The Leaderboard

The phrase “Startup as a Service” has crept up here and there across the interwebs over the last decade. In modern entrepreneurship, founders can buy into resources and accelerated growth via corporate-sponsored hackathons, incubators, and startup studios.

The last on that list has given Startup as a Service the most meaning to date. Startup studios like Betaworks can support founders with anything from validating ideas and building a go-to-market strategy to fundraising preparation.

What about the part that comes next — incorporation, banking, equity management, and the actual fundraising?

Yesterday, AngelList launched a new product for that, and it had startuppy folks buzzing. AngelList Stack, as the name suggests, is really like multiple products in one but built to work seamlessly.

To start, founders use a "friendly UI" with best practices baked-in to incorporate their company. That process traditionally takes weeks of work, and can now be done much simpler according to Sumukh Sridhara, AngelList Head of Product & Engineering. From there, founders get equipped with a bank account and are ready to fundraise with a single link. The company can issue SAFEs (the agreement that gives investors future equity) and create Roll Up Vehicles.

AngelList Stack also automatically sets up an automated cap table — the document that shows who owns what equity in a company — that updates as you grow. The suite also helps to manage equity grants for employees and investor certificates and communications.

If you’re in the startup space, you might already be using individual Carta products for some of these services. Carta originally launched to the startup world with its digital stock certificates, then called eShares, in 2012. It scaled to cap table management and started rolling out features like SAFEs to support easier fundraising. The company has continuually stretched the Startup as a Service space and just last month launched Carta Launch, a fundraising and equity management platform.

While Carta’s been targeting founders from the start, AngelList started its story with a community for investors to connect with and invest in startups. Techie pundits indicate this as a pivot for AngelList to the founder-side of the moon.

Many of you know that AngelList is a sister company to Product Hunt. Working towards our own mission to empower makers, we're thrilled to welcome friendly competition that benefits makers.

Newsletters have done for email what social distancing did for QR codes. Your inbox made a comback from 1990's romcom nostalgia, and is now flexing on Slack and your DMs.

Don’t expect that to change soon. Along with newer tools like the Substacks of the world, Google is the latest big tech player to experiment with newsletters. It's got a new Museletter product in private beta that lets you publish a newsletter or blog from Google Drive (Notion users, try this instead?)

Newsletters aren’t just for niche creators; they’ve changed the way we digest journalism, too. Just look at Morning Brew and Axios, which recently hired 20 new reporters to launch local newsletters in 8 new cities, adding to its 14 existing newsletters.

To be honest, we’re here for it. Newsletters are a great delivery mechanism for the specific information that you care about. They allow for hyper-focus that’s curated by your subscription preferences, which offers a nice alternative to an algorithm.

With that, we bring you these 7 newsletter launches from the last year that our community thinks you should know about:

Unicorner: Up and coming unicorn startups, before they make it big
“Very impressed by the insights and in-depth approach that Unicorner takes”- Audrey Wu

Popcorn: Movie and TV suggestions curated for streaming platforms
“You made a product that can save someone's night!” - Easton Hunter

Munch by Moving: Crypto insights, trends, and analysis
“Robinhood snacks but for crypto, long-awaited!" - Mirza Uddin

Unboxed: Sneakerheads, this is for you
“Amazing newsletter! One of my favorite parts is “best sneakers to buy for retail or less”- Taylor Loren

Every: A writer collective covering productivity, strategy, and more
“Love the writer collective idea… Strength in numbers.”- Nicci Talbot

Tedium: Taking on the questions that “nobody thought to ask”
“It is simply a must-read. The more fascinating bits are his deep dives into the history of things that usually don’t have histories written about them.” - Gregory Bufithis

You're not the only one feeling it. Professional women, Wall Street bankers, public health workers, and cybercriminals are all the recent subjects of media articles on burnout. In an Indeed survey from earlier this year, 52% of respondents said they felt burnt out, up from 43% pre-Covid.

We’ve seen a few approaches to how makers tackle burnout. Startups like Erudit AI, Cymfo, Kona 2.0 launched earlier this year with tools for managers and leadership to capture data on employee mental health. The latest company-focused product in this space is LEON, a “wellness intelligence platform.”

LEON collects a variety of data and engagement metrics to analyze how an employee is feeling and recommends a “playbook” with quantifiable metrics to drive well-being at work.

“We're using a mixture of Sports Science voodoo, SaaS-driven integrations, and surveys to [recommend the exact playbook... before the whole damn place burns down,” maker Bryan Smith shared.

Other makers target the individual themselves, like Therappy and Holly Health. Therappy launched with its first anxiety course, meant to help master the basics of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and be available to those who need it 24/7. Holly Health, which we mentioned not long ago when writing about trending iOS apps, is a burnout prevention coach from London-based researchers. It uses personalized recommendations and reminders to nudge you in a healthier direction.

Although not directly tied to burnout, we’d be remiss not to point out Inflow’s launch over the weekend too since adults with ADHD are often diagnosed after a burnout. Inflow is also a self-help app and it helps with ADHD management through five-minute exercises that help implement new skills for managing a daily routine.

Then somewhere in between self-help and top-down help sits products like mello, which collects data on employee wellness through check-ins (via Slack, Teams, Google Chat) and then educates employees with resources to combat burnout.

We aren't biased about what you choose — whatever helps float your boat again. 🤗

Imagine walking into a casino and placing everything you own on one square with your name on it. That’s how many people approach their careers.

What if there was a way to spread out your money across the board, with an equal amount placed on each person in a cohort of people like you?

Pando is a startup working to make that possible through income pooling. With Pando, a group of members come together and commit a small portion of their income to a shared pool. The funds get equally divided up each year.

Pando took aim at baseball players first after it launched in 2017. Since then, it’s achieved some success attracting athletes into Pando pools — particularly minor league players who may never make it to the majors. After it raised a $8.5M Series A, Pando began expanding its reach to other high-risk, high-reward professionals, like entrepreneurs.

Pando's website is currently featuring pools for professionals in healthcare, fintech, social impact, and founders in general. Pools are like an insurance policy, but not to be mistaken for one. Pando doesn’t guarantee payouts. Payout rules are set per pool by the users although Pando does set ground rules, like what happens if someone stops contributing (there's basically a one-year grace period).

We’re seeing more makers who would rather play a positive-sum game over winner-takes-all. Pando is part of a greater movement towards community building, but puts skin in the game in the form of your dollars.

Would you spread out some of your eggs into your cohort’s basket? Tell us on the launch page.

“What’s on the roadmap?” said pretty much everyone reading this.

If you don’t consider yourself a product maker, we’ll assume you’ve wondered “Awesome, but what’s next?” about something you’ve seen on Product Hunt. That, in essence, is the product roadmap.

Leanbe launched today with a data-driven roadmap generation platform for makers. It covers all three steps of the product development loop: user feedback, analysis, smart road mapping, and notifications to keep users up to date.

Leanbe’s all-in-one solution is “designed in accordance with the Lean cycle methodology which preaches to learn, build, measure, and repeat.” Collection boards track user feedback, enabled with an upvoting system to help with prioritization. Feedback data is then analyzed and Leanbe generates a roadmap for the product.

Users in the community have started submitting their own feedback.

"I like the fact that you didn’t just build the major feature of the product but made it be universal at its core - covering the whole cycle...” - Sona Madoyan

"Quite an interesting idea - all steps in one place! For sure this will help product managers understand what’s effective to build next." - Norayr Margarian

What’s next for Leanbe? Integrating AI into the data analysis process.

Click below to see the tool in action, and leave feedback. If your feedback gets enough upvotes, Leanbe may just put it “at the front” of the roadmap.

“This is my life's work and I can't tell you how excited I am to finally be able to talk about it publicly,” Nader Al-Naji, aka Diamondhands, wrote on Product Hunt.

We first wrote about Bitclout in April, a buzzy, fresh product with the goal of putting social media on the blockchain. Yesterday, Al-Naji revealed himself as its creator along with the blockchain that Bitclout is built upon, DeSo.

DeSo, short for “decentralized social,” is a new blockchain built from the ground up in order to make the concept of decentralized social a reality. As DeSo explains it, social applications generate a lot of data and existing blockchains weren’t equipped to handle it.

Anyone who wants to use the DeSo blockchain, from Bitclout users to makers, has to hold its native cryptocurrency called DESO (a rebrand from the token’s original name, CLOUT). The founding makers raised over $200M in funding by selling $DESO to over 44K users, including big names in VC like a16z.

Besides Bitclout, over 100 apps (NFT platforms, trading tools, etc.) have purchased $DESO and started building on top of the blockchain. Al-Naji partially credits his initial anonymity for that initial success — he believed people felt more empowered to build on top of an ecosystem where they’re weren't relying on a centralized entity to call the shots.

This launch comes after what some had felt was a chaotic entrance earlier in the year. For his part, Al-Naji recognized concerns around Bitclout’s tactic of baiting celebs to the social network with dummy profiles were valid.

Some of the primary concerns from that time have been sorted out, like the ability to exchange your $DESO (formerly $CLOUT) for other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH. I.e. You can get your money out of Bitclout if you want to. Others still remain, like environmental impact — Al-Naji says he plans to switch to a more environmentally-friendly mechanism for validating blockchain transactions, proof-of-stake, by the end of the year.

Ready or not, a new wave of social products is coming — what questions do you have for Diamondhands?

We’ve got quite a few fantasy league players in our community. Some like to play the field with Congress, others cricket, and techies – startups. As we saw with Visionaire, NFTs and fantasy leagues are a good fit. The scarcity around NFTs adds a new dimension of interest and rewards fans who are passionate and invested.

While makers are getting creative with leagues, classic sports have been one of the main entry points for NFTs into the mainstream media (see: NBA Top Shot). If you’re up to date on this, it may come as no surprise to hear of a startup called Sorare that just raised a $680M Series B for NFT fantasy football (or "soccer" but this is a France-based startup). It’s the largest Series B in Europe to date, according to co-founder Nicolas Julia.

If this is all a little bit on the nose for you (sports memorabilia always gets the headliners), let’s look at a much more unique application of NFTs which left some scratching their heads.

Loot has become a virtual phenomenon in crypto and gaming communities. It was created by serial founder (see: Vine, Peach, Byte) Dom Hofmann, who — cutting right to the chase — created 8,000 “bags” of randomized gear words and put them up for purchase as NFTs on OpenSea.

Creatives did what they do best. They got their words/NFTs and ran with them like an improv group with a scene suggestion. They put a picture to the words in their loot bag, designing them using whatever format they wanted. They created guilds or sub-communities among those with like-items. They also created their own smart contracts to sell the individual items in their bag. Earlier this month, Coindesk reported Loot had achieved $46M in sales.

Hoffman himself is unsure of what’s next with Loot. There are still no actual adventures or players – just gear. Maybe he will choose to create a gaming universe, eventually, but loot on its own is not exactly limiting in this space. Gamers are expecting a day they can buy a sword that works across the whole metaverse, made possible by blockchain tech.

At the end of the day, NFTs, like Loot bags, are still artificially scarce which is why many people proceed with caution in this space. Tomorrow, everyone can decide they are worth nothing.

But if you can count on two hyped communities to continue driving demand in these platforms, gamers and sports fans are probably it. Plus, they're having a lot of fun out there building their fantasies.

We love to debate the pros and cons of Twitter as much as the next, but that’s not why we’re here.

It’s true, the company has made missteps (RIP Fleets) and entered surprising new territories. Competition also looms from new social giants like TikTok and Discord, the latter of which just fundraised another round at a $15B valuation.

Twitter continues to be an invaluable channel for many in our community and tech at large still. It’s loved as ground zero for burgeoning ideas, a platform for building in public, a knowledge gateway, and a window into Elon Musk’s mind.

That’s why makers invest their time in building products that make your tweets sing. We’re here to share 12 of the most popular from the last few months.

Messer - Drag and drop image resizer
Brandbird - Turn screenshots into good-lookin' posts
Twitter Real-time banner - Update your banner in real time, interactively with your followers
Poet.so - Capture and share Twitter posts as pretty images
Listr - Curated Twitter lists and threads
RevSync - Let readers subscribe to your Substack, MailChimp, Ghost on Twitter
Typefully Pro - Advanced analytics and scheduling
Direcon - Real-time analytics for Twitter Spaces
Display NFT Collection - Need we say more?
Tweet Flick - Save, organize, and find tweets
Dewey - Search, sort, tag, share collections, and export to Notion, etc.

See and follow the latest Twitter product launches here.👇

Yesterday, we wrote about how startups are tackling employee onboarding challenges caused by a remote workforce. There’s another culprit at play here — the fact that we use so many apps.

On average, small to large businesses implement 73-175 apps. As we mentioned, documentation is one solution to helping teams manage buried knowledge among all these tools. Another is search.

A search tool for your work apps might feel like déjà vu if you read our newsletter on Qatalog. The “work hub” pulls together all your tools and has a master search function. This week we also met Glean.

Glean calls itself a “work assistant.” The hero feature today is the ability to search across all of your work apps, and there are discovery and connection functions for team members, too. This part slightly resembles a social or LinkedIn profile, but Glean says the product reveals insights and helps you find people who can help with whatever it is you need at work.

“Glean can search across the entire breadth of your company... It understands who you are, what you’re working on, and who you’re working with, to deliver highly personalized results,” CEO Arvind Jain wrote.

The makers’ expertise is reflected across Glean. Jain himself founded Rubrik, a cloud data management company, after serving over a decade as an engineer at Google. He’s joined by several other ex-Googlers and Facebook engineers.

Glean and Qatalog are after your holistic workspace, but we’ve seen several other tools launch this year to make information more accessible through search.

Jadoo - Search and manage your mobile screenshots
Findem - Search for the ideal job candidate with the exact attributes you need
Bloop - In-IDE code search engine that retrieves JS and TypeScript code examples
Vehicle Listings API - Programmatically search cars and trucks available for sale
SaveCmd Terminal Search - Search command history from other clients from the command line

Now we just need a product that searches our brains for names we just learned.

No doubt, a lot of you are power users of some of the SaaS tools you use at work, especially if you helped implement them for your team.

A new startup thinks that makes you a treasure trove of potential for helping with onboarding and documentation. Tango is a tool, enabled by a Chrome extension, that automatically creates step-by-step how-to guides as you complete your work.

In today’s launch, co-founder Ken Babcock shared:

“What started as an idea to digitally “shadow” co-workers blossomed into the fastest way to capture and share know-how... We capture screenshots, links, and descriptions to save you time and energy… you become your team’s hero!”

With more companies going remote, employee onboarding is ripe for an upgrade. The makers of Tango told TechCrunch they saw the window of opportunity open in this space when the pandemic happened, so they left Harvard Business School to go start Tango. Last month, the company announced its $5.7M seed round.

Employee onboarding is just one use case for Tango; another obvious one is customer support. Early adopter Jon Bell pointed out on the launch page that automated documentation could work for personal use as well. Bell just launched Replay.io yesterday, which is in a similar cohort of recording tools. It helps teams capture, inspect, and document bugs so developers can squash them faster.

Tango is looking for feedback from the community so if you’re sitting on some knowledge, you can ship it to your team and test the tool here.👇