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The last frontier of DTC startups seems to be...emergency kits. 🚨

According to JUDY, a company that launched earlier this week to help people better prepare for emergencies, over 60% of Americans have no plan in disaster situations. JUDY’s solution is a bright orange box full of things like meal replacement bars, water, first-aid supplies, phone chargers, blankets and dusk masks, along educational content to better prepare you for emergencies.

That last part — the educational content — is what JUDY hopes will separate it from the competition; the company can help you prepare for emergencies depending on where you live in the world. If you go to the company’s website, there’s a nifty little tool that lets you enter your zip code to understand the natural disasters that could occur in your area, such as earthquakes, fires, floods and hurricanes. You can then download a corresponding plan to understand how to better prepare for unpredictable emergencies.

“Over a year ago, we set out with the mission to understand why American families were so vastly underprepared for emergencies. Through this journey, we’ve spoken to hundreds of people across the country and tapped some of the greatest minds in emergency management. We learned quickly that the act of purchasing an emergency kit is not enough. Without the knowledge and know-how of what to do in an emergency, you are not prepared.” - JUDY Maker Nik Sharma

Would you get a JUDY kit? Tell us here. Here’s what a few early adopters think:

“I remember over preparing for certain emergencies as a child - would be much better to have actually guided walkthroughs for the whole family.” - Trent

“A DTC brand for emergencies. Very clever! The design is pretty dope as well.” - Anthony

“My wife put one of these together once the earthquakes and fires started in LA. Her brother is Army Special Forces so he helped a lot based on domain knowledge but we found many of our friends were unprepared as well. It’s one of those things you wish you had after it’s already too late.” - Sean

What does the internet know about us? 🤔

Well, over 350 companies hold sensitive personal data on any given person and about eight new companies get ahold of your data every month. Enter: Mine.

How it works: Mine lets you discover all the companies that hold your personal data in ~30 seconds. Then, in (literally) one-click you can request for the company to forget you. It’s a superrrr easy way to clean up your digital footprint from all the times you bought something online or signed up for a new digital service.

“Having been on the inside of the tech world, my co-founders and I saw how people, and even ourselves are losing trust in companies,” Mine co-founder and CEO Gal Ringel wrote on Product Hunt. “Our goal is to help you reduce unnecessary online exposure, without compromising your digital experience.” 

The company has spent the last year in stealth until the company launched last week. It’s important that the company does not process or collect the content of your emails or your personal data, even though you have to give them access to your email to use the tool.

Some early reactions from the PH community (they were mixed):

“We, at Designmodo, have received two requests from this service today. It seems to work well for registered users and subscribers.” - Adrian

“Amazed to see how many places have my info even if I didn’t use them for years.” - Gabby

“If you can send the email on behalf of the user's email, that would make it more likely for me to accept the GPDR request directly.” - Benjy

The 5th annual Golden Kitty Awards have come to an end. You nominated thousands of products across 25 categories, casting tens of thousands of upvotes to select the winners.

So without further ado, here are the 2019 Golden Kitty winners in each of the 25 product categories

🌍 Social Impact Product of the Year: Wren 

🛠 Hardware Product of the Year: MacBook Pro 16“

📱 Mobile App of the Year: GitHub for Mobile 

🖋 Design Tool of the Year: Figma Plugins 

🖥 Dev Tool of the Year: Composer 

🌈 Diversity and Inclusion Product of the Year: Elpha 

⛓ Crypto Product of the Year: Snowball Money 

🙌No Code Product of the Year: Makerpad 

💰 Fintech Product of the Year: Predicto 

🤖 AI & Machine Learning Product of the Year: FaceMaze 

🌚 Side Project Product of the Year: Leave Me Alone 

🌴 Remote Work Tool of the Year: Nomad List 5.0 

🙀 WTF Product of the Year: Bird News Now 

🗣 Audio & Voice Product of the Year: Descript Podcast Studio 

😎 AR Product of the Year: Wanna Kicks 

💪 Health & Fitness Product of the Year: Zenia 

🏡 Smart Home Product of the Year: Lazy

🔐 Privacy Focused Product of the Year: Brave 

💋SexTech Product of the Year: Coral 

📦D2C Product of the Year: Haus 

😸PetTech Product of the Year: Whistle GO 

💀Product Memoriam: Inbox by Google  

🌟 Product of the Year: AirPods Pro 

Check out the winners, runner ups and honorable mentions in all 25 categories here .

We also gave out two data-driven (non-voting) awards. Congrats to our Maker of the Year, Marie Prokopets, and Community Member of the Year, Kunal Bhatia.

And a big thank you to our sponsors Xometry, monday.com, Dave, Spoke, Airtable, Public.com, Conde Nast and Bevy. 

Congrats to all makers for building awesome things in 2019. 😺

TLDR; We launched something new.

Since Product Hunt launched in 2013, we’ve seen more than 150,000 products launch on the platform, upvoted by millions of people and discovered by several million more.

But we have many more ideas we want to explore around product discovery independent of producthunt.com. So we quietly started working on a new site and brand last year, taking our learnings from the past six years to build something new that we hope you’ll enjoy. We’re calling it YourStack and it’s a place to share and discover the products you use and love.

Why did we build this? The products we use have a major influence on our lives, and today we have more options than ever. Right now, we’re turning to our friends and experts offline and on broader social networks like Twitter and Instagram to ask things like:

“What workout apps do you use?” 

“Which smart home security system do you have?”

“What do you use to make coffee in the morning?”

“Which tools do you use to manage your startup’s distributed team?”

“What’s your favorite book on psychology?”

Our goal with YourStack is to create a home for these conversations, along with a community of people sharing and discovering the products they love. ❤️

How it works:

• Everyone has a profile to showcase their stack (aka the products they use). For example, here’s Ryan Hoover’s stack. Who knew he was such a big fan of the Corosi Air Fryer? And here’s Naval’s stack. TIL he’s a Rumble Boxing fan.
• Your stack might include things like the apps on your home screen, a book that changed your perspective, your favorite smart home gadget or your favorite beauty accessory. The more products you stack, the more useful YourStack becomes. 
• You can also use our ‘Pro Tips’ feature to learn new things about the products you already use. For example, did you know you check your AirPods’ battery level on your iPhone? Or did you know about the hidden ‘Concerts’ feature on Spotify? Pro tips are like a community-generated user manual of secrets, hacks, and how-tos. 

Similar to Product Hunt’s launch six years ago, we’re limiting the number of people that can join as we gather feedback and improve the product. Join us and share your stack.

Vine is back... kind of. The highly-anticipated reboot from the founders of Vine, a new app called Byte, is finally here. 🎉

The app debuted on iOS and Android on Friday with a “creativity first” mission. How it works: Byte lets you upload content from your camera roll or shoot media using the app’s camera. You then share your creations — six-second videos — just like you used to on Vine. It also sounds a lot like TikTok.

However, Byte’s founders hope the app will stand out from the pack by helping content creators actually make money (TikTok isn’t great at this right now). The app plans to launch a partner program in the near future that offers monetization option to popular creators on the app.

“We hope it’ll resonate with people who feel something’s been missing,” the Byte team wrote on Twitter.

Some early reactions:

“I was part of the BETA program during the last few months and Byte is really amazing: so much creativity bundled together.” - An

“This is the ‘TikTok’ killer. Vine should’ve never closed in the first place and swooped in.“ - Sean

“YouTube Byte compilations incoming...” - Andre

P.S. Follow us on Byte (@producthunt).

We’re excited to announce the last batch of Golden Kitty finalists. Voting is now open for the following categories:

😸 PetTech 

🌟 Product of the Year 

💀 Product Memoriam 

Note: The Product of the Year award and today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at CitizenNet. The Product of the year winner will get three months of free digital advertising services from Citizen Net and the each category winner will get 1 month free.

We’re also excited to announce finalists for Community Member of the Year  and Maker of the Year. Unlike other categories, the winners will be selected using data informed by the winner’s maker goals, comments, upvotes, product launches, and more over the past year.

You have about 24 hours to cast your votes across all categories. Voting officially closes tomorrow at 7am PT.

Winners will be announced on Tuesday January 28th. Stay tuned and see you in person next week? 👋

Another day, another Golden Kitty category drop. Stay tuned for the big reveal tomorrow, when we’ll announce finalists for the coveted Product of the Year award. ICYMI: TikTok won last year and they seem to be doing... pretty well.

New finalists announced below. Click through to vote for the winners. 👇

💪 Health and Fitness Apps 

🏠 Smart Home 

🔐 Privacy-Focused Products 

💋 SexTech 

📦 D2C 

Voting for these categories (and all categories that dropped earlier this week) is now open and closes this weekend on Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Go vote!

And if you haven’t already RSVP’d to one of our PH Meetups happening around the globe next week (+ and IRL meetup happening in LA), you can do so here.

Attention! More finalists for this year’s Golden Kitty Awards have just been announced.

Check them out 👇

🌚 Side Project 

🙀 WTF (ICYMI: An app called ‘ Die With Me’ won in this category last year)

🗣 Audio and Voice 

😎 Augmented Reality 

🌴 Remote Work Tools 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at Spoke. 

Voting for these categories (and previously dropped categories) is now OPEN and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT.

More finalists will drop first thing in the morning tomorrow, so look out for news around health and fitness apps, smart home devices, sextech products, privacy-focused apps and D2C products.

To celebrate all makers next week, we’re putting on a little shindig in LA (aka the 5th annual Product Hunt Meetup). If you can’t make it to LA, chances are there’s a Product Hunt meetup happening in your city that day — there will be events everywhere from New York to DC to Toronto to New Orleans to Mexico City and beyond. It’s almost like we planned it. 😉

More Golden Kitty finalists just dropped! 👇

As a reminder, voting is OPEN and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Upvote your favorites here or click through the categories below.

🌈 Diversity and Inclusion 

⛓ Crypto 

👀 No Code 

💰 Fintech

👾 AI and Machine Learning 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at Public.com and Airtable. 

More voting to come in tomorrow’s newsletter, where we’ll announce finalists for the next batch of categories (side projects, WTF products, remote work tools, audio and voice products, and AR projects). ICYMI: Winners will receive a prize package with custom swag and a golden kitty trophy. 😸

🚨Reminder: We’re hosting an IRL Product Hunt Meetup in Los Angeles on January 28th at 6 p.m. There will be a DJ, photo booth, swag (of course), free-flowing Philz and a pancake bar. The event is free and open to all ages (including all the teenage makers out there). RSVP here. 👈

If you can’t make it to LA, check out one of the other 60 Product Hunt meetups happening around the world that day.

Over the past week, you all nominated your favorite products of 2019 across 25 CATegories. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have narrowed down the finalists by category. Here are the first five categories (keep an eye out in your inbox every day this week as we announce more finalists).

🌍 Social Impact 

🛠 Hardware 

📱 Mobile Apps 

🖋 Design Tools 

🖥 Dev Tools 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at  Xometry,  monday.com and Dave. 

Voting starts today and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Upvote your favorites here.

Look out for tomorrow’s newsletter where we’ll be sharing the finalists for the next batch of categories (diversity and inclusion, crypto, no code, fintech, AI and machine learning). In addition to lots of love from the PH community, winners will receive a prize package with custom swag and a golden kitty trophy. 😸