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If you’ve been observant enough, you might’ve noticed we recently added a new topic on Product Hunt. We’re talking about Notion. A lot of you get excited whenever a cool new Notion-related product launches. This new page will allow you to search through those much easier.

To celebrate that, we’ve put together a round-up of some recent products that caught our eye. And because it’s Friday and we know you’re tired (same), we’ll break it down into a couple different categories to make it easier for you to pick your next Notion add-on.

📝 Personal productivity

Slashy allows you to create custom commands like adding drawings, video, or audio recordings.

This Digital Bookshelf stores and categorizes all the content you read, watch and listen to.

Track everything health-related (like workouts, vitamins, and macros) using the Health Hub OS.

🤖 Automation tools

API MAKER helps you create your own API using databases created in Notion.

Notion Pack for Coda lets you use Coda to create charts from Notion data and send emails through Coda from a contact list stored in Notion.

The Notion Automation Hub pulls together 100+ pre-built automations for common workflows and use-cases.

🗃 Project management

Nora allows you to track the progress you’re making on projects and auto-estimate due dates, and get suggestions on what to do next.

Side Project OS gives you the tools to act on those ideas that are filling your notebooks by helping you strategize and define an MVP.

The Notion Web Designer Hub allows you to manage your freelance projects, from lead stage to project completion.

What’s your favorite Notion-related product you recently discovered?

Budgeting for a holiday? Make a spreadsheet. Need a pro/con list? You could try a spreadsheet. Life falling apart? Spreadsheet. As this maker would put it, “we all always end up back in spreadsheets.” Sounds poetic.

We’ve seen slides get a makeover and plenty of products reimagining the traditional document experience. There’s still a lot that can be done with how the good ol’ spreadsheet fundamentally works and integrates with current technology.

Enter Equals. The app takes all of the useful functionality of a spreadsheet and adds built-in connections to any data warehouse, modern versioning, and collaboration. You can use it to connect to any of your databases, like Stripe transactions or Quickbooks data. Every data pull is versioned and restorable so you don’t have to worry about any underlying data changing.

One of the makers behind Equals, Bobby Pinero, who spent over 7 years as Intercom’s CFO, shares that he’s seen “folks using Equals to automate and share forecasts, operating models, cohorts, funnels, sales plans, and burn models.”

Others also seem to be excited about the launch. “I think Equals is the fastest I’ve ever moved from ‘oh that’s interesting’ to ‘take my money,’” Austen Allred (BloomTech’s co-founder) shared on Twitter.

A few other products are tackling spreadsheets in interesting ways. Rows and Grist, to name a few. We did a deeper dive into this a while back. Check it out here.

“We should hang out sometime!” Never happens. 🙃

Don’t worry, we’re guilty of it too. Keeping in touch with people you care about is hard work and unless you’re making an active effort, nearly impossible.

Amato and Sparkbook both launched yesterday with this very issue in mind.

Amato lets you import contacts from your address book and set reminders so you don’t forget to call or visit them. You can then add the Amato widget to your home screen and check the status at a glance or update it after a call or visit.

The maker shares where the inspiration for Amato came from: “I love my grandma. I really do. Unfortunately, I see and talk to her very rarely - mostly on holidays and birthdays. Usually, I'm just too busy and totally forget to call her…”

What’s different about Sparkbook is its shuffle option. After you’ve chosen your favorite contacts, you can shuffle through them to choose who to reach out to next. You can also send pre-written texts to spark conversations and leave notes to pick up where you left off.

While you’re at it, document some of the memories you make along the way with Qote Beta. The mobile app allows you to collect quotes and create albums for specific events like trips or parties. For each album, you can invite friends to browse through everything.

What happens when hundreds of thousands of products are launched or hunted over the span of eight years on Product Hunt? Well, for one thing, a standout community of ideators and makers is born.

Also, discovering new products gets a little hard to navigate.

We’ve watched products go from MVPs, hackathon submissions, and side projects to businesses, unicorns, and bootstrapped success stories since Product Hunt launched in 2013. We all love following along, but have had a hard time doing so.

“Just look at Framer — the team has dropped over thirty launches in less than a decade! ...We knew we needed to make some changes…“ shared Product Hunt CEO, Ashley Higgins.

So we did, and today we get to be a little bit meta as we launch Product Hubs on Product Hunt.

We’ve rolled up all the information that’s needed to learn about a product’s journey, from launches to reviews, into one hub. Now you can follow products and receive updates whenever your favorite launches something new. This feature was created for product stans and makers who build in public.

“Product Hunt shouldn’t just be where you launch your product, but where you can build a community,” shared Product Hunt PM, Michael Silber.

Product Hubs are a big change to how the platform is structured. “We had to restart it several times before reaching these results” noted Head of Design Julie Chabin, and “Migrating a lot of data related to the post to the product without breaking the models and bringing the site down was a significant challenge,” shared Engineering Lead Vlad Vladimirov.

We’re just getting started though and Product Hunt makers would love to get your feedback.

A new #lifehack has been making the rounds on the interwebs recently. You might’ve read it, too. It’s selectively bolding certain parts of the beginning of words to be able to read faster. It looks funny, something kind of like this, but it seems to work.

The science behind it? Turns out the bottleneck while reading is our eyes and not our brain. Reading this way helps our brain “autocomplete” the rest of the word after only seeing the first few characters, speeding up the process.

That’s how Jiffy Reader was born. Jiffy is an open-source browser extension that applies that technique when you’re browsing articles. “The way that Jiffy Reader works is by taking a certain part of every or some of the words and changing the font weight. For example, in our default settings, we take the first half of every word and make it bolder. This allows for a more seamless reading experience,” the makers shared.

Tools like these (Bionic Reading was one of the first to draw buzz) work by guiding your eyes over the page using fixation points. This encourages a smoother reading experience while maintaining comprehension of the words.

If you want to put this bionic reading extension to the test, here are some recent (play)books to check out.

📘 The Founders offers a look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team—including Elon Musk, David Sacks, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman.

📗 Become a Nocoder is a collection of resources for learning no-code, including terminology, building guide, tools, and platforms.

📙 Product-Led Growth Book explains the strategy and execution behind product-led growth.

📕 Maze x ADPList Scaling Research Playbook showcases real-life examples and key principles for product teams to run their own research and make informed product decisions at scale.

Learning from others firsthand is essential. We watch and learn from all of you launching every day. But there are some questions and situations that require a little more context and personalization.

Mana helps you find advice from builders, creators, and professionals who have been where you want to go. This happens through 1:1 video calls and live-streamed office hours and workshops. You also have access to resources like guides, templates, and toolkits and can join chat communities with others on a similar path.

When founders James Lo and Bobby Tang left their jobs at McKinsey and Apple, they realized many of their peers wanted to switch careers or start something of their own. What stood in the way was a lack of tactical advice from others who were in the same situation. That’s why they built Mana. Tang says that “people have raised entire funding rounds, made critical career transitions, and even decided their college major” on the app.

Scrolling through Mana’s catalog, you’ll see experts ranging from start-up founders and investors to yoga instructors and music producers. They’re also accepting applications for new mentors, in case you or someone you know might be interested.

How do you make big life decisions like changing careers?

“In shows like Billions, really wealthy people have advisors following them around, helping them optimize every single decision - that's what this feels like. Elite guard rails and life hacks.” reads one of Uprise’s testimonials. Billions? Life hacks? Color us intrigued.

Uprise looks at your full financial picture and provides advice on your tax strategy, the best accounts (i.e. credit cards) for your use case, and how much to save and invest to hit your goals. It also analyzes your employer benefits to ensure you’re taking full advantage of them. After sharing your situation, it uses automated processes as well as human experts to make sure recommendations are viable for you.

The makers behind the product have backgrounds in finance and payroll, which makes them particularly mindful of security and privacy issues, sharing that they “retain only as much data as needed and only for as long as is required to provide our services.” Jessica Chen Riolfi previously worked at Robinhood, Wise, and Earnin, while Chris Goodmacher was employee #2 at Justworks.

A few days ago we also saw Claritus launch, with a focus on those who are actively investing and looking to organize and track their assets. The tool provides automatic integrations with over 17,000 financial institutions and dynamic reporting, whether we’re talking stocks, crypto, or options.

But if you’re simply looking to move away from spreadsheets, see where your money goes, and manage it, Habitual Money and Avocado Finance are worth looking into. Or, get some inspiration from the community.

Plant parenting is no joke. A lot of effort goes into keeping those babies alive and thriving, let alone healthy enough that you can have them on your dinner plate. Farmer’s markets and organic options are great (albeit rather pricy), but there’s a certain level of pride and satisfaction that goes into growing your own food.

MULTO is one project that’s working to bring that to the everyday consumer as a compact shelf. The technology behind MULTO, called “ebb and flow,” is similar to tides in the ocean where the water level rises and falls at regular intervals. With MULTO, this happens thanks to an automatically activated submerged pump. This creates a continuous circulation around the roots, enriching them with nutrients and oxygen with each cycle. Mael Thomas, GM of Prêt à Pousser (parent company) shares that “the special sun-mimicking grow lights and our own liquid nutrients will get up to 200% more yield than other traditional solutions.”

The personal indoor farm allows you to grow up to 60 plants, ranging from standard vegetables and herbs to root plants like radishes. The team has surpassed its initial crowdfund campaign goal which ends on Sunday and is currently at $340k+.

If you’re not ready yet to go all-in and have a fully-fledged shelf, take some baby steps and learn more with these products.

🪴 Plant Care provides care instructions, identifies plants using AR, and sends you watering reminders.

🌿 Notion Plant Manager is a Notion template that helps you track plants room by room and remember your dead ones in a dedicated cemetery. Equally cool and creepy.

🌾 DOOT is a plant monitor which tracks various metrics essential to plant/crop growth, allows users to see these metrics over time, and be alerted when they are out of range.

Scroll through LinkedIn for a couple of minutes and you’re bound to find one of those crazy corporate anecdotes and a bunch of variations of the “I’m pleased to announce…” post. While the platform is still one of the most efficient ways to find opportunities, some of you feel it’s “lost its purpose” and “has become more of a social network than being a top-notch professional network.”

That’s one of the areas Peerlist is hoping to improve. The community-led professional network has work profiles at its core, which are aimed at designers, developers, indie hackers, and creators. This means it enables you to showcase your work directly from Github, Dribbble, Substack, Medium, DEV, Hashnode, YouTube, and Product Hunt. You can also add custom projects and credentials.

As far as the social element goes, Peerlist helps you discover people based on the skills and work they are doing. You can keep your network organized by adding connections to custom lists. This kind of organization also extends to the feed, where you can contextualize your posts as opportunities, books, URLs, and events.

Social apps are notoriously difficult to build and grow. Peerlist’s focus on the utility of building a profile to showcase your experience is an interesting growth strategy. We’ve seen this in past successful companies – think filters on Instagram and video creation on TikTok.

Other similar platforms include Golden Kitty Award winner, Contra, which gives freelancers flexible, commission-free opportunities, and Showwcase, a professional network built for people who code. Polywork (backed by Youtube founders, among many others) is another popular LinkedIn alternative.

We constantly see and write about fascinating makers building cool stuff. As a founder, you often have to be an expert at most things: product, design, talking to your users, and fundraising, just to name a few. Luckily, a lot of you have picked up on the struggles of founding a company and realized it’s not a zero-sum game.

Downturns like the one we’re going through make early-stage building that much harder. Here are some great resources to make life a little bit easier, whether you’re starting out or have been in the game for a while.

Startups.fyi, which launched today, is a curated directory of free tools and resources for startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. The website currently has 50+ tools that range from scheduling software to design tools and famous pitch decks.

Accelerator Hunt is a categorized collection of startup accelerators. YC also recently launched Startup School Live 2022, its 7-week online course where YC Group Partners and YC founders teach you how to build a billion-dollar company, through in-person meetups and talks at YC alumni offices in 30+ cities all over the world.

For the ones in a hurry, Startup 101 offers bite-sized lessons for entrepreneurs who are looking to start a company or are in the process of building one.

At Product Hunt, we also have Founder Club, a monthly subscription that gives you access to deals from 32 different companies (Stripe, Brex, Deel) and savings of over $100,000 in discounts and credits. Lurking our Discussion tab can also be useful. Partner Up helps with finding co-founders, mentors, or teammates, while Ideas and Validation and Growth are great for getting input and advice on your product.

You got the tools, now go break things! 🛠