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A gen Z-style approach to sports viewing has arrived.

This year we’ve seen dating and social launches from makers who’ve recognized that existing technology doesn’t satisfy the way Gen Z prefers to share, consume, and interact. Now ephemeral, short-form (and may we say, more joy-inducing) content is coming to sports.

Over the weekend, Buzzer launched — a new way to tap in and watch your favorite sports moments live.

With Buzzer, people can follow their favorite sports stars or teams. They’ll get a notification when it’s time to catch a buzzer-beater moment and can watch it live. Live broadcast snippets start at 99 cents each. Longer streaming access is made available for specific events as well. Maker Noah Chestnut explained that sports fans no longer have to wait around, glued to the TV wondering what’s going to happen.

In an article posted by the makers, Buzzer CEO Bo Han told Bloomberg:

“We envision Buzzer becoming the discovery and curation tool that brings Gen Z fans back to live sports with simple access to ephemeral moments."

The new approach has gained the startup a $20M Series A with a gambit of investors including sports stars themselves like Naomi Osaka, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky.

Outside of Gen Z, the accessibility of lightning-in-a-bottle moments at your fingertips can appeal to any generation, which is helping NFTs gain early success among sports fans too (albeit, digital ownership and ephemeral content are somewhat contrasting concepts). Today, access to sports viewing is costly, hard to find, or requires an un-personalized subscription bundle. Investors are hoping to claim over $75 billion in value in the live sports market in the U.S. alone (it appears the app is only in the US for now).

Founded in 2020, Buzzer is launching on Product Hunt with partnerships with the NBA, NHL, and PGA. The new funding is expected to help expand such partnerships, as well as grow the team and improve the app’s social features.

It’s been quite a year already.

For many of us, it didn’t pan out as expected. In tech, the silver linings were found in unicorn herds, phoenixes rising from the ashes, and pandemic-made underdogs.

It seemed like every other day, we were talking about a new industry or space that's experiencing unprecedented growth from a new way of living, from EdTech to alts and NFTs.

H2 has already started off with a bang, but before we get too much deeper, we’re recapping the standout top launches from H1.

Contra - A new professional network for flexible work

“I've only been part of this community for about a week and... already I've gathered feedback on my work from professionals, gained access to book, video, and course resources relating to my field, helped people out with their queries, and so much more!” - Aishwarya Agrawal

Ray.so - Turn your code into beautiful images

“This is awesome! Wish it existed when I was building [my company], as we shared lots of code snippets on social and elsewhere. I love how simple and curated it is with the color schemes.” - Danny Halarewich

Audiblogs - Listen to any web article in your podcast player

“[A]bsolutely amazing! If you're anything like me and have a chrome window with a thousand tabs of articles that you'll definitely, absolutely, 100% find the time to read (lol), you need this.” - Nader Khalil

Persona - Identify verification for any use case

“10 lines of code for an entirely customizable identity verification system?? That's a game-changer. Count me in.”- Jake Disraeli

Open VC - Browse 2,200+ funds by investment criteria

"Love this! Such a useful tool for entrepreneurs working on researching their target investors." - Stephanie Rich

The team behind tl;dv may have been nervous about their launch yesterday, but they made a splash and blew a few minds with their introduction video.

tl;dv 1.0 provides a better way to catch up on notes post-meeting.

“[W]e found that it always takes way too much time to repeat and contextualize every important live meeting insight and takeaway, especially without the context, the emotions, or the visuals… in most cases, we still (have to) join too many live meetings out of FOMO.” - Raphael Allstadt, maker

With tl;dv, you can link your meeting minutes to the exact moment in your video recording & transcript. It works as a Chrome extension, and other core features include one-click record, video transcriptions (English so far), and share functions to popular apps and CRMs like Slack, Salesforce, and Notion.

The company is focusing on Google Meet to start, with “Zoom coming very soon.” It’s worth noting that tl;dv has a few competitors in this space, which is white-hot after remote and hybrid workplaces blew up over the last year and a half. For example, Google Meet users may be familiar with Otter.ai, and in Zoom land, Grain has been enjoying a great year and launched an update earlier this year.

It’s also clear from the community response that many people are hungry for better meetings.

“I've been waiting for a product like this for ages! Working in customer success, keeping track of notes in video calls is an absolute mess.” - Andrew Mertell

“It basically replaces the scrubbing bar and changes the game for how to take notes too.” - Daniel Giovacchini

"This is going to be so useful, congratulations on your launch. No more wall-of-text meeting notes!" - Blake Hunsicker

See what all the hype is about.

Referrals — everyone seems to love them.

Referral programs continue to grow in popularity and although there are companies that have been in this space a long time, we’ve seen a few new launches in sectors that are quickly growing.

Digital products

Social Checkout is an API for enabling customers to refer people and redeem group discounts. The idea for Social Checkout came after cofounder Benyam Ephrem implemented Stripe & PayPal payments for his business that provides technical prep for interviewees.

“In [this] niche, many people know others that would want the same product, but I had no out-of-the-box way to tap into this social capital.”

Social Checkout is in beta. The makers are currently focused first on similar customers — digital products like online courses and desktop apps.

Newsletters

If you’re a creator, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve googled referral programs as well. Being in this space ourselves, nary a week goes by that we don’t read a tweet about successful referral programs from companies like Morning Brew and the Skimm.

You may remember SparkLoop, which launched on Product Hunt last year with the tagline “the first referral tool for newsletters.” SparkLoop presented 1-click integration with email provider tools like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor, making it easy for newsletter companies to add referrals directly into their product, just like Morning Brew does.

Competitors responded. Viral Loops launched its original referral product five years ago, but recently debuted its own newsletter product, designed specifically for writers and publishers. It follows GrowSurf. Also now a mature referral program provider, GrowSurf launched its own newsletter product earlier this year.

Then yesterday, Sparkloop revealed its latest hand with Magic Links. Magic Links eliminates email sign up forms altogether for newsletters that are cross-promoting with other newsletters — another popular tactic in this space.

It’s all great news for creators — the world just can’t seem to get enough of newsletters 😉.

It’s time to announce our Makers Festival – Green Earth edition winner (who will be collecting a sweet set of prizes!)

Hundreds of makers took part, raking in upvotes in the thousands. Congrats to all the participants — You thought on your toes and took the opportunity to challenge yourself.

The winner and runners up are:

First Place 😺🏆 - Ryan with Grow Feedback

Grow Feedback enables teams to share instant feedback via Slack. As you grow, so does your impact — Glow plants a tree every time you send & receive feedback. Ryan shared:

“Our team used the Green Earth festival as an opportunity to build a new ESG component into Grow. Planting real trees to celebrate our users growing together has been a much bigger hit than we could have ever imagined. Letting people choose where their trees get planted and giving them certificates is icing on the cake - people have even started sharing on social media. How cool is that!”

Runners up:

• Nuke My Email gets rid of useless, unread emails cluttering your inbox and costing the planet CO2. Maker, James Ivings, shared:

"While working on Leave Me Alone, we encountered a number of users who wanted to simply erase their ENTIRE inbox and start again! In our research, we found something surprising. It costs around 4g of CO2 for an email to be sent, read, and stored over its lifetime. Over 250 billion emails are daily, so these [unwanted] emails are having an immense impact on the environment!”

• Green Habit helps you form habits that help the earth, like shorter showers and turning off the lights. It's maker, Nathan, shared:

“GreenHabit solves the problem of people feeling their green habits are insignificant. Too often we give up on green habits because they are simply inconvenient or less comfortable. I set out to make your green habits stick and then amplify their impact by influencing others to do the same.”

Show some love to the makers and our big blue planet today:

We've been talking about “no-code” for a while now. Lately the term can feel like an umbrella that encompasses a whole lot. Our take is that makers are regularly pushing “the limits” of the space. A few new launches demonstrate recent growth.

Today, the team at Glide presented an overhaul to their app builder. Glide 1.0 launched two years ago for creating mobile apps from Google Sheets. With the update, users no longer have to use Sheets. Glide has its own built-in function, Glide Tables, that makes your potential app more scalable. Add features like collaboration tools and action sequences, and you have a quick way to create an app, now with even more power.

Also unsatisfied with leaving makers to string together no-code tools, Noloco launched last week, hyping their tool as a “complete no-code solution for the next generation.” Noloco’s approach to end-to-end app development includes features like a built-in database, design customization, and subscriptions. The last point is one of the main ways Noloco hopes to differentiate itself from Webflow. As one user puts it:

“It's like Webflow + Memberstack + Jetboost + Stripe all in one.” - BD Hoang

Despite the potential of a great all-in-one tool, it’s not uncommon to hear makers say they started with no-code tools until they scaled. In February, we watched the launch of Uiflow Studio, a tool for developers to build UIs and web app logic visually. The company told TechCrunch that its targeting companies at the point in which they begin designing their own UI. Designers can import Figma files, with all visual assets becoming ready-to-use custom components.

“Uiflow also brings enterprise scalability, performance, collaboration, and integrations with lots of APIs and Data Stores. That differentiates us from single-user focused no-code platforms.”

Co-founder Sol Eun also told the Product Hunt Community that Uiflow was heavily inspired by Unity, the game engine, to enable rapid productivity by building both client-side logic and UI/UX visually.

Uiflow gained over 1,200 signs ups after its Product Hunt launch. We’re thrilled to see these new tools gain traction among community favorites. 🙌

Creator tools have been making headlines lately but companies need upgraded video tools as much as ever.

JW Player announced a huge $100 million funding round last week following the growth of its video streaming traffic, which increased by nearly 200% over the last year. You may recognize the company — it’s not a hot fresh startup. It was JW Player that powered YouTube’s first video player back in 2008. Now the company powers video for over 600,000 apps and sites.

Dave Otten, JW Player CEO and founder, told TechCrunch that the company plans to use fundraising to tackle monetization-related features — which makes perfect sense. Monetization needs are not specific to the passion economy. As more companies move to paywall written content on their own sites, so goes video.

The company also plans to expand its live video and on-demand features — its live-streaming traffic, in particular, grew 400% over the last year.

Live streaming is seeing upgrades elsewhere too. In April, Be.live announced mobile streaming on Product Hunt. The company has been enabling 3rd party streaming since 2016 but professional live streaming often involves desktop tools. The new launch enables streaming and easy editing on the go with just your phone.

For its part, newcomer ClearMix is tackling the video-creation process for businesses, beginning to end. In its Product Hunt launch on Friday, ClearMix CEO Ian Folau noted that even though video editing tech has greatly evolved, companies still struggle with video production.

ClearMix takes a 100% remote approach. Customers start by ordering new videos online, a ClearMix producer directs the shoot with their HD webcam and proprietary recording studio, editors handle post-production, and you get your video in a library where you can download it or share as GIF.

Early adopters had this to say:

“Really good for people who want to start a Kickstarter but don't have the money for an expensive pro setup!” - Vagif Aliyev

“Video used to be really hard to do well and was something that only series A+ companies could do. Clearmix made it SO easy.” - Will Drevno

Creators make video look easy, but for marketers and startups that need a hand...

As a community of tech lovers and early adopters, who can relate?:

You discover a new app and you’re thrilled. It sounds like it fits your needs exactly. You download it, register, and after two weeks of push notifications overwhelming your screen, you turn them off. Your usage falls along with your hopes of how it could help. Repeat for cluttered inboxes and unsubscribes.

In many cases, it’s not that you have a bad app on your hands — it’s the notifications. They’re annoying and even stress-inducing.

Yesterday, Courier launched on Product Hunt. In his introduction, founder Troy Goode brought up that episode of The Office where pseudo-entrepreneur Ryan Howard introduced his latest venture, WUPHF.

“Being plugged into every provider is the correct next step, but where they got it jokingly wrong was sending it to every provider at the same time.”

Courier is an API plus no-code studio that enables developers to deliver the right messages at the right time. It integrates with Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, MailGun, Twilio, and many more for quick automation workflows.

Courier’s launch follows a $10.1M Series A closed in September. Goode is ex-Eloqua, a marketing automation company acquired by Oracle, which is where he became frustrated by how many different tools teams were using to communicate with prospects and customers.

Although large companies often end up building their own communications infrastructure in-house, Courier hopes to provide a solution for smaller teams, and for larger ones who don’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel.

On the consumer side, Courier’s concerned with user preferences as well.

“Courier makes it easy for developers to build notifications that allow you to control whether you want to receive those notifications, when you want to receive them, and how you want them delivered.”

Goode also asked for examples of companies who do a good job or "suck extra bad" at sending notifications. See what people are saying and...

The world has started healing. By the world, we mean your social life.

Arts & entertainment has been one the hardest hit sectors during the pandemic. Startups, as well as creators, had no choice but to rethink their approach.

IRL, the social calendar app that launched on Product Hunt two years ago, even thrived. In a pivot of (we assume) desperation, IRL became “In Remote Life,” launched a redesigned app, went heavy on social integration, and re-focused on virtual events.

It worked. IRL just raised a $170M Series C, pushing it to unicorn status, now with a vision to become the WeChat of the West. The company is taking advantage of Gen Z's absence on Facebook.

“They essentially use Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. But there is no groups and events product for that generation,” CEO Abraham Shafi told TechCrunch.

Behaviors are shifting yet again with venues re-opening in many places. IRL is finding a comfortable seat at the intersection of online and offline. The mash-up of events and outing products that we’ve seen leave us predicting your social life will look just as hybrid as your work life. New products are hoping to take advantage of non-homebody fun-seekers like HULA, Hoppout!, and DUNK.

DUNK launched earlier this week — an app that enables you to surprise your friends with secret plans to a secret destination. Early adopters are happy to bite into in-person fun.

“Definitely using this on my next trip with the boys, this looks like a great way to motivate the troops ! ✈️” - James Hyot

"Love the idea 💡After a year or so of not being able to travel, the surprise element of DUNK makes it even more exciting for company events or friends get-together 🤩" - Nicolas

On the other hand, between Gen Z's interest in the metaverse and dispersed teams, virtual spaces are still hot and will keep growing, even if that Memoji audience at WWDC was a little bit creepy. We love to see products like Zen Republic HQ, a blockchain-based VR game park, and Pluto Auditorium, a virtual auditorium, reshape the way we think about connecting.

Steve Jobs famously said, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

It’s normal to try emulating those we admire, but many product makers know to take this one with a Himalayan lamp-size grain of salt. Customer research creates better products. The problem is, the process is usually ad hoc and time-intensive. In turn, makers rely on assumptions and can’t iterate fast enough.

We’ve seen a number of new products tackling customer research, including today’s launch of Great Question which combines the full process into one place. This early adopter sums it up well:

“Very excited to replace 3 apps, 2 airtable bases, a few zaps and a whole lot of headache for managing research!” - Darren Chait

With Great Question you can recruit participants with landing pages, manage and conduct research, and easily share with your team, leveraging interview transcriptions and tags.

A common goal we see among products in this space is to help makers integrate customer research into every new release. In that spirit, here are eight more new tools to help you get there.

User Hero - Store, parse, and analyze your data better with this research repository

UserLeap - Run targeted micro-surveys, powered by AI

Maze Templates - Leverage 50+ pre-built user tests and surveys

Surveys by HockeyStack - Create rich, targeted surveys including NPS and exit-intent forms

BlockSurvey 2.0 - Survey securely with a blockchain-powered alternative to Google Forms, etc.

Akin - Replace assumption-based personas with data-driven segments powered by AI

FeedbackLink - Direct happy customers to share and survey the rest

Viable - Sort, tag, and find insights in your helpdesk and survey feedback with GPT-3