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With the past two years being a 50-million-person social experiment on changing how we work, the big debate revolved around those who want to work from the office and those who prefer working remotely. But as countries are easing restrictions, it seems like some companies have found a middle ground: hybrid-remote work.

Naturally, makers have been busy building solutions that can offer the best of both worlds. Here are some to look at if you plan to swing by the office every once in a while.

☕️ Café 2.0 helps teams gain more visibility over who’s where to decide where to work from. It lets you align your plans with teammates, discover internal communities, and find out about events, celebrations, or new hires. Café wants to promote flexibility by letting people meet in offices, coworking spaces or, you guessed it, cafés.

🎙 Around’s real-time audio synchronization ensures that all microphones and speakers are enabled concurrently so that you no longer need to huddle around a big screen when working in hybrid environments.

🪄 We recently talked about Tandem’s new launch – Hybrid Spaces, which gives teammates an always-on window to teleport around the office, using off-the-shelf conferencing hardware.

🍩 Although we’re a fully remote company, we use Donut for Hybrid Work to create deeper connections with others on the team. Its latest release includes hybrid-friendly templates, Watercooler for shared channels, Hybrid-friendly Intro messages, and more.

🦦 The New Otter makes team meetings more productive and collaborative with automated meeting notes and transcription that include key takeaways so that no one gets left behind – whether they’re working from the office or from home.

What’s your take on ways of working? Vote here.

Building is not easy. Fortunately, the maker community is a very resourceful and helpful one. We love when others share their knowledge and we continue seeing that happen all the time over discussions and on launches.

Recently, these makers curated and launched playbooks to make learning from others easier. Let’s take a look. 👇

Wizen Guides covers most topics indie makers will need when they’re just getting started. The makers interviewed founders and distilled their advice into actionable how-to guides for others to learn about marketing, product, and more.

Scaling Research Playbook by Maze x ADPList covers insights and advice from 30+ UX leaders sharing real-life examples and key principles.

“Our goal is to give UX leaders a practical guide on how to scale the impact of research by empowering product teams to run their own research and build a learning muscle in their organizations,” Maze founder shared.

The Science Based Playbook of Pricing provides practical recommendations and examples of price setting, based on research papers from scientific journals such as the Journal of Marketing and Marketing Science.

CXL Playbook Community is a bootstrapped project and offers over 2500 step-by-step marketing guides, ranging from growth to analytics and A/B testing.

Early Stage Founders Playbook is a book for founders who “love building features and struggle with marketing.” It contains 21 sections that will help you figure out what marketing tactics are most suitable for you, a curated list of 35 software tools to help you grow faster, and a planner with 36 marketing activities to take, average budget, and probable conversion rate for every activity.

You know that scene in every action movie when the computer whizz furiously hacks a system using some random commands on a dark background and goes “I'M IN”? The tool they’re writing commands in is the terminal. It’s what most developers use, without a doubt, on a daily basis. Still, not much has changed in its UI over the past 40 years.

Enter Warp. The company recently announced its $17M Series A, led by Dylan Field, co-founder, and CEO of Figma.

Warp is a Rust-based (a fast programming language) terminal that allows you to create your own workflows and share them with your team. It groups commands and outputs like a data notebook and lets you find useful ones through community-sourced workflows and command generation. If you work with a terminal, you might know the frustration of not being able to move the cursor wherever you need it. Warp solves that.

Maker Zach Lloyd has been a developer for 20 years. He previously worked as a principal engineer at Google and was TIME’s interim CTO. When talking about what pushed him to work on Warp, Lloyd shares: “I want to bring collaboration to the terminal. My experience as lead engineer on GDocs made me realize that every productivity app is more powerful when it’s collaborative. I’m excited to bring that approach to the terminal as well.”

What annoys you about the terminal in its current state? Let the makers know in the comments. They might be able to help.

This is your daily reminder that you don't need all those tabs open.

Yesterday we saw a new player join the save-for-late race in an attempt to make collecting knowledge easier. Meet Heyday. What seems different about the tool is that you don’t actually do any of the saving yourself. Instead, the browser extension automatically collects web pages you visit and pulls in content from your apps.

Maker Sam DeBrule shares that he started working on Heyday as “today's tools require behavior change and constant input. That’s okay for productivity junkies but the rest of us are stuck with 100 open tabs.” He believes that “knowledge management tools should be easy/fast to set up, layer on top of existing workflows, and require little manual input,” carrying on to explain that staying organized should be made as easy as “Honey makes it to save money or Grammarly makes it to write well.”

Heyday remembers what content you visit, including websites or tweets, and uses artificial intelligence to resurface these whenever you’re reading something in the same area of knowledge. One user referred to it as “your own personal Google search engine for anything you’ve looked at, read, or thought ‘I should make a note of this.’”

The save-for-later, bookmarking space is a compelling, yet crowded one. We’ve written about using AI to resurface content in the past so it’s interesting to see makers working to minimize the time we spend learning and getting used to a new tool.

What do you use to make sense of all the information you come across? Let us know.

It’s something makers hear every day. The folks at Butter did, and it turns out their users needed a way to collaborate on the go. Hence, today’s launch – Butter for mobile.

You might remember Butter from its distinctive yellow branding or one of three nominations in the Golden Kitty Awards this year.

Butter initially launched when the pandemic hit as a way for facilitators to recreate the energy and collaboration of traditional, in-person workshops. Two years in and “our users told us that they want to be able to use Butter for ALL their meetings — including more routine stand-ups, townhalls, 1-on-1s, and more casual discussions,” maker Jakob Knutzen shares.

Today’s launch comes as a response to user feedback and includes “a time-boxed agenda to keep things on track, fun emoji reactions, soundboards, GIFs in the chat, a hand-raise queue to minimize the awkwardness of talking over each other, and easy polls.” Cue the cat GIFs.

While some are making their way back to the office “just to sit on Zoom calls,” remote events and get-togethers don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Last week saw Golden Kitty Award winner Vowel move from private to public beta to help async, distributed teams make brainstorm sessions, recurring meetings, and user interviews more productive.

What do you think? Are we butter off collaborating remotely, or is this the end of an era?

Time to rise and grind. It’s Hustle Hour.

Golden Kitty Award winner Uizard launched Uizard Hat 1.0 today. The team is taking no-code to the next level, claiming that the new product lets you create design mockups straight from your mind. The makers explained that in order to unleash the power of true design thinking, all you need to do is “put on your Uizard Hat 1.0, visualize your product, and there you have it: from idea, straight into fully interactive prototype.” Talk about visionary.

Speaking of no-code, the Clover team is feeling nostalgic and launched CloverCities. The website builder brings back the creativity of the early web for Web 1.0 homepages. Think glitter, rainbow, and neon. “The drag and drop interface is packed with everything you need to express yourself and possibly cause seizures,” the team explained.

If you’re more of a “go outside and get your hands dirty” kind of maker, VC Turner Novak is launching the Banana Capital Accelerator. The premise is simple: receive $125k for 7% ownership of your banana farm. And we all know how much VCs love to be helpful, so they promise to roll up their sleeves, dig deep, and plant the seeds of the future. They “add value with capital, advice, fertilizer discounts, and an exclusive customer network.” Call us intrigued.

We’re not sure what it was, but today felt like a great day for product launches. Here are a few more unbelievably good ones that caught our eye:

🎮 Finally, a productive way to use your PS5. The FlutterFlow Console lets you build native mobile apps directly from your joystick.

👃 Pond5 Nasal Navigator uses advanced olfactory technology to identify smells you just can’t put your nose on.

😾 ShameBot by WFHomie makes shaming your teammates easy. Whenever they make a mistake, ask a dull question, or make a cringy comment, this is how you make them question their self-worth.

🎥 Hide the Pain Harold's April Prank helps you create personalized prank videos with the Internet’s meme-star.

Two in five workers show signs of burnout.

That’s one of the insights the Yerbo team found from surveying 30,000 participants for The State of Burnout in Tech 2022.

The team built an interactive way of looking at how the syndrome fuels turnover, particularly in tech companies. While we love watching and documenting makers’ hustle to launch great products, it’s important to recognize the tell-tale signs of burnout. The report identifies these as exhaustion, self-inefficacy, cynicism, and depersonalization, referring to them as “the ghosts of burnout.”

Meet the techman – “(they) love what they do, but feel pressured to work long hours, which leaves little time for personal life and creates work-life conflicts,” researchers explained. A few interesting findings point to some differences in how burnout affects different people. Women seem to be more affected, with “69% feeling run-down and drained, compared to 56% of men.”

You might think those in leadership positions are less vulnerable due to a higher sense of achievement. Well, you’d be wrong. The research shows there’s not a significant difference between ICs (34.5%) and managers (30.5%).

Looking out for the well-being of employees is no doubt the most efficient way to avoid chronic workplace stress, and there are tools out there that can help.

⛑ Quan identifies the root cause of well-being problems and points to the most effective solutions for managers and teams.

🧘 Cuely provides 1-min guided exercises delivered through Slack to help you stay well throughout the day.

🛁 Proof of Self Care encourages you to take a break and do some act of self-love.

What do you think? Do you identify with those two in five workers? Go ahead and…

Employers are still struggling to fill jobs and retain employees and it looks like some of those just entering the workforce are ditching suits for the metaverse.

There are at least a couple reasons why people are interested in switching to a career in Web3. One is that Web3 provides younger candidates the opportunity to become an expert without the need for decades of experience. Another? It pays WELL. “Regardless if you like it or not, Web3 is easily 2x to 5x what Silicon Valley pays,” NomadList founder shared after coming across a $750k/year job posting.

Yesterday we saw the launch of Hustleverse, a community that wants to help engineers, designers, marketers, PMs, and community managers in Web2 onboard and transition their careers to Web3. “We’ll host events with Web3 founders and builders to teach community members about Web3 tools and career opportunities. We’ll also facilitate high-level peer networking to help members build their network,” maker and Creative Director at early-stage VC Hustle Fund, Hung Pham, shares.

If you’re still on the fence about this Web3 thing, you can also window shop. Web3 Jobs has 15,256 jobs and 2,231 projects listed that you can browse. You can also sign up to receive a daily or weekly round-up of new jobs added. You know, just in case.

Hunted takes a slightly different approach. It connects you with Web3 startups that can commit to your desired salary. You get to stay anonymous until you interview and earn NFTs along the way.

Window shopping on Redfin and Playhouse may still be our favorite leisure activity, but behind that farmhouse door is the reality of real estate right now.

Investors bought a record share of US homes in 2021, driving up prices for individual home-buyers. The info comes from a new report from Redfin. Investors bought nearly one in seven homes sold in America’s top metropolitan areas (the most in at least two decades), it says.

The report was prompted after Redfin had taken note of stories about individuals or families losing bids on home after home to cash investors. With rents high as well, would-be buyers who are priced out of the market end up spending their paychecks month to month instead.

So what’s the solution? Regulation and legislation are always an option — like one new bill introduced in California that seeks to increase taxes on house flippers.

HomeRoom introduced its solution recently too. It’s a real estate investing platform that says it offers investors the opportunity to earn 50% more, while helping renters pay 50% less.

The premise is to take the real estate buying process digital and remote, letting investors save money which should translate into lower rents. HomeRoom’s turnkey experience connects investors to everything from financing to construction managers to local teams that furnish and tech out your rental property. The team helps match investors with renters too. The startup says it’s currently at a 90+% occupancy with 99% investor retention.

The barrier to entry might still be too high for some investors, as one commenter pointed out.

But maker Johnny Stryker Wolff Jr. says the startup is competitive — ”even in this market — with [out of pocket] down payment costs from ~85k-150k.” He continued, “A core pillar of our mission is democratizing access to real estate as an investment - it's THE most recession-proof way to build wealth...”

Can HomeRoom provide an everybody-wins solution, keeping rental prices low while helping make real estate investing accessible? What do you think — ready to close, or still not sold?

“This launch was planned in February, but one greedy little man had a plan to invade Ukraine. So we had to evacuate Fuel's Ukrainian team over those last two weeks.” That’s not something we hear every day in a maker comment.

Alyona Mysko started working on Ukraine-based Fuelfinance after being a start-up CFO for over eight years. “Founders are not financially savvy, and good CFOs are expensive and often not a priority. State of the art is Quickbooks + Excel spreadsheets. ERPs like Netsuite cost $100k+ and 12+ months of setup to start with,” she shares.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, who previously co-founded Petcube (one of the most prominent startups originating from Ukraine) was one of Fuelfinance’s clients. He first joined the company as an advisor and later as a co-founder, helping Mysko and team build a product that feels faster, affordable, and not-looking like it came from the 90s.

The start-up wants to act as a cloud-based financial department for other companies. Its web-based app paired with in-house consultants help put together profit and loss statements, financial projections, and budget runway for the next 6-12-18 months, estimating what may happen and what’s likely to happen.

Fuelfinance saw great support from the community when it launched last week with over 1,100 upvotes. One maker expressed interest sharing, “the pain point is undeniable,” while others vouched that the product saves them from headaches.

With recent news of fintech unicorn Ramp raising yet another massive round and Mercury helping founders get minimal dilution funding, we’re seeing a lot of products aimed at supporting founders in managing and automating their finances in more non-traditional ways.

So, what do you think, is it about time we…