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Our ultra-fast Daily: Three takes on new products. Yesterday’s top ten launches. That’s it.

An 18 year old’s new side project
Over the years we’ve seen a ton of new tab browser extensions. Some of our personal favorites: Momentum, Unsplash Instant, Tabby Cat, Tabagotchi, and of course, The Product Hunt Tab. 😉

Yesterday, myFrontpage launched to give everyone the POWER to create their own new tab experience. Using its visual editor, you can customize your page with preset widgets, including welcome text, the current weather, random memes, jokes, and even xkcd comics. It’s refreshingly simple – you don’t even need to register an account.

MyFrontpage was built by An, an 18 year old maker from Germany. In his launch introduction:

“I never really liked the default page which showed up when opening up a new tab in my browser. I see it hundred times each and every day. And yet, it's unpersonal, not really customizable and actually kinda boring. That's why I created myFrontpage.”

This isn’t An’s first product (as evidenced on his Product Hunt profile). He’s also built:

First Tweets, a directory of the first tweets ever tweeted
shrtcode, a secure link shorter alternative to bit.ly
Tele.rocks, a TV channel built on top of YouTube
RSS API, a tool to convert RSS feeds into a JSON API
SnackLog, a food tracking web app

We’re inspired by community members like An and many of the other young makers on Product Hunt from around the globe. Keep building, friends. 😸
Facebook revives GeoCities
Facebook’s experimental NPE team have recently launched their latest creation, E.gg, a goofy personal webpage creator that is reminiscent of the 90’s. The app feels very nostalgic, a hat tip to the days of GeoCities and MySpace.

Kevin, from NPE, shared;

“It all started when a few of us found ourselves missing the raw and exploratory spirit of The Early Internet and began to wonder things like: Is this misplaced nostalgia? What was _actually_ so special about that time?”

The result of this train of thought was E.gg. A blank canvas for self-expression with GIFs, text, and shapes. The idea is that you can be ‘off-beat’ and ‘mis-matched’ without drawing a critical eye from peers to represent your half-formed ideas and passions.

Early feedback from the community is largely positive;

“Tumblr, Google Sites, WordArt, ~a e s t h e t i c~, it’s all in the beautiful and zany world of e.gg!” - Khoi

“This gives me early internet vibes — that landing page is crazy (in a good way)“ - Anthony

“I... I'm in love 🥺 Literally can hardly wait to try this out, mind is BUZZING with ideas” - Alexander

E.gg isn’t the only site drawing early 90’s internet vibes of late. Dating app Struck's aesthetic is very retro and reminds us of Poolside Fm, itself a visceral throwback for the senses. Could it be that with all the progress and complexity of modern technology, we’re craving the simpler times where we could all just innocently hang out with everyone’s first internet friend, myspacetom?

If you want to take a step back in time, there are plenty of products out there tugging at our nostalgic heart strings:

Stackoverflow 90’s: Bring back the '90s to StackOverflow with this retro looking Chrome Extension

Icon rewind: Don’t like change? Get old icon logo’s for the apps on your phone with MSCHF’s 22nd drop

Retro Wave Generator: Bring back the 80s with this throwback image creator

My 90’s TV: Watch the TV shows from your childhood and wind back the years

Macintosh.js: A 1991 Macintosh in an app - for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Transfer files in and out, mount disk images, and time-travel back to the 90s.

GifCities: Discover the GIFS of the early internet with this retro animated GIF search engine

The Internet Arcade: 900+ classic arcade games from Joust to Paperboy, free and playable in your browser
Running the whole remote show
Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at monday.com.

Organizing a team can be a challenge, especially remotely. Knowing what each department is working on, from sales to ops to project management, is not easy. monday.com has been working on some things to help.

Their platform gives your team organizational knowledge to be able to move quickly. You can outline projects, assign ownership and make sure communication is super clear across the team (without email – goodbye, inbox zero anxiety). monday.com is designed to provide a big picture view of what teams are working on, enabling them to work better together.

But monday.com isn’t new to the scene (anyone remember dapulse?). They’ve doubled in size a couple times since 2012 and dog-fooded along the way.

Since then they’ve been working with some big names including companies you probably haven’t heard of like Uber, Universal Studios, and Walmart 😉. When a whole organization’s workflow is on Monday’s platform, everything can be managed from one place. This makes growing your business, opening a new office or preparing for the unexpected much easier.

They’re offering the Product Hunt community a 30 day free trial with premium customer support to help get your team started risk free.
Is Alexa spying on you?
Yesterday MSCHF – the “Banksy” of the internet – dropped the Alexagate, a privacy hat for Alexa.

Like a tinfoil hat to block the aliens from reading your mind, the Alexa hat blocks Bezos from listening to your bedroom banter.

Here’s how it works: The Alexagate uses pulsed ultrasound to jam the device’s microphone. Simply clap or tap the Echo 3 times to unjam the signal. Repeat to reenable privacy mode.

While expectedly tongue in cheek, MSCHF’s 26th drop reflects a growing sentiment: Consumers are increasingly distrusting of Big Tech and perhaps rightfully so as more of our lives, physically and digitally, integrate with technology. The result: Privacy tech is hot rn.

Over the weekend Mozilla quietly launched its VPN service to encrypt your network activity and hide your IP address.

Last month Jumbo announced a massive update (and $8M in funding) to make it easy for consumers to monitor and control their data. The app can notify you when your SSN, credit cards, or passwords are found on the dark web. You can also use it to quickly delete data collected by Facebook, Google, and others.

Hey, a new email platform from the Basecamp team and most upvoted product in June, took a hard stance in support of consumer privacy with email screening and pixel blocking so senders cannot see when (and where) you open emails.

Unsurprisingly, former US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, is getting in on this. “Today, I’m announcing the launch of the Data Dividend Project. A movement to empower Americans to take back control of their data.” he announced on Product Hunt.

These are just a few recent, popular launches, but there’s a rabbit hole of privacy tech to explore here.
The next big audio social network?
Cappuccino launched on Product Hunt over the weekend with a fresh take on social audio. Record a short voice memo, or ‘bean’ as they call it, to share with your friends and family. This ‘bean’ could be a short anecdote from your day, a joke, a thought, anything really. Every morning at 8am the app delivers a ‘cappuccino’, a compilation of you and your friends’ audio stories.

Olivier, Cappuccino cofounder, shared:

“Our goal with Cappuccino is to provide an amazing way to start the day with a daily show created from the voice messages of your friends.”

Although early days for the team, the feedback from the Product Hunt community has been positive:

“Been loving using Cappuccino these past few weeks, such a lovely and more intimate way to connect with my family and friends.“ – Anthony

“It became such a joy to play my cappuccino as I'm getting ready for the day ahead, and have my morning filled with the voices and stories of my closest friends.” – Sarah

“I really enjoy the unique way the app connects you with your friends. It's almost like a mini-podcast consisting of snippets / slice of life insights from friends.” – David

We’ve seen an increase in audio products launch on Product Hunt this year. In person encounters have been harder to maintain with social distancing in place, but social connections are more needed than ever.

We talked about this in more detail at the start of the month covering the 2.0 launch of YAC, and back in May with the launches of Watercooler and Walkie. Although these products are more geared to work-based audio communication, Cappuccino brings the focus back to smaller social circles with friends and family.

Makers are finding creative ways to use audio to help us remain connected, in what feels like a disconnected world. People are expanding their social network on Clubhouse; deepening their connections with their team using YAC, Tandem, Walkie, and Watercooler (among others); and creating more intimacy through audible stories with Cappuccino and Saga.
The Stepchickens cult
If you’re an avid TikTok binger, there’s no doubt you’ve heard of Stepchickens.

The self-proclaimed cult was started by comedian Melissa Ong, aka the Mother Hen. Her call to action inspired a wave of creators to change their profile to what you see above (yes, that’s a pic of the Mother Hen). “Rise up stepchickens!” they said.

The cult expanded into an app and quickly shot toward the top of the App Store. The app is a community of communities with creativity and playfulness at its core. There’s a place for fans of Fortnite, Billie Eilish, cats (of course), k-pop, sneakerheads, and a ton more.

It’s also a tool to create memes and TikTok-friendly videos. We played around with it, impressed with the level of detail that went into its tooling.

Stepchickens is a perfect example of the power of community and how building a community-first strategy might be the best way to start. Mother Hen certainly isn’t the only one to execute a community-first strategy. Casey Neistat spent several years building an audience on YouTube before launching beme, an app designed for his massive following of consumers and creators.

Many makers and entrepreneurs often build a product in isolation. The “build it and they will come” strategy rarely works. If you’re building something new, consider involving a community of people excited about your vision. These people will provide the best feedback and help get the word out.

Plug: We built Ship to do just that. It’s a tool to find early adopters and involve them in the building process.

If you’re looking to join a new cult, check out Stepchickens. 🐔
“No cream with 7 Splenda” ☕️
Many of us start the day with a cup of coffee. 64% of Americans drink coffee regularly according to the NCA, with over 2 billion cups consumed globally on a daily basis (according to Wikipedia).

The Product Hunt team is no different. We drink a lot of coffee. A Philz run during our team retreat is a mission. Who takes no cream with 7 Splenda?? What’s a mint mojito?? We even had our own limited-run blend called the the caffeinated kitty. But nowadays, Aaron is without question our resident coffee connoisseur. Check out that whip:




Over the years we’ve seen numerous coffee products launch on Product Hunt. So much so that we dedicated a whole topic to the caffeinated beans. Here’s a short selection:

Taika recently launched with a promise to “accentuate reality” with its cold brew enhanced by adaptogens designed to keep you calm, focused and clear. We recently tried it. It’s good.

Brew Diary makes it easier to brew the perfect, consistent cup using an Apple Watch.

Source Coffee is a hand-curated database of specialty coffee shops around the world.

Coffunity is a community of coffee drinkers sharing tips to achieve that perfect brew.

Quokka Brew launched today is a cold brew in a can with added nootropics with brain boosting qualities.

Coffee Pixels is a solid bar of coffee. Think a chocolate bar, but it’s coffee.

YESPLZ Coffee delivers coffee and a (physical!) magazine every month.

Ripple Maker turn selfies into coffee art (seriously).

If tea is more your thing, here is a robot that will make it for you. 🙃
Shopify’s new side project
Yesterday, Shopify launched its Canva competitor, Taler, an always-free design builder with customizable templates and photos. The aim is to make it easier for makers and ecommerce entrepreneurs to share beautiful assets on social media without a designer.

Taler isn’t the first “side project” launched by the $110B+ company. Last year Shopify launched Hatchful, a tool to create your own logo. Last month they introduced DopinBlog to make it easy to embed a blog into Shopify sites.

Shopify isn’t the only big company spending time and resources on side projects. Facebook’s NPE team continues to explore new ideas with Bump, AUX, Whale, and more. AWS recently launched a beta of an experimental no-code platform called Honeycode. Last week Google released Shoploop, a video-based shopping app for beauty products.

We’re big fans of side projects – that’s how Product Hunt started – and continue to explore new ideas. Our most recent project: Product Hunt Mentors Network. Side projects offer teams and individuals creative outlets to be experimental, scratch curiosity, and to take risks. Don’t underestimate what a side project might grow into.

It’s also worth noting that it’s OK if a side project doesn’t succeed, as long as there’s learning. Of course failure isn’t the goal but the experience from a failed project can be beneficial; another step toward building something meaningful and wanted. We’ve written in some detail about our own side project failures if you want to learn from some of our past missteps.

Let us know what side projects you’re working on right now over on Twitter. We’d love to see what you’re building.
The end of pointless meetings
We’ve all been in a meeting that should have been an email. Some information is just more efficiently shared asynchronously.

That doesn’t mean that all meetings are pointless. They’re a necessary part of working life, but the misplaced meeting notes, back and forth scheduling, forgotten action items, and open agendas are frustrating (especially right before lunchtime 😋).

Luckily there are now plenty of tools available to make meetings better. We’ve seen an increasing number of products emerge in this space. Here are a few:

Rate the meeting helps with scheduling and gathering feedback after each meeting

Hugo turns your calendar into a collaborative note-taking tool

Navigator creates a collaborative workspace for each meeting

Jottie brings note-taking, to-do lists and decisions making to meetings

Tooqan collects honest feedback post meeting from attendees

Loom kills the meeting (we love and use it at Product Hunt)

Veed is an alternative to Loom that records your screen and webcam side by side

Range visualizes your team’s daily standup asynchronously in Slack

Meetingbird means you can avoid the back and forth when scheduling a meeting

And when you’re stuck in a painful meeting, use Callback to fake an "emergency call". We won’t tell. 😉

(Image credit: reddit /Vizzer97/)
“This is game-changing”
This weekend tech Twitter was ablaze with tweets about OpenAI’s newest project, GPT-3. A handful of makers and builders received early access to test out the new AI model with some incredible results. This is one of our favorites from Jordan Singer, a Maker of the Year nominee from a few years ago.

While there’s debate about how “game-changing” GPT-3 is, it’s undoubtably another step toward the future. In a tweet, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, stated, “For non-programmers, it's like experiencing the magic of programming for the first time.”

Over the years – especially the last few – we’ve seen an increase in the number of AI-related products launch on Product Hunt. No doubt we’ll see a wave of GPT-3 powered experiments shortly. In the meantime, here are 10 AI-powered products launched over the last few months:

Is it cake answers the internets biggest question of the moment

Slazzer quickly removes the background on any image

Fluently users machine learning to help you write in any language

Rosebud AI generates realistic, but fake, virtual models

Perfect Quote uses AI to find quotes that match any image

Krew offers at home fitness options enhanced with AI use cases

Proven offers personalized skincare powered by AI tailored to individuals

PodBot.ai generates and records a podcast episode about your topic of interest

Pearlii offers free, fast dental check-ups using AI image processing

Let’s Enhance uses AI to increase photo resolution with no loss in quality

Follow the Artificial Intelligence topic to keep up to date on the latest AI launches.
Top Launches:CamoCamoApiway.aiWaldo