The Leaderboard

Who remembers Yo?

The app went viral back in 2014 to the surprise of many people, including the makers themselves. They had built the app — the one with a single button to say “Yo” — in 8 hours as a quick way to communicate with family and friends. With its own momentum, and buzz generated from Product Hunt and Reddit, Yo launched to the top of the App Store.

Then there was Push Party almost exactly one year ago today 🤔... we're still waiting for an update on that one.

The reason for our nostalgia? A new app that hit the top of the App Store last week across 5 countries, called Push it. The app has a single feature. The big red button lets you send a push notification to everyone who subscribes to you on the app. Simple as that.

Yo comes from the makers of Sendit, an app that lets Snapchat users play games (like Truth or Dare) and start AR-powered conversations with their friends. The app has been gaining traction with 9 million downloads worldwide, so the makers created Push it to explore more mechanics for driving interactions between friends.

We’ve seen other startups tackle the challenges of push notifications, but products in this space are almost always meant for businesses. We’re looking forward to seeing where this P2P push goes, but unfortunately, most of us will have to wait a bit longer. Push it is only available to users in California and Australia for now.

“But didn’t you say it’s at the top of the app store in five countries?” Yup. The buzz is strong with this one. If you don’t live where Push is live yet, you can always add it to a collection on Product Hunt and save it for later.

In the meantime, we rounded up a handful of new apps from the last year to help you connect with your friends.

Party Blends - Share a link, connect to Spotify, and create a music mix with your friends
TICE or Beacon - Two options for location and ETA sharing, while staying private
XSight - Find friends and get deets with AR using your phone camera
Hyperbeam - Browse and watch movies together in your browser
Friendspire - Get and share recs for food, movies/shows, books, and podcasts
Letterloop - Create private, group newsletters with family and friends
Call Your Friends - See how long its been since you’ve been in touch and get reminders (mom will probably like this one too)

Last week, the Edtech platform Udemy went public. The IPO did not go quite as well as investors hoped. Nonetheless, it was a big day for the 11-year-old company and its co-founder Eren Bali (who stepped down from CEO to chairman and later started a newer company) and an inspiring story for many. Udemy was Bali’s second attempt at an online learning company after his first in his home country of Turkey failed.

Udemy is one in a string of Edtech companies (Coursera, Duolingo, Nerdy, Powerschool) to have IPO’ed this year. While Edtech companies going public isn’t new, Crunchbase notes that it indicates a potential shift towards US-based Edtech since Chinese-based companies have been dominating the US IPO market in recent years. Online education and distanced learning have been popular in China for quite some time, but the US saw a boost because of the pandemic.

A number of startups (ClassDojo, CourseHero, Quizlet, Codeacademy) have also closed big funding rounds after going years without doing so. Codeacademy raised a $40M Series D earlier this year, though founder Zach Sims didn’t attribute that to the pandemic. The company has achieved $50 million in annual recurring revenue and has been steadily doubling its growth since 2018.

This week, Codeacademy launched its newest product: Docs, a free coding documentation site for popular programming languages and frameworks.

“Codecademy Docs is a low-key big step for the team because it's our very first step into the realm of open contribution and UGC (user-generated content),” maker Sonny Li shared on launch day.

Li also shared that the site has surpassed 700 entries across 18 different topics. A leaderboard on the homepage highlights contributors and the entries they've authored.

Codeacademy had previously said it would be using some of its funding to grow internationally in India and invest in its Codeacademy for Business product, which competes with Udemy’s enterprise product.

We’ll be on the lookout for updates. 👀

That moment when you walk into a room and forget why... A new product wants to fill the gap every time your memory fails you. Which is a lot — we forget 80% of the information we experience daily.

Personal.ai is, well, a personal AI. It captures your spoken, written, and visual memories on a “Memory Stack” (even using legacy data from Google Calendar and Twitter) to help you remember things later by delivering proactive or timed messages. Your AI can even engage with others for you – sort of like the son of Anton, for all you Silicon Valley viewers.

"Think of all the time that you can save when your AI can message in your own voice, trained on your own memories."

Your AI gets better/is trained the more you use it over time. “GPT-3 is built on the memories of the public internet, while [Personal.ai] is built on the memories of your private self,” co-founder Suman Kanuganti explained to TechCrunch before competing in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 2020 under its former name, LutherAI (link in quote added by us).

We know what you’re thinking: What about privacy? Handing over all my data — even voice records — to a company?

“We’ve decentralized your memories from your identity and secured them with blockchain technology to ensure no one — not even us — can see what you capture with your AI,” wrote Xiaoran Zhang with today’s launch. Zhang, an NLP product builder, is part of a co-founding team of AI experts led by Suman Kanuganti. The founding team brings combined experience from past work at LinkedIn, Google, and Intuit (to name a few).

Privacy is a centerpiece topic for the company. The makers of Personal.ai are adamant about building an AI product that will have a positive impact on humanity. Personal.ai has pledged to never sell your data for advertising, but blockchain technology is what’s at the crux of the company’s work to keep your “virtual identity” safe from bad actors. To store users’ data, it uses Oasis Labs, a privacy tech company built on a permissionless blockchain. In addition to decentralizing your data, maker Marc Ettlinger explained to a commenter that users can delete their data from the system forever, if they so choose.

What do you think? Do you want to see what it’s like to train your own virtual assistant, or do you still have questions? Don’t be shy. 👇

We saw Google’s answer to Notion back in May. Now we officially have Microsoft’s too — or you could compare it to Google Wave (put to rest in 2010) as TechCrunch did. No matter who did what first — people are pretty impressed with Microsoft’s delivery now.

Microsoft introduced Loop, a new app for collaborative documents, at its Ignite conference yesterday. If you were following closely, you might have seen this coming.

In 2019, Microsoft introduced Fluid Framework, a new platform for developers to build real-time collaborative products. Then last year, the company put the code on GitHub, open-sourced it, and announced they were building Fluid into its productivity apps.

Loop is made up of three parts: components, pages, and workspaces. Components are live content, from standard items like lists and tables to sales opp records via Dynamics 365 records. Updates to components happen in real-time, across multiple apps. Developers will be able to build third-party Loop components, too.

Pages are pretty self-explanatory, and a workspace is a whiteboard-like hub where your components live. You can see them all at once (including the ones not built by Microsoft) and who’s working on them.

Loop hasn’t been given a release date (“the upcoming months”) but we’re supposed to see components arriving inside of Teams, Outlook, and OneNote this month.

That will hold us over until 2022, when we can use Mesh for Teams too. It's Microsoft’s metaverse platform for work which looks a whole lot like Facebook’s Meta’s Horizon Workrooms.

Mesh will let users create avatars and, like Horizon Workrooms, your movements and gestures are mimicked in the metaverse within an immersive office space where you can use Teams features like Together mode and Presenter view. Or you can all get “out of the office” to somewhere more fun — a team-building location of your choosing.

"As a company whose focus is on productivity...it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. It’s all coming together," said Microsoft Technical Fellow and HoloLens creator, Alex Kipman.

The topic of generative art has received a boost over the last year thanks to the success of NFT projects like CryptoPunks.

Earlier this year, a collection of nine CryptoPunks sold on Christie’s for almost $17M. The original 10,000 CryptoPunks were generated via software algorithms by the makers at Larva Labs. Each Punk was given its own unique combination of distinctive and randomly generated features.

Generative art is art that’s made using a predetermined and autonomous system where ideas, forms, shapes, colors, and patterns are generated algorithmically. Bauhaus Art Generator and Mondrian Art Generator from maker Andrew Brother are recent examples of products in this space.

So are Art by an AI and today’s launch of starryai. The products are built with a GAN or general adversarial network, a machine learning model where two neural networks compete with each other to produce more accurate predictions.

starryai is an app by an AI artist named Mo Kahn who was inspired to “remove barriers to entry to AI art generation and make it as simple as two steps.” Enter a few words into a text box, select an art style, and a few minutes later, you’ll have a work of art that’s yours to keep and even mint into an NFT.

Despite the subject line of today’s email, it would be short-sighted to describe generative art as fake — however, products built using GAN are being used to create synthetic design work for business purposes.

See: Virtual Models, Face Generator, and Malivar.io. Malivar launched last month with a tool for businesses and content creators to produce synthetic, digital spokespeople. Users generate a face with their ideal attributes, upload their own videos, and malivar automatically applies the face to produce a whole new avatar for your business.

“We believe that the future digital world is going to be filled with avatars. Everyone will have their own avatar and especially big brands,” founder Valery Sharipov wrote.

If you’re new to this space, you can trial generating new art in most of the products we’ve linked to. Makers might also be interested in checking out Generative Art in Go, a book introducing you to the basics of algorithmic art with the Go language.

Every organization and division faces transition. Employees leave, new ones are onboarded, and projects are passed off. For software, the issue to speak of is introducing a new developer to the product’s codebase.

“First, let's level-set: Understanding codebases is hard,” wrote founder Shanea (King-Roberson) Leven with today’s launch of CodeSee.

CodeSee is a new tool to make codebases easier to digest with auto-generated, self-updating diagrams that help makers visualize an entire codebase. Developers and product teams can use CodeSee to create tours/visual walkthroughs of the code, add labels and notes with color-coding, highlight activity across a codebase, and more.

“With Maps, you can… provide context to other devs to support faster onboarding, planning, and code reviews,” Leven explained. Prior to CodeSee, she led product teams at Lob, Google, Docker, eBay, and Cloudfare.

Even if you’re not a developer, the value of a product like CodeSee isn't too difficult to see — even more so in the context of open source projects. Many makers now view open source as the only viable option for building their products, but when makers open up their codebases for modification, codebases can become difficult to navigate. Thousands of developers could be contributing to the project from all over the world.

Codesee is leaning into the inherent fit — the makers have also launched an open-source community called OSS Port to help developers participate in open source projects.

CodeSee is off to a strong launch, with makers of various backgrounds chiming in:

“Not a developer, but I've had to be very aware of our codebase in past projects. Something like this would've saved me so much time then!” Wilhelm Rahn

“It looks this will make my life easier, allowing me to highlight only the important files and tour about a project to get started. Congratulations!” Kristina Anderson

Leven wants to hear about the unique codebase challenges developers in the Product Hunt community face. Add your voice:

We see it sometimes — makers are working on their project and run into roadblocks because the tools or tech they require are lacking. They stray course to build a solution. Occasionally, that side project turns out to be a winning idea.

That's how ClickUp started. Founder Zeb Evans was feeling unfulfilled while working on a company that sold Instagram and YouTube followers when he pivoted to work on ClickUp, a project management tool his team created that's now challenging the likes of Asana and Monday.com.

After bootstrapping its first few years, the four-year-old startup just closed a $400M fundraising round, bringing it to a $4B valuation. ClickUp said it’s the single-largest Series C in the workplace productivity market. Evans told Forbes he doesn’t plan to raise any more money — with customers from Webflow to IBM and the new funds, Evans has his eyes set on an IPO.

"Side project" can be a broad term. Not every one has to end with an exit (i.e. an acquisition or public offering). Some makers prefer to try out ideas that are profitable, but they don't feel pressure to scale. Others build purely for fun.

Here are 7 more self-identified side projects that launched this year. They run the gamut, but we didn't want you to miss them.

Motion One: An animation library from the creator of Framer Motion and Popmotion

Jam: An open-source Clubhouse tool

Self Test: See how good you are at receiving feedback, convincing others, staying calm, and more

Sutle: Save and organize resources into a directed learning path

Usage: System activity monitor and widgets for iOS nerds

Vibe City FM: Cruise through a regularly updated selection of chill music

Send a Mixtape: Paste in your playlist URL to generate a paper mixtape template you can pass on

Maybe you’ve been too preoccupied with crypto creeping into your apps to notice, but conscious consumerism has its own foothold in the mainstream. According to Nielsen, 73% of global consumers say they would definitely or probably change their consumption habits to reduce their impact on the environment.

There's a long way to go towards sustainable living, but with younger generations embracing activism and new products launching in this space, passive support is poised to continue shifting towards active pressure to accelerate change.

Tulipshare is a new platform that facilitates using shareholder rights to fight for social and environmental progress.

“We already launched three initial campaigns (with more to come!): changing Coca-Cola’s packaging policy to use 100% recycled materials, ensuring fair and safe working environments for Amazon warehouse workers, and allowing independent and third-party technicians to repair Apple products,” Timur Garifzyanov wrote on Product Hunt.

As Tulipshare points out on its website, the platform is not for day traders or swing traders — lasting change occurs from long-term investment. In some ways, Tulipshare is the flipside to meme stocks and coin flipping although there are sometimes positive intentions beyond those investment “strategies” as well.

Last week, we also saw the launch of Ampliphi, a new plastic footprint management platform for brands. While it’s not uncommon to see products for personal carbon footprint tracking or carbon offsetting in business, Ampliphi takes sustainability a step further. Businesses can import their data to surface insights and Ampliphi provides a tailored plan for plastic reduction and a vetted marketplace with packaging alternatives and “circular economy integrations.”

Cluey is the latest to launch in this space. The platform enables conscious consumers to see the impact of their purchases and follow trending news or conversations happening around those brands. A Chrome extension gives insights into brands while actively shopping online. Cluey takes your purchase decision a step further by providing a feature that lets you send your feedback to the brand right in the tool. This makes it easier for consumers to collectively demand change.

Let’s talk about tech — in real life!

ICYMI, events are back, baby. We kicked off our first IRL meetup in post-pandemic times last month in New York City and had a blast.

We’re going to be real with you — socializing took some practice after that long of catnap. But there’s no judgment here. Only product-loving people eager to talk about what’s new out there — from Web3 to D2C; mobile games to board games; chatbots to dancing bots.

Come and talk about the future with us again.

Next stop: San Francisco. Tuesday, November 9. 6:30 pm PT. That’s right, in two weeks!!

Ashley Higgins will be there and Josh Buckley, too. We’ll all nibble, drink, be vaccinated, demo fun tech, feel awkward at least once, laugh, be grateful to be alive, and learn about an amazing product we didn’t know existed before we got there. Save your spot and RSVP here!

Thanks to our sponsor, Intercom! The Intercom Early Stage Program helps early-stage startups grow. Eligible startups get advanced Intercom features and Early Stage Academy at a 95% discount.

Not in San Francisco? Have FOMO, you should not. Come virtually or host a meetup, you should.

💻 Yes! Join virtually and meet with other amazing people? Hop in to Topia on November 9th at 6:30 pm PT.

😸 Additionally, unofficial meetups have always been essential to this global community. You don’t have to be an expert or an extrovert. If you can safely host a gathering, we’re here to help — just let us know you’re here for it.

So ditch the sweatpants (ok, keep the hoodie if you want!), RSVP and meet us on the other side of the keyboard.

How’d you sleep? In America, one-third of adults don’t get enough sleep, according to the CDC. You’re in exhausted company (including with this writer) if sleep eluded you yet again.

Here's a solution you haven’t tried yet — a Digital Sleeping Pill.

Chris Aimone and the makers at Interaxon have launched their newest headband, Muse S Gen 2. It's designed to help you fall asleep and guide you back to sleep if you wake up.

If you’re not familiar with Muse products: Interaxon has been making its brain-sensing headbands since 2012. They use EEG (Electroencephalography), technology that’s used to help diagnose conditions like epilepsy and dementia. Brainwaves send the wearable real-time feedback on your brain activity, heart rate, breathing, and body movements. This information combines with guided meditation and practice to help you with sleep, stress, and focus.

Unlike previous models, the next generation of Muse was created to provide immediate relief, and it uses what Muse calls a Digital Sleeping Pill to do it (emphasis on “digital”; no actual pills involved.)

“Digital Sleeping Pills are a new type of intelligent sleep experience that uses natural changes in your brain activity to modulate your sleep experience and cue your brain for sleep,” Aimone explained.

Muse S works when you pair your headband (a soft plush-one) with your mobile device and your own (hopefully comfortable) headphones. If you wake in the night, Muse pairs the information it’s gathered from your brainwaves to serve up content for guiding you back to sleep.

The content is similar to what you can find on other calm-inducing apps: sleep stories, ambient soundscapes, and guided meditation. All of it is available to first-generation users, too.

If you’re going to splurge on sleep, you might put EightSleep up for consideration too. The makers of The Pod smart mattress launched SleepOS earlier this year. The app uses machine-learning algorithms to automatically adjust the mattress temperature using your profile preferences and then learns based on your feedback.

Otherwise, drop your questions or feedback for the Muse co-founder on the launch page. 👇