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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.
Spotify Wrapped is four years old now (though Spotify first started throwing out your yearly stats in 2015 under a different name). In stuff-that-goes-viral years, that’s pretty old. But the internet hasn’t tired of it yet.
Plenty of journalists have done rounds of interviews to dig into why it is we love our Spotify stats so much (despite the fact that Wrapped is a reminder that Spotify is tracking us). One emerging theme is that our data gives us a peek at our persona or brand.
This year, maker Ios noticed that Apple music users were left out of the fun (and self-discovery). Ios had previously launched TuneStalgia, a music nostalgia app that imports your Apple Music data and tells you daily the songs you forgot you loved. Wanting to delight disappointed Apple users, he built a “wrapped” into the app in just 8 days and now we Apple Music users can grab some of our stats, too.
“When people go to listen to music they’re looking for a change in their day, mindset, ability, perspective, heart. They want to hear music that makes them feel something, or maybe — a feeling they’ve once felt before. This was just another chance to do that,” wrote Ios.
That all being true, music is obviously only one small slice of us and our days. So here is are six more ways to wrap yourself up this year.
Favo.so Wrapped (Your Twitter likes)
2021 Looped or 2021 Your Year in Meetings (Your calendar stats)
Tis’ the season for kindness. Thankfully, we're sharing a handful of new products that are making it easier to give.
Over the last few decades, cause-marketing has become a powerful tool for nonprofits and charities to fundraise. So powerful that in a recent survey by Sprout Social, 66% of respondents said they think brands should take a stand on social and political issues. Cause-marketing lets for-profit businesses enjoy increased profits and give back to a cause that aligns with similar goals, while nonprofits reap the donations.
That’s why we think POGO is an interesting product. Maker Joe Perl launched the charitable platform last month which is “powered by purpose-driven brands.” In other words, brands like Vita Coco (coconut water) and allplants (plant-based meal delivery) can use the platform to offer discounts to customers in exchange for a donation to the charities they are funding. In a way, it feels like personal fundraising pages, but for brands. Perl shared that POGO is an MVP, but is onboarding 20+ partners each week with 300 users so far.
You may have caught the launch of the Carbon Neutral Club with a related offering but targeted on fighting climate change. Users calculate their carbon footprint by answering a few short questions about their habits, and the platform determines the cost of your membership based on your footprint. Members can take advantage of savings across sustainable brands partnered with Carbon Neutral Club.
Two more new products to check out in the charitable giving space are Headado and Daffy which are working to make charitable giving easier, as part of your regular routine.
Hedado is working to simplify your charitable giving by handling donations for you as a single transaction. Just choose which charities you want to give to, allocate your support, and Hedado will make your regular donations and track your receipts for tax time.
Daffy has a similar offering. Users can choose how much they want to put aside on a regular basis, and lets you contribute via cash, stock, or crypto. Your giving fund can also grow through “one of [the company’s] nine modern investment portfolios," where it grows tax-free. That means more money to the charities you want to support. 🙌
What would social media look like if was created by creators? We looked at that question with the latest Clash launch in October, but we’re excited to dive back in after the debut of HiHo.
“HiHo is an idea I became obsessed with immediately after selling my prior companies, JibJab (in 2018) and StoryBots (to Netflix in 2019). People were more comfortable than ever with face-forward video for communication, however, the world’s largest public discussion forums were exclusively text-based…” wrote Gregg Spiridellis in yesterday’s launch.
To add more context, Spiridellis co-founded JibJab with his brother, Evan, back in 1999. After achieving video virality in 2004, the brothers started collecting achievements like ABC’s People of the Year. Maybe it's been a while since you made a JibJab but despite being one of the first video creation tools on the internet, the platform persists in a crowded market today. It has 1.4 million paid subscribers and only 25 full-time staff + freelancers. The company was acquired in 2018.
Then only months later, the founding brothers’ animated kids show, StoryBots, was acquired by Netflix. The show had been introduced by the Spiridellis brothers on YouTube in 2012 and five years later, it started winning Emmys. The founders were inspired by Sesame Street, but wanted to teach modern-day lessons (e.g. “What is DNA”) to today’s device-centric children. They found success with their clever animated bots.
For the new endeavor, HiHo, Gregg Spiridellis is joined by co-founders Mike Bracco (formerly on the Product team at JibJab) and Gustavo Barcena (an ex-JibJab and Facebook engineer).
Aside from the founders, what sets HiHo apart? The app approaches social through TikTok-like video but is built for asynchronous conversations, like Twitter and Reddit. Users can thread their videos, reply to others with video on their own time, and download stitched conversations to share. There are also public forums, private DMs, and groups where you can meet people with similar interests.
The founders are also focused on building a “more civil social experience” that promotes kindness, positivity, and authenticity. “... We’ve made a number of important decisions around what to leave OUT of the product: like buttons, view counts, camera filters, and predatory algorithms,” wrote Spiridellis.
The question remains: Can async video take off the same way written forums have? (Now seems a good time to mention that Reddit, announced it filed its confidential plans for IPO yesterday.)
A video thread of what's trending in meme stocks does sound pretty cool… Thoughts?
Last year, we wrote about Canva taking on Adobe with its desktop app. Then in October, we wrote about how Canva is killing it.
We are here for this competition, since we get to reap rewards with some excellent software.
Adobe re-branded and re-approached Spark and just launched it as Creative Cloud Express, which is likely the most direct aim we've seen Adobe take at Canva’s market yet. On the Adobe blog, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky wrote:
“Creative Cloud Express draws on our decades of experience… It makes the core technology in our industry-leading products… available with just a few clicks — and with no learning curve… [It’s] is an app that only Adobe could develop because it takes some of the magic from our professional creative technology and makes it accessible to anyone.”
I.e. Adobe wants you to remind you that it’s the long-time expert in this space. Even though its Creative Cloud Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) has focused on design professionals, Adobe’s Ashley Still told TechCrunch that the company has seen a lot of growth from non-professional users in recent years. So Adobe took Creative Cloud Suite's world-class design software and gave it a non-professional-friendly experience.
Belsky also shared example after example of use cases from non-expert designers, from a tattoo artist sharing his latest design to a student creating an interactive history report.
The product features certainly resemble a Canva experience. There’s a library of templates, background removal, filters, convert to PDF, and much more. You can also use the integration with Creative Cloud Libraries “to take assets from Photoshop and Illustrator that maybe a colleague created for them and then re-use them in the Creative Cloud Express app.”
Creative Cloud Express is free and you also can pay to unlock premium features, like access to Adobe’s 175 million stock photos and 20,000 fonts.
After you test it out, don’t forget to let us all know what you think in the comments. Thrilled to see Adobe step up their game for non-professionals, or will you be sticking to Canva (or another competitor)?
It was only a matter of time before we saw no-code builders focus on web3 products.
Software that lets you build marketplaces and apps without code are still evolving within web 2.0 (i.e. the current phase of the internet that drives online collaboration). Now, as a wave of blockchain tech pushes us towards the next phase of the internet, no-code is perfectly suited to play a big part. No-code democratizes creation, and web3 is all about democratizing the internet.
Enter: thirdweb, a platform for building web3 apps and games without code. It launched yesterday alongside its announcement of closing a $5M funding round from high profile investors like Mark Cuban and Gary Vee (and Ryan Hoover).
thirdweb’s founders are Steven Bartlett and Furqan Rydhan. Bartlett previously founded a marketing agency called The Social Chain, and those in the UK may recognize him as the newest — and youngest — investor to join the "Dragon’s Den" (the "Shark Tank" of US or Tigers of Japan). Rydhan is a serial entrepreneur: the co-founding CTO of Bebo and then AppLovin. He started an incubator, Founders Inc., which is where the idea for thirdweb emerged.
“We've spent the last 18 months, in my incubator, working with a bunch of teams who are trying to launch NFT and web3 projects. During that time we learned the biggest barriers for developing these experiences is learning new programming languages and blockchains,” shared Rydhan.
thirdweb facilitates deploying smart contracts (using your own wallet) so that you can use widgets and interfaces with web3 features in your product, whether that be an app, game, or DAO. Makers can use thirdweb to launch NFTs, marketplaces, social tokens, and more.
The platform is free to use until royalties and fees are programmed into the sales of NFTs that are launched. thirdweb takes five percent of the royalties of secondary sales. At least one commenter expressed some disappointment with this model, but the makers support it, saying that it means the company's revenue is in direct proportion to the success of its customers.
Feedback otherwise has been overwhelmingly positive, with multiple early adopters commenting on the company’s strong customer service experience via Discord.
It’s of note that we did also just see related launches from Tellie, InLoop, and Nifty Generator, so if you’re building or integrating products in this space, check those out next.
Is this a spreadsheets renaissance? Or are spreadsheets just another beneficiary of the no-code movement.
Regardless, beyond the haters but before the people with the “I heart spreadsheets” mugs, is a growing population of inbetweeners. Marketers, small business owners, and beyond may not know how to code, but they do feel proficient enough with integrations and no-code builders to create tools that work for their specific needs. Still, they haven’t been able to quit Excel for good. Perhaps new products will change that.
“The world runs on spreadsheets, but the last time they got a major update was in 2006,” wrote Rows co-founder Humberto Ayres Pereira.
Rows (formerly dashdash) launched earlier this month, a year after opening its public beta. Rows' “spreadsheet superpowers” include interactive elements (buttons, input fields), sharing (without letting others mess up your formulas), automated reports, integrations with tools like Google Analytics and Crunchbase, and the ability to connect custom APIs.
Back in July, Spreadsheet.com opened up its beta to allow more people to try its “all-in-one spreadsheet” solution. Put simply, it works like the Excel you know (and maybe love) but adds a “whole new set of capabilities that give it the power of a database and project management system.” This includes rich data types, file attachments in cells, connected worksheets, Kanbans, Gantts, and more (of the spreadsheet tools here today, this one feels the most like a direct Airtable competitor).
Grist launched its relational spreadsheets product last month. The tool lets you do things like link records across tables, drag-and-drop your data, and more. Some commenters shared that they saw Grist as “the only viable alternative to Airable,” but a note by co-founder Dmitry Sagalovskiy’s best explains Grist’s approach to the market. While Airtable would be best be described as a relational database, the makers built Grist so that it’s easy to start with just a spreadsheet.
“You can start building a spreadsheet, and end up with a proper relational database and a versatile custom application, all in one.”
Rows is also pretty unconcerned with comparisons to software in this close quarters, from Airtable to Zapier and Notion. Ayres Pereira told TechCrunch: “Yes, we overlap… but I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero-sum game for us.”
A team of data scientists, machine learning developers, and product designers to help get Christmas shopping done... we’re listening.
Outdone has just launched its AI-powered gift recommender that aims to tackle the rough experience of shopping for gifts online. Co-founder Hugh Lagrotteria painted a picture of what that looks like today. The TL;DR: Your Google search delivers a bunch of content, and you have to sort through it (from clickbait to sponsored and biased content) and figure out what’s disingenuous or organic.
Outdone tackles the problem in a couple of ways. First, a clean UI to contrast the messy search experience. Gift givers answer a few questions about the person they’re shopping for and Outdone recommends 3 to 4 apparel brands (apparel only so far) that the engine identifies are a great match.
Those suggestions are based on surveys of thousands of consumers. “[W]e used that brand preference data to build a neural net recommender system — a first of its kind in the gift-giving space!” Lagrotteria explains.
GiftPicker takes a similar approach in regards to using a modern UI and an “epic database” of gifts. The makers (a team from Presently which enables group gifting) called it “Buzzfeed quiz meets holiday shopping.”
Then there’s Giftpack which is also powered by AI but is focused primarily on employee gifting. It’s a CRM software to help you select, deliver, and track gifts in bulk. Giftpack also starts with a brief questionnaire. The software picks 5 of the best gift options and sends the suggestions to your email, where you can just make a selection and begin shipping globally.
Gifty also launched earlier this month with a different approach to gift-giving. It's a social platform where people can create gift lists, connect them with friends and family, and shop. Maker Ines Makula noted that she was motivated to create the app because of all the waste created by unwanted gifts:
“In the UK every Christmas people receive 120 million unwanted gifts that either end up in landfill or in storage.” Makula is looking for feedback so be sure to pipe up with any thoughts.
Yes, we’ve covered new meeting software ad nauseam at this point, but can we help it if there’s still so much to surface here?
Today, Headroom debuted its meeting software to the community. At a time when Zoom is still making headlines, what makes a competitor like Headroom stand out?
The tool is focused on filling user experience gaps, using AI to power the real-time legwork that goes along with having a meeting. And the founding team is stacked with AI expertise.
That includes co-founder Andrew Rabinovich, an ex-Google software engineer who worked on computer vision and ML algorithms for photo and video annotation. Prior to starting Headroom, he spent five years at Magic Leap where he was the Head of AI. Co-founder Julian Green is also an ex-Googler where he launched computer vision products like the Cloud Vision API and managed deep-tech moonshots (i.e. "innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.”)
“Headroom uses real-time AI to make video conferencing smarter and more natural,” wrote Green on the launch page. That includes “enhanced video and audio quality at lower bandwidth, real-time transcripts, one-click notes, gesture recognition, real-time share of speaking time by participant, cloud video recordings and replays, searchable transcripts and notes.”
The demo illustrates the features, and we have to agree with the video that “the best part” seems to be that everything (across transcripts and collaborative notes) is searchable.
While we haven’t seen real-time gestures before (which are fun and much easier than finding reactions on your keyboard), we have been watching makers launch real-time, collaborative note-taking Zoom apps over the last year. And just yesterday, we watched founder Richard White launch Fathom to #1 Product of the Day with a tool that aims to eliminate note-taking on Zoom calls.
So if you want to keep Zoom at the top of your work vernacular, you can “circle back” to some of those apps. If you want to try Headroom, now’s a great time to do so and share feedback with the makers. The tool is free.
Green also threw out a challenge to “discover the 4th gesture recognized in Headroom meetings… 👍 👎 ✋ ? ... No, not that one!”
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Webflow.
You can take years to build a product or do it in a weekend. A maker can be a child prodigy or someone who can’t write a line of code. Anyone can be a maker, and that’s true now more than ever.
Few movements have made good on their promise to democratize something better than the no-code movement has democratized entrepreneurship. Webflow has a hand in that with its visual canvas that lets anyone build a site, with down-to-the-pixel customizations, all without code. The startup has enjoyed a gratifying year — it closed a $140M Series B, announced oft-requested features like Logic and Memberships, and reached over 3M users.
Now it has launched a new streaming platform to tell the stories of those users.
“We're curating stories that will inspire, and also producing original series that share stories about the impact no-code is having in the world,” wrote maker Mischa Vaughn from Webflow’s content team.
Webflow TV will feature original productions as well as a highly curated collection of inspiring stories while partnering with content creators like The Futur and Charlie Marie. Its first original docuseries is called Generation No-Code and looks at how no-code development is closing the gap between idea and impact and empowering historically “would-be” entrepreneurs with the tools to pursue their dreams.
“Going through all these stock [image] sites, I just couldn’t find diverse illustrations. I just didn’t feel like I was being represented. Who’s going to do this or release this — why not me?” shares maker John Saunders in the trailer.
In true no-code fashion, the team created Webflow TV with five tools in just one month, inspired by a project from the company’s internal hackathon where the team asked “Can a streaming platform be built with Webflow?” You can read about the tools and their build on the blog.
We’re looking forward to watching the series and have started checking out content on the platform. It’s all free, so you can start watching now too.
It may seem like a lifetime ago already, but Americans and all those who “celebrate” Black Friday and Cyber Monday were just chattering about deals, or lack thereof, this year.
Part of the decrease was due to supply chain issues, part to increased demand, and part to spreading out sales and shopping to earlier dates, but nonetheless, “consumers have been surprisingly willing to accept price increases,” Ken Perkins, founder of Retail Metrics, told Bloomberg.
Is this temporary? Most likely, as a result of everything we just noted, but there’s a possibility that the price slashing of the future won’t look the same as Black Fridays of the past. One more factor to consider is that more businesses are using, or want to use, better technology to drive their decisions. In Adobe's Digital Trends 2019 report, 50% of organizations said they planned to increase their CX-related spend, with AI and real-time experiences as key investment areas.
We’ve seen a few new tools recently that leverage AI to offer sellers dynamic pricing. Yesterday, Moonship launched its AI tools for Shopify merchants to offer personalized discounts. Moonship uses machine learning models to predict what visitors will end up purchasing, only giving a nudge in the form of a personalized discount to non-purchasers. Maker George Zeng (ex-Facebook and Groupon) says the tool can increase sales by an average of 20% and as much as 80%, and takes less than a minute to install without technical expertise.
Haglit is another AI-powered software for Shopify, but works as a chatbot that haggles with your customers to decide on a price they’re willing to pay.
On the B2B side, there’s Corilly, an AI-powered price optimization and localization service for SaaS companies. As co-founder Abel Riboulot notes, most companies tackle worldwide pricing by addressing a foreign market or two, but, “for instance, the purchasing power of Norway is 30% higher than the US, and Indian tech salaries are 60% lower than in the US.” Corilly’s API systemizes your pricing page and enables you to run price experiments. Last month, the YC-backed startup launched an update that included improvements to the service and more out-of-the-box integrations with payment processors like Stripe and Paypal.
If you’re a business owner, or know one, what do you think about using AI tools for adaptive pricing? Check out Moonship and leave your questions for Zeng.
