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Ads are back in full force and not everyone was expecting it.

“The venture capital world spent a decade betting against advertising, and it’s about to blow up in their faces,” Bryan Goldberg, CEO of Bustle, told the NY Times.

He was referring to how subscriptions have become the darling model of many industries — then 2020 happened. While people were stuck at home, online shopping climbed and hasn’t stopped since in a “post-pandemic Roaring Twenties economy.” Digital ad dollars are pouring in.

A report by Agency Group M showed digital media grew by more than 7% in 2020, projecting 22% growth in 2021. Google and Facebook make up about 87% of the growth according to the NY Times and Interactive Advertising Bureau.

This all could change now that Apple has rolled out its iOS update requiring your permission to track your online activity (Facebook is not happy). Nonetheless, since digital ads are here to stay, now’s a good time to see what makers launched to improve your advertising.

Audience Targeting
ExactBuyer: If your lookalike audiences aren't looking at your ads, they might be worth another look. This new API and data-enrichment tool was built by data scientists to improve your audience targeting with just-in-time updates.

Repixel 2.0: Let’s say you sell tennis balls — targeting a company that sells rackets sounds about right. This tool was built to help you share pixels and find partners in your niche.

Setup
Analyzify: If you have a Shopify store, Analyzify can help you set up Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Facebook Pixels, and Universal Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce without any coding expertise.

Management
ADYOUNEED: This new tool aims to simplify your ad process by giving you one place to create, manage, and optimize your ads across platforms.

We think you've heard this one before, but just in case: there are also a whole host of GPT-3 tools to help you with your ad copy.

Say what you want about MySpace — those pages had personality. Over the last decade, websites have become more streamlined and neat.

Now one maker has created a website builder that better enables people to unleash their creativity, but with an easy, no-code tool.

“There seems to be fewer and fewer personal websites — many of which now look increasingly similar — and, yet, more people than ever have some Graphic Design Lite experience (a la Snapchat & Instagram)” - XH

XH launched mmm.page on Product Hunt today and is receiving an incredible response from Tech Twitter.

mmm.page makes it easy to create collage-like websites (overlapping text, images, GIFs, YouTube videos) on desktop and mobile. The drag & drop builder and automatically responsive pages makes it “dead simple” to build a fun, functional site in no time. Over the last 24 hours, XH has re-tweeted a wave of personal websites created by early adopters.

Of course, the Product Hunt community is digging the freedom too.

“mmm.page makes web development more like scrapbooking, and it's a lot of fun! We can ignore all the technicalities of building a website and just get creative.” - Sreeram Venkitesh

To quote one Twitter user, @viktoriaa, “today is a great day to abandon your actual responsibilities and spend a stupid amount of time on redesigning your personal website.”

Don’t forget to add your voice on the launch page as well and let HK know what you want to see next.

Who else gets excited when they find out a friend just got the same wearable as you? Seeing someone you know get active can be exactly the motivator you need.

The Cabana Health app launched this week, syncing people in team-based communities regardless of the tech they use. Users can find, create, and join “cabanas” that centralize the wellness activity you’re already tracking in your other apps. Maker MacBrennan said:

“People accomplish more together, and now there's finally a place where you can escape the verticals every health app & wearable traps you in through a tech-agnostic social health interface :)”

The Product Hunt community was overwhelmingly optimistic about Cabana’s concept and mission.

“Love this idea, the health and well-being space is super interesting now that we're in a remote-first world (many of us at least)!” Kenneth Cassel

As Kenneth points out, health tech has seen a major boost over the last year, though much of the attention has been given to hardware and telehealth. On the former topic, Peloton’s and Tonal’s growth are regular conversation topics, but wearables are getting a boost too based on the recent $100M fundraise by Oura ring.

On the latter, telehealth is going through a watershed moment. Crunchbase reported that telehealth funding is supercharged at every stage across a wide variety of startups. When EverlyWell launched on Product Hunt four years ago, some struggled to see the value in at-home testing kits. Now the company is reporting 300% growth and has leveraged it to close a $175M Series D and acquire two companies to scale its services.

On Product Hunt, over the past 2 months alone we’ve seen remote monitoring of cancer patients in India, AI-supported joint pain management, and tele-therapy for Spanish-speaking people.

While we're enjoying the convenience and accessibility of health tech, Cabana Health’s tech-agnostic approach to bringing communities together feels unique and refreshing in the blossoming of this space.

We love stories about individuals who’ve chosen to share their knowledge with their community.

Figmaster is just that. It’s a new paid workbook plugin that helps individuals or design teams structure and update their Figma skills with an end product of a style guide and component library. Maker and product designer Mateusz Wierzbicki created the exercises to help others build a modern design system from scratch.

“My time is limited, so I can't help everyone. However, I always dreamed about creating an educational resource to share my knowledge about the design systems and workflow in Figma.”

Taking stock of the inventory in your plugin treasure chest is smart prep for any Figma master. We rounded up ten trending plugins from this year so far, for Figma and the company's new collaboration whiteboard, FigJam.

Phigma - Templates for your Product Hunt launch images

Stratum UI Design Kit - Universal kit for everyday interface work

Nucleus UI - Another UI component library

Elevation Scale - Shadow design system tool

QR Coder - QR code generator tool

Scribe - Tool for creating data-driven graphics

5,000+ Illustrations by Artify - Illustrations to search and import

Stratum Wireframe Kit - Component library for FigJam wireframing

Daily Task Prioritizer - Templates to help you plan in FigJam

Paywall Screens - Categorized paywall screens with template

Going into a bank to open an account will probably become as retro an act as burning a CD, thanks to identity verification startups.

This space has been growing and evolving. If you have opened a financial account online recently, you may have been asked to record a video of yourself speaking a specific prompt. This kind of tech is not only handy for the user, it powers a company’s process for satisfying KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) regulations.

Startups in this space have been working to make that process easier, quicker, and accessible to various industries and business sizes.

Case in point: Passbase which recently launch Biometric Authentication. Passbase launched its core product on Product Hunt less than a year ago — a “full-stack” solution enabling companies to integrate identity verification into their products, without code or natively with their API and SDKs. The Passbase founders have referred to their product as “Stripe for identity verification.”

The new iteration adds biometric authentication (along with more features and updated API). This means that, for companies using Passbase, once a user has completed the onboarding process and been verified, they can use biometrics (in this case, face ID) to authenticate themselves again, as needed while using a product.

Launches over the last year show how competitive this space is. In February, Persona, a fully automated identity verification suite, launched on Product Hunt followed by a $50M Series B. Like Passbase, Persona’s founders explained that their experience implementing identity verification in past jobs was full of pain points and stitched-together solutions. Maker Rick Song explained:

“We want to support every company with access to affordable identity verification solutions that can be integrated easily, without engineering bandwidth, and without having to commit to a costly contract.”

More recent Product Hunt launches in this space include Authentiq 2.0 and Invoid, an identity verification solution for India.

Each touts a familiar message about making identity verification accessible for more companies. With the tech in place, we’re eager to see what interesting use-cases pop up outside fintech.

Retail may be bouncing back in many places, but brick-and-mortar stores have a hot channel to compete with — WhatsApp. Fortunately, that might not be a bad thing. Loss of foot traffic has traditionally been especially difficult for small businesses, but a wave of new tech is changing that.

For starters, we recently wrote about startups changing the way you pay including Per Diem’s tools to help local SMBs like coffee shops. We also shared the Rare Things launch, an eCommerce site featuring world-class artisans with TikTok-esque snippets.

Then there’s messaging apps. Nait Jones of a16z told us in April about Pamper Nail Gallery, which built much of its business through hustle and messaging before joining the TxO accelerator. Apps like WhatsApp have become an (arguably unlikely) essential sales channel for small businesses in a grassroots way.

Chat: On one side of this space, we’re seeing tools that enable “conversational messaging” for businesses. That’s a fancy way of saying bots make users feel like they’re having personal, one-to-one conversations. Today Botsify launched a no-code WhatsApp Chatbot. This follows similar recent launches from Landbot 3.0, Morph, and WATI. These tools enable businesses to automate and scale their conversations with limited technical expertise.

Convert: Beyond chats, the browsing and payment experience is heating up — especially in India. Facebook has been working to meet demand. It rolled out Carts in WhatsApp in December, following a Catalog feature a year earlier for shoppers to see a business’s offering and request items. Beyond that though, most businesses and shoppers are left to exchange payment elsewhere. WhatsApp launched person-to-person payments in India and Brazil, but progress has been slow.

While Facebook deals with government regulations across countries, startups are offering solutions. BusinessOnBot, a recent YC alumn, recently launched its product enabling WhatsApp storefront ordering in India. Gupshup, a company with a 15 year presence in India made a partial-pivot into this space with a $100 million fundraise from Tiger Gobal. Meanwhile in Europe, Berlin-based Charles raised a €6.4 million seed round for its “conversational commerce” SaaS.

The bottom line: if you're an SMB, you're getting options.

This newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Alt.

Last month a Lebron James autographed rookie basketball card became the most expensive basketball card ever sold at $5.2 million. Sports fans may be experimenting with digital sports moments, but there’s no doubt that physical cards remain the OG.

In March we wrote about the launch of Alt and its $31M Series A led by Seven Seven Six plus notable investors including Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures. Alt is a platform that lets you invest in sports cards just like stocks. The launch drummed up interest from newbies to seasoned traders who get by on makeshift tracking tools.

"After seeing a Wayne Gretzky rookie card go for $1.3M, this is something I could get into. Great product."- Glen Creaser

"I went from checking Coinbase first thing in the morning to checking Alt. Never going back to excel ;-)" - Greg Rosen

Alt differentiates the buying process from its competitors in a couple of key ways. Every asset that you see for sale on Alt has already been authenticated and is sitting in Alt's bank-grade Vault. A purchase enables instant transfer of ownership and your Portfolio on Alt is updated to show the current market value of your assets, powered by Alt’s proprietary data model.

“Alt makes this possible with Alt Value which allows you to understand the value of your cards and track them over time. Their exchange makes it easy to find investment-grade assets and transact securely, with some of the lowest fees for sellers in the market.” - Alexis Ohanian

Those selling fees are a 1.5% transaction fee with no extra processing costs.

The team at Alt told us they’re currently building lending, grading services, escrow, and more — i.e. giving your sports cards the kind of treatment you’d expect when investing in a house.

You don’t actually have to be a sports fan to care about Alt, which is short for alternative investments. In full, the company is an exchange to trade alts — they’re just starting with sports cards. The model can apply to many assets: watches, sneakers, art, and more.

By taking a lot of concern out of alt trading — sketchy transactions, safe storage, lack of clarity on the valuation — Alt can attract investors of all types, from hobbyists to seasoned investors who want to diversify their portfolios.

An app launched last week designed for ephemeral, one-to-one, anonymous conversation. Remember those? This commenter does:

“It's like when you rode on the train with a complete stranger before the internet.. You were more willing to share intimate information and discuss topics… This app is like a digital version of this conversation.” - Mark Khramko

Postmodern. works by enabling timed conversations between strangers that last from 5 to 60 minutes, depending on the prompt you choose to discuss. Prompts are topics of conversation, which seem to have a nice balance of being relatable yet broad. For example, “I don’t want my job to define me, but I’m not sure what should.”

Postmodern.’s maker Nathanial explained his motivation for the app:

“It’s critical that we have the ability to intellectually explore without fear of social ramifications… Just two brains bouncing off of each other exploring the void.”

In a way, Postmodern. is the flipside of the dating apps we covered last month which use prompts to help you make lasting connections. Don’t expect anything permanent from Postmodern. — you won’t be able to return your conversations once they’re over (we suppose there’s always Craigslist missed connections).

Even those who don’t consider themselves to be social may find something for them in Postmodern.’s completely anonymous framework. After more than a year of separation, many of us are getting chatty and have been reminded of the value of human connection.

Here are 7 more products that make for good conversation.

Historico - Daily historical events in an iPhone widget

mindf***- Bad Unicorn brings us Headspace with profanity

Fish Swami - Put your epic catch on record to show your friends

Cappuccino - Record audio "beans" with friends; listen tomorrow

Read This Twice - What’s on Elon Musk's reading list? Find out.

Humit - If reddit and Spotify had a baby

It’s been almost a year since OpenAI introduced GPT-3, the language prediction model. TechCrunch called it “the tipping point for artificial intelligence” noting that it will soon power thousands of new startups and applications. That's probably not an exaggeration.

As a quick refresher, GPT-3, or Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, is trained on 175 billion parameters making it the largest transformer-based model in the world at the time of debut (Google researchers have since spoken about their Switch Transformer model that they say has been trained on 1.6-trillion parameters). As a transformer, GPT-3 is a deep learning model that mimics cognitive attention to decide what’s more important at every step as it processes input sequences.

Since its introduction, we’ve seen a lot of products launch that leverage all this artificial intelligence to develop new ways to process language-based tasks faster. A few have already gained great usage and fundraising traction (CopyAI just raised $2.9 million), and even though we’ve covered this before, there’s as much innovation as there are requests to hear what’s new in GPT-3-powered products.

Voices: Use AI voices to run your help desk or create ads

A/B testing: Optimise faster with A/B testing on autopilot

Sales emails: Get help with your sales emails and follow-ups

Fundraising emails: Or get help with pitching to investors

All the emails: Turn bullet points into an email in your own style

Long-form: Use Jarvis or ContentBot to write blogs and guides

Hiring: Create job descriptions and resumes faster (is the future of hiring all AI)?

Growth: Generate personalized growth strategies for your startup

Chatting: These shape bots have personality; Lila is a deep thinker

For those of you who love an open-source project, GPT-Neo is a grassroots project to create an open-source GPT-3 alternative.

"Everyone was obsessed with the idea of a 'Star Trek'-like replicator you could have in your home… But what we've learned is that 3D printing is a new manufacturing process that enables new applications to be built." - nTopology co-founder, Bradley Rothenberg, via Axios.

3D printing rose to the moment during the pandemic. For example, in New York, health care provider Northwell Health designed 3D-printed adapters to convert BiPAP machines (used to treat sleep apnea) into ventilators, and in India, HP has been working with healthcare providers to use 3D printing to shorten manufacturing time from months to days.

nTopology released its third iteration of its design and engineering software, which introduces real-time visualization powered by GPU acceleration. The bottom line without the jargon is that nTopology’s software expects to expedite the development of advanced 3D-printed products. Maker Alkaios Bournias Varotsis notes:

“This technology breakthrough will fundamentally change how mechanical engineers & industrial designers interact with complex geometry for advanced products… Even the most complex designs are rebuilt in a few seconds.”

Jiga, a B2B marketplace for custom manufacturing, also launched during the pandemic. Maker Yonatan Wolowelsky explained that Jiga works to make production faster by allowing makers to upload their 3D models, and connecting them with verified suppliers who can even give direct feedback to help produce complex parts.

Jiga’s vision is to be the standard communication platform for manufacturing. The team has also helped to supply ventilation machine parts to hospitals during shortages.

In manufacturing SaaS innovation, MakerOS launched its all-in-one software platform that’s as if “Autodesk, Salesforce, Trello, and Shopify had a baby”. In other words, it enables manufacturers, engineers, designers, and fabricators to facilitate product development with tools built for this industry, from CAD inspection tools to project management.

We're looking forward to seeing what else 3D-printing manufacturing will enable post COVID.