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“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…

What’s the most insignificant hill in tech you will die on?

For some, it’s the GIF. The fact that its pronunciation creates such a squabble shows just how much we all value GIFs.

Yesterday the internet found out that Stephen Wilhite, the man credited with creating the GIF, died. It responded with gratitude for the engineer and reflection on what GIFs have meant to pop culture. Some got nostalgic for simpler times when a GIF of a dancing baby was all anyone could talk about. Many shared the backstory behind the Graphics Interchange Format — tl;dr: Wilhite created the GIF after being tasked with figuring out how to distribute high-res color graphics quickly at Compuserve. The prototype took about a month to build and GIFs launched in June of 1987. The first image Wilhite created was a picture of an airplane.

Hard G-ers, this might also be your day to face the music, in honor of Wilhite, who has clarified without hesitation that it’s pronounced “JIF,” with a soft G. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” Ouch.

In our own ode to Wilhite (We LOVE GIFs — was it not obvious?), we’re highlighting a handful of the newest products that make GIFs easy to create and tons of fun. Without Wilhite’s work, none of these products, and so many more, would be possible.

• Text Chat Animator - Simulate a messaging conversation and create a GIF of it
• Sergif - Record a GIF with your webcam and share it with your friends
• Simplified Animation Maker - Animate your designs in one click and share as GIFs (and more)
• PaintSnap - Turn your photos into paintings. This app creates a GIF of the brushstrokes
• KIKLIKO - Like Giphy but for GIFs with sounds to share in messaging apps and beyond
• GIF Export - Export GIFs from Figma
• Meet Cam - Overlay fun GIFs, meeting timers, and more on your camera

Got a Product Hunt launch coming up soon? You can also check out this How-To on creating an animated thumbnail with Lottie and Canva.

“Let me know how I can be helpful.”

That sounds like a friendly offer, but for those deep in startup world, it’s a punch line too. The phrase, spoken from investors to founders, often unintentionally amounts to lip service.

It may seem trivial but the topic matters because founders have so many more options for approaching funding today than they had five years ago — secondary markets for private equity, crowdfunding, bootstrapping, minimally-dilutive capital, micro-investments, and factoring. So founders who do approach VC investment often seek more than just cash. They want investors who align with their vision and, well, help.

And many do want to help. Ex-founders and early-stage employees-turned-investors especially understand the grind, and sit on a trove of wisdom and expertise. As Alexis Ohanian put it: “I truly believe the future belongs to those who can assemble and activate their cap tables to be a league of super contributors.”

There are two problems, “founders are busy and can’t put tasks on a silver platter, and investors want to help but don’t want to step on toes,” explained Brian Murray, an investor and Partner at Craft Ventures, in a Product Hunt Maker Story.

So Murray and his co-founder, Fahim Ferdous (who also co-founded AdQuick), built Cabal.

Cabal is an all-in-one platform to help founders and teams surface what they need from investors and make it easy for them to contribute. The tool combines an email client, an e-signature product, a lightweight CRM, and workflows.

In a demo, Murral illustrates some of the tools including one of Cabal’s workflow features, the Ask tab. Here, founders can share a page with advisors that shows which companies the startup is targeting, and people the advisor knows at those companies. Startups can draft pre-written emails that advisors can use to reach out to the contacts.

Check out the demo video to see other ways investors can be helpful.

“This is something I'm really passionate about,” Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, and Partner at Greylock shared on Tome’s launch page today. Hoffman has been working with the team behind the product for the past two years and led their seed round.

Makers Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, who both led Product at companies like Facebook and Citizen, started working on Tome after becoming frustrated with existing slide tools that forced them to spend time on formatting rather than on crafting the message. The fact that slides have historically been difficult to manage from a mobile device didn’t sit right with them either.

Tome positions itself as “a storytelling tool for work.” The app is a slide builder that supports sharing and presenting dynamic, complex ideas – think 3D models, motion graphics, or interactive charts, through tile-based formatting that automatically structures the layout of the content. It’s been built to feel native on mobile, allowing you to collaborate with your team through comments, mentions, and seen states. You can think of it as “a Pitch meets FigJam hybrid.”

We’re big fans of storytelling here at Product Hunt, so what’s interesting about Tome’s launch is its focus on helping make hard concepts easier to explain. It does this by allowing you to use narration, annotations, and web embeds, removing communication barriers that may arise from using text and images only.

While today is the first time the app publicly launches, Tome has been built alongside early users at Superhuman, Flexport, and Neeva who use it for internal design demos, reviewing customer feedback, and team all-hands.

The team has started working to integrate apps like Figma, Framer, Looker, and Airtable but wants to hear what you’d like to be able to add to your presentations.

The founders will be hanging around to discuss any questions and ideas you may have, so head to the comments. 👇

We’re actually surprised we didn’t see this sooner but alas, Shopify has launched its own Link in Bio tool called Linkpop.

The humble bio link may seem like old news, and why wouldn’t it? Many of us probably come across that “click the link in my bio” call-to-action daily. But the bio link has transitioned from footnote to the main character — another market boosted by the pandemic and now riding the tailwinds of the creator economy.

AJ, the founder of Carrd, told the Verge that he had to start building out his team when the bio link part of the business started growing in 2020. Influencers picked up the tool as the Black Lives Matter movement started picking up steam. Then there’s Jijo Sunny and the makers behind Buy Me A Coffee. They launched Bio Link recently, announcing that it grew to serve 170k creators with 4M monthly visitors in the six months after its beta launch.

Last week Linktree, which is probably the most well-known name in the business with more than 24 million users, joined the unicorn club. Co-founder Alex Zaccaria told TechCrunch last March about its hyper-speed growth — 4 million new users within just three months.

Linktree just announced a partnership with Shopify at the end 2021, enabling users to launch a storefront on their Linktree page. Shopify’s new product will now compete — it features customizable pages, lets users shop directly on bio pages, and delivers a “page-load about one-fifth the size of other bio tools.”

With millions of users on Linktree, it’s likely that a partnership still makes sense for Shopify, as an offering for its own 1.75 million users, but the new product may remind other startups that the market is delicate. As AJ put it to the Verge, “One technical change on any of the platforms, by allowing people to link to various things from their page, could destroy these services.”

If you have any questions or feedback on Linkpop, make sure to drop it here👇 for the Shopify team today.

What’s better: getting in 10,000 steps a day or switching to a Mediterranean diet? Well, it depends. Being able to tell what’s making you feel great (or not) is hard and varies by person.

Enter Cor.

We first heard about it six years ago when founder Bob Messerschmidt launched a crowdfunding campaign. As the former Director of Platform Architecture for Apple's Optics and Spectroscopy team, Messerschmidt had worked on bringing Apple Watch health sensors to market. After a long hiatus of heads-down building, Messerschmidt is back.

Cor is an at-home infrared spectrometer that uses your blood to provide insights into how lifestyle tweaks affect your health.

Infrared spectrometers use specific wavelengths of light to identify and quantity molecular changes. The spectrometer is the size of a WiFi router and comes with analytics tracking tens of millions of data points. You’ll have to prick your finger and gather a small sample of blood every week, but according to the team, you’ll be able to discover what food and fitness practices have the highest impact on you.

This might feel familiar to one infamous Silicon Valley scandal many of us are watching unfold in a dramatized TV series right now. In contrast to Theranos’ culture of secrecy, Cor shares its plans publicly, explaining that insights and profits from their early adopters help scale data and bring the product to the average consumer. Messerschmidt has also been clear about what data Cor can and can’t provide. In an interview with Forbes, he compared the device to current wearables – you can think of Cor as being “1,000x more sensitive than Apple Watch.”

Still, if you’re squeamish at the sight of blood, but like the idea of taking more control over your health, Mage recently launched to help you own your medical records, kind of “like a passport for going into medical facilities.” You can share your health record with a hospital but only for the duration of the visit.

Music lovers could argue that a data scientist working on better song recommendations is doing a public service. We get that.

It's something Adam Bly worked on as the VP of Data at Spotify — improving data discovery to inform anything from product strategy to playlists. Bly stepped into the role after Spotify acquired his company, Seed Scientific, which conceived and built data products for companies like Beats and the United Nations. His resume is dusted with more accolades and accomplishments, too. He was a Visiting Senior Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard Kennedy School and founded an award-winning science magazine called Seed.

Recently, Bly has turned his sights back towards the public good (in the traditional sense) with System, a website that aims to explain how anything in the world is related. Think of System like Wikipedia in that it is free, open, and a public resource for knowledge. System gathers statistical evidence of relationships between topics and then organizes and visualizes it.

At a glance, System looks like a web of knowledge graphs, but those are based on semantic relationships (e.g. coffee is a beverage) while System is based on statistical relationships, Bly explained.

“A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is.”

Bly founded System after recognizing that the biggest global challenges, like COVID and climate change, are systemic while data and knowledge are organized into silos. System was designed to show how the world actually is, so we can change it.

This is the beta 1.0 release and the team has much planned, including soon allowing anyone to contribute evidence of relationships to System. For now, you can start exploring relationships like unemployment and social distancing.

Amie is off to the races today as it launches into beta.

The product started gaining interest two years ago as its founder, Dennis Müller, left his job as a Product Manager at N26 (the Berlin-based neobank that’s gearing up for IPO) to work full time on productivity tools. Müller and an N26 colleague, Lukas Klinser, also launched Productivity.so, securing Product of the Day with their library of productivity hacks that highlights hidden shortcuts in your favorite tools.

Amie then picked up $1.3 million in funding from the European VC, Creandum (an early Spotify investor), and other angel investors to kickstart hiring and development.

Now, it launches today with its four-in-one app, combining your Gcal, to-do lists, scheduling links, and a personal CRM under the headline of joyful productivity. Overlapping tools enable you to do things like drag & drop to-dos into your calendar, or multi-select and color-code your meetings. Joy can be found in things like seeing your Spotify sessions in your calendar, a birthdays widget on mobile, and “emoji explosions.”

There is so much high-quality competition in this space (see: Cron, Vimcal, and Hera for starters), but maybe we don’t have to tell you that. A lot of you have already taken interest in Amie's launch video and chimed in with support, and to ask: “how do you compare to the rest?”

Müller responded that Amie is overall built to focus on how you engage with your colleagues. Its stand-out features include “advanced link sharing [with a] booking page that is really beautiful,” drag & drop to-dos with “way more power to be added soon, a mini personal CRM, [and a] really great mobile app." More integrations are coming soon, too.

Amie is slowly onboarding users into its beta. We’re told that Google API limits are the culprit, but the Product Hunt community gets to skip to the front of the list, with the first 200 people getting access immediately.

Today’s newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Mercury.

Mercury, the banking stack, made a splash with its debut back in 2019 as an early business-focused challenger bank.

Co-founder Immad Akhund started working on the company after reflecting on his own banking difficulties while founding Heyzap (acquired in 2016), and on the experiences of the 200+ startups that he had invested in too. At the same time, he had been impressed with the consumer-focused neobanks that had risen across Europe (think Monzo, Revolut).

European neobanks are known for their modern UIs and super fast onboarding, so the entrepreneurs who knew what they were missing were excited to see Mercury’s launch in the US. Mercury carried on the concept that banking deserves a better UI. An application can be completed in minutes, enabling companies across the world to get an FDIC-insured checking account, debit card, and savings account often within a few hours. You can see the dashboard experience in a new new demo the team shared last month.

The API that Mercury launched next was a part of the company’s vision from the start, Akhund shared. Startups can use the read & write API to customize their banking experience, for example, automating Slack bots to send custom notifications to their teams.

While Mercury has continued to evolve into a full business banking stack (debit cards, currency exchange, and wire transfers were built in after launch), it’s also expanded its focus to providing new offerings that help startups access the capital they need to grow. The team put together an Investor Database, a tool that’s filterable by industry, type, and check size, so that founders can find an investor and get in touch. They also created Mercury Raise, a program that puts startups in front of seasoned investors. Think of it like a founder-friendly Shark Tank.

Now, Mercury has launched Venture Debt to help founders get quality capital without sacrificing too much equity. Minimal dilution and founder-friendly terms can help companies extend their runway, supercharge growth, and even reach a higher valuation.

Mercury is a financial technology, not a bank. Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust®; Member FDIC.

Digital advertising is overdue for disruption. The pandemic gave digital ads a boost for a while, but they haven’t been able to weather longer-term issues like changing tastes for privacy and oversaturation in the D2C markets.

Facebook is feeling it as its ad revenue growth shrinks from year to year. Looks like Zuckerberg was right to be worried when Apple made it easier for iPhone users to stop apps from tracking them. The kinds of D2C companies that used to thrive on Facebook aren’t faring well either. Companies report tripling ad prices and poor results.

The question that remains is “How do you fix it?” Plenty of founders have turned to subscription models instead of ads. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for every vertical, like D2Cs, plus many consumers are finding that subscriptions are getting costly and hard to manage.

Comrade introduced its solution today — an extension that pays you, the internet surfer, when you engage with an ad. Your browsing activity is used in real-time, while advertisers are bidding on keywords and URLs behind the scenes. Then your activity is discarded immediately after. According to Comrade, there’s no data collection, data sharing, or user profiling.

Comrade flips cost per click advertising around, paying the user for their data, and limiting its use. “Since 1994, when we were still browsing on Netscape Navigator, the cost per click has been paid to advertising platforms only. With Comrade, a large share of that cost per click is finally shared with users for their time and attention,” wrote Comrade co-founder Sami Baddar.

How much users can earn will vary. Baddar explained:.

“It depends on the industry. Since it's a CPC auction, advertisers can bid on the same keywords and URLs, putting the price up considerably, even all the way up to $50 and more.”

What do you think — would you use the extension?