The Leaderboard

Today’s Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at JotForm.

Some folks may think that forms are dead, and that chatbots and phone tracking software are the future of data collection. However, three-quarters of marketers still use web forms for lead generation, and there’s a reason for that.

JotForm is of the camp that forms are very much alive. The company is dedicated to innovation within the industry, and continues to develop new products, integrations, widgets, and applications in a relentless effort to improve user experiences and increase conversion rates.

As a result, JotForm now has over 5M users collecting critical information with simple-to-build, intuitive online forms.

The company’s newest development? JotForm Mobile Forms. With a powerful offline mode, advanced form fields, and unique features like “kiosk mode” and form assigning, it’s a mobile data collection app that lets you create, share and complete forms from your phone or tablet. You can seamlessly collect data anywhere you go.

More handy products from JotForm:

📝 10,000+ customizable form templates for any type of form you can think of

⚙️ 300+ form widgets designed to collect every bit of data you need

🔗 100+ integrations to link forms with payment processors, CRMs, email marketing and cloud storage apps

✍️ JotForm Cards offers a friendlier way to ask questions with fun, interactive forms

📄 JotForm PDF Editor converts form submissions into professional, personalized PDFs

No, they’re not fake nuggets. They’re real nuggets, made by the world’s first chicken nugget startup, NUGGS.

Yesterday, NUGGS, which makes nuggets from texturized pea protein technology (instead of animal-based technology) officially launched (with $7M in funding). Why it’s not just another plant-based alternative to the animal-based meat industry: NUGGS founder Ben Pasternak plans to run the venture like a tech company.

The team spent over a year of research and development on the “product” — the nuggets — which are free from major allergens like eggs, wheat, dairy and soy. They’re also cholesterol free, contain 22g of protein (about 2x more than animal-based nuggets) and are 180 calories (about 20% less than animal-based nuggets), a formula that “kills you slower,” according to the company. And NUGGS plans to release product updates — they will continuously share how the formula improves over time based on user feedback.

Some feedback for NUGGS from the PH community:

“Indistinguishable from a real chicken nugget, much better” - Allan

“Would love a low(er) carb version if possible!” - Dilan

“I'm excited that tasty meat alternatives are becoming available to the public for a reasonable price! The slick branding and website are a bonus” - Ani

It’s worth noting that Pasternak is 19 years old, and previously created Monkey, which was acquired in 2017 and currently has 20M users. Other NUGGS team members include 20-year-old Head of Product Liam Mullen, a self-taught molecular gastronomist, and 20-year-old Head of Growth Alex Michelle, a social media guru with six million Instagram followers.

For more inspired food choices, check out these products that have launched in the past year:

🍅Misfits Market is ugly produce, delivered monthly

🤑Budget Meal Planner provides calculated recipes on a $5/day budget

😋Soylent Squared are 100g mini meals

🍔Creator makes robot-made burgers

☕️Dripkit Coffee is portable coffee

Today in distracting technology: you can now watch Netflix at work and make it look like you’re on a conference call.

Yesterday, Netflix Hangouts, a Chrome extension that disguises Netflix as a fake four-person conference call, made a splash on Product Hunt. During the “call,” your show of choice will appear in the bottom right grid, while three fake coworkers will appear in the other feeds.

The concept is clever, though you’re coworkers might get suspicious if you’re hangin’ in a Hangout all day. Or if they catch Michael Scott in your meeting.

Some instant reviews:

“This is a terrible idea guys! So terrible it's gooooood” - Robby

“Already watched season 3 of Stranger Things” - Mike

“I don't see how this could possibly go wrong” - Sharon

The maker behind the project is Daniel Greenberg out of Mschf Internet Studios. Over the years, Daniel has made some truly weird, hilarious products that are very internet-y. Most recently, there was Track This by Firefox (opens 100 tabs to distract trackers), The Texting Doorbell (what it sounds like), FlexTime (FaceTime simulations with Kim Kardashian, Post Malone, etc.) and The Persistence of Chaos (malware art), to name a few.

Check out all his projects here.

Now go forth and watch Netflix! Meaning go to work. 😳

Last month, Bye Bye Camera launched on Product Hunt with a lofty goal: to be “the camera for the post-human era.” In practice, this means that every picture you take with Bye Bye Camera automatically removes any people from the photo.

Some initial reactions:

“This is a commentary of the human experience and the experience of humans in app form” - John

“So cool. Who needs humans in pictures anyways?” - Dave

And according to Bye Bye Camera Maker Damjanski, these comments are actually part of the product. In fact, he doesn’t consider Bye Bye Camera a product per se, but more of an “online performance.”

“The launching process for me is always part of the piece. You have an intent or an idea of what’s going to happen when you launch something, but ultimately people will use it in a totally different way” - Damjanski

Bye Bye Camera isn’t Damjanski’s first “online performance” — he’s launched a bunch of wacky, artistic experiments on Product Hunt.

There was MoMAR, an augmented reality “gallery” that allows users to virtually alter physical art. With MoMAR’s release, things got very meta and the PH community started to question the meaning of art itself.

“Great platform that makes you question the very core of what art is and how it exists within our society” - Clemens

There was also Humans Not Invited, a CAPTCHA that filters out humans (we’re sensing a theme 😉) and only lets programs pass. With this project, Damjanski said he was surprised that it turned into “a game” where people tried to hack their way past the CAPTCHA, and would comment on the post when they finally made it in.

When we asked Damjanski about where he gets his inspiration, he said it’s often a long, mindful process.

“It starts out with having read or seen something, and that inspires some thought. Sometimes it’ll take up to a year to do something. For Bye Bye Camera, we started talking about it last February and then this past February we decided to actually make it.”

More works from Damjanski on Product Hunt:

🤔 What am I pretending today? replaces Facebook’s ‘What’s on your mind?’

📸 No Shutter App only takes photos while the iPhone shutter is loading

🙌 Age-Gate With Attitude is a *different* age verification system

😋 Clemo is an SMS-based chat bot for restaurant recommendations

👀#FiveForAll is high five emojis for everyone

👶 Babyname is Tinder for baby names

For the full collection, go here.

It’s Christmas in July! ☀️🎅

Enter to win an iPhone XS, courtesy of our friends at Digg, Triphop, Finimize and more.

The winner will also get:

🔊 A new, second-generation AirPods
📺 A 64GB Apple TV

Note: Due to legal restrictions, this is only limited to U.S. folks. If it were up to us we'd be sending you all iPhones and kittens this year.

Happy Friday. That is all. 😻

“Look cool, wear pizza, support the AI fashion scene” - David

Yesterday, a new t-shirt company launched on Product Hunt. The twist? All of the shirts are designed by AI, having learned from a training set of over one million open source images.

In fact, the entire company — from the logo to the marketing copy to the brand name (“Cross & Freckle“) — is generated by AI. Don’t worry — the makers behind the project, Paul Blankley, Tyler Becker and Sarah McBride, are real humans.

“The original idea was simply to use AI to generate the doodles. Then we started seeing other generative websites and tools pop-up on PH, like Hipster Business Name and Talk to Transformer and so we decided to see just how much of a startup you can generate with AI.“ - Sarah

How they did it: The team trained a machine learning model on Google Creative Lab's “Quick, Draw!” dataset. Then they trained the model on NYC-themed drawings, with the output being minimalist doodles of rats, dogs, pizza and pigeons.

While the concept of generating an entire retail company — from clothing design to brand name — is a novel one, the intersection of retail and AI is a growing sector.

Retail spend on AI is forecasted to grow to $7.3 billion by 2022, a significant bump from the $2B spent in 2018. As retailers are learning to leverage artificial intelligence, the customer experience gets more personalized, brick-and-mortar inventory can be optimized and marketing investments can be hyper-targeted.

And some big retailers are already doing this; Levi’s uses AI to recommend ideal sizes and placements for inventory within its stores, North Face uses IBM Watson’s cognitive computing to make personalized recs on what coat customers should buy, and online consignment store ThredUp recently released “Goody Boxes,” which use an AI algorithm to remember customer preferences.

“The applications for this technology are two-fold: as a creative tool and as an efficiency tool. For example, a designer could use a training set of trending Instagram photos and generate ideas for new clothing items based on what people are already wearing and responding to. From an efficiency stand point, such a generative algorithm could feasibly take a core design created by a brand and apply it to many different clothing item designs and dimensions, cutting out the manual and labor intensive work that is currently required to do so.” - Sarah

IKEA just introduced the “world’s comfiest font.” Why? Memes.

Earlier this week, IKEA unveiled “Soffa Sans,” a font born out of the internet memes from its digital “Design your own sofa” tool. The planner allows people to configure different sectionals, and showcases the final product in 3D. IKEA doesn’t put a limit on the size (or cost) of these online couches, so of course the internet had a field day.

So IKEA — always the *hip* brand — made a font where each letter is formed by pieces of a sofa. You can download it for free here. Want more weird fonts? We obviously have got you covered. Some to check out:

👀Airbnb Cereal

👀Pokemon-font

👀Color Dot Font

👀Saucy AF Font

👀YayText!

P.S. The first 3D type foundry launched today. 🚀

Yesterday, GANpaint launched on Product Hunt and shows how creative tools of the future may work. 

The tech uses AI to add, delete and edit objects, and draws with object-level control using a deep nueural network (a GAN). More specifically, this tool takes the natural image in a specific category — let’s say churches — and allows modifications with brushes that draw things like trees, domes, brick-textures, etc.

GANpaint is the latest in a slew of creative, experimental AI-driven tools aiming to be the next Photoshop.

It’s worth noting that Photoshop got an update with a “magical” AI-powered selection tool in early 2018. If you’re an artist or a designer, try some of these out to see if they save you some output:

📸 Remove.bg uses AI to quickly remove the background from any photo

📱 BG App does the same thing for photos on iOS

😁 Lensa is an AI-powered photo editing app for selfies

🌄 Nvidia GuaGAN uses AI to turn sketches into photorealistic landscapes

👀 Mosaic uses AI to make your Insta feed better

Remember Evernote?

Spoiler alert: It’s not dead. If you weren’t (or aren’t) a die-hard user, it’s a note-taking up that was hugely popular a few years go. The company was founded in 2008 and reached unicorn status in 2012. To date, the company has raised nearly $300M in venture backing.

However, Evernote’s growth began to slow in 2015, and the company went through multiple rounds of layoffs over the past few years. According to a recent NYT article, Evenote is joining a cast of dying unicorns, or "zombiecorns," which also includes once-hot companies like Foursquare and Quora.

Some comments from Evernote’s 2014 PH launch:

“Great piece of kit, would certainly recommend! I'm a premium user, and it's worth every penny.” - Giacomo

“Still my fave. Very easy to use. I have premium subscription so I am very satisfied.” - Liz

“The second brain” - Felix

And what users thought of Evernote’s reboot in 2017:

“I want to love you again Evernote” - Brian

“I too want to remember everything! Always love you Evernote... sometimes you make it difficult, but always love.” - Austin

“Great to see Evernote doing something new. I love it as a service. It's like Dropbox for my brain.” - Samuel

With fierce customer appreciation, Evernote continues to serve a dedicate pool of users. Today, Evernote’s apps are still downloaded 50,000 times per day, but the company faces stiff competition. Other popular apps in the world of note-taking:

Notion combines the best features of Dropbox, Excel and Google Docs 🗒

Google Keep lets you save your thoughts wherever you are 💭

Taskade lets you create tasks, notes, and video chat on the same page ✔️

Bear is a well-designed, flexible writing app for notes (and prose) 📝

Things is a productivity app for the hyper-organized 💯

Milanote is a notes app for more ~creative~ work 🧠

Todoist makes entering new tasks lightning-fast ⚡️

Tell us what you think of Evernote today here.

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

The challenge: Startups need tools for growth that are designed to be both fast and scalable, especially when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.

A solution: HubSpot for Startups.

How it works: Startups can manage contacts through HubSpot’s (forever) free CRM, sell better through a suite of sales tools, manage all marketing through marketing automation software, and close the loop with customers through service tools. This makes getting your first customer, or getting your 100,000th customer (and keeping them happy) much, much easier.

The really good news: They have a special offer for the PH community. Startups are eligible for up to 90% off HubSpot software, free programming, education, events, over 300 integrations, as well as the opportunity to build an integration on HubSpot. Apply here.

And another thing! Anyone who applies for HubSpot for Startups through this link will receive a free Community Pass to INBOUND, HubSpot's 24,000 person event this September in Boston. Founders and startup employees will have unique opportunities to meet other founders, investors, and get valuable startup-only content.