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“I think of habit formation as filling a bucket one drop at a time. Building that infrastructure, rather than building yourself up.”

That’s what Twitch co-founder Justin Kan told us about his approach to building healthy habits.

If you have trouble with habits, you’re not alone. It’s a common topic of discussion we see in the Product Hunt community and we all have our own stories to tell. Kan’s story included hitting a rock bottom moment and looking to exercises in meditation to find his way to his way out.

When he was worried he’d fail, he turned to Twitter and asked his followers to help keep him accountable — a kind of building in public, only building on your self infrastructure. That started his journey to launching Kin today, a social habit-forming app.

“I've been on a quest to improve my mental and physical well-being so I can present the best version of myself to the people around me. Amongst other things, this quest led me to start building Kin with @amittm, @damienkan, and @omarjalalzada.”

Kan and Omar Jalalzada, two of the co-founders, talked to us about their own unique journeys to understanding what drives successful habit formation (read more here). Kin’s goal is to help you create long-lasting changes and the makers have wrapped their learnings so far into the app, building off of concepts like breaking down your habits and even self-acceptance. Along with tracking, Kin bakes in accountability with chats and courses to help you learn about habit formation.

Chances are that you’re working on a habit right now, whether it’s reading more, exercise, working on your side project, or something else. Join us on Twitter Spaces today at 4pm PST to ask Kan and Jalazada about their expertise on building habits. Can’t make it? Drop your questions here.

The Kin team has also asked the Product Hunt community for feedback on the app, so don’t forget to share yours.👇

Let's be honest, many gamers are not as calm as the character in that GIF when they lose a game. Hopefully with a teacher, or SenpAI, you'll die less.

Makers Olcay Yilmazcoban and Berk Ozer launched the AI-based personal gaming assistant to the Product Hunt community today. SenpAI (a reference to the Japanese "senpai" which broadly means "teacher") helps gamers learn faster with key insights on how to play better. That includes pre-game setup analysis, in-game support, and after-game performance breakdowns and suggestions.

Yilmazcoban explained that the primary focus is to support low-to-middle level competitive gamers who would like to improve their gameplay. Casual gamers can also use SenpAI to save time and effort in their gaming journey and keep up with meta changes.

SenpAI was developed by Turkish startup, Falcon AI, who started the company to improve AI capabilities and focused on esports after seeing the high demand in the space.

Demand is definitely growing. Esports attracts more than 450 million enthusiasts and viewers, generating nearly $1.1 billion in revenue per year according to research firm NewZoo.

As gaming continues to grow, coaching products have been expanding with different approaches targeted towards both professionals and casual gamers. Voice-assistants like Fridai create a frictionless experience with walkthroughs and screenshots that don’t require you to move a finger. Marketplaces like Metafy match gamers with instructors.

Startups like these and Falcon AI have recognized the demand goes beyond career professionals.

“When I say esports, people may misunderstand me. Our focus includes both professional gamers and up-and-coming gamers who just want to improve their skills,” Ozer told TRT World.

SenpAI currently supports League of Legends and VALORANT with TFT coming soon.

Hugs to that HBO intern — we’ve been there.

On to our regular programming: As we told you yesterday, Spotify officially launched Greenroom this week, its audio room feature. The big tech fight for audio champion of the internet has people placing proverbial bets on their favorite fighter.

We’re experienced enough to know #winning doesn’t always mean getting there first, and that there’s room at the table for makers that find a way to differentiate themselves.

People aren’t over audio. It’s true — audio got a big boost from social distancing (Forbes reported that 60% of audio listening is done at home). Still, audio adoption is increasing. In 2020, an estimated 100 million people listened to a podcast each month, and the number is expected to increase to 125 million in 2022.

We’re cheering on these ten podcasting and social audio platforms, each offering a unique value to listeners.

Castyr - If TikTok and Goodreads had a podcast baby

Bang - Erotic audio story app for sexual wellbeing

Primer Rooms - Interactive audio experiences for kids

Quest - Soundbites with career advice from hands-on experts

Beams - Social podcasting for topics up to 90 seconds

Craphouse - Audio space for debating, brainstorming and any other crap

Reason - Listen to podcasts with friends and discuss topics with each other

Alpe Audio - Audio courses to master new topics on the go

Listenable - Bite-sized courses by well-loved experts

Audiotorium - Hyper local live audio performances

For those of you hungry for face-to-face time, put your headphones down and go enjoy waffles with a stranger.

The newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Masterworks.

We've written a lot about alt investments lately. Fine art is a tried and true alt.

The problem: If you want to own any in your portfolio, you’re going to need a $10,000,000 check.

Why own art at all? Hedge funds do it because that’s where they make the biggest returns. According to Citi, contemporary art prices crushed S&P 500 returns by 174% from 1995-2020, and over two-thirds of billionaire collectors allocate 20% or more of their portfolios to art.

Masterworks started disrupting the art industry in 2017 and has been a leader in this space. The team had recognized that only the wealthiest investors got the jump on the most groundbreaking technologies, like bitcoin for example, and re-invented the game for blue-chip art.

Many think of fine art as the largest un-securitzed asset class (worth $1.7 trillion), meaning the value of a piece of work can’t be pooled into a group of tradeable assets, like a company does with its public stock. That’s exactly what Masterworks did though. The company has purchased over $150M in art and has amassed over 165K users. With their proprietary art Price Database, they took 75,000 data points from 6,000 artists and auction sales to build a comprehensive art database, investment platform, and secondary market for fine art.

Since its launch, Masterworks has become the largest platform for investing in blue-chip art from artists like Banksy, KAWS, and Picasso.

Here’s a preview from the database.

1. Gerhard Richter, A B, Still. Purchase Price $264K, Sale Price: $33.98M. 128x return
2. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled. Purchase Price: $121,762. Sale Price: $29.3M. 420x return
3. Christopher Wool, If You. Purchase Price: $305,000. Sale price: $23.7M. 77x return.

The team at Masterworks has been working to democratize ownership of high-end artwork because they’ve seen the returns for investors.

Now they have released the database to everyone with no strings attached so you can browse artwork for free. The database and matching algorithm make it simple to see the value of the artwork and what your investment can deliver.

Product Hunt subscribers are getting first dibs. You can skip the 15,000 person waitlist by clicking below. See disclaimer.

This writer loves a great salesperson (literally married to one.)

Still, the message in the TestBox launch video rings true. Trying new software, vetting it, and getting your team on the same page can turn into a full-time job. While the tools and techniques around enterprise sales evolve regularly, the process itself has changed little in comparison, especially for the customer.

The makers of TestBox introduced their customer-led buying experience to the Product Hunt community yesterday. Frustrated with their experiences around sales pitches, demo trials, and long wait times, they sought to innovate the buying process.

“TestBox gives buyers a true side-by-side experience of each product so buyers can test if each solution will truly work for their team. It’s also super easy for buyers to track their feedback on each product and collaborate with their teams to ensure that they make the right decision the first time.” Sam Senior

So far, the Product Hunt community is eager to see a new buying model.

“This is epic - I HATE the enterprise sales process from a buyer's perspective and I'm keen to see this problem fixed.” - Rami Kalai

TestBox is launching with mostly Customer Support software available to test, including Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Hubspot. The makers are working to expand verticals and vendors.

Peter, a TestBox cofounder, gave some insight into some of the challenges and obstacles the team is tackling, from securely embedding products into the platform to building environments that serve each user as they try the software.

“Over the coming months, you’ll see us build out our TestBox for Sales, TestBox Insights, and move into more and more verticals.”

If you have any suggestions for the TestBox team, don’t forget to share.

Another crypto trading platform? Why not!

Today Coinrule launched to the Product Hunt community with its own unique selling proposition focused on helping new and hobbyist traders invest in crypto with automation tools — emphasis: no bots.

“We built Coinrule because the world of finance is changing and most markets are managed by bots and run by investment banks. That brings inequality, hobbyist traders have few tools to compete and not much access to good investment opportunities.” - Gabriele Musella, maker

With Coinrule, users automate their trading by setting up a system of rules. Bitcoin down 2%? Maybe you’ll want to create a rule to buy Ethereum with specific conditions set on volume, price, or market cap.

Early adopters have taken to Coinrule’s design-first approach and lack of jargon.

“Power to the people, automated trading designed to fit into your pocket. This is a fantastic venture debunking the idea that you have to be big to win. The truth is you have to be smart to win.” - Steven Hess

“What I like most in this product is how easy it is to setup a rule, test it in a demo account and take it live” - Tiago Santos

Coinrule has launched with integrations to over ten of the most popular exchanges including Binance and Coinbase. Commenters asked about competitors that use two increasingly popular strategies for trading – bots and copy-trading.

The former is generally what Coinrule is steering away from.

“We believe that normal people are able to build automations without needing 'black box' bots running for them.”

In regards to copy-trading, the makers of Coinrule explained to a few interested traders that a feature is in the works. Copy-trading and social trading have been made popular at different scales by platforms like eToro and Public. While social trading often takes the form of sharing or chating about other people’s investments, copy-trading can enable investors to simply duplicate the trading actions of popular investors, or their friends, with the click of a button.

Which strategies work best for traders depends on their level of experience, risk tolerance, and how much time they want to spend on trading. If you tend to be swayed by "buy the dip" tweets, it might be a good time to...

Last month we wrote about the growing space of identity verification with the launch of Persona, which its founders have called “Stripe for identity verification.”

Not to be outdone, Stripe has just launched Stripe Identity. The new product lets businesses programmatically confirm the identity of global users. In other words, Stripe’s making it easier for makers to confirm their users are who they say they are.

Like its competitors, Stripe Identity will make identity verification, which is normally cumbersome and complex to build and execute, more accessible to businesses.

Stripe users get the benefit of having identity tools centralized among Stripe’s other core business operations so they don’t have to hop between payments, subscriptions, and verification. Verification can start with grabbing a link from your Stripe dashboard (i.e. no-code), or can scale to embedded verification using Stripe’s pre-built libraries and SDKs.

Stripe Identity rounds out a number of impressive expansions from the company recently:

Stripe Tax - Calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST with one line of code

Stripe Payment Links - A no-code way to create payment pages in just a few clicks

Stripe Invoicing - Create and send a Stripe-hosted invoice in minutes, without code

Stripe Treasury - Embed financial services in your platform

That’s not including what they’ve been working on over the last twelve months.

Stripe Climate - Direct a fraction of your revenue toward initiatives that remove carbon

Stripe Billing Customer Portal - Let customers manage their subscriptions

This product growth was to be expected after Stripe closed a $600M fundraising round in March at a valuation of $95 billion. Co-founder John Collison explained that the company planned to use much of the raise to invest in Europe, telling TechCrunch:

“Whether in fintech, mobility, retail or SaaS, the growth opportunity for the European digital economy is immense.”

Last week’s release of Stripe Tax was the perfect example of Stripe’s execution. Stripe Tax was built out of Stripe’s Dublin Engineering Hub, and together the products take the company one step closer to Collison’s goal of building a global payments and treasury network that works everywhere.

Sometimes simple actions are the most satisfying.
Checking Google Calendar in a click.
Snipping highlights to Notion from anywhere.
Pasting copy and formulas from an arsenal of your creation.
Collapsing your tabs — you’ll need them later.
Telling YouTube ads to f*ck off already.

Here are eight highlights from the world of extensions over the last year.

Hijack Your Feed - Replace Twitter ads with eye-catching to-dos.

“The personal feed is one of the most influential inventions in computation to date… We were curious what a product that allows you to hijack your feed to work for You, instead of advertisers, looked like” - Jason Yuan, maker

Raindrop.io 5.0 - Bookmark everything, with full-text search.

“This cuts out so much effort in the post-bookmarking "processing" [that] nags me constantly.” - Nida Nizam, commenter

Button for Google Calendar - See your schedule and join meetings in a click.

“Saves me extra time on typing and less 1 click - might seem small, but it’s not for someone who uses calendar a lot!” - Alex Zhezherov, commentor

CSS Scan Pro 2.0 - Hover, get CSS, copy and export.

“I launched [CSS Scan Pro] with the vision of re-imagining the Devtools for web design.” - Guilherme Rizzo, maker

compose.ai - Turn bulleted lists into emails.

"I waste so much much time going from that 'bullet point' version... to something that sounds like reasonably coherent english!” - Brian Sierakowski, commenter

Trove - Create highlights and comments across the internet.

“Context switching sucks. There's so much interesting information out there that I want to collect... saving highlights on any page is now just a click away.” - Akshath Sivaprasad, maker

Text Blaze - Eliminate repetitive typing with saved snippets.

“You can start saving hours of repetitive typing, ...create dynamic snippets using formulas, and form fields and collaborate with your colleagues on shared snippets.” – Dan Barak, maker

Wardrobe for Chrome - Keep tabs tucked away.

“I love how my browser is not cluttered anymore” - Lyviama Uguaynh, commenter

Don't forget to tell those YouTube ads to F*ckOff (no revenue or makers are harmed in the use of this product).

A new app called Superlocal is here to help you connect with your local area — but differently from how Nextdoor does it.

“The closest we've seen a social platform come to connecting people locally is Nextdoor. You could argue that, while their product does get people nearby communicating more, it often drives people further apart. Superlocal exists to help us feel better connected to where we live, making us happier and more empathetic towards our community." - Alex Kehr, CEO of Superlocal

Superlocal wants you to love where you live. It’s focused on creating more positive social interactions with:

• Images requiring location tags. Kehr says this subconsciously promotes showing off where you live.
• Requiring tags based on current location with the goal of making tagging authentic and casual.
• The ability to follow people in other cities to stay connected to your old hood.

Meanwhile, Nextdoor has been working on Craigslisty features. It noticed buy/sell listings on the app increased by 80% since the start of 2020 — 25% of the listings advertised free stuff. Last week, Nextdoor launched a Free Finds feature to browse free items in the neighborhood. You don’t have to be a member to scroll through free listings, but you will have to sign-up to actually contact the seller (the growth hackers are watching).

Facebook? It wants a bigger piece of what Nextdoor built (It must be doing plenty right with whispers of an IPO are in the air). Facebook launched Neighborhoods in Canada last month which is essentially a Nextdoor clone.

Launching in what’s recognized as one of the friendliest countries in the world seems like a good start, eh?

What’s the blocker holding back computer vision AI (i.e. the technology that trains computers to interpret images and videos) from solving the hardest problems we face today?

According to Eric Landau, it’s the difficulty of creating usable, labeled, training datasets.

“That’s why we built Cord, a platform that can automate the data annotation process for computer vision use cases.”

We’ve briefly touched on the amount of data companies use to train AI models. Google is using all of your failed CAPTCHA attempts to train its AI and their latest Switch Transformer model (although an NLP) reportedly has been trained on 1.6 trillion parameters. The point: AI models need a lot of training data and makers can use help with annotation.

Cord automates the creation of training data through a “micro-model approach” so AI makers can build computer vision applications faster.

Landau explains how the micro-model tool works (summarized for readability):

1. Define the set of questions you are asking the data.
2. Do a handful of manual annotations to start teaching the system what you want to annotate.
3. Build a micro-model.
4. Run model, review the predictions, and retrain.

Sounds simple enough but this image helps for the non-technicals, too.

Landau says that Cord is already being used to help build datasets for computer vision applications that include the diagnosis of cancer, detection of people in danger in construction sites, and management of small business inventories.

The Product Hunt community is warmly welcoming Cord.

“Would've loved this in my previous gig where I was managing a team of computer visions experts who were always starving for properly annotated data sets.” - Kevin Simons

“Labelling training data is often the hardest part of ML projects. Glad to see someone tackling this part of the modelling pipeline!” - Elena Udodova

“Our ML team at Uber would have wished they something like this back in the days to label their data!” - Palle Broe

Take a look at the launch page to discover more potential verticals for Cord and how it differs from competitor CVAT in the comments.