The Leaderboard

Happy Friday! In today's Leaderboard: Daily Dev just launched a Discord but for developer-led communities (duh), Rippling's employee analytics tool might lead to hiring babies, and Alibaba isn't content with just owning the knock-off sneaker market, it has set its eyes on becoming an AI giant. 

In today's Leaderboard: Notion's new AI assistant has the potential to finally give you peace at work, Spotify launched a new feature to curate bangers on demand, and a new platform is aiming to show scammers the door — but scammers are gonna scam...

Are designers about to be replaced by AI? I wouldn't worry about it, I mean one thing AI is no substitute for is good taste, you either got it or you don't. That's according to Sanjana, our Head of Content who gave her take about two new AI-powered design tools below. 

Slidejoy: On-demand presentation design (by a team of humans!). 

I’m glad to see Slidejoy is bucking the trend of throwing AI at everything and opting to instead focus on delivering value through simplicity while tackling the time-consuming, thankless task of creating Powerpoints. It’s a refreshing approach, though I’ll be more interested to see whether they can scale, expand and stay relevant without the automation their competitors rely on to fuel growth.

Solidroad 2.0: AI-powered sales and customer support conversation simulator designed to train customer-facing teams. 

It’s refreshing to see Solidroad focus on improving people rather than replacing them — an approach I rarely see in AI support tools. The interactive lessons and real-world simulations are a great touch, especially since you can customize them to fit your team’s needs, instead of relying on a library of templates and boilerplate scenarios. It makes ongoing coaching, which is always crucial, so much more manageable.

Clearspace (#2 on yesterday’s leaderboard) is a screen time manager that conditions access to selected apps on “proof of motion” — squats, pushups or steps. It reminds me a bit of how legendary mathematician John Conway (allegedly) made his computer login a difficult math problem to keep his mind sharp. More generally, I’m excited to see how advanced computer vision will enable all sorts of new technological possibilities.

Modal is the best serverless GPU platform. I know because I founded Banana.dev, a popular competitor. (Yes, writing this was quite the exercise on the ego). What I love about Modal is that it makes me *think differently* about how to write code. I don’t need a microservice, I just write a function. I don’t need S3, I just add a volume. I don’t need to deploy to show my coworkers my app, as I was developing in the cloud the whole time. Modal is what programming and deploying should’ve been from the start — with the added perk of GPUs.

Positional — #4 on yesterday’s leaderboard — provides tools to create, optimize, and analyze content. We’ve been using its Optimize tool to build out our new category pages and their Content Analytics are the first legitimately helpful page analytics tools I’ve used. Given there’s a sea of AI spam-generation products masquerading as SEO tools right now, I think anything that adds real value like this is going to take off.

Hunters, Makers, Lurkers: Today we’re excited to launch The Leaderboard, a redesigned version of our daily newsletter. Every edition will feature three staff perspectives on products you should know about, alongside yesterday’s leaderboard. Fast, fun, and ahead of the curve. We hope you love it, and maybe share it with a friend if you do.

Hi, hi, hi! It’s Monday — you know what that means. A new week of cool new products. In today’s digest, I’m covering a tool that lets you make professional-grade screen recordings in no time. But first…

The headlines: 

🐦 X competitor Bluesky has added eight million users in the last ten months. 

🧑‍⚖️ TikTok has begun the process to appeal the order that it be sold or banned.

🐣 The creator of the original Flappy Bird has disavowed the new version.