The Leaderboard
Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
The humble widget has viral potential. See: Locket, a widget that has unexpectedly risen to the top of the Social Networking category of the App Store. The widget shows live pictures from your friends, right on your home screen. Maker Matt Moss shared:
“I had graduated from UCSB that June, but [my girlfriend] was going back to school in the fall... We started using the app every day to stay in touch… Once our friends started asking to try it, we decided to release it on the store. Since then, a few viral TikToks have catapulted the app to wayyyyy more users than we ever expected :)”
“Simple but beautifully executed” is the popular opinion on the widget thus far.
Here are seven more widget-based products from the last year you should check out to simplify your mobile experience.
Pretty Progress - Personalize your own countdown & progress widgetsLearn Geography - Put a country quiz on your home screen
Home Widget - Control all your HomeKit devices right from your home screen
Deliveroo Widget - Reorder from your favorite UK restaurants and grocery stores
Usage - Monitor your device with stats like storage and battery life
Meep meep - Track activity of any Instagram account
Wyd? - A widget “for smartphone addicts” to encourage you to do one thing
We’re excited to announce the last batch of Golden Kitty Awards finalists. Voting is now open for the following, so go ahead and choose your favorites.
✍🏼 Side project
and…
We’ll also be announcing finalists for our Maker of the Year and Community Member of the Year soon.
Voting officially closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59 pm PT.
😻 One last big thank you to this year’s Golden Kitty Awards sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s.
There is still time to register for the Golden Kitty Awards 2021 virtual ceremony where hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom will be announcing this year’s winners live, alongside MANY other exciting guests and activities. Get this on your calendar now so you don’t miss it.
The second to last drop of Golden Kitty Awards finalists is here! You know what to do (in case you don’t — VOTE)👇
⚜️ Design tools
🏋️♀️ Health & fitness
Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59 pm PT. Go upvote your favorites HERE.
Make sure to reserve your front-row spot at the virtual Golden Kitty Awards 2021 ceremony to witness this year’s products get etched into history with winners of the past, like Figma and Robinhood.
🙏 A big thanks to this year’s Golden Kitty Awards sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s.
Look out for tomorrow’s newsletter, where we’ll be sharing the final batch of finalists including the highly-anticipated category, Product of the Year. In the meantime, go vote for the rest.
More Golden Kitty Awards finalists just dropped!
Time to vote! 👇
👨👩👧👧 Children & Family
🧑🎨 Creator Economy
Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59 pm PT. Go upvote your favorites HERE.
Don’t forget: you're invited to the LIVE Golden Kitty Award ceremony. Avoid the FOMO and grab a virtual seat here.
Special thanks to our sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s, for making the Golden Kitty Awards 2021 possible.
Purrfect, now that you have all the information you need, go cast your vote. We’ll be back tomorrow with the next handful of categories.
The second drop of Golden Kitty Awards finalists is here!
Starting now, you can cast your votes for...
💸 Fintech
🛠 Hardware
📎 SaaS
(😻,😻) web3
Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59 pm PT. Go upvote your favorites HERE.
There is still time to register for the GKA 2021 ceremony on January 27. Be warned, this is NOT your dull, run-of-the-mill awards show – we’ve put together a spec-cat-ular list of guests and entertainment. This includes hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom from The Room Where it Happens podcast, a panel with our very own Ryan Hoover, live music, an after-party in the metaverse, and much more.
❤️ This year’s Golden Kitty Awards are made possible by our sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s.
We’ll be back tomorrow with the next handful of categories. Now, go choose the best.
Last week, you nominated your favorite products for the Golden Kitty Awards 2021. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have the finalists for the first six categories!
Starting now, you can vote for the best in...
Mobile Apps
Audio & Voice
No Code
Productivity
Work from Home Anywhere
WTF?!
Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59pm PT.
Put everything on hold for a few minutes and go vote HERE.
Winners will get to share their acceptance speeches LIVE during our virtual awards ceremony. You're invited to join us in a global celebration. Expect...
🧠 Hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom to drop insights
😺 THE Ryan Hoover to share his 2022 outlook as he hosts a panel
🪄 Magician Johnny Wu to leave us speechless
🤔 Fierce competition on tech-themed trivia with the Big Quiz Thing
🎤 Grooves from up-and-coming musical artists via Sofar Sounds
🐕 Doge overload with an after-party in the Doge Temple
❤️ Appreciation for our sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s
Tbh, missing this would be CATastrophe, so head over to the website to register.
We’ll be back tomorrow with the next handful of categories. Now, go choose the best.
Get the popcorn.
This week, OpenSea announced it raised a $300 million fundraising round, valuing the NFT marketplace at $13.3 billion. Forbes notes that the funding introduces founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah into the three-comma club, i.e. their estimated net worth is valued at over a billion dollars (in this case $2.2B each).
OpenSea had quite the year as NFTs became a household term. The startup’s blog noted it increased its transaction volume over 600x last year.
Not everyone is rushing to put OpenSea in their startup fantasy league. Some might be waiting to see how Coinbase’s own NFT marketplace shakes out after it announced it would be launching one soon. Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong even said the market for non-fungible tokens could surpass its crypto trading business.
Others are debating what all this funding means for web3. It’s of note that OpenSea’s previous round of $100M was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm that Jack Dorsey has been trolling. Jack takes issue with how venture capitalists have been funneling money into web3 (VCs deployed $30B+ globally in 2021 into crypto startups, minting more than 40 unicorns last year). The entire point of web3 is a distributed internet — user-controlled, enabled by blockchain tech — so some took offense to Jack’s remarks as a stinging ngmi (“not going to make it”) attack.
Balaji Srinivasan, ex-Coinbase CTO and General Partner at a16z, pointed the finger back at Jack's own company for being guilty of enabling centralized leadership. Jack maintained that criticism only helps those in this space grow.
Regardless of what camp you’re in, if you haven’t explored NFTs yet, this is shaping up to be the year to do so, even more than 2021. We just met two newcomers in this space.
Quest NFT is a platform for easily creating NFTs from your social accounts (Instagram now, with Twitter and TikTok coming soon). Your NFT gets posted on Quest as well as the NFT marketplace, Rarible.
You can think of NFT-Inator as a way to create your own version of Bored Apes, with a simple toolkit for generating designs with randomized combinations and layers that are export-ready.
So put down the popcorn now and go make your NFT.
Today’s Daily Digest is crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Secureframe.
When a tech founder (or anyone else on the team) dreams of closing a huge deal, they probably leave out the mundane stuff, like wading through the customer’s hundred-line cybersecurity questionnaires to prove their product is up to snuff.
Compliance may not be sexy, but SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliance are so crucial to doing business that telling a founder they can achieve it in weeks is enough to shoot a product to #1 Product of the Day. And earn it a shiny Golden Kitty Award.
The product: Secureframe.
After the startup made a splash with its launch a year ago, the company proceeded to close an $18 million Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins and with participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and Base10 Partners.
Secureframe provides a complete security automation platform that simplifies compliance end to end. Its approach is to provide over 100 deep integrations with SaaS tools (like the ones your HR team uses) and cloud providers like AWS. Secureframe then automatically collects and stores the evidence that your company needs, saving hundreds of hours of tedious manual work.
To save time, companies can use one of the 40+ auditor-approved templates to get started, rather than starting from scratch. The platform also provides security awareness training and a vendor management portal where users can manage their vendors and detect which are in scope for each framework.
To modernize the old and slow audit approach, Secureframe provides continuous monitoring, real-time alerts, and a data room to generate reports. With traditional auditing and pre-audit prep, it often takes a company months of manual remediation before they can receive their certifications. That time is crucial in startup world.
Secureframe speeds up the process from months to weeks.
“Because Secureframe is basically adding a lot of automation with our software — and making the process so much simpler and easier — we’re able to bring the cost down to a point where this is something that a lot more companies can afford,” co-founder Shrav Mehta told TechCrunch. “...We’re trying to solve that problem to make it super easy for every organization to be secure from day one.”
Click through below to save your team months of time and schedule a demo of the platform.
The Golden Kitty Awards 2021 have landed! Nominations are open, so you can start submitting your favorite products NOW. These are the products you want to see go down in tech history. 🏆
Our annual awards are a celebration of the best products and makers from the last year. There are over twenty award categories covering today’s foremost topics on innovation and tech, including No-Code, AI, and Web3 (to name a few). We’ll also be putting two ameowzing humans in the spotlight for their contributions to the community.
Here’s how it works: You nominate products in each of the categories from now through Saturday, January 8. Then on Monday, January 10, we’ll start dropping finalists in each category. Five categories at a time, over five days.
After a week of voting on the best products of 2021, this year’s Golden Kitty Awards culminates with an epic virtual awards ceremony on January 27, hosted by brilliant minds, Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom. Isenberg and Bloom are admired authorities in the tech community for their work in venture capital, products, business strategy, and content creation including their newest podcast, The Room Where It Happens.
You’ll definitely want to stick around for the afterparty, too. We’ll drop more details soon, but expect a lot of magic ✨ and memorable live performances. You can put the event on your calendar now.
Other than YOU, the Golden Kitty Awards 2021 are made possible by our sponsor, Flatfile. We’ve talked to you about Flatfile before, so you might remember the startup for its platform that makes validating and onboarding customer data quick and simple. Flatfile helps SaaS companies reduce churn and provide even more value to their customers by cutting down the time it takes to get started.
Now go — nominate.
👇👇👇
How is that healthy eating resolution coming along? You’d be forgiven for struggling this early into the new year. We’ve all been there.
Around this time of year, people look to meal delivery services like HelloFresh or Blue Apron to help them with their goals. If it’s not healthy or home-cooked meals they’re after, it’s salvation from the daily dilemma: what’s for dinner?
Unfortunately, subscribers have been left wanting with current delivery services, including a former VP of Product at HelloFresh.
“As a user myself, I found that the service wasn’t flexible enough to accommodate my personal preferences. It also didn’t relieve me of having to head to the grocery store…” shared Christian Schiller, a co-founder of Kitchenful which launched last week.
Kitchenful can be described as a grocery concierge service, meaning the startup offers its app to help you plan your meals and groceries for the week, rather than sending you a meal kit. Users specify their preferences, and Kitchenful makes recommendations for your weekly meal plan. Then a grocery list is generated and Kitchenful places your order with your local supermarket like Whole Foods or Walmart.
The startup’s approach stands out among a sea of competitors because of how customizable it is. While many meal kits have options for dietary restrictions, options are limited for customizing meal plans.
With Kitchenful, users can choose recipes and add additional products from a grocer’s inventory. The app can also help households reduce waste. Already have onions? You can remove it from the grocery list (which can also lower your grocery bill) and Kitcheful can suggest ideas on what to do with leftover ingredients, too.
Christian and his co-founder, Christian Hartung, are alums from the Summer 2021 batch of Y Combinator startups. Leave your feedback and questions for them below — for example, one commenter has asked for nutritional details on their weekly menu. If you’d like to see that as well, make sure to upvote the comment or add your voice!
