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TFW when someone says “tax prep.” 🙄

Luckily, there’s an easy solution that will make you feel 🙂: FreshBooks.

FreshBooks ($75.1M raised) is a popular accounting tool that caters to the self-employed and their teams — i.e. a lot of you.

Some things you can do with FreshBooks:

🙌 Whip up invoices and get paid quickly
💸 Record expenses and bill them back to clients to recoup costs
⏰ Track and bill time by line, project or hour
🚀 Send proposals and estimates to help you win new business

AND on top of all of this, the company just introduced a new suite of industry standard double-entry accounting features. 👀

You: “But what does double-entry even mean?”

“Double-entry” means there are always two entries for each accounting transaction: credit and debit. For example, if you buy a new laptop for your business, the double-entry system will track the purchase as a credit for the cost and a debit for the new asset you now own. Ultimately, FreshBooks’ new features will help you and your accountant keep your business going.

What the Product Hunt community thinks of FreshBooks:

“Love FreshBooks. Was instrumental in helping our startup operate in the early days.” - Alec L.

“In my opinion, if you don't have a proficiency in accounting, systems like FreshBooks are great.” - Mike K.

“No matter if you're a self-employed person looking for an accounting solution or a small/medium enterprise co-operating with you accountant, FreshBooks makes accounting much easier to handle.” - Matt P.

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

What if you could code without coding at all?

This is the idea behind STUDIO, a new design tool that launched on Product Hunt yesterday. According to maker Yutaka Ishii, the inspiration for STUDIO comes from wanting to shake up the fragmented design process. The tool lets designers skip developer hand-off, subsequent feedback loops and hours of coding, and instead focus on the best part of web design: designing.

How it works: STUDIO lets you instantly render designs into fully responsive webpages. And it differs from design tools like Figma and Sketch in that you can actually publish your website design without translating it into code.

Some reactions from the community:

“Very interesting product, web design will be changed” — Asia

“I’ve been using the beta for a few months now and it gives you all the controls you need to make your site very customizable while getting pages published FAST” - Caleb

“It can significantly reduce the cost of thinking, designing, and spreading to the world. It is now an indispensable tool for me” - Takahiro

The most requested feature from the community? A CMS. But The STUDIO team confirmed that they're planning to release a visual CMS later this year.

We're seeing an uptick in the amount of projects launching that are *code free.* Which makes us happy — it's never been easier to be a maker and put something out into the world. Some of our recent favorites:

Checkout Page is a code-free way to sell anything with Stripe 💸

Appcues lets you build onboarding flow from start to finish without code 👍

Carrd lets you build simple, one-page sites for pretty much anything 🖥

Webflow is a website builder made for designers 🚀

Airtable is a coding platform for non-techies 😍

Zapier can connect and automate over 500 web apps 👏

Searching for a new job is hard — i.e. it's a lotttt of time spent googling. 🔎

Recently, we've seen a a wave of projects pop up looking to solve this problem. Let's call it the rise of the niche job board.

Instead of a one size fits all search tool, these job boards cater to a specific group of people. Whether you're looking for a tech job in Africa or a gig with your old team, there's a job board for you. We rounded up a few of our favorites that might help you make your next move:

Tech Ladies was designed with diversity and inclusion in mind from the beginning, and 50,000 women already use it 💁

Remote OK is a huge job board for remote-friendly jobs 🌎

Frontend Jobs is for — you guessed it — frontend developers 💻

First Dev Job is for developers looking to land their first job 👀

Just Junior Jobs is specifically for junior-level positions, and perfect for people fresh out of college or grad school 🎓

RemoteIndian Job Board is a remote job board for devs based in India 🇮🇳

Wellpaid is a contract-only job board for roles in tech ✍️

Relocate will help you find a job that sponsors relocation to 10 different countries ✈️

HiTechJobs CA is for those looking for a tech job in Canada 🇨🇦

Nicheboard launched on Product Hunt last week to help you find your niche job board 🙌

And we'd be remiss if we didn't plug our own job board for makers here — it's full of startups building pretty amazing products 😉

The 4th annual Golden Kitty Awards have come to an end. You nominated 12,000 products across 22 categories, casting tens of thousands of upvotes to select the winners.

So without further ado, here are the 2018 Golden Kitty winners in each of the 22 product categories.

🌟 Product of the Year: Tik Tok

📱 Mobile App of the Year: Shortcuts

🛠 Hardware Product of the Year: Apple Watch Series 4

😎 AR Product of the Year: Wanna Nails

🌍 Social Impact Product of the Year: Matter

🏡 Smart Home Product of the Year: Google Home Hub

🌚 Side Project Product of the Year: MacBook Alarm

🔐 Privacy Focused Product of the Year: 1.1.1.1 by Cloudflare

🐈 Made with the ProductHunt API: Maker.rocks

⚡ ️Lifehack Product of the Year: History Search

💪 Health & Fitness Product of the Year: RocketBody

📚 Founder Book of the Year: MAKE Book

💰 Fintech Product of the Year: BUY ME A COFFEE

🌈 Diversity Product of the Year: Diversify Tech

🤖 AI & Machine Learning Product of the Year: OneSoil Map

🔉 Audio & Voice Product of the Year: Krisp

⛓ Crypto Product of the Year: Coinbase Wallet

🖋 Design Tool of the Year: Draftium

🖥 Dev Tool of the Year: Prettier

🙀 WTF Product of the Year: Die With Me

Check out the winners, runner ups and honorable mentions in all 22 categories here. We also gave out two data-driven (non-voting) awards for Community Member of the Year and Maker of the Year.

Congrats to all makers for building awesome things in 2018. 😺

Two years ago Product Hunt joined AngelList’s family of companies to extend its mission to support startups and makers. Today we’re sharing some big milestones.

In 2018, we reached over $1 billion in assets under management (with 23 unicorns in the portfolio 🦄), 2 million active job-seekers, and 20,000 new products launched. Over 75% of startups that announced seed funding from leading U.S. investors in the last two years have raised, recruited or launched on AngelList or Product Hunt. Within that group:

💸 28% took money from a venture fund or syndicate run on AngelList
👥 59% used AngelList to hire
🚀 36% launched a product on Product Hunt

Over 100,000 startups of all sizes used AngelList to discover talent. Among U.S. job-seekers, six industries stood out in terms of where they want to work next: machine learning and AI, data and analytics, consumer, health,
blockchain and crypto, and social good.

Then there's you — the Product Hunt community. This past year makers and startups big and small launched the 120,000th product on the platform. 9K of you used our startup toolkit to attract and communicate with over 2.7M beta users. And well over 2M upvotes were cast from around the globe. 🌏

And we're building something brand new, too. Curious? Sign up, and we'll share a sneak peek shortly. 😉

What's the next Instagram? Or Twitter? Or even Facebook? 🤔

These major networks (which also includes LinkedIn, Snapchat and Pinterest) have long defined the social media category, making it hard for any newcomer to snag market share. Like really, really hard. Space in our smartphones is precious real estate, which means we're less inclined to download new apps. Especially when all our friends are already spread across six huge social networks.

Case and point: RIP Vine. And Secret. And Yik Yak. And Peach. 💀

The next big thing

TikTok has recently emerged as a new — and successful — social app, at least from a usage point of view. In 2017, ByteDance (TikTok's China-based owner) acquired teen social app Musical.ly for ~$1B as a way to enter the U.S. market. Unfortunately Mindie, a very similar app that predated Musical.ly from a French-based team, didn’t find the same level of traction.

In November, the app reportedly surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in monthly downloads in the U.S. Yesterday, ByteDance announced that TikTok has reached 250 million daily active users, and then launched Duoshan, an app that is veryyy similar to Snapchat . 😱

If you're not familiar with TikTok, it's sort of like a social network for amateur music videos. Dancing, gymnastics, comedy, cheerleading and parkour are also popular on the app. TikTok is built to constantly grab your attention, and as a result its user base skews pretty young.

If YouTube, Snapchat and BuzzFeed had a baby, this would be it.

TikTok's long-term survival

TikTok is undoubtedly blowing up, which means the big six will try to own it or clone it. In fact, Facebook already (quietly) launched its own TikTok competitor called Lasso.

While cynics might claim consumer social is dead, TikTok illustrates that mainstream consumers remain eager to play with new toys. Here are 5 other social consumer apps that we’re watching:

October is a semi-anonymous Twitter 🐦

Blind lets you chat anonymously at work 💬

Islands is like Slack but for college students 🎓

Dialog lets you create your own radio show in the internet 🎙

Horsealot is a social network for horse riders 🐴

Yesterday, Wordpress's parent company Automattic launched Newspack, a new publishing platform tailor-made for local newsrooms. And its backed by $2.4M in funding led by Google.

How it works: Newspack will operate as a secure, inexpensive toolkit for small to medium-sized newsrooms that will make their technical decisions easier. It will definitely support existing Wordpress plugins and *maybe* include website design, commerce options or CMS configuration.

“Sounds, essentially, like a sponsored/subsidized, hosted, distribution of WordPress” - Chris Messina

Interestingly, Facebook had a similar announcement this morning. 🤔

Today the tech giant announced a $300M (!) investment in local news over the next three years. For context, Google committed $300M to news products and initiatives last March — with Newspack now being one of the beneficiaries. 💸

It's worth noting that Facebook and Google control the online ad market, and digital publishers have traditionally tried (but struggled) to make money from online ads. Regardless, money is money and the survival of local media is good news for all.

In other news (how many news puns is too many?), we've been playing with some new writing tools: Write Together is a new spin on blogging and 200 Words a Day is a dead-simple tool that helps you write a little every single day.

Last week we asked our Twitter community a simple question — “What's an app that has changed your life recently?”

We weren't prepared for the response. 👀👀👀

But we're not surprised that people care (a lot) about the apps they use. Apps account for up to 90% of the time you spend on your phone, and that's usually concentrated to a handful of favorites.

The other thing we noticed among the many, many answers we received: the same apps kept cropping up. Here are a few of them:

Todoist is a to-do list app (that over 13 million people use). Its biggest advantage over other to-do list competitors is that it works across everyyy platform. ✅

Notion is an “all-in-one workspace.” It's really an organizational app that's Google Docs meets Excel meets DropBox. 🙌

Headspace, a meditation app, was mentioned a lot. Folks also gave shout outs to competitors Calm and Primed Mind. 🧠

Grammarly is an editing app that helps you write without mistakes. It automatically checks your spelling, grammar and punctuation, and will give you synonyms for words to grow your vocabulary. 📝

Airtable is a spreadsheet app that makes it so easy to build custom apps. 👏

Bear is a writing app that you can really make your own. It's sort of like Evernote, but more simple. ✍️

Monzo is an app-based bank to manage day-to-day spending. 💸

Gyroscope brands itself as an “OS for the human body.” It will give you an overview about yourself — like how much time you spend online. 👤

Telegram is a messaging app that's superrrr fast (and secure). 🔒

Despite CES already rescinding an award for a mico-robotic sex toy made for women — by a woman — we're optimistic about the future for women in tech.

That's why one of our fav weekly reads is Femstreet, a newsletter on women in tech, diversity and venture capital that hits your inbox every Sunday. The maker of Femstreet is Sarah Noeckel, an early-stage investor by day, who founded Femstreet to bring great visibility to the growing community of young women in venture and tech. We asked Sarah about her favorite products made by female founders. 👩

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The most common question I get is: “Who’s the most inspiring female founder that you have met?”

Investments into female healthcare exploded in 2018 and, as a result, women built some fantastic products for other women. And as more young adults delay parenthood — and the number of same-sex couples starting families climbs — demand for these products has never been higher. Here are a few companies I like in the space:

👶 Modern fertility made a fertility test that women can take at home to better understand their fertility hormones.

What to watch: There's no dominant brand in the fertility category, but it's also a space where customers are willing to pay. Modern Fertility provides people with information that was previously very expensive and often inaccessible in a value-driven way at a cheaper price point.

🤰Carrot Fertility works closely with employers to offer affordable, custom fertility care benefit programs that include IVF, surgery and egg freezing.

What to watch: I really hope that the future of fertility is entwined with the future of work. Many people don’t have insurance to cover these types of treatments through their employers’ health plans. Carrot addresses cost by taking aim at the larger system and processes all reimbursements internally, validating claim details by the company’s own standards.

⚕️Tia is a “one-stop-shop” for female health.

What to watch: Tia is designed to feel more like Snapchat than a traditional healthcare experience. You can finally chat with your doctor like you chat with your mom, and it solves the problem of waiting months to see a gynecologist as a new patient.

P.S. It's opening it's first NYC location soon, expanding beyond its digital health assistant, AskTia.

📚 O.School is a sex-ed platform that's a non-judgmental resource for all things sexuality, dating and relationships.

What to watch: With pornography on one end of the spectrum and sex-negative abstinence programs on the other, there are very few online resources that promote body positivity, inclusivity and how to handle sexual trauma. Serial entrepreneur Andrea Barrica founded O.School to fill that void. O.School is a safe space for users to engage with sex educators via live streams, chats and on-demand content.

🚨 Golden Kitty News 🚨

Over the past week you all nominated your favorite products of 2018 across 22 CATegories. We tallied up over 12,000 nominations. Here are the finalists:

🌟 Product of the Year
📱 Mobile App
🛠 Hardware
😎 Augmented Reality
🌚 Side Project
👀 Lifehack
🖋 Design Tool
🖥 Dev Tool
🙀 WTF
🗣 Audio and Voice
🌈 Diversity and Inclusion
👾 AI and Machine Learning
💪 Health and Fitness App
🏠 Smart Home
📚 Founder Books
💰 Fintech
🔐 Privacy-Focused
🐈 Made with Product Hunt API
🌍 Social Impact
💻 Maker of the Year
🤗 Community Member of the Year

To pick our finalists for ‘Community Member of the Year’ and ‘Maker of the Year’ we pulled data from all of 2018 and created a model to compare individuals against a number of metrics including (but not limited to) their Maker goals, comments, upvotes and product launches.

Check out the complete list and upvote your favorites 😻🏆

Voting starts today and closes Tuesday January 15th at 6pm PT. The winners will be revealed on Thursday January 17th!

Note: We host these awards every year to throw the spotlight on unique projects and people. That said, we’re very grateful to the entire Product Hunt community and all makers around the world who are launching projects every day. Here’s to makers everywhere — we salute you. 🙌