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It’s rough out there. While scrolling Twitter yesterday, you may have seen some founders announce they’re laying off parts of their teams. Significant cut-offs have been happening since the beginning of the year and we’ve already seen at least 22 companies join the list in Q2 alone.

If you’re curious to dig deeper into the data, one maker created a database tracking tech start-up layoffs since COVID-19. Layoffs.fyi gets all of the information from public reports. It even shows a list of folks looking for new opportunities with contact information.

But why is this happening now, you might ask. One reason is that fundraising has slowed down. While global VC funding in 2021 was on a high, recent reports show that Q1 funding fell for the first time in a year. That, paired with bloated valuations, start-ups struggling to find ways to increase revenue or become profitable, and a looming bear market, might be bringing us closer to seeing the bubble burst.

We like to look at the positive, though. There are plenty of companies out there looking to hire. Fortunately, we continue seeing makers find smart, creative ways to gather opportunities and help those wanting to make a career change.

Take Honter, for instance. The app launched today with an interesting discovery mechanism. “We found a good use for the matching system Tinder uses. We believe we can connect faster and better creative freelancers with potential new clients,” the maker shares.

Another tool worth mentioning is Himalayas, a remote job board that allows you to search 2,000+ open roles at 1,700+ remote companies. You can filter by time zone, visa, skills, company, salary, and tech stack. Alternatively, if switching to a career in Web3 sounds exciting to you, we recently wrote about it here.

Yours truly has some open positions too.

So you want to be a data-led or data-driven company? You go Glen Coco. Let’s forget about the semantic differences between the two for now. The point is, decisions that are guided by data are often better than a hunch. The hard part of making sense of the numbers — they’re everywhere.

ChartHop launched today to help distributed teams visualize their people data. Kind of like a people analytics platform. The app connects data from sources like Carta, Gusto, and Slack to create a dynamic organization chart, an employee directory, as well as announcements for birthdays and anniversaries. “You can get started in minutes by syncing directly with your payroll system or importing your data via spreadsheet,” wrote founder Ian White, who previously co-founded Sailthru and Startdog Ventures.

Also keeping visualizations and collaboration at the forefront, Outcode’s dashboard enables teams to create landing pages from data like monthly active users, revenue, and customer feedback. The no-code data page integrates with various applications to create automated workflows for actions like sending promo codes and emails to segments of users.

After being nominated for this year’s Golden Kitty Award for best SaaS product, June’s newest launch brings product-led analytics across all teams. “Everyone, not only PMs, should be empowered to understand how the product is actually being used. Engineers, designers, marketers, success, and sales all want and need to know that they are working on what really matters,” one of the makers shared. The app connects to your Segment account and instantly generates metrics from user behavior data.

Directus 9 made a splash last week when it launched Directus Cloud, a data-stack (as-a-service) that turns SQL databases into no-code apps and APIs, in the cloud.

You’ve now got the tools…

“This is a game-changer product, with infinite use cases,” someone commented on this launch today. Others seem to agree — the community has given a lot of positive feedback with 100+ conversations started so far. The launch video is getting a lot of praise, too.

We’re talking about folk, a CRM (that’s short for customer relationship management) tool that helps teams keep track of their contacts. Salesforce, one of the first CRMs, pretty much revolutionized how sales teams in SaaS companies were managing outreach. Times have changed and so have the use cases. Here’s where folk comes in.

The tool lets you build a customized CRM and choose from templates like “CRM for investors” or “CRM for user research.” You can build your contact list directly from LinkedIn and Gmail using a Chrome extension, assign contacts to others on the team, set reminders for when you need to catch up with someone and organize them by groups.

The folk team has been silently shipping this for 18 months while “trying to invent the next generation of the CRM.” Maker Thibaud Elziere also shares that the team was “very inspired by the new generation of No-Code tools like Webflow, Airtable, Notion, or Shopify. So we’re trying to bring the same level of customization, simplicity, and delight, to reinvent the CRM for all.”

Another popular launch we’ve recently seen in the CRM space is Feather. The maker started building the tool with the intention of filtering and consuming the content we see on Twitter more mindfully. Feather allows you to subscribe to people you want to hear from and add them to your contact list.

How do you keep track of conversations and people you want to connect with?

We might not have all been blessed with the perfect pitch of a musical virtuoso, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun creating music. The fact of the matter is, even the best artists use sophisticated technology to makes music production easier and more accessible (for you music lovers, we recommend Apple TV’s Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson for more on this).

Splice is one tool being used by millions of musicians and has been around since 2013. It offers a royalty-free sample library that can be used to build new beats or shape your existing sounds.

Today, the Splice team is launching a new product.

CoSo, short for “complementary sounds,” is an AI-powered tool that uses Splice’s catalog to find sounds that work together. CoSo’s goal is to create a fluid sound discovery and music-making experience. The way this works is through something called looping layers. Each layer represents a sound, which can be things such as vocals, beats, basslines, guitars, and keys. You can use up to eight of them for each song. Swiping right on any layer prompts CoSo to quickly find another compatible and complementary sound.

A big focus of the CoSo app is emphasizing the creativity of the users. Although the technology is similar to generative music, the human element (human-centered AI) of being able to choose what to tweak in your tracks makes it different.

“Music will always be subjective, the core principle for CoSo is a good starting point, that delivers on the promise of ‘sounding good.’ We can all agree that something that sounds good might not necessarily be interesting. That’s why we are giving users a set of mechanics to navigate that starting point and make it whatever they want eventually,” Head of AI/ML & Audio Science at Splice, Ale Koretzky adds.

We gave the tool a try and here’s what we came up with. A little bit of “Vintage Cassette” mixed in with some bass and vocals. Kinda groovy, right?

Share yours with the CoSo team.

“Moving forward, every company I found will be remote by choice,” shared Amir Ashkenazi in an article for Product Hunt about his opinions and advice on remote work.

This is a decidedly confident stance for a serial entrepreneur like Ashkenazi. The founder is perhaps best known from his time as VP of Product Search at eBay after his company, Shopping.com, was acquired for $620M. Or for his leadership as President of AOL Platforms following the acquisition of his advertising platform, Adap.tv.

Sure, remote working is becoming more commonplace. Airbnb just went fully remote, after all. Some question though why it took so long for a company in the tourism space to get there. Ashkenazi’s stance on this issue still stands apart from other seasoned entrepreneurs who got their start in the ol’ office.

But the pandemic changed Ashkenazi’s thinking for the good. It drove him to start Switchboard, which is emerging from stealth today with a new way to help teams work side-by-side remotely.

“It’s a collaboration tool designed for remote work: part cloud browsers, part conference room, part video call.”

The cloud-browser means that you and your colleagues can work together in a shared workspace, collaborating within the multiplayer tools you already use (from Figma to GDocs) without having to share your screen or download a new app. The rooms have what Switchboard calls “meeting memory,” so your team can pick back up right where you left off in the next meeting.

Ashkenazi also writes, “we’re in this remote experience together.” True. As the corporate world evolves, founders are going to have a lot of meeting and collaboration tools to experiment with, from virtual HQs and metaverses to screen sharing tools. Of course, they can always build their own too.

So far, the Product Hunt community seems to think Switchboard is a “game-changing” idea worth testing out. What about you?

Live shopping is having a moment. Far from new, the concept first became popular during the late 70s and 80s, when TV networks like QVC would broadcast hosts showcasing products and pitching directly to consumers. What we’re seeing now is an updated version of that from our mobile devices.

Social shopping has seen great success in the Asian eCommerce space, where it’s set to reach $423B in sales this year according to Shopify, and new launches seem to indicate it’s gaining momentum elsewhere, too.

Ukrainian-based Infinite launched a few days ago and helps retailers embed the experience into their own shops using its white-label SaaS platform. The tool allows businesses to communicate with customers in a live chat and publish shoppable recordings of these streams to drive sales post-live.

Ownvibe is tackling live shopping differently. The buying happens directly on its app. With a TikTok-style feed, the product aims to help consumers easily discover a “new wave of Gen Z shops,” which have sustainability in mind. Whatnot has also seen massive success in the collectibles market. Founded in 2020, the company raised three rounds in 2021 alone, quickly becoming a unicorn in the live shopping space.

Big names are also jumping on the bandwagon. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok already give creators the ability to add links while they’re live-streaming. During Coachella this year, Youtube allowed those watching its live stream to buy commemorative t-shirts as part of the experience. However, it actually started experimenting with live shopping last year when it launched a weeklong “YouTube Holiday Stream and Shop.”

Snap is also making moves in the eCommerce space. Yesterday it announced its new Dress Up feature that allows users to try on clothes using AR.

The biggest challenge here will be distribution. While most of the experimentation so far has involved influencers, celebrities, and household names, it will be interesting to watch how other retailers will be able to benefit, compete and emerge with other tactics and offerings.

Photography used to be an art reserved for those who could afford expensive (and ginormous) equipment. Technology changed that. Everyone’s a photographer in the smartphone age, and with VR/AR gaining momentum 3D seems like an interesting place to be building in. Whether 3D will take over the design space has also sparked discussions.

We take snapshots of our day-to-day life, places we visit, and people we love, but you can still spot professionally made images. You know, the ones you see in Instagram ads and product campaigns. A big part of that is due to how those images are processed and rendered.

Enter Colorful, a browser-based tool for creating 3D images. If that makes it sound too complicated or like you need to be a professional photographer, you don’t. You can think of it as a virtual photo studio for those who have zero experience with 3D modeling but still want to create aesthetically pleasing shots.

“Virtual photography / 3D rendering is not accessible to everyone. Most 3D software is hard to learn and powerful desktop computers are needed for photorealistic renderings, so we decided to offload all the heavy lifting into the cloud, making 3D renderings truly accessible for the first time on any computer,” one of the makers shared on the launch today.

Colorful lets you build your scene from scratch or by using pre-made templates and thousands of 3D props. Need to see how a chair would look in your new living room? Just drag and drop it into your existing frame. You can play around with the (virtual) light and the (virtual) camera to position your subjects and also collaborate with your team and clients to get feedback and create together.

Colorful is not the only one of its kind. We’ve seen some interesting launches in the 3D space recently.

Spline wants to build an easy-to-use 3D-first design tool, Unreal Engine 5 is a tool that offers game developers and creators real-time 3D rendering, and Kaedim Platform and r3DPhoto help turn 2D images into 3D. The same applies to 3D resources, which we’re seeing plenty of. Retro 3d illustrations, 3D Bay for Canva, and Lottie in 3D are only some of the interesting ones.

The Colorful team is looking for feedback from the community as it’s rolling out the beta, which currently offers its PRO plan free of charge. Feel free to share your creations with them or chime in in the comments.

Writing is a real form of art. We soak in great pieces of writing because we understand how much there is to consider when sitting down in front of a blank sheet of (digital) paper.

If you’re writing an email, you’ll need to consider your tone of voice, length, and clarity. If you’re writing a blog, you might be concerned about SEO keywords and how to make your content better than your competitors. Storytelling? Every word counts, but don’t miss the forest for the trees.

Fortunately, you’re not the only one who struggles with words. We often see tools launch which generally make us feel less alone in our (absence of) thoughts, from those that function as our Editor to those that can do our keyword searching for us.

Here are 6 fresh tools for when words escape you.

Dabble is a tool created specifically for book authors, because storytelling isn’t usually formed in a vacuum or as one consecutive thought. The tool helps you organize your story elements, focus, set a writing schedule, and drag and drop pieces of your work.

Smart Copy Everywhere from Unbounce helps you with creative copy on the spot, whether it’s generating it from scratch, or remixing a sentence you already wrote to offer a better option.

YouWrite is like assigning out your copywriting work. As an example, you can simply type in the keywords “dental cleaning Monday” and the tool can generate a comprehensive email you can send to your patients, even reminding them to bring their insurance card.

YouWrite, a new product from Richard Socher and team at You.com, joins an increasingly crowded space.

Mark Copy, Simplified AI Writer, and Frase 2.0 are also three more competitors in the AI-assistant space to check out. They can help you cut writing time from hours to seconds.

Historically speaking, Notion is our most searched keyword. It doesn’t take much to realize how many of you love this productivity app. When the team launched its Template Gallery in 2019 and opened the door for makers to build and showcase their own templates, no-code lovers went nuts.

We’re lucky to continue seeing makers build great tools using Notion. We’ve rounded up some of the more recent launches you should check out if you’re a fan or are looking to bring some organization to your life.

The Notion Automation Hub has over 100 pre-built automations for the most common use cases and workflows people use Notion for. These templates will show you how to transfer data from apps to Notion and create triggered automations.

Some cool automations this bundle contains: enter a LinkedIn people search and scrape all the results into a Notion database or automatically open your next meeting on Google Calendar with Notion notes when the meeting is about to start.

Notion Freelancer OS works like an operating system that helps you manage your freelance business in Notion. It lets you visualize each aspect of the projects you’re working on: timeline, tasks, meetings, and progress. You can also set up a client pipeline using the provided CRM, which syncs to your existing projects.

Notion Website Suite’s template helps you create and publish your own no-code website using more than 100 component blocks. This can be used as your portfolio or as a blogging page.

Notion Pack for Product Managers contains templates for daily standups, agile retrospectives, a 1:1 meeting planner, and a space to keep track of objectives and key results. These templates also come with widgets to increase your productivity, like a Pomodoro timer and a Spotify focus playlist.

Notion Personal Finance Dashboard allows you to log expenses and income, set budget goals you want to meet, analyze your spending status and top expenses, and break it all down by category.

Zenly is not a new app. We first saw its launch back in 2016, a year before getting acquired by Snapchat for a whopping $213M. Despite being an inspiration for Snap’s map feature, Snap decided to continue running Zenly as a separate product.

Over the weekend, the team launched Zenly 5.0 and earned Product of the Day. If you need some context as to what Zenly is – it’s a social maps app that marks all the places you and your friends have been. The app lets you see where your friends are, using always-on GPS, so no need for check-ins. You can then message them from the app to make plans and hang out.

The Paris-based team has been heads down working on its biggest redesign to date for its now 35 million monthly active users. One of Zenly’s makers shares “you’ll see new features like public profiles and auto check-ins for places (this is our antidote to curated posts on other social platforms). You’ll also find your footprints (your virtual scratch map) that show all the areas you’ve uncovered and haven’t yet been on your map.”

Looking at the versions side-by-side, the update feels a lot more grown-up, elegant, and aligned with today’s design trends. The initial playful, colorful, emoji-filled appearance has been replaced by a dark mode mixed with trendy gradients. As expected with major redesigns (remember Snapchat’s 2018 update?), reviews have been mixed, although most of its supporters seem to be excited about the new features.

If you haven’t heard much about the app, that’s not surprising if you’re in the US. Since its inception, Zenly has been mostly focused on growing in Europe and Southeast Asia, and it’s growing in popularity in Brazil and India.

We recently saw Snapchat's Q1 results show that the photo-sharing app is growing faster than its rivals Meta and Twitter. Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, is taking over from Zenly’s founder soon, and it will be interesting to see where he takes the social app.

The social space is getting a lot of buzz right now, but it’s notoriously difficult for newcomers to break through. We’re excited to see new and old players build and innovate. What are your thoughts on Zenly’s take on social? Let the team know in the comments.