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In an unusual time, Apple held an unusual virtual Fall event revealing new hardware and software, but leaving out the much anticipated iPhone.

Here's a quick recap of the highlights ICYMI:

⌚️ Watch SE is a new, more affordable watch (starting at $279) with fall detection, advanced fitness features, and Family Setup with watchOS 7.

🩸 Watch Series 6 expands the health capabilities of previous models with a new feature measuring blood oxygen levels. Should be available from Sep 18, starting at $399.

✏️ iPad 8th Gen features the Neural Engine, updated hardware, and a low price tag of $329 for the basic model.

🆔 New iPad Air features an all-new and larger screen design (similar to iPad Pro), next-generation Touch ID and it comes in a bunch of pretty colors. Should be available next month starting at $599.

🏃‍♂️ Fitness+ is a new personalized fitness experience built for Apple Watch and can be used in combination with iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. Clear launch date is not yet available, but Apple promised it’s arriving later this year.

🍏 Apple One offers Music, TV+, Arcade, News+, Fitness+, and iCloud in one simple plan promising you the biggest bang, binge, and blast for your buck. Launching later this Fall with a starting price of $14.99/mo.

And finally, the new iOS updates (iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and WatchOS 7) are coming today across the Apple device lineup around the world.

TLDR; Apple revealed new Watch Series 6 and SE, updated iPad, redesigned iPad Air, and announced Fitness+ and Apple One subscriptions.

What are you most excited about?

Hi, I’m Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, you might know me as Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones, and I’m excited to share Dandi with you.

For the past 4 years, I have been lucky enough to work for the United Nations Development Programme as a goodwill ambassador. Not only have I seen the real challenges we face, but I’ve met people around the world who are trying to make it a better place.

One thing these people all have in common is that they need to spend way too much time fundraising, branding and networking – and less time doing the important work.

So we built Dandi. Through technology, video content and data, we’re helping grassroots projects and nonprofits get the funding they need to make real, positive change in their communities, and less time on all that other stuff.

You can use Dandi to discover and connect with projects in your local area, or if you’re involved with a nonprofit you can apply to our community funding program.

This year especially, challenges can feel overwhelming. We hope Dandi can give a little power back to those people seeking to make a positive impact in their community.

We will be available to answer questions over on our launch page. So please ask us anything! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Thank you,

Nikolaj

Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster. That’s before we even start talking pandemics, market crashes, and natural disasters (hello, 2020). A support network can be a safety net for founders in more ways than just financial.

The recently launched FounderPool aims to de-risk startup founding by pooling equity and creating a community of founders mutually invested in each other's success.

While many people have talked about exploring startup risk diversification, nothing has taken off yet. Chandra Duggirala, the CEO of FounderPool, explains their approach below:

”You put a percentage of your equity into a pool alongside other founders you respect. All founders in a pool are invested in each other and are incentivized to help each other succeed. The most interesting thing about this is that you get exposure to a bunch of startups not by forking over cold, post-tax cash, but your common stock.”

The community seems to resonate with the idea with over 1,000 upvotes, together with 100 companies that have collectively raised $1+ Billion and joined the pool.

The benefits can exceed the purely financial, it works similar to insurance protecting you from losing it all. “Unfortunately, when startups fail, most founders can’t just start over. Responsibilities grow, opportunity costs mount, and your risk tolerance goes down fast. Many founders are forced to give up their dream and get back to a 9-5 job.” – Duggirala

This initiative looks promising. If you’re a VC-backed founder and you’re comfortable with up to a small piece of your equity in exchange for reduced risk, apply for an invite.

Today's newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Stripe.

Our guess is that most of you have heard of Stripe Checkout — you’ve maybe even integrated it into your own site (we have). Yesterday, Stripe launched the new version of Checkout on Product Hunt. Stripe have built this, quite literally, 'so you don't have to.'

For anyone not in the know, Stripe Checkout is a prebuilt, hosted payment page optimized for conversions, now with:

⚙️ Address auto-complete and real-time card validation
💻 Multi-device functionality
📱 Apple Pay and Google Pay
🌐 Support for 25+ languages and 135+ currencies
🌍 10 international payment methods
🎨 Customization with your logo and brand colors

These features are intended to save you time (and hundreds of lines of code) to focus on your actual product. Their demo does a pretty good job of showing how it works. They’ve also made it easier to integrate Checkout across use cases, like platform payments and subscriptions. And of course - it works with Stripe's customer billing portal which lets your subscribers update their payment details and manage their subscriptions without needing to reach out to your support team. A pretty nifty time saver.

Here’s what the Product Hunt community had to say:

"I Love Stripe Checkout. It's super easy to implement and manage." - Sujith

"Instead of building one from scratch we can just use this! Will save us so much time." - Philip

"I've been using Checkout for a couple months now and I'm super excited you guys finally released the coupons for one-time payments! 🎉 Can't wait to start using it. Nice work!!" — Spencer

Dare we say it: if you’re looking for the fastest way to integrate Stripe, you may want to… check it out. 🥁

The summer may be coming to an end for some, but this doesn't mean summer vibes need to be over too.

Poolside FM just launched its hotly anticipated iPhone app. Now you can enjoy summer vibes all day, every day.

If you’re familiar with Poolside FM, you already know it’s an instant download. If you’ve never heard of it, well, you can thank me later 😉.

Starting out as an experimental web player, Poolside FM is a summer music radio station that pairs nostalgic retro graphics from the 80s with feel-good electro and disco tunes. You can listen to 5 different channels: Poolside FM, Indie Summer, Hangover Club, Tokyo Disco, and Friday Nite Heat.

Trust us, this app is rad. Just look at what the community has to say about it:

“TODAY IS A GOOD DAY!!!” – Razzy Lee

“I've paid yearly for Spotify and not using it for 3 months because of Poolside FM. Great for background music while working. 🌴” – Yigit Pinarbasi

“App is snappy AF and UX of the app is also great! I already replaced the spotify app I had in my iphones dock with poolside. Rock on!” – Ignacio

“Me: I want to catch the last bit of summer fun with Poolside FM Poolside FM: summer now lasts all year long!” – Jun Gong

Poolside may become your favorite place to chill and take a break from 2020.

Best of all, it's free.

Texting is the new email.

83% of millennials open SMS messages within 90 seconds of receiving them, according to an OpenMarket study.

Yesterday, Lio Slama launched Neo, an SMS bot and CRM software built to drive revenue through texting.

SMS marketing is a huge opportunity for companies. Statista reports that nearly half (44%+) of the world’s population owns a smartphone.

The maker of Neo, asks, “Why can’t we chat with small businesses through SMS the same way we text our friends?” And it’s a valid question, given that we all carry our phones everywhere and open funny GIFs from friends pretty much instantly.

Let the facts talk, engagement stats compared to email are mind-blowing, Sama reports, “Email open rate is 15% where SMS is 98%. Email response rate is 6% where SMS is 46%.”

We all use our phones to text friends daily. It's familiar and personal. Companies like Neo and Community.com are making it easy for companies to text customers like you would your friends, and are seeing pretty interesting engagement rates.

You can even text us on (415) 481-3148 for a pre-launch surprise each Friday (if you're based in the US or Canada).

Regardless of a well-received launch, they should definitely get a cat! (Check the product for more context.)

If you’re interested in SMS marketing and tools, have a look at these:

Clerk is the texting (SMS/MMS) solution built for Slack.

SMS Bot Creator automates your SMS replies using a trainable bot.

Botsify is a chatbot builder (including SMS textbot) with lots of integrations.

Really Good Texts curates ridiculously good text marketing campaigns.

Privy Text provides text message marketing for small and growing ecommerce brands.

SMS Marketing Examples collects the world's best SMS marketing case-studies.

What does a lifehacker and NBA Star have in common with you and me? Sleep.

Yesterday Pzizz launched a big update to its sleeping app which originally launched in 2006.

Pzizzis one of the OG sleep apps. This app combines scientific research with internal learnings to create “Dreamscapes” tailored to improve your sleep cycle.

After nearly 15 years, Pzizz made its name in the space. NBA pros, seasoned journalists, and celebrities swear by it. Some claim it cured their insomnia, improved their sleep quality, and eased traumas.

Pzizz’s CEO, Rockwell Shah, explains how they do it on Product Hunt:

“Meditation is great. But there are so many other techniques that can help you get better sleep. Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Autogenic Training, Psycho-acoustics, HRV Breathing, Sleep hypnosis, CBT-i, Guided Imagery, and more. The research even shows that combining techniques is generally more effective than using one alone.”

The app is loved by millions now but Pzizz origins were quite humble and many will see resemblances to Winamp, the legendary music player with its own skin museum.

Pzizz is one of many aiming to improve (and capitalize on) sleep. Here are some other sleep apps you want to check out:

Drift is a free app that showcases the sights and sounds of beautiful locations around the world.

Rise Sleep automatically tracks your sleep debt and circadian rhythm.

Sleepedy connects you with a sleep coach and uses sleep therapy to improve your sleep.

SleepTuner is a tiny wearable sensor giving you much of the same data as a sleep lab.

TickTot is a child sleep timer and tracker.

Bambú is a sleep and meditation journal for Spanish speakers.

GPT-3 keeps making headlines. While it’s still not publicly available, beta testers have been showing us what’s possible. Humans are creative and all, but the next revolutionary idea may not come from us. 🤯

Yesterday, serial maker and Golden Kitty Award Winner, Pieter Levels, launched IdeasAI, a GPT-3 powered startup idea generator.

Taking good ideas from existing startups, the app uses an autoregressive language model with deep learning to generate new product and business ideas so you don’t have to.

At the time of this writing, it generated over 3,720 ideas. There are some bizarre and obvious ideas (“the first real-time CRM,” really AI?) that may not turn into anything useful, but humans, like you or I, can help judge the quality and improve the app by liking and disliking suggestions.

“So if you like an idea, you can claim it, pay $99 and it gets removed from the site. (kinda like those hip hop beat sell sites).” – explains Levels.

This could be a useful tool for makers to come up with side project ideas or even inspire the next big thing.

There are several specific GPT-3 applications applied to web development, marketing, copywriting, and other practical applications. But we're most excited about the counter-intuitive, non-obvious uses of this (and GPT-4) technology.

If you’re looking for more fun experiments with OpenAI’s model, we featured some cool solutions featuring the *game-changing* cake detecting app and tons more.

Leonardo da Vinci predicted the future pretty accurately by saying “He who can copy can do.”

Cutouts wants to be the Pinterest board for your clipboard.

With this free extension, you can save images, text, and videos with a click. ML will do the sorting and organizing for you and even generate color palettes and mood boards. No signup needed to try it out.

We couldn’t go a day without our beloved copy+paste function. But with great power comes great responsibility.

Ever sent a funny GIF instead of the final report link to your boss?

We feel you. 🤦‍♂️

There’s a better way to keep your favorites websites separate from cute cat pics or funny GIFs. Here are some of our favorite clipboard managers launched earlier:

Pasta is a clipboard time machine with a beautiful interface.

Copy Space synchronizes clipboards from Windows to all your devices.

Paste is a smart cloud clipboard history and snippets manager for Mac.

Control V lets you copy and paste over the internet.

CopyLess can store up to 1000 recent clippings.

Maccy is a lightweight and minimal open-source clipboard manager for macOS.

If you’re looking to expand your productivity horizons, have a look at these powerful and programmable text expanders: TextExpander, Alfred, aText, Keyboard Maestro, and canSnippet.

Humans are social by nature.

Just like back in the 90s, online communities are having a moment right now. AIM, MSN Messenger, IRC, anyone?

In this socially-distant time, people desperately need to close that gap and connect with like-minded peers.

“Community is the new moat,” claims First Round in their 2019 State of Startups report.

Of course communities don’t appear out of nowhere. It takes thoughtful, intentional effort.

Why create a community?

Community is such a buzzword nowadays. And while it can be very impactful when done right, not every project or business needs a community strategy.

But those who build a strong community tend to benefit in a number of ways: Increased WOM, greater loyalty, and a stronger relationship with users of the product. More importantly, users benefit most when there’s a strong sense of belonging and mutual understanding.

Some of this translates into more active contributions from the community itself. Facebook famously activated community volunteers to translate the site to over 100 languages.

How do you build a community?

This is a long conversation that we won’t fully cover in today’s digest, but below are a few tips.

First, start small and focus on a specific audience. The more defined the community, the easier it is to build for their needs and expectations.

Next, involve the community in the process. In the early days of Product Hunt we “built in public”, sharing mockups and our roadmap to gather the community’s feedback well before writing code. Not only does this lead to better product decisions, but it engenders more trust and buy-in with the people that care most about what you’re building.

“Communities feel magical, but they don't appear out of nowhere. Just as when you’re building a fire, there are certain ingredients you need to assemble and an order of operations you need to follow to generate a spark, fan the flames, and keep it going,” says Bailey Richardson, early Instagram community manager and author of Get Together.

What do you use to build a community?

Although tools won’t build a community, there are plenty of useful options to bring your community together.

Here are some tools to consider:

Circle is the recently launched modern creator-focused community platform to help you bring together your discussions, memberships, and content, all under your own brand.

Disciple lets you gather, engage, and monetize your network with your own community platform.

PeerBoard is a modern community platform designed to live as an organic part of your existing website or product. You can even embed it into any website.

Mighty Networks is a new kind of website builder that enables you to bring your community, online courses, and memberships together in one place.

Discourse positions its open-source platform as a civilized discussion board for your community.

Spectrum fills in a void between Github and Slack, as described by the community member and allows you to join, start, and build online communities.

Comradery is a fully customizable online community platform that provides both threaded discussions and real-time chat.

If you’re serious about starting a community, check out Community Canvas, a framework to build meaningful communities, and The CMX Guide to Building Community Platforms.