The Leaderboard
Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Yesterday, the annual 2019 Breakout List launched on Product Hunt, naming the latest batch of “high potential and high growth” startups on a breakout trajectory.
The Breakout List was founded in 2014 to help tech workers vet companies for rocketship potential.
These startups usually have a solid VC backing, but the list is not scientific by any means. More often, companies that make the list are going after large markets and generating revenue fast.
“We help engineers, salespeople and other people in tech accelerate their learning and career trajectory. Investors know lots about the potential of a given startup - they’ve likely seen or been told their private financial metrics. Candidates deserve better information on companies. They’re betting their career,” Breakout List Maker Chris Barber wrote on Product Hunt.
Here's a breakdown of a few of the top startups:
📦 Flexport ($304M raised) is a freight forwarder that enables faster and cheaper shipping. Ultimately, Flexport is digitizing the entire international shipping process, allowing customers to do things like track the freight in their global supply chain in real-time.
🚘 Nuro ($92M raised) is building autonomous vehicles for last mile delivery. The company's technology aims to substantially reduce delivery prices using autonomous vehicles and has grown from 0 to more than 200 employees in two years.
🏠 Blend ($160M raised) was founded by a group of ex-Palantir employees and simplifies the mortgage application process for both borrowers and lenders. In the past year, the team's headcount grew from 270 to 400.
💌 Clearbit ($2M raised) makes business intelligence APIs — tools that help you learn things like who's behind an email address. The company was founded in 2014 and has since launched a Gmail widget to help you find anyone's email address, high-converting lead forms, and a tool to turn anonymous web traffic into data.
⚡️ Bolt wants to give retailers a better shot at competing with Amazon through a dead-simple checkout for customers. The company's team includes a handful of folks from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb, and grew from 15 to 60 in the past year. The company's funding is undisclosed but its backers include founders of PayPal, Intuit, Splunk, StubHub, and Oculus, to name a few.
💪 Airtable ($162M raised) is a productivity tool for teams that's part spreadsheet and part database. In March, the company announced a new apps platform that gives non-coders tools to build complex software. Airtable is also a sponsor of Product Hunt Radio. Coincidence??? 🤔😂
✨ Ubiquity6 ($37.5M) helps developers create augmented reality apps. The small team is engineering-heavy and “pre-breakout.” It launched out of stealth in August with fanfare, demonstrating a beta preview of its technology for the first time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
💵 Atrium ($75.5M) is a “better law firm for startups.” It's really a low-cost legal option for young companies, with Justin Kan at the helm.
💸 Reserve aims to solve a major challenge with cryptocurrencies: price stability and actual functionality as transactional money. The company is backed by people like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, and is currently in a “pre-breakout” phase.
🚙 Comma ($8.1M) is a self-driving car OS. The CEO is George Hotz, and the company is building technology in tandem with the autonomous vehicle industry.
Also on the list: Neuralink, Discord, Superhuman (get your invite here), Plaid, Notion, AngelList, and more.
But what made it special, also caused its downfall. The shield of anonymity enabled trolling – and it only takes a few bad actors – without recourse and quickly the company came under heavy criticism.
On Product Hunt, co-founder Chrys Bader, explained the purpose of the app:
"There seems to be a lot of misinformation here. Secret was never about posting secrets. It's always been about giving people a safe place to say what's on their mind while keeping their privacy. AKA sharing secretly."
Secret eventually shuttered in 2015 but the mission was nobel and while challenging, there’s still an opportunity to create a social network where people can share their true thoughts without risk of losing their job[1] or worse (in some parts of the world). At least that’s what the founders of a new app believe.
October launched last week with a similar mission. Its CEO, Paul Bohm, described their purpose:
"We’re a social network built by experienced economists, security researchers and mathematicians. Our goal is to create 1) a safe environment for good discussion, and 2) a place that increases in quality as more people join."
If Secret and Twitter had a baby, it would be October. The app borrows Secret's photo-based expression but with a Twitter-like following model. Unlike Secret, users can post anonymously OR using their real identity. To incentivize positive behavior, users earn coins when posting good content, which we anticipate will power a new wave of functionality as the community matures.
So far the app seems to have avoided the abuse that plagued Secret, although October hasn't hit scale… yet. Until then, check it out.
[1] Will my tweets get me fired? is an app that will scan your timeline for questionable tweets.
As expected, we a saw a large global turnout of makers from dozens of countries creating unique solutions within voice/audio, social impact, health/beauty, remote working, brain stuff, inclusion and more. A few of these include:
💅 Keepin’ it Feel – A reflection tool for understating your emotions
😎 360 Calm – Guided VR relaxation and cognitive therapy
🗣 Yelling Across Cubicles – A walkie talkie for remote teams
👩 FeMake – The home of data on female makers
🕒 My Timezone Is – Easily share your timezone
Voting ends December 2nd. Next week we’ll announce the winners.
Huge thanks to all of you who participated, helped a fellow maker, and helped spread the word. 🙏
So we're hitting you with a product that will be fun for the actual holidays: HP's Sprocket Printer. It's like a printer for your pocket.
The little printers let you:
🖨 Print directly from your smartphone
📸 Share instant 2x3 inch photos or stickers
📱Connect to Bluetooth to print using paper technology
They're super cute and only $89.99 today ($40 off).
HP's also doing a big Black Friday gadget sale right now, right here.
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at HP.
On behalf of the Product Hunt team, we're thankful to *you *and to...
🐱 Cats on the Internet
🐶 Dog on the Internet
🐐 Goats on the Internet
🌍 Makers all over the world
🗞 Learning about tech every day
🌀 This GIF-creating app
⛵️ $7.5K in free AWS credits ;)
🎄 Presents from Apple (this year)
🔼 The most upvoted products this month (so far)
🎉 Product Hunt community meetup hosts (this could be you!)
And of course, YOU as well. 🙏
Us too (and millions of others celebrating Thanksgiving in the U.S.). But — holiday cookies aside — there's a lot of tech out there that wants to make you healthier, even if it's simply saving your eyes from your computer's LCD. We dug through a lot of the apps to help with those premature New Year's resolutions:
😱 Steps helps you beat social anxiety with small challenges
🙀 Comper Smarkin is a smart skincare device that improves your skin
💻 F.lux adjusts your screen to the time of day, with 5K+ upvotes (!!!)
🏃 7 Minute Workout is a scientific workout app from the New York Times
💪 Sweatcoin is an app that pays you to get fit
👀 Curie is a personal posture trainer you can use at work
💦Freeletics gives you high-intensity training plans
😴 Circadia is an app and therapy lamp that helps you sleep better
🏋 Zova is a personal trainer in an app
🏅 Striive awards you for reaching your fitness goals
Oklahoma just announced Tulsa Remote, offering remote workers $10K in cash, free coworking space, and discounted housing to move to the city. While $10K isn’t enough for most people to uproot to a new town, we expect more cities outside traditional tech hubs like Silicon Valley to experiment with this model.
This movement is made possible because of the rise of remote working. 🌍
We’re seeing remote-specific job boards like Remote OK and We Work Remotely emerge.
Tools like NomadList, Nomad Flights, and this community for remote makers make nomad living easier.
And platforms like Unsettled, Remote Year, and Selina are offering a turnkey solution to live and work in exotic places like Bali (or perhaps Hollywood).
The company also released their SDK a few weeks ago, which has already generated several million dollars in revenue.
The details
With the new app, users create Genie clones of themselves via "Wheels" to select from over a million different combinations of skin tone, eye color, hair style, clothing and accessories. Unlike other emoji apps — where avatars all virtually look the same — Genies are all unique in both physical appearance and personality.
Here's where it gets super interesting: Your Genies can communicate with each other. 😯
Scientists and engineers at Genies studied hundreds of millions of user chats to develop an algorithm that detects over 180 small mood changes. Using keyword and sentiment analysis, Genies can act out things you say in real-time. Genies can also communicate with each other in groups of up to six people, and be used across iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, to name a few.
A brief history of Genies
Last December, Genies came out of stealth with a beta app to deliver the most buzzworthy stories of the day to users alongside an avatar that does something related to the news. At the time, the startup was valued at $100M from top investors. 😳
Some immediate reactions on Product Hunt:
"So cool! A Genie could react to news that Elon Musk’s SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket with an avatar shooting into space 🚀🌌" — Niv
"As a 17 year old, I can see this spreading like wildfire in high school and college campuses around the country." — Sameer
"Genies might be a preview of the future of media. At least, this is probably what their investors (including NEA, Foundation Capital, CAA, Trinity Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and Maveron) are hoping for." - Ryan
Today, the company disclosed an additional $10M in a second round of funding, bringing its total capital raised to $25M.
Genies is backed by an all-star lineup of investors, including: NEA, BoxGroup, Lerer Hippeau, CAA Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Foundation Capital, and many others. Celebrities have also invested, including Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, Joe Montana, Shawn Mendes, A$AP Rocky, 50 Cent, The Chainsmokers, among others. 💸
What's next
Genies also announced a partnership with its first global advertiser, Gucci, for users who want to dress their avatars. 👠
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Genies.
Over the past several years there’s been a shift in the media industry. Let's call it the rise of the paywall. 💸
As publishers both large and small struggled to generate ad revenue, the collective media industry moved towards a more direct financial relationship between publications and readers with subscriptions. 👀
It turns out people will actually pay for news. The New York Times has about 3 million paying readers. The Athletic, a subscription publication for sports news, reportedly has over 100,000 subscribers (and received $20M in funding earlier this year). Investigative tech news site The Information is well-known in Silicon Valley, with subscribers paying $399 for an annual subscription. Even Medium is pushing towards a subscription-based model after taking a dramatic left turn away from the ad business last year. Now, their subscriber base has reportedly grown by 160 percent.
Several startups have also cropped up to help anyone create paywalled content. Substack (a YC-backed company led by the former CTO of Kik) makes it super simple to create paid email newsletters. Revue is an easy-to-use publishing platform for email that also lets you charge subscribers.
Now, a new publication is challenging the paywall, with a mission to make the news accessible to anyone — regardless of price point.
Earlier this week, The Correspondent launched in the U.S. with an entirely new vision for the media industry: a member-funded, free to access, ad-free platform on a mission to “unbreak the news.” 🗞
The Correspondent is an offshoot of “De Correspondent,” a Dutch startup that uses a choose-what-you-pay membership model for a year's worth of access to its news. De Correspondent already has 60,000 subscribers in the Netherlands.
“At The Correspondent, we actually make a difference between subscription and membership. In our view, subscribing is: paying money to get a product, and membership is: paying money to join a cause,” — The Correspondent Founder and Editor Rob Wijnberg wrote on Product Hunt
Members in this case are a community of readers that The Correspondent views as an untapped resource of knowledge versus a “target audience.”
“We invite them to share that knowledge and experience by having correspondents spend at least 30 to 40 percent of their time interacting with members and readers — not as an “extra”, but as an integral part of her work” — Wijnberg
The news follows two more big name publications — New York Magazine and Quartz — putting up paywalls this week.
Zendesk is having a big week.
On Tuesday, the company launched a new sales automation tool, called Sell, as well as a custom app development tool called Sunshine. ☀️
The significance of the launch
Largely known as a major player in customer service software, Zendesk acquired sales force automation startup Base in September to expand into CRM.
Now, Sell's launch marks the first step in Zendesk's plan to introduce technology for sales among its suite of products. 🤝
The details
🙌 Sell aims to enhance productivity, processes and pipeline visibility for sales teams.
💸 The tool will cost $19 per user per month.
👀 It also comes with features like drag-and-drop dashboards and over 30 out-of-the-box reports
Understand customer data wherever it lives
Sunshine, Zendesk's development platform that also launched this week, will be available for free as part of the company's enterprise tier.
Sunshine is built entirely on AWS and has a ton of features, including:
👁 A single view of customers from across applications
🕐 An events tool that lets companies create a timeline of customer activity
💭 A “Custom Objects” feature lets users store random customer information
Explore more Zendesk
Zendesk Explore is an analytics product for businesses to measure and understand the customer experience.
With Zendesk Explore, you get instant access to the customer analytics that matter—and the deeper understanding of your customers and business that comes with it. 📈
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Zendesk.
