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Founders, if this week’s been nothing but crickets, it’s not you; it’s Burning Man week.

Unless you’re in fundraising mode, the quietness and calm of these past few days (no Twitter drama?) probably gave you a chance for some heads-down work. If you’re planning to keep that up and stay focused on building, we’ve got some interesting playbooks and resources for you to browse through.

This Project Proposal Pack offers 7 pages of templates for outlining project ideas, defining the work to be done, project schedules, and costs.

Avoma Sales Playbook includes actionable tips, tools, and processes for those in SaaS sales. “We analyzed hundreds of sales calls to come up with an actionable playbook for sales leaders, managers, AEs, and SDRs,” the makers share.

Also for SaaS companies, this Content Marketing Playbook walks you through tactics for attracting the right audience, driving qualified traffic, increasing user signups, and getting more paying customers.

Stripe’s Pricing Table lets you generate a table where you can display your pricing plans side-by-side. Once customers select their desired plan, they’ll be directed to Stripe’s conversion-optimized checkout page to complete the transaction.

Get some inspiration for your website’s Hero section from this collection of 240+ designs of leading tech companies like Github, Squarespace, and Expensify.

As much as we love fully-fledged, complex productivity apps that basically let you optimize your entire life, there’s something about simple, yet powerful browser extensions. They’re lightweight and usually don’t require you to do much, except for a few clicks – a true and tried “less is more” approach.

We’ve been watching the space closely and noting down interesting ones we’ve seen launch recently. Here are some that might make you want to go “Add to Chrome” (or whatever browser you’re using – we won’t judge, now that Internet Explorer’s dead).

AdGuard MV3 is “the first ad-blocker” built on top of Chrome’s Manifest V3. It lets you block ads, trackers, and social widgets, as well as self-defined web components and domains.

AI2sql uses AI to generate SQL queries from natural language input.

Depths is a bookmark manager for developers. The extension lets you tag all your saved resources and calculate an estimated read time, with full-text search enabled.

CSS Scan 3.0 helps you check the CSS of any element you hover over and copy its entire rules with a single click.

Slashy adds custom command functionality to Notion. It comes pre-packaged with plugins to make drawings within Notion and record your video and audio, and it gives you the ability to create your own simple commands or advanced plugins with its SDK.

Iago helps you learn new languages by overlaying subtitles on streaming websites like Netflix, Disney+, and Youtube, in both your native and target learning language.

In May, we launched Product Hubs for following along with your favorite products beyond launch day. Now you can do that and discover much more, wherever you are, with our entirely new Product Hunt mobile apps for iOS and Android.

“Looking at the data over the past few years, we noticed how much Product Hunt usage was coming in on mobile (apps and mobile web),” wrote Product Hunt CEO Ashley Higgins on today’s launch. “ To address this shift and best serve the Product Hunt community, we decided to build a brand new native mobile experience for iOS and Android!”

With the new apps, you’ll be able to discover products in list or card view, find the tools you’re looking for with an improved search experience, and catch up on Stories and Discussions so that you never miss out on the next greatest thing. Plus, you can do all of it without stressing your eyes — dark mode is finally here.

“This is just the beginning,” shared Product Hunt iOS Team Lead, John Grange. “ We are laying a really solid foundation to build whatever features we can imagine going forward, even allowing us to explore mobile-first features going forward.”

Grange and team worked alongside the Product Hunt community to ensure that the apps would first and foremost be a tool that helps empower makers. In addition to incorporating years of community feedback, we worked with early adopters in our Beta program who helped by submitting tons of feedback, reporting bugs, and sharing creative solutions (even wireframes!)

“The new android app for PH is literally amazing. It is about 10000x more useable on Android now, and the List/Card view layout swap is amazing,” shared Beta Program member, Tim.

We hope you feel the same as Tim. As always, share your feedback with us here or directly from within the apps, by going to Settings > Leave Feedback.

“Reddit launched NFTs. Notably, the term “NFT” is never mentioned,” shared one observant maker on Twitter (link added by us).

The company introduced its “blockchain-backed Collectible avatars” back in June, giving some away for free to its most avid users, and making them available for purchase by others. The NFTs are stored and managed in your Vault on Reddit and can be traded on marketplaces like OpenSea and SuperRare.

Despite skirting the buzzword, Reddit didn’t skip out on some NFT criticism and “backlash to the idea of additional DRM [digital rights management], how they play into the greater fool theory described by Bill Gates, and what blockchain energy use means for the environment,” writes Richard Lawler at the Verge.

Still, despite critics becoming increasingly vocal, the concept persists. Sure, some of these moments might elicit cringe — not everyone was impressed by Eminem and Snoop Dog’s weekend MTV VMA performance in the metaverse as their Bored Ape alter egos. Ironically, maybe part of the problem lies in the speedy path NFTs have had into the mainstream, with celebrity endorsements and over-hyped projects leaving new investors victim to scams. The mere mention of NFTs elicit eye rolls, but can makers change the conversation?

The question is whether a re-brand of NFTs and a low-profile on-ramping into “digital collectibles” on major platforms is a better go-to-market strategy. Meta is working a similar angle. It launched its own “digital collectibles” on Facebook and Instagram. The feature lets users connect their digital wallets to their accounts so they can post their NFTs across their profiles. Twitter added a similar feature at the start of the year.

TechCrunch coverage notes that “app sleuths have noted that [Meta] is also working on custom animations for NFT posts and digital collectible collections.”

So the bad news for “right-clickers” — NFTs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Just don’t call it an NFT.

Audio had its moment of glory during the first lockdown when Clubhouse reached its peak and podcasting blew up. But is it back? Tbh, It never really went away. According to Buzzsprout’s latest report, podcasting continues to be on an upward slope, with over one-third (104M) of Americans listening to podcasts regularly. It looks like more of these folks listen to podcasts than have Netflix accounts.

Youtube recently announced a dedicated podcasts page, which will allow users to explore new and popular podcast episodes, shows, and creators, as well as recommend podcast content. For creators, Youtube will also provide audio-first analytics. Earlier this year, an 84-page deck was leaked, which revealed the company’s plans for podcasts, including its focus on featuring new audio ads sold by Google. Hello, new revenue stream. 💸

Twitter is joining in the fun, too. On Thursday, the company announced the launch of a new version of Twitter Spaces, branded as Stations. Slightly different from traditional podcasting apps and feeds, Stations features topic-based playlists that will include both episodes from RSS feeds, as well as Twitter-native audio clips and recordings.

By the looks of it, makers are also excited by the future of audio–we’ve seen plenty of great launches recently that point to that.

Zencastr launched Zencastr 3.0, which now lets creators record, publish, and monetize their episodes all from the same place.

Galas helps podcasters receive more feedback from listeners by allowing them to create a forum-like page for discussions that can be added to their show notes.

EditEddy by Headliner lets you upload your audio, get a transcript, then edit your audio by editing the text. You can use it to remove filler words and correct any errors in the transcript.

It’s time to get real. Short-form content like TikToks, Reels, and YouTube Shorts have slowly but surely narrowed our attention spans. If you haven’t fast-forwarded a movie scene recently or got bored of a 10-minute video in the first two, congrats. You’re likely consuming a healthy amount of catchy, bite-sized content. For the rest of us, some tools can help.

Upword, for instance, takes long-form content like articles and webpages, uses AI to summarize and extract key ideas, and lets you annotate, edit, share, and listen to these. When asked about how the summarizing process works, the maker shared that “the model learns from real people who summarized documents and huge amounts of training data.” You can also contribute to this by leaving feedback for each AI-generated note.

Once a written summary of your document has been created, you can add comments to it, edit with your annotations, and highlight it. A text-to-speech AI will also read the content out loud for you, which sounds strangely human. Upword comes with a Chrome extension that you can use to add links to your library.

This reminded us of a recently launched tool from Typeform. Relayed turns Zoom meetings (audio) into written summaries. In short, it’s like Upword in reverse. You can use it to communicate with your team asynchronously and conduct user interviews and sales outreach.

How do you ensure you’re getting the most out of the knowledge you consume?

The founder of Tinder is switching lanes and going into the wearables market.

Sean Rad, who founded the dating app back in 2012, is launching the Happy Ring, together with the Happy Health team. The device uses AI and biometric sensors to track your mental health. These include a custom electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor that looks at how your stress levels change in real-time. In short, it monitors your sympathetic nervous system to detect when your fight or flight response gets triggered. You know, the thing that keeps us alive in dangerous situations.

While the design itself might remind you of the Oura ring, the team reassures those interested in using it that the form factor was a constraint – research led them “specifically to the finger, as it is the gateway to the autonomic nervous system allowing for the most accurate monitoring of the wearer’s mood state.” They also add that the Happy Ring has more sensors than existing health tracking devices out there and focuses primarily on one’s mental health, rather than physical stress.

The Happy Ring doesn’t only tell you about your mood on an ongoing basis. It also uses AI, which constantly adjusts based on what it learns from you, to provide personalized exercises that can help lower your stress levels, like breathwork and journaling.

Apart from Sean Rad, makers of the product include Dustin Freckleton, former co-founder of BioTech company LVL Technologies, and Sue Smalley, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA.

We’re curious to see how the new gadget will measure up to existing ones. In the meantime, here’s a great thread on how other makers are taking care of their mental health while building.

According to Eric Glyman, Ramp’s co-founder, the average finance team spends 520 hours/year paying bills. That’s the equivalent of three working months out of the year spent wading through invoices and figuring out due dates.

Ramp Flex launched yesterday to help these teams save time and automate how they pay vendors. Flex allows finance teams to pay bills and manage cash flows directly from Ramp's platform. Embedded into Bill Pay, Ramp pays your vendor up front. You can then pay them back in 30, 60, or 90 days for a small fee.

“When we talked to founders and entrepreneurs, we noticed that cash flow management was a common theme — businesses wanted a way to line up the timelines of their ‘cash out’ with their ‘cash in’ so that they could grow efficiently, without the headache of toggling between multiple solutions.” the makers share.

Flex is not the first to offer companies the “buy now, pay later” option. We recently talked about a YC company called tranch, which enables SaaS and Service providers to be paid upfront while offering their customers payment flexibility. Customers can spread invoices from $10k to $250k over 3-12 months.

On the consumer side, things don’t seem to be looking too bright. In a recent round of financing, Swedish BNPL service Klarna’s valuation plunged 85% to $6.7 billion. Whether this is due to overall market sentiment or the multitude of new entrants in the space remains to be seen.

What’s your take?

The cool thing about the Internet is that it’s infinitely scalable. SaaS is one business model we’ve seen skyrocket in recent years. With a global market value of over $170B, the SaaS space has increased in size by around 500% over the past seven years. Not surprising, as 80% of businesses use at least one SaaS application.

Here’s a rundown of recently launched SaaS tools we think you might want to know about.

Zeda.io has been designed to help product teams collect feedback, define goals and initiatives, plan roadmaps, and write clearly-defined specs for developer and design teams to execute.

UpLink lets accountants, auditors, and lawyers request hundreds or thousands of documents from others. This removes the need for the back and forth with the client, which is usually done over email while keeping track of status in Excel.

Snackeet allows you to integrate Instagram-like stories to your website, so you can boost engagement rates, sell products, get feedback from customers, and get more leads for your business.

Changelogs & Idea Management by Ignition helps you collect and organize feature requests and prioritize your roadmap. You can use it to then announce new features via custom branded changelogs.

Kinde provides founders with the infrastructure for authentication, user management, feature flags, and billing. Kinde uses an API or SDK to integrate with your product.

Creabl is a user-behavior analytics tool that lets you know who your customers are and why they convert, monitor mouse trails and clicks, group users in specific segments, and track retention.

What do hacking (no, not ethical hacking) tools and big tech have in common? Collecting information on what you type on your device while visiting external websites might be one thing.

You know those in-app browsers that pop up from time to time when using mobile apps? According to Felix Krause, a former Google engineer, it turns out that some of them might be getting to know you a little too well. His recently published research shows that TikTok’s in-app browser can track all your keystroke (think passwords and credit card information) by injecting Javascript code snippets into external websites.

Despite these findings, there isn’t any way of knowing or proving whether TikTok and other big tech companies are using this data in a malicious way. The video-sharing app shared that they “do not collect keystroke or text inputs through this code,” and that the Javascript snippets are only being used for troubleshooting and testing. Ongoing data privacy concerns over the Chinese-owned app don’t make this situation any rosier.

If you’re still feeling uneasy, Krause created InAppBrowser.com to help you verify what apps do in their webviews. You can test this by opening the app you want to analyze, sharing the InAppBrowser.com URL through a feed post or DM, and tapping on the link inside the app to open it. The code of the website is open source, which allows the community to improve its efficiency over time.

As part of his research, Krause included a FAQ for the non-techies, explaining that you can protect yourself by making sure that the app you’re using offers a way to open links in your default browser, rather than the bespoke ones.