The Leaderboard

Attention! More finalists for this year’s Golden Kitty Awards have just been announced.

Check them out 👇

🌚 Side Project 

🙀 WTF (ICYMI: An app called ‘ Die With Me’ won in this category last year)

🗣 Audio and Voice 

😎 Augmented Reality 

🌴 Remote Work Tools 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at Spoke. 

Voting for these categories (and previously dropped categories) is now OPEN and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT.

More finalists will drop first thing in the morning tomorrow, so look out for news around health and fitness apps, smart home devices, sextech products, privacy-focused apps and D2C products.

To celebrate all makers next week, we’re putting on a little shindig in LA (aka the 5th annual Product Hunt Meetup). If you can’t make it to LA, chances are there’s a Product Hunt meetup happening in your city that day — there will be events everywhere from New York to DC to Toronto to New Orleans to Mexico City and beyond. It’s almost like we planned it. 😉

More Golden Kitty finalists just dropped! 👇

As a reminder, voting is OPEN and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Upvote your favorites here or click through the categories below.

🌈 Diversity and Inclusion 

⛓ Crypto 

👀 No Code 

💰 Fintech

👾 AI and Machine Learning 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at Public.com and Airtable. 

More voting to come in tomorrow’s newsletter, where we’ll announce finalists for the next batch of categories (side projects, WTF products, remote work tools, audio and voice products, and AR projects). ICYMI: Winners will receive a prize package with custom swag and a golden kitty trophy. 😸

🚨Reminder: We’re hosting an IRL Product Hunt Meetup in Los Angeles on January 28th at 6 p.m. There will be a DJ, photo booth, swag (of course), free-flowing Philz and a pancake bar. The event is free and open to all ages (including all the teenage makers out there). RSVP here. 👈

If you can’t make it to LA, check out one of the other 60 Product Hunt meetups happening around the world that day.

Over the past week, you all nominated your favorite products of 2019 across 25 CATegories. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have narrowed down the finalists by category. Here are the first five categories (keep an eye out in your inbox every day this week as we announce more finalists).

🌍 Social Impact 

🛠 Hardware 

📱 Mobile Apps 

🖋 Design Tools 

🖥 Dev Tools 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at  Xometry,  monday.com and Dave. 

Voting starts today and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Upvote your favorites here.

Look out for tomorrow’s newsletter where we’ll be sharing the finalists for the next batch of categories (diversity and inclusion, crypto, no code, fintech, AI and machine learning). In addition to lots of love from the PH community, winners will receive a prize package with custom swag and a golden kitty trophy. 😸

Warning: Get ready for some serious Apple nostalgia.

Yesterday, Maker Sam Henri Gold took the hood of his (unofficial) Apple Archive, an extensive collection of all things Apple.

The archive includes everything from old Apple commercials, to never released ads, to press releases and obscure photos that capture Apple’s history since it was founded 44 years ago. 🍎

The collection has about 15,000 (!!) files, which includes WWDC sessions, printed ads, Macworld videos, TV ads and clips of random things like Steve Jobs giving a tour of an early days Apple store.

Gold reportedly starting working on the archive when the YouTube channel ‘EveryAppleVideo’ (which was exactly what it sounds like) started taking all of its videos down. While Apple could definitely kill this project, we hope it doesn’t. Gold’s ultimate goal is to preserve the brand beloved by many and inspire creativity among younger folks.

Gold, who previously made an app for Twitter called Nighthawk, says he’ll continue to iterate on the archive in the meantime.

Check out the beautiful tribute to Apple for yourself here. 👈

Earlier this week, Google announced that it’s buying the no-code platform AppSheet. The price of the deal was not shared, but the move marks Google’s continued investment into the no-code/low-code space (the company launched a low-code application development tool for G Suite in 2018).

AppSheet will help Google give companies a simple way to build mobile apps without writing code, instead pulling data from spreadsheets (like Google Sheets), forms (like Google Forms) and databases to build apps.

“The demand for faster processes and automation in today’s competitive landscape requires more business applications to be built with greater speed and efficiency. However, many companies lack the resources to address these challenges. This acquisition helps enterprises empower millions of citizen developers to more easily create and extend applications without the need for professional coding skills.” - Google Cloud vice president Amit Zavery wrote in a blog post about the acquisition.

More than 200,000 apps have reportedly been deployed using AppSheet to date, with over 18,000 monthly active app creators building apps on the platform.

For more no-code products, check these out:

📃 Coda is a programmable document editor

👍 Bubble helps you build a fully functional web app without any code

💥 Sheety turns Google Sheets into APIs, instantly

🗣 Voiceflow let you build voice apps without code

📱 Glide lets you create mobile apps from Google Sheets

✔️ Sheet 2 Site generates websites from Google Sheets

A big acquisition happened in fintech this week. Visa bought Plaid, a startup that develops financial APIs, for $5.3 billion, in a deal that effectively doubled Plaid’s last private valuation.

A refresher on Plaid: It’s kind of like Stripe, but instead of helping individuals send and receive payments online, it helps applications (like Venmo, Acorns, Robinhood, Coinbase and Gemini) connect with users’ bank accounts. 25% of people who have bank accounts in the U.S. have reportedly connected to the service (through an app like Venmo).

According to a blog post from Plaid CEO Zach Perret, the company will continue to operate as an independent business unit under Visa.

“We were very impressed by the Visa team from the minute they approached us. They share our vision for the future of financial services and have deep respect for the developer community we support.” - Zach

According to Visa’s deck on the acquisition, they are hot on the fintech sector. Some notable launches in fintech we’ve seen over the past year (in case you’re looking, Visa):

💸 Atom Finance is like Bloomberg Terminal, but for free

💸 Stripe Capital offers instant loans to customers

💸 Coin Assistant is the “Venmo of crypto”

💸 Lannister is an encrypted personal wealth manager

For a lot more fintech products, go here.

Drum roll, please. January is here which means it's time for...The Golden Kitty Awards! 😻

This marks our fifth year hosting The Golden Kitty Awards, giving you — our community — a chance to nominate your favorite new products from 2019 and the makers that made it awesome.

This year is going to be our biggest Golden Kitty Awards to date, with 25 categories up for grabs. There are also 6 new categories in 2019. The new category additions are:

D2C — New brands that are successfully cutting out the middle man 📦

SexTech  — Products that acknowledge and enhance human sexuality 💋

PetTech  — Things that benefit your furry companions 😸

Remote Work Tools — Things that make remote life a little easier 🌴

No Code — Projects with little to no code required! 🙌

Product Memoriam — We’ll remember these projects fondly. RIP. 💀

How it works: Pick your fav products across each category (the full list of categories is listed here). You can pick from any upvoted product in 2019.

You can nominate products starting TODAY until Friday, January 17th at 11:59 p.m. PT. On Monday, January 20, voting will open as we announce the finalists in five categories throughout the week.

In other news, we’re excited to announce that we’re hosting an IRL Product Hunt Meetup in Los Angeles on January 28th at 6 p.m. There will be a DJ, photo booth, swag (of course), free-flowing Philz and an open bar (drink responsibly). The event is free and open to all ages (including all the teenage makers out there). RSVP here. 👈

Note: If you can’t make it to LA, check out one of the other 60 Product Hunt meetups happening around the world  that day. 

Start nominating your fav projects here!!!

The Golden Kitties are brought to you by our friends at Spoke, Dave, CitizenNet, Bevy, Xometry, monday.com,  Airtable, and Public (get started with free stock). 

Significant Otter is an Apple Watch app that debuted last week to help couples share their moods with one another. According to the Maker, the idea came from wanting use the Apple Watch for something other than fitness.

“We started by wondering how one could use the Apple Watch beyond fitness tracking, and to support social connection. We created this simple app for couples to be in touch "from the heart," watch to watch. The app generates a cute animation representing what it infers you're doing/feeling. You can then can tap to send to one (and only one) person." - Andresmh

The app uses the biosignal sensors that are built into Apple Watches to communicate (these are the same sensors used to monitor your heart rate from the Health app). There’s no texting, calling or messaging involved — you feel and see what your partner (or friend! or mom!) is feeling through adorable otter animations. It will let you know when “you’re feeling excited from a surprise, motivated from the gym, or upset from work,” and communicate that emotion via animation to your partner.

“My partner and I have been in the beta for the last few months. We love how easy it is to feel connected and together, even when we're both busy or in meetings! It doesn't hurt that animations are also adorable.” - Justin

Over the past three months, we’ve seen over 20 creative Apple Watch apps launch on Product Hunt. A sampling:

❄️ Slopes is a nifty ski tracking experience

🙏 Aura is a personal mood tracker

🙌 Kegel Coach is a kegel exercise app

🐶 TameWatch make you watch your health through a virtual pet

☀️ Sundial App gives you sun and moon alerts via Apple Watch

🌧 Snowflake Weather is a super detailed weather app

💦 Thirstic is an app that tracks how much water you drink

For more down the Apple Watch rabbit hole, go here.

David Dobrik has 11 million Instagram followers. He has even more followers on YouTube, where over 15 million people subscribe to his channel. All of that is excluding the three million followers he has on his Instagram account dedicated exclusively to photos taken on a disposable camera. You get it — David has a lot of followers.

That’s why it’s not that surprising that David’s new camera app, David’s Disposable, has already reportedly surpassed over one million downloads. FWIW, it launched in late December. 📸

The app landed briefly at the top of the list of Apple’s more popular free apps in the App Store, sitting above Disney+ and Instagram itself (it’s no longer listed at the top of that list). According to The Verge, folks on TikTok have also taken to recommending the app.

The lo-fi, '90s look of disposable cameras has made a big comeback on Instagram as of late, a trend fueled by nostalgia and the need for imperfection on an app the rewards perfection. So far, that look has been achieved through apps like Huji Cam (which was downloaded over 22 million times as of 2018), 1888, Gudak, or an actual disposable camera if you’re old school.

David’s Disposable seems similar to a lot of these apps — it turns your phone screen in a Fujifilm-style disposable camera. When you snap a photo with app, you have to wait until 9 a.m. the next day to look at the photos, simulating the experience of an actual disposable camera. You can also order the photos as prints directly from the app. 👀

David’s Disposable is free to download, but a $1 subscription fee will get rid of ads within the app.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at monday.com. 

Over the last few months, we’ve shared how monday.com‘s (valued at $1.9 billion) work management tool is uniquely designed to help teams collaborate, communicate and stay in sync. To date, over 100,000 teams worldwide — including companies like Uber, Adobe, Universal, and Cotsco — use  monday.com to get work done. 

How it works: monday.com allows you to manage any workflow or process through a variety of different views (kanban, timeline, charts, etc) to visualize the status of your projects, see who’s doing what, prioritize tasks, set due dates and communicate with your team in real time. It also lets you put your workflow on autopilot, integrating all your tools into one automated workflow. Ultimately, it frees your team from repetitive manual tasks so they can focus on impact and innovation with pre-made automations.

Bonus features:

• Dashboards give you the ability to see the big picture, and you can build and customize your dashboards to gain important insights and a clear overview of your work
• Automations with third party tools, including your calendar, email, Zendesk, Slack, Dropbox, Mailchimp and many, many others

You can try it for free here. Some reviews from the PH community so far:

"I love Monday, truly. It's beautiful and strikes a great balance between clean and intuitive and deep functionality." - Jason

“Friendly, modern an intuitive UI. Limitless applications. Visual, overview, fantastic support, rapid development of even more features." - Bart

“My definition of an agile tool. Combines all that my team needs in one place.” - John