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Today's newsletter was crafted by us and sponsored by our friends at Stripe.

Our guess is that most of you have heard of Stripe Checkout — you’ve maybe even integrated it into your own site (we have). Yesterday, Stripe launched the new version of Checkout on Product Hunt. Stripe have built this, quite literally, 'so you don't have to.'

For anyone not in the know, Stripe Checkout is a prebuilt, hosted payment page optimized for conversions, now with:

⚙️ Address auto-complete and real-time card validation
💻 Multi-device functionality
📱 Apple Pay and Google Pay
🌐 Support for 25+ languages and 135+ currencies
🌍 10 international payment methods
🎨 Customization with your logo and brand colors

These features are intended to save you time (and hundreds of lines of code) to focus on your actual product. Their demo does a pretty good job of showing how it works. They’ve also made it easier to integrate Checkout across use cases, like platform payments and subscriptions. And of course - it works with Stripe's customer billing portal which lets your subscribers update their payment details and manage their subscriptions without needing to reach out to your support team. A pretty nifty time saver.

Here’s what the Product Hunt community had to say:

"I Love Stripe Checkout. It's super easy to implement and manage." - Sujith

"Instead of building one from scratch we can just use this! Will save us so much time." - Philip

"I've been using Checkout for a couple months now and I'm super excited you guys finally released the coupons for one-time payments! 🎉 Can't wait to start using it. Nice work!!" — Spencer

Dare we say it: if you’re looking for the fastest way to integrate Stripe, you may want to… check it out. 🥁

The summer may be coming to an end for some, but this doesn't mean summer vibes need to be over too.

Poolside FM just launched its hotly anticipated iPhone app. Now you can enjoy summer vibes all day, every day.

If you’re familiar with Poolside FM, you already know it’s an instant download. If you’ve never heard of it, well, you can thank me later 😉.

Starting out as an experimental web player, Poolside FM is a summer music radio station that pairs nostalgic retro graphics from the 80s with feel-good electro and disco tunes. You can listen to 5 different channels: Poolside FM, Indie Summer, Hangover Club, Tokyo Disco, and Friday Nite Heat.

Trust us, this app is rad. Just look at what the community has to say about it:

“TODAY IS A GOOD DAY!!!” – Razzy Lee

“I've paid yearly for Spotify and not using it for 3 months because of Poolside FM. Great for background music while working. 🌴” – Yigit Pinarbasi

“App is snappy AF and UX of the app is also great! I already replaced the spotify app I had in my iphones dock with poolside. Rock on!” – Ignacio

“Me: I want to catch the last bit of summer fun with Poolside FM Poolside FM: summer now lasts all year long!” – Jun Gong

Poolside may become your favorite place to chill and take a break from 2020.

Best of all, it's free.

Texting is the new email.

83% of millennials open SMS messages within 90 seconds of receiving them, according to an OpenMarket study.

Yesterday, Lio Slama launched Neo, an SMS bot and CRM software built to drive revenue through texting.

SMS marketing is a huge opportunity for companies. Statista reports that nearly half (44%+) of the world’s population owns a smartphone.

The maker of Neo, asks, “Why can’t we chat with small businesses through SMS the same way we text our friends?” And it’s a valid question, given that we all carry our phones everywhere and open funny GIFs from friends pretty much instantly.

Let the facts talk, engagement stats compared to email are mind-blowing, Sama reports, “Email open rate is 15% where SMS is 98%. Email response rate is 6% where SMS is 46%.”

We all use our phones to text friends daily. It's familiar and personal. Companies like Neo and Community.com are making it easy for companies to text customers like you would your friends, and are seeing pretty interesting engagement rates.

You can even text us on (415) 481-3148 for a pre-launch surprise each Friday (if you're based in the US or Canada).

Regardless of a well-received launch, they should definitely get a cat! (Check the product for more context.)

If you’re interested in SMS marketing and tools, have a look at these:

Clerk is the texting (SMS/MMS) solution built for Slack.

SMS Bot Creator automates your SMS replies using a trainable bot.

Botsify is a chatbot builder (including SMS textbot) with lots of integrations.

Really Good Texts curates ridiculously good text marketing campaigns.

Privy Text provides text message marketing for small and growing ecommerce brands.

SMS Marketing Examples collects the world's best SMS marketing case-studies.

What does a lifehacker and NBA Star have in common with you and me? Sleep.

Yesterday Pzizz launched a big update to its sleeping app which originally launched in 2006.

Pzizzis one of the OG sleep apps. This app combines scientific research with internal learnings to create “Dreamscapes” tailored to improve your sleep cycle.

After nearly 15 years, Pzizz made its name in the space. NBA pros, seasoned journalists, and celebrities swear by it. Some claim it cured their insomnia, improved their sleep quality, and eased traumas.

Pzizz’s CEO, Rockwell Shah, explains how they do it on Product Hunt:

“Meditation is great. But there are so many other techniques that can help you get better sleep. Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Autogenic Training, Psycho-acoustics, HRV Breathing, Sleep hypnosis, CBT-i, Guided Imagery, and more. The research even shows that combining techniques is generally more effective than using one alone.”

The app is loved by millions now but Pzizz origins were quite humble and many will see resemblances to Winamp, the legendary music player with its own skin museum.

Pzizz is one of many aiming to improve (and capitalize on) sleep. Here are some other sleep apps you want to check out:

Drift is a free app that showcases the sights and sounds of beautiful locations around the world.

Rise Sleep automatically tracks your sleep debt and circadian rhythm.

Sleepedy connects you with a sleep coach and uses sleep therapy to improve your sleep.

SleepTuner is a tiny wearable sensor giving you much of the same data as a sleep lab.

TickTot is a child sleep timer and tracker.

Bambú is a sleep and meditation journal for Spanish speakers.

GPT-3 keeps making headlines. While it’s still not publicly available, beta testers have been showing us what’s possible. Humans are creative and all, but the next revolutionary idea may not come from us. 🤯

Yesterday, serial maker and Golden Kitty Award Winner, Pieter Levels, launched IdeasAI, a GPT-3 powered startup idea generator.

Taking good ideas from existing startups, the app uses an autoregressive language model with deep learning to generate new product and business ideas so you don’t have to.

At the time of this writing, it generated over 3,720 ideas. There are some bizarre and obvious ideas (“the first real-time CRM,” really AI?) that may not turn into anything useful, but humans, like you or I, can help judge the quality and improve the app by liking and disliking suggestions.

“So if you like an idea, you can claim it, pay $99 and it gets removed from the site. (kinda like those hip hop beat sell sites).” – explains Levels.

This could be a useful tool for makers to come up with side project ideas or even inspire the next big thing.

There are several specific GPT-3 applications applied to web development, marketing, copywriting, and other practical applications. But we're most excited about the counter-intuitive, non-obvious uses of this (and GPT-4) technology.

If you’re looking for more fun experiments with OpenAI’s model, we featured some cool solutions featuring the *game-changing* cake detecting app and tons more.

Leonardo da Vinci predicted the future pretty accurately by saying “He who can copy can do.”

Cutouts wants to be the Pinterest board for your clipboard.

With this free extension, you can save images, text, and videos with a click. ML will do the sorting and organizing for you and even generate color palettes and mood boards. No signup needed to try it out.

We couldn’t go a day without our beloved copy+paste function. But with great power comes great responsibility.

Ever sent a funny GIF instead of the final report link to your boss?

We feel you. 🤦‍♂️

There’s a better way to keep your favorites websites separate from cute cat pics or funny GIFs. Here are some of our favorite clipboard managers launched earlier:

Pasta is a clipboard time machine with a beautiful interface.

Copy Space synchronizes clipboards from Windows to all your devices.

Paste is a smart cloud clipboard history and snippets manager for Mac.

Control V lets you copy and paste over the internet.

CopyLess can store up to 1000 recent clippings.

Maccy is a lightweight and minimal open-source clipboard manager for macOS.

If you’re looking to expand your productivity horizons, have a look at these powerful and programmable text expanders: TextExpander, Alfred, aText, Keyboard Maestro, and canSnippet.

Humans are social by nature.

Just like back in the 90s, online communities are having a moment right now. AIM, MSN Messenger, IRC, anyone?

In this socially-distant time, people desperately need to close that gap and connect with like-minded peers.

“Community is the new moat,” claims First Round in their 2019 State of Startups report.

Of course communities don’t appear out of nowhere. It takes thoughtful, intentional effort.

Why create a community?

Community is such a buzzword nowadays. And while it can be very impactful when done right, not every project or business needs a community strategy.

But those who build a strong community tend to benefit in a number of ways: Increased WOM, greater loyalty, and a stronger relationship with users of the product. More importantly, users benefit most when there’s a strong sense of belonging and mutual understanding.

Some of this translates into more active contributions from the community itself. Facebook famously activated community volunteers to translate the site to over 100 languages.

How do you build a community?

This is a long conversation that we won’t fully cover in today’s digest, but below are a few tips.

First, start small and focus on a specific audience. The more defined the community, the easier it is to build for their needs and expectations.

Next, involve the community in the process. In the early days of Product Hunt we “built in public”, sharing mockups and our roadmap to gather the community’s feedback well before writing code. Not only does this lead to better product decisions, but it engenders more trust and buy-in with the people that care most about what you’re building.

“Communities feel magical, but they don't appear out of nowhere. Just as when you’re building a fire, there are certain ingredients you need to assemble and an order of operations you need to follow to generate a spark, fan the flames, and keep it going,” says Bailey Richardson, early Instagram community manager and author of Get Together.

What do you use to build a community?

Although tools won’t build a community, there are plenty of useful options to bring your community together.

Here are some tools to consider:

Circle is the recently launched modern creator-focused community platform to help you bring together your discussions, memberships, and content, all under your own brand.

Disciple lets you gather, engage, and monetize your network with your own community platform.

PeerBoard is a modern community platform designed to live as an organic part of your existing website or product. You can even embed it into any website.

Mighty Networks is a new kind of website builder that enables you to bring your community, online courses, and memberships together in one place.

Discourse positions its open-source platform as a civilized discussion board for your community.

Spectrum fills in a void between Github and Slack, as described by the community member and allows you to join, start, and build online communities.

Comradery is a fully customizable online community platform that provides both threaded discussions and real-time chat.

If you’re serious about starting a community, check out Community Canvas, a framework to build meaningful communities, and The CMX Guide to Building Community Platforms.

Conscious consumerism has become bigger than a short-lived fad.

In the pre-pandemic times, brands started to notice more people questioning their lifestyle choices and pushing for a change (thanks Greta!). Responsibility has been used as a Gen-Z marketing tool increasingly appealing to other demographics as well.

One such app is YAYZY, an eco-lifestyle tracking app that shows the carbon footprint of your purchases in real-time.

The makers of the app built it inspired by the belief that action begins with information. Their app raises awareness of sustainable lifestyle alternatives to travel, fashion, food, and more.

Now, with all the surprises that 2020 brought us, people are cutting back on excessive shopping and considering other lifestyle choices, cooking bread at home, anyone?

Consumers are not alone. Makers are increasingly more interested in combating climate change by combining Fintech and Cleantech.

There is no shortage of environment-protecting initiatives that popped up in the last couple of years. Here are some simple and some creative ways to become a more conscious consumer:

Website Carbon Calculator shows how much CO2 your website emits.

Kuri suggests low-carbon recipes and adapts to what's in season around you.

Wren offsets your carbon footprint by saving rainforests.

Capture wants to be the Fitbit for your carbon footprint by tracking your mobility and food choices.

Sliced finds opportunities that have a direct impact on reversing climate change.

Climatebase curates climate-positive jobs, organizations, and events.

Climatescape is an open directory of organizations creating solutions to climate change.

Collective.Energy is a community for crowdsourcing and launching climate solutions.

Enviro.Work is a job board for environmentally positive work that benefits the environment.

Carbonly is an online carbon footprint tracker that plants a tree for every new install.

Carbon Trim is an app for discovering carbon footprints of daily actions.

Vera for Business makes it simple for your business to stop ocean plastic.

Tripit shows your flight’s carbon emissions and provides ideas on how to reduce it.

Joro is the “Fitbit of carbon emissions”.

Last month, college student Liam Porr tricked everyone and went viral on Hacker News with a GPT-3 generated fake blog post. In his own words, “it was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”

We’ve seen a ton of GPT-3 powered projects since it was introduced by OpenAI in July. Yesterday, scientist and maker, Samanyou Garg launched another one: Magic Email, an app that summarizes and generates emails using AI.

The creator of previously well-received TLDR This extension returned with a GPT-3 powered email assistant that summarizes and generates professional emails from one-liners. It’s currently in beta, join now to get early access.

Whether it’s fake news or smart algorithms, AI is taking over communication. With tools like GPT-3, there will be even more innovation and viral stunts.

From email summaries, narrated podcasts, copywriting to networking, AI is capable of replacing boring time-sucking communication habits.

Here are some other promising AI-powered products from the community:

Say Less works inside Gmail so you can write shorter emails with AI.

Kriya AI finds relevant professionals and writes smart email intros.

VWO Humans vs AI is a competition to test GPT-3 generated web copy against humans.

Kafkai is a fully AI-powered unique content generator.

Podcastle converts to natural human speech podcasts using machine learning.

GPT-3 Job Description Rewriter does exactly what it says using OpenAI's GPT-3 model.

LALAL.AI uses AI to split any song into vocal and instrumental tracks.

Shortly is an AI creative writing assistant generating new creative plots and story developments.

Zoom hosts 300 million meetings daily. 🤯

While most meetings are intended to be productive, you can still have some fun with Zoom custom backgrounds.

We’re seeing a rise in the number of projects aimed to make Zoom more self-expressive (and hide the mess behind your desk chair). Transport yourself to the Simpsons’ living room or recreate your pre-COVID office space.

Here are a few projects you might want to check out before your next meeting:

3D Rooms Project makes illustrated iconic rooms available as free Zoom backgrounds.

Actionable is a way to personalize your Zoom with QR codes and interactive backgrounds.

Zoom Exotic is pretty self-explanatory bringing you 100+ exotic video backgrounds.

VirtualOffice brings branded virtual offices for your remote team's Zoom meetings.

Canva has a free Zoom background creator with over 100 templates and customization options.

HiHello lets you add your name, title, company, and logo to your virtual background.

HavePride.in is a custom virtual Zoom background generator supporting LGBTQ+ Pride.

Zoom Background curates 1000+ free crowdsourced backgrounds for your next meeting.