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What’s the difference between an LLC and a C-Corporation? 🙃

If you don’t know, Firstbase does. The YC-backed company is helping makers launch US companies online, all in one platform. Maker Mark Milastsivy started Firstbase three years ago, but it was limited to one product —Firstbase Start— which focused only on incorporating a US company and accessing startup tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and AWS. Today, the platform has multiple products in its offerings.

In addition to helping makers manage legal matters, Firstbase automates your business compliance, creates a physical business address, helps you apply for financial tools, and sets up payroll accounts in any US state. Firstbase Raise helps startups connect their business data to Firstbase and share it with VCs. “Our goal is to make fundraising more data-driven and empower more founders to raise money and build massive businesses,” says Milastsivy.

Firstbase is making an impact across borders. So far, the platform has helped makers in over 160 countries launch their businesses in the US. For Milastsivy, making that kind of impact is personal—"As a foreign-born founder myself, I had to go through many manual processes with banks and lawyers when initially starting a business, and I quickly realized that these situations could be extremely difficult to navigate.”

According to an MIT study, immigrants in the US are 80% more likely to start businesses than American-born citizens. Building companies is no walk in the park, so we love seeing makers come full circle and give back to the community through tools that make the journey easier. Here are some that caught our eyes:

Formance helps you build and track custom money flows.

Lawpath wants to make legal support accessible for small businesses. It helps business owners create legal documents, eSignatures, and manage their legal workflows.

Nanonets automates your financial processes. You can automatically upload invoices, pay and manage vendors, and access real-time expense reports.

Nowadays, practically anyone can develop a SaaS product or an app without any programming experience, and some of the biggest companies continue to roll out DIY solutions.

Two months after the launch of its no-code pricing table, Stripe added to its no-code suite with a new customer portal that lets customers manage their own billing details. Business owners can create a link to a secure, prebuilt customer portal and share it with their customers, allowing them to manage their payment details, invoices, and subscriptions.

The ability to expedite those tedious processes is key— 90% of no-code users attribute faster business growth to the usage of no-code tools and 28% of people say they use no-code tools because it’s the fastest way to get things done. According to a recent report from Gartner, it’s expected that 70% of new applications will use no-code or low-code tools by 2025, up from 20% in 2020.

So whether you’re just starting your app or adding to your no-code stack, here are a few of the latest options:

Teta is a no-code tool that allows you to build iOS and Android apps, dark-mode included. Maker Gianluca d’Ottavio says that Teta is not just for design, but is a Flutter-esque, full-stack tool with integrations like in-app purchases with PayPal, in-app subscriptions, Google Maps, and more. It’s also equipped with real-time collaboration abilities and widgets that help with interface-building.

Maker Ufuk Dag and his team wanted to make AI more accessible, so they built Cameralyze. The no-code AI builder helps makers create different types of AI apps, including face detection, face blurring, and object recognition.

WotNot is a no-code bot builder that helps businesses build bots for a variety of use cases like lead-generation automation, customer support, and appointment booking.

If you’re a maker, you’re likely no stranger to the phrases “talk to your users” and “user-centric product.” Though it’s great advice, it also leaves a lot of gray area.

How do you get the insights that you need?

That’s the question maker Thomas Moussafer and his team had when they created Jimo, a user research tool for product teams. It’s all about “helping product teams involve their users at any stage of the product life cycle, via in-app workflows and a dedicated collaborative space,” said Thomas.

Jimo provides product teams with a dedicated portal to share product updates and a public roadmap with their users. With the ability to embed Figma and Maze, you can share prototypes get feedback, and receive a report that sums up user preferences. It also lets you target the right users based on attributes, behavioral data, and momentum “without bugging devs” to do the work for you.

Behind some of the most successful start-ups are teams dedicated to collecting user feedback, so it’s great to see makers building user research platforms that could make life easier for other makers. Betafi, Poll the People, and Cycle are just a few of other options in the space.

As always, let the makers know what you think in the comments (we’re sure they’d appreciate the feedback 😉).

NYC Climate Week took place last week and while critics say there was a lot of greenwashing involved, VCs and politicians alike are betting on the industry. The need to reduce carbon emissions is dire, with global emissions rising 6% in 2021, despite many companies’ commitments to cutting their emissions.

Eyes (and wallets) are on the tech world for assistance—Q2 marked a record $882 million in VC fundraising for carbon-cutting startups and companies like Uber are implementing their own tools to mitigate their impact on the climate crisis. The ride-share company launched a new tool for its business clients at Climate Week, allowing them to track the carbon emissions of work-related rides.

Some in the space fear a 2008-esque industry crash — when the financial crisis hit, funds disappeared. Industry veterans are less worried this time. As the folks at Protocol put it, “it feels like you can’t walk a block without tripping over a climate tech founder or venture capitalist looking for the next big carbon-cutting startup,” while the VCs themselves say “There’s too much vested interest to go back to clean tech 1.0.”

We’re relieved to hear that for mother earth and the new climate tech startups in our community, like Bidi Charge.

The rise of EVs has transformed the car industry and parking lots as we know it. Despite increasing demand, more EV chargers are needed, and Bidi Charge is responding by installing EV charging points in areas requested by users. In the future, the platform will also allow you to crowdinvest in charging points and earn returns on your investment.

Lune is helping reduce carbon emissions too by enabling companies to integrate automated emissions calculations and carbon offsetting into their customer experiences. Companies can allow customers to offset shipping emissions at checkout and choose greener ways to pay.

It’s a tale as old as time – should makers focus on building or on distribution and marketing? It’s difficult to say, but what’s clear is that “build and they will come” doesn’t always hold true. A good marketing strategy helps you establish your brand and grow an audience, but getting there can feel overwhelming. The key is to start small and figure out what works best for your product.

Whether you’ve solidified your strategy or are just now building out your marketing plan, here are some recently launched marketing products to help.👇

Versify is a Web3 customer engagement solution that helps you engage with your customers via NFT collectibles. It’s geared towards makers that are less familiar with crypto and integrates with existing CRM platforms so you can automatically airdrop an NFT to your customers. With Web3 infiltrating the marketing strategies of companies like Starbucks and Nike, it might be worth testing.

Hypotenuse AI can help with your content marketing strategy. It uses AI to generate blog articles, product descriptions, marketing copy, and images.

MeltingSpot is geared towards marketers that are looking to explore user-generated content. As a community platform, it helps you centralize your content and engage with different audiences. You can also host webinars, workshops, and interviews.

Mailmeteor 2.0 lets you send personalized email campaigns and auto follow-up sequences from Gmail. It’s an update to the existing Mailmeteor tool and allows you to add follow-up emails until you get a reply.

Will you add any of these to your marketing stack?

If you’ve kept up with everything tech-related, you’d probably agree that 2022 is likely to be the year of Artificial Intelligence.

AI adoption across industries is rapidly increasing; 35% of companies are using AI and 42% are exploring it. OpenAI has made its presence known this past year—first with DALL-E 2 (which, as of this week, lets you edit people’s faces using AI), and now, it's open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper.

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system “trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.” It’s the latest attempt of a company trying to make speech recognition and translation more accessible. Its focus on improving ASR is especially important—a 2020 Stanford study found that existing ASR systems have a much lower error rate with white users (19%) than Black users (35%).

OpenAI claims that about a third of Whisper’s audio dataset is non-English and that it processes accents, background noise, and technical language at a very robust level. Whisper can translate from non-English to English, which could make speech-to-text translation a much more accessible feature and eliminate the biases we see today.

While Whisper is geared towards enabling developers to add voice interfaces to a wider set of applications, AI-powered products are for everyone.

Here are some new AI-powered products that don’t require any dev experience. 👇

Charlie 2.0 not only has a cute mascot, but uses AI to help you generate HD, 2K, 4K, widescreen, vertical, and square images, and blog content.

Suggesty is an AI search tool that helps you get human-like answers to your Google search without scrolling through all the results pages.

Typed uses AI to help you collaborate with your team to write, research, and view tasks all on one page.

Ever heard the saying “friendship is not about who you’ve known the longest, but who’s shown up for you when it mattered?” Let’s apply that to your toolstack. Yes, you may feel bonded to the productivity tool you’ve used for the past 5 years, but maybe you’re missing out on something that meets more of your needs.

Check out some recent community preferences that are alternatives to popular products 👇

Artboard Studio is like two design favorites meshed into one; Maker Mucahit Gayiran combined the Figma-eque design experience with features that resemble After Effects to help designers turn into animators. It’s cloud-based and works with vectors, images, and videos so you can design anything from Instagram Stories to stationery items.

Looking for an alternative to Typeform or Google Forms? Feathery is a low-code option that connects to over 2,000 tools and helps developers build complex forms.

Cal.com, the open-source alternative to Calendly, re-launched this month with support from investor Alexis Ohanian, and is now available for individuals. You can tailor links per scenario, automate your workflow, avoid meeting overload with buffers between meetings, and more.

Slack is a favorite amongst many for its team-building capabilities, but it’s not the only tool that can help your remote team bond together. Kosy is out of beta and helps remote teams collaborate and have fun together. Teams can build a virtual workspace and keep chats and meetings within Kosy.

If you’re shipping an app and looking for an alternative to Firebase, Appwrite launched yesterday. The open-source tool provides developers with authentication, databases, storage, and real time capabilities to build web and mobile applications.

Will you befriend any of these tools?

Spotify Audiobooks officially launched in the U.S. yesterday, directly competing with Audible and potentially threatening its dominance in the audiobook industry.

Audible, which was acquired by Amazon in 2008, controls 41% of the US audiobook market and critics say it has a monopoly on the industry. Could Spotify’s entry into the space threaten that?

It seems Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek and his team hope so. Nir Zicherman, head of audiobooks at Spotify, especially sees the potential to expand the audience for audiobooks and transform how users interact with content—the audiobook industry is already extremely profitable at $1.7b, but audiobooks represent less than 7% of the entire book market.

Spotify’s grip on all-things audio has already been growing. The platform is already a leader in music streaming services and podcasts, so adding audiobooks to the mix could make it a convenient all-in-one app for users who don’t like jumping around. It could also be a gamechanger for the company’s profits; despite being a leader in streaming, “[Spotify] has still never reported an annual profit.”

Spotify debuted its audiobook catalog with 300,000 titles from best-selling authors like Michelle Obama and Stephen King, and introduced a pay per book pricing model that’s a huge contrast to Audible’s unlimited subscription model.

We’ll be watching to see how Amazon responds to its new competitor. “Just as we've done with podcasting, expect us to play to win,” Ek says of Spotify.

A large part of sales isn’t only establishing trust, but all the grunt work that comes along with tracking your prospects’ needs and meeting them where they are. The transition to a very virtual world has added an extra layer of difficulty.

We’ve collected the latest community favorite products to help with common challenges when it comes to outreach and closing leads. 👇

Nektar is a no-code solution for revenue operations and customer-facing teams. Maker Abhijeet Vijayvergiya came up with the idea when he noticed that sales reps just didn’t have the time to update customer relationship management (CRM) tools, which scattered critical data all over the place and created issues for revenue operations teams. Nektar captures CRM data from sales reps as they go about their day, so key revenue activities and buyer contacts don’t slip through the cracks. It can also be used for the entire customer lifecycle, so it’s not limited to people in revenue ops.

Social selling? Of the sales reps who use social media, 64% hit their team quota, and leaders in social selling create 45% more sales opportunities than their counterparts. Hexospark can take out some of the manual work by helping sales teams find new leads on LinkedIn.

If you’re working with enterprise level clients, or those that require highly secure environments, you know you’ve felt the burden of the 200+ security question requests when procurement teams are vetting a new software. It prolongs the sales cycle. HyperComply solves this by enabling sales teams to respond to security questionnaires faster and using AI and human review to quality-check answers.

Maker Robin Singhvi noticed that his sales reps were struggling to create and present successful product demos to prospects, so he created SmartCue. SmartCue helps sales reps create personalized product demos and a library of demos based on use cases, buyer personas, industries, and more.

If any of these help you ring the real or proverbial gong, make sure to leave some feedback or a review on their pages.

Uber was hacked this past Thursday and a successful social engineering tactic (aka psychological manipulation) was to blame.

If you’re thinking “it can’t happen to me,” you’re probably wrong. The 18-year old Uber attacker tricked an employee by repeatedly sending them multifactor authentication (MFA) login notifications for an hour and then messaging them on WhatsApp pretending to be an Uber IT person. The attacker asserted that the MFA notifications would stop once the login was approved, and it worked.

With just one employee’s information, the hacker gained access to Uber’s cloud infrastructure and OneLogin, an identity and access management service. The attack was a classic case of phishing, a social engineering tactic that utilizes fake emails and text messages to trick users into revealing their personal information. Employees are usually the biggest target, and Uber was the latest victim.

The truth is, no matter how protected you think you are, there’s always room to learn new ways to protect yourself and your company. Hackers are getting smarter and even the most “secure” techniques (like MFA) can’t guarantee that you’re immune from a cyberattack. Less than a month ago, hackers used similar employee-targeted phishing tactics to breach Twilio and DoorDash’s systems too.

Besides not clicking on suspicious links and giving out your personal information to people posing as your company’s IT professionals, there are a few more ways to protect yourself from cyberattacks.

If you’re a maker, we recently covered the security benefits of penetration testing here. Albert, a cybersecurity program for Slack, and TypingDNA ActiveLock (an authentication app backed by Google’s AI-focused fund) could also help. The latter functions by using biometrics-based security to continuously authenticate users based on the way they type. In the first 1-2 days of use, ActiveLock runs in “training mode” to learn your typing pattern. From then on, the app runs in “active” mode and blocks unauthorized users. If an unordinary typing pattern is detected, all devices are locked.

For individuals, a VPN and the CrowdSec Console, a security tool that monitors cyber threats on your online services could help.