clone.
Launching in what’s recognized as one of the friendliest countries in the world seems like a good start, eh?
What’s the blocker holding back computer vision AI (i.e. the technology that trains computers to interpret images and videos) from solving the hardest problems we face today?
According to Eric Landau, it’s the difficulty of creating usable, labeled, training datasets.
“That’s why we built Cord, a platform that can automate the data annotation process for computer vision use cases.”
We’ve briefly touched on the amount of data companies use to train AI models. Google is using all of your failed CAPTCHA attempts to train its AI and their latest Switch Transformer model (although an NLP) reportedly has been trained on 1.6 trillion parameters. The point: AI models need a lot of training data and makers can use help with annotation.
Cord automates the creation of training data through a “micro-model approach” so AI makers can build computer vision applications faster.
Landau explains how the micro-model tool works (summarized for readability):
- Define the set of questions you are asking the data.
- Do a handful of manual annotations to start teaching the system what you want to annotate.
- Build a micro-model.
- Run model, review the predictions, and retrain.
Sounds simple enough but this image helps for the non-technicals, too.
Landau says that Cord is already being used to help build datasets for computer vision applications that include the diagnosis of cancer, detection of people in danger in construction sites, and management of small business inventories.
The Product Hunt community is warmly welcoming Cord.
“Would've loved this in my previous gig where I was managing a team of computer visions experts who were always starving for properly annotated data sets.” - Kevin Simons
“Labelling training data is often the hardest part of ML projects. Glad to see someone tackling this part of the modelling pipeline!” - Elena Udodova
“Our ML team at Uber would have wished they something like this back in the days to label their data!” - Palle Broe
Take a look at the launch page to discover more potential verticals for Cord and how it differs from competitor CVAT in the comments.
“Interior design + rental furniture, all-inclusive?” Sounds like a good deal to some in the community!
That’s what Pabio is offering with its new monthly subscription service for your apartment furniture.
The Rent The Runway-esque model as applied to home is already being used by SMBs and startups globally — notably Feather in the US and Harth in the UK (Pabio is in Switzerland for now with plans to expand soon). Some competitors offer interior design consultation, but that mostly translates to site visits and mood boards. Pabio is differentiating itself by combining interior design know-how with technology.
“The user goes through a virtual onboarding questionnaire and tells us their interior design preferences. Based on their floor plan, Pabio automatically generates a photorealistic 3D model of the apartment with furniture and decor items. We do this with our proprietary rendering technology.” - Carlo Badini, co-founder of Pabio
Rendering technology along with AR has been making its way into more of our homes over the last five years. Ikea, for example, has been a trailblazer in this space, being one of the first to launch an AR furniture experience with Apple’s ARKit in 2017 and acquiring startups like AI imaging Geomagical Labs just last year. Many more have followed suit.
There is still human touch involved in your Pabio experience. Co-founder Anand Chowdhary explains:
“A professional, human, interior designer picks furniture based on your preferences (we do a phone call to get to know you better)... They are assisted by our friendly robots, of course!”
Much of the rest, from scheduling deliveries to insurance claims, is digital. Aside from convenience, Pabio cites all the benefits you would expect and hope for when renting high-quality furniture: always-on style, flexibility, and environment-friendly goods.
Plus, you don’t have to twist a friends' arm to help you move for a measly slice of pizza since Pabio manages that too.
While products that market themselves as open-source alternatives to X may still have an air of rebellion, open-source founders regularly view open-source as the only option to achieve their mission.
Baily Pumfleet told us:
“It was very clear from the start that [Calendso] will always be open-source, because we believe that scheduling should be accessible to everyone.”
John O’Nolan told us:
“Since the idea behind Ghost was to build the best software for publishers and journalists, it made a lot of sense to structure as a non-profit SaaS company, making open-source software.
Among today’s launches is an open-source alternative to Retool, and along with it, we rounded up 7 of the biggest open-source launches from the last year.
ToolJet (like Retool)
App builder tool for building on top of the data using
Calendso (like Calendly)
Calendar and scheduling tool to integrate into your product
Jitsu (like Segment/Fivetran)
Event collection and data integration
Screenity (like Loom)
Screen recording and sharing
Chatwoot (like Zendesk/Intercom)
Omnichannel communication platform
Athens Research (like Roam Research)
Knowledge graph for notetaking, research, and documentation
Porter (like Heroku)
Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud provider
Jam (like Clubhouse)
Clubhouse-like audio rooms as a service
For a weekly dose of open-source, check out Console, a new newsletter from Jackson Kelley, an engineer from the Amazon Alexa team. Console dives deep into a new open-source project and the developer behind it.
Earlier this week, Belvo announced a $43M Series A which the company believes is the largest Series A ever for a Latin American fintech company.
The YC-backed startup launched on Product Hunt a year ago with its Open Banking API platform to enable apps to connect to bank accounts with ease. Its founders recently told TechCrunch that their goals are similar to Plaid when it comes to open banking or open finance in that Belvo is “working to democratize access to financial data and empower end-users to port that data and share [it].”
We’ve previously touched on other products targeting the under and unbanked LATAM region. Belvo’s funding also reflects a continued trend towards a developer-first model for startups that leverages the utility of APIs.
Alpaca is in this cohort too having raised $10M last autumn along with a slew of other API startups with large funding rounds. Alpaca has used its funding to help accelerate building new features and products.
“I'm impressed by your shipping cadence!” - Hiten Shah commented.
Same. Since we covered Alpaca’s Fractional Trading API in late March, the company has launched Alpaca Broker API and Alpaca Data API.
Alpaca’s Broker API packages an end-to-end brokerage experience (opening accounts, money movements, fractional trading, etc.) for customers. The company partnered with Midas and Gotrade for their launch — the first international fintech trading apps to launch on Alpaca. The former, Midas, provides access to Turkish stock markets (as well as the US).
The latter, Gotrade, is another YC-backed startup that launched on Product Hunt last week. Built on the Alpaca API, the app allows anyone in the world (150 countries outside of the US) to invest in fractional shares of US stocks. Founder Rohit Mulani explained:
“Gotrade was born out of a personal frustration when we tried to get access to the US markets ourselves from Singapore. Gotrade levels the playing field between the haves and the have-nots. A farmer in Southeast Asia or a student in South America can own a fraction of the same portfolio as Warren Buffett.”
We want to note that all investors should understand any tax implications before investing, but you can take a look at your options to start:
It’s the billion-dollar question: How do you know if something is a good idea?
Two new products launched this week that empower makers to test and validate their ideas, helping to separate the good ones from the bad ones and ones that need improvement.
For makers and aspiring founders who need hands-on support to get to the starting line, there’s Day Zero.
Day Zero is an iteration from the founder of Day One, a fellowship for early-stage founders. You might see where this is going. Day Zero is a community for founders in their formative stages. The Day Zero community helps people to explore business ideas alongside serial founders and industry experts. New and aspiring founders can gain the tools and mentorship they need to ideate and validate their ideas “so your next big thing doesn't stay inside your head.”
Early Day Zero community members shared their experience:
“This product makes it feel *good* to scratch that entrepreneurial itch without spending a lot of $, quitting a job, or needing to announce it to the world” - Alifya Valiji
For makers who are already running or ready to start, the first step is often testing. Maker Avi Muchnick was used to creating burner pages to test his ideas but found that the tools and process for it were cumbersome.
“I would use Squarespace's website builders to spin up fake pages with surveys attached, and then would take out Google ads against those pages. Bottom line, this was a major process.”
Muchnick built Burner Page to allow makers to be up and running with tests in 60 seconds. He created the product first for himself and, after validating the idea with early testers, decided to focus on Burner Page. The Product Community has welcomed the new tool.
“I think this product is an amazing idea for young entrepreneurs. It helps get their feet wet...” Gidharee Saran
We know what it’s like to have a head full of swirling ideas or even just one gnawing at you. It can feel both exciting and overwhelming. Our best advice:
Spaces was one of those drops but was just one of a slew of product updates recently announced by Twitter. The two most prominent reasons for this uptick of features? The creator renaissance and the realization that money has been waiting for Twitter in the creator economy.
Not long after its initial introduction of Spaces in December, Twitter acquired Revue (newsletter platform similar to Substack) and Breaker (social podcasting) followed by its launch of the Tip Jar. When you put all the pieces together, you can see that Twitter is working on creating a mega-space for creators. Few could have guessed Twitter’s first foray into being an actual content generator would be on the topic of weather.
Twitter has teamed up with Eric Holthaus, "Rebel Nerd of Meteorology,” (and a total of 18 local meteorologist contributors) to launch Tomorrow a local weather news service that uses all of the creator products Twitter has added. Twitter's VP of Product, Mike Park, told Axios:
“It’s the largest collective of writers and experts we’ve launched with.”
Look out for long-form content, live audio sessions, ticketed virtual events, and Q&A where members will be able to ask questions to climate experts during weather-driven breaking news.
This is just the start of the company’s new model to invest in local collectives where audiences fund local writers and creators with low overhead. The model will help Twitter’s bottom line, which is great for the company since ad revenue has been stagnant. Park explained to Axios that “it will soon get to a place where video monetization is one among several revenue models on Twitter.”
In retrospect, weather seems like an excellent focus for Twitter due to the urgency of climate change and the platform’s role as a breaking news distributor.
We’re wondering what type of creators Twitter will tap into next. Ideas?
Makers Festival is back and this time we’re building for a Green Earth.
When we chose this year’s theme, we considered many of the trends currently sweeping through tech, culture, and the Product Hunt website. The problems our planet is facing are the ones we believe are most urgent.
Fortunately, the ideas this community can develop never fail to surprise us— even in a pinch. From software that can help tackle corporate carbon footprint to countertop devices for composting, we’ve seen launches that enable a green future. Let’s see how far we can push this.
Like past Makers Festivals, this is an inclusive virtual event. The planet doesn’t care if your product is no code or code so neither do we. You can fly solo or pull together a team (we’re all remote pros now, right?). Here's the timeline:
June 1 (Today): Registration opens
June 7: Submissions open
June 21: Voting opens
June 25: Voting closes
June 30: Winners announced
There are really great prizes on the table for Makers Festival winners (if helping planet earth isn’t enough) like tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt, a CMS plan from Webflow, a Founders Club subscription, Product Hunt swag, and a coveted Silver Kitty trophy.
Thanks to our partners — TechCrunch, Trends by the Hustle, and Webflow — who are helping to make this Makers Festival a success.
Need inspiration to get started? There’s no better place than Product Hunt. Browse through more new and trending products in Green Tech. You can also look to past winners for stories of makers who remind us that weekend projects can turn into venture-backed companies.
But first, register. 👇
Last week, Pitch raised an $85 million Series B to “unify the fragmented workflow of presenting.” Pitch has quickly grown its offense against PowerPoint for the past two years, launching publically to the world last October and following with its presentation templates in March.
The Berlin-based company hasn’t been shy about the legacy elephants in the room, telling Reuters its software is “a PowerPoint killer.” CEO and co-founder Christian Reber is emboldened by his past experience with Microsoft, who purchased his product Wunderlist back in 2015, only to sunset it for Microsoft’s own competing service, To-Do.
Reber may have a bone to pick but the company’s vision for pitch decks is reaching beyond less lackluster meetings. Reber explains in a blog that the rest of 2021 is jam-packed with major improvements including advanced analytics and a full publishing and content ecosystem. Picture profile pages for creators to publish their storytelling and thoughts. Reber wrote:
“Our vision is to turn Pitch into a thriving destination for the world's best thinkers and makers to share revolutionary ideas.”
Pitch isn’t the only company looking to disrupt this space, which is ripe for change. After all, Powerpoint launched back in 1987. Even with Keynote and Slides (and Google’s latest announcements), Pitch shows there’s more in presentations we didn’t even know we were missing.
Canva launched its expansion into Presentations last month. Looping 9,000 presentation templates in with Canva’s other features — 100 million design assets, real-time collaboration — makes Canva Presentations a powerful tool.
Canva’s original audience is rich with users who either have little design skill or no time to waste. On the other end is Adobe. Adobe has honed in on designers with its new Presentations Adobe XD plugin. Maker Lance Shields explains:
“The inspiration to build this tool came from years of experience as designers ourselves spending countless hours building slide decks to explain design decisions. Finally, there is a presentation tool for designers!”
Each company’s approach shows how much room there is to grow in this space. Also, competition breeds better tech and it’s nice to finally have options.