The Leaderboard
Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
“Setting aside the rest of the week to go through the 9000 people on this year's Forbes 30 Under 30” — Hunter Walk
Forbes released its annual “30 Under 30” list yesterday, highlighting 600 youngin's who promise to be the next generation of leaders. With such an exhaustive number of people featured, it takes a lot out of what makes the coveted list actually special — young people changing the world. 🌍
Watching people (at any age) make cool new things is something that inspires us — and is one of the reasons we're hosting our own Makers Festival next week.
But to give you some inspiration before the hackathon, we combed Forbes's list for the coolest products made by the people on it. Here are 30 of them:
Cargo wants to turn ride-sharing vehicles into vending machines. 🚘
Cabin is a luxury sleeper bus service from San Francisco to Los Angeles. 😴
Omni lets you store, share and rent out your unused belongings. 📦
Drop is an app that rewards you for spending at your favorite places. 💸
Genies was dubbed a “Bitmoji killer.” The app lets you create personalizable avatars that react to the news, and the startup has raised funding from top VCs at a ~$100M valuation. 👀
Grabr works as a marketplace for people unwilling to pay international shipping rates. ✈️
Cafe X is a robotic coffee bar. It's exactly what it sounds like. ☕️
Recharge lets you pay per-minute to use a hotel room to rest. 🏨
Plotaverse is a suite of five motion photo editing apps that has over 6 million downloads (and is used by people like Kim Kardashian and Ariana Grande). 📸
Tia is basically a personal gynecologist in an app. 🙌
Unfold helps you create gorgeoussss stories for Instagram and the startup is seeing 100K downloads/day with millions of users. 📱
Life House launched on Product Hunt earlier this month with a mission to upgrade boutique hotels for the Airbnb generation. 🏩
Pathrise is a “career accelerator” for students that will coach you until you get a job. 👩💻
InkBox is a semi-permanent tattoo startup for tats that last 12-15 days. 🤔
Agrilyst helps indoor farmers manage their crops. 🌾
Lattice was created to make employees' working hours more efficient. ⏰
ScopeAI helps companies sort through customer feedback using AI. 🗣
Mars Reel is a sports video highlight reel for high school sports. 🏀
Brex has branded itself as “the first corporate credit card for startups.” 💳
Rainway is a web service that lets you play your favorite PC games on any device. 💻
Ader connects brands with gaming influencers. The network has over 2,000 content creators to date. 🎮
Betches Media started as a Wordpress blog and is now a full-fledged multimedia company geared towards millennial women. 💁♀️
Superhuman (as the name implies) is one of the fastest email systems out there. 💌
Morning Brew is a daily email newsletter that delivers bite-sized business news. 🗞
Teachable lets you sell individualized online courses (and get 💰).
Purple is a chat app that lets creators (like journalists) engage with audiences via text message. 💬
Candid, a direct-to-consumer startup for clear aligners, was built as an alternative to Invisalign (and costs 65 percent less). 😁
Atrium created a low-cost legal option for startups (and Justin Kan is a cofounder). 💵
Felix Gray is for all of us: non-prescription glasses for people who stare at screens. 🤓
HelloAva is an AI-powered personal skincare consultant. 😍
Many of us in the tech industry are all too familiar with the concept of “brain hacking.” Let's call it the Elon effect.
But before we all bring the power of the internet into our minds (welp), let's talk about the crop of apps that exist right now focused on making our brains stronger, less stressed and more productive.
🧘 Headspace is the “gym membership for meditation.”
😴 Endel uses personalized sound environments to help us sleep, relax and focus.
👀 MindFi is an app that trains you to meditate with your eyes open.
🙌 Aura is a “Spotify for mindfulness meditations” that audio streams platform for digital health and wellness content that recently raised $2.7M.
🧠 Tinycards is an app from Duolingo that gives you flashcards on hundreds of topics.
🤓 Learning Lab is a tool that challenges people to learn anything in one month alongside their day jobs.
🎶 Brain.fm gives you the music you need to meditate, relax, sleep, work or focus.
🔊 Noisli lets you mix different sounds to create your perfect environment, so you can then boost your productivity.
🙅 The ToDon't List is a to-do list for things you shouldn't be doing.
👂 Self-Monk is an AirPod-first meditation app
What do you use to boost your brain? Share it with us on Twitter and we'll RT the most useful or creative recommendations. 😉
ICYMI, we announced the Product Hunt Makers Festival (our annual hackathon) yesterday, which you can sign up for until November 24 at 11pm. Note: One of the themes this year is “Brain Stuff.”
Last year we ran our first ever hackathon online with over 4,000 makers participating from all over the world. 🌎
This year we’re calling our 2018 hackathon a Makers Festival, welcoming all types of makers to build together over Thanksgiving week. It’s a chance to connect with other makers to solve interesting problems, challenge yourselves to create something from scratch and win your very own kitty award (more on that later). 😉
Who is Makers Festival for?
Makers Festival is for everyone! Not just coders. All types of Makers and Creators are welcome to participate: Designers, photographers, illustrators, artists, writers, videographers, etc.
What can you make?
You can make anything — it doesn’t have to be an app, bot or website. It might be an e-book, interview series, photography collection, a painting, a song, etc.
Rules:
* There's no restriction on team size
* All participants must sign up here
* All participants must complete all three assignments (Project page, Upcoming page and Medium post)
* All participants must complete their submission form by November 24 at 11pm PST
* Winners will be chosen by the Product Hunt community with our team’s input, and the winners will be announced on November 26 right here in the Product Hunt newsletter 🙌
Facebook's former CIO Tim Campos just launched a new calendar app to take the hassle out of scheduling meetings.
The kicker: you might actually use it.
"It's kind of like a mashup of what would happen if Google Docs, Google Maps, and Google Calendar all got married” — Tim Campos
The new app, called Woven, isn't the first startup to take a crack at solving frustrating calendar experiences. X.ai ($44.3 million raised) and Clara Labs ($7.2 million raised) use AI to schedule meetings on your behalf. Meetingbird (acquired by Front) and Calendly let you create meeting slots for others to choose from.
Woven is different in that it puts calendars and scheduling features together — but it isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead of trying to replace GSuite or Outlook, Woven works on top of Google and Microsoft tools.
“Our desktop and iOS apps sync with your existing Google calendar and provide a couple of unique new features to start: 1) we show your events on a map with automatic 🚘time calculations; and 2) you can collaborate with guests to find the best time and place to meet” — Woven Designer Bob Ryskamp
Woven also uses a built-in virtual assistant that you can ask to suggest meeting times on its own.
The company has raised $4.8 million in funding and here's a preview of what might be coming to your calendar next:
📊 Analytics for your time
🎬 Rich attachments (docs, videos, agendas)
☑️ Automated task/work time scheduling
Samsung just unveiled a foldable smartphone. You read that right.
At Samsung’s annual developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, the company finally revealed the long-rumored foldable display — dubbed the “Infinity Flex.” 📱
Justin Denison, a Samsung exec, demonstrated how the phone works with a prototype on stage, showing off how the phone could run three apps at the same time when opened.
“The Infinity Flex display is the foundation for the smartphone of tomorrow” - Justin Denison
But Samsung isn’t the only smartphone maker working on foldable screens. It was reported in March that Apple is reportedly working on a foldable iPhone it plans to release within the next two years. So hang tight, Apple loyalists. 😉
We’ve also seen other *unconventional* phones emerge lately. Light Phone is a minimalist’s dream and raised over $2M in funding. The Zanco is the world’s tiniest phone. Nokia made a “Matrix” phone. The Fox Mini 1 is a $30 backup phone for your smartphone.
Pro tip: Don’t quit your daydream.
We’re living in the age of side hustles, where companies from Instagram to Glossier to GitHub have evolved from personal projects to huge successes.
If you’re not familiar with the history of Product Hunt, we also got our start this way. 😏
We rounded up some interesting resources to pull from if you’re hustlin’ on the nights and weekends:
💌 Sidemail launched earlier this week as a cheaper alternative to multiple G Suite accounts, so you can manage email for your side projects with unlimited inboxes.
🤔 If you're stuck on your next great idea, use The Side Project Scoring Tool to evaluate and choose the right pursuit.
🙌 IndieHackers is a website and community focusing on helping entrepreneurs become profitable while remaining independent.
💰If you're looking to put your side project up for sale, Transferlot is a curated marketplace where founders can easily buy and sell.
👋 MakerWidget is particularly helpful when you're first getting going. You can embed a widget of yourself on your project pages so visitors can see who you are, where to find you and what you did before.
💻 newCo is a community and bootcamp to build a product without a writing a line of code.
Are you working on a side project? Join us on Makers, a place to share what you’re working on and get support from other friendly folks in the Product Hunt community. We’re announcing something big later this month. 😉
The presidential election isn't until 2020 but today's midterm elections remain incredibly important, shaping the House and Senate. A massive amount of voters (36 million!) have already cast their ballot ahead of today's election, pointing to the possibility of a record turnout for a midterm. 😳
We went down the Product Hunt rabbit hole and found some cool tools to help you get to the polls and exercise your right today:
🇺🇸Vote.org is building tech that removes the barriers to voting. You can look up your nearest polling place so you know where to go today and they'll show you who and what will be on your local ballot.
👀 EveryPolitician is a rich open database on politicians, including everything from biographical details to social accounts.
🗳VoteWithMe matches your phone contacts with a voter file to show you registered friends who needs to get to the polls
💻Vote Banner is a small javascript snippet to add a banner to your site to remind your users to go vote.
☎️Dial Congress is a Chrome plugin that displays the phone number of a member of the U.S. Congress when you hover over their name. You can use this to let your legislators know how you feel about political issues in the future.
See you at the polls!
The Product Hunt community had some mixed reactions:
"I'd hazard a guess that this app provides a comparable level of distraction to a phone conversation" – Andreas
"I used to drive 4 hours a day to get to SF, my time was spent only on podcasts because not listening to something would be so boring. I dig the idea, and wish you the best" — José
"I respect the effort, but distracted driving is a big no no" – Shuen
Niko, the founder, quickly jumped into the discussion:
"The existing research shows that so-called Alertness Maintaining Tasks (AMTs for short - and trivia has been specifically tested as part of existing research) actually have a *positive* effect on driving safety, by slowing performance deterioration and maintaining a higher level of alertness for longer."
Drivetime is a new entrant in a growing list of audio-based app experiences. We'll see more exploration in this space as people adopt Google Home's, Alexa-powered microwaves, Apple's HomePod, Facebook's Portal, AirPods, and other audio-based interfaces. Consumer behavior is already shifting toward an audio-first future.
Whether you say "Alexa", "OK Google", or "Hey Siri", there's no denying audio is on the rise. In fact, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 and about 30 percent of all searches will be done without a screen. 😳
Keep an ear on this space.
The new venture, naturally dubbed Hers, offers birth control, hair products, prescription skin creams and sexual wellness products for women. Andrew, the founder, jumped into the Product Hunt discussion:
"Although most people think access to women's 'wellness' is abundant, when you actually look at the ability for a woman to get REAL medicine online, and on her time, and with her own decision making, it's non existent."
Backed by $97 million in funding, Hers is the latest in a lineup of startups bypassing the doctor's office and drugstores to deliver prescriptions straight to your door. 💊
VC's are hot on this space. Here are a few other startups in this area that have gone on to raise recent rounds:
• Nurx helps women get birth control prescriptions without a doctor’s visit ($41M raised)
• Roman prescribes erectile dysfunction meds online, and more recently expanded their product line to offer a service to help smokers quit ($91M raised)
• Modern Fertility helps women gauge their reproductive help with at-home fertility tests ($7M raised)
• Capsule provides an on-demand service for prescriptions ($70M raised)
• Curology pairs patients with dermatologists to provide customized skincare treatment ($19M raised)
The global telemedicine market has exploded in recent years, with startups raising over $1.2 billion since 2013. The market is expected to reach nearly $20 billion by 2025, up from only $6 billion in 2016. 😳
After 10 years, we still don’t know the true identity of Satoshi and his/her/their long-term impact on banking, government, business, etc. 🤔
At its peak in late 2017, bitcoin’s market cap was over $300 billion, quickly approaching the market valuation of the world's most notable technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. It's now dropped to a third of what it once was before. 😳
This volatility is another sign that we're early in the days of crypto as makers around the world continue to tinker and build creating decentralized apps (indirectly) inspired by Satoshi. Here are a few to explore:
📷 Pixelfed is a decentralized take on Instagram
🎨 Cryptographics lets you create and own digital art on the blockchain
👀 Blockchain Demo visually explains how the blockchain works for newbies
💰 Crumbs turns spare change into cryptocurrency, similar to Acorns
🎧 Blockchain Curated turns top crypto articles into podcasts
💬 Leeroy is a decentralized Twitter built on Ethereum
🎲 Crypto Takeovers is a prediction-driven game on the blockchain
💸 Blockchain Job is the place for non-technical folks to find jobs in crypto
And of course there's also Cryptokitties, which is one of the most well known consumer dapps, even though fewer than 500 people use it daily.
While many of today's consumer dapps lack the accessibility and features of their centralized counterparts, we're excited to see the space mature. Bitcoin's white paper may have been published a decade ago but we're still early.
