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2019 was the year of the “sober curious” movement.

We saw product launches of all stripes in this space, from Kin (a non-boozy alternative to alcohol) to Haus (a low-ABV option) to a cannabis-infused social tonic.

So it’s appropriate that there’s now tools that promote wellness around alcohol consumption. Notably, Less launched this week to help you become more mindful about drinking. The app was created by the makers of Zero, an app the lets you track your fasting.

How it works: As you log drinks through the app, your daily intake affects a weather simulation where you’re on a metaphorical sailboat. To keep “skies sunny and the wind at your back,” you have to stay under your alcohol limit. The app then organizes your drinking data in graphs so you can watch things like how many drinks you have per week and how much money you spend on alcohol over the course of a year. There’s also a “Tips” tab that has a selection of drinking-related articles, mocktail recipes and advice from medical experts. 🙌

Some early reviews from the PH community:

“I’m pumped for this. Use Zero religiously.” - Justin

“I really appreciate this app and I wish I had a product like this when I decided to curb my drinking a few years ago.” - Zak

“Just embarking on dry January. Less is going to be in my pocket and on my side“ - Carrie

Would you use this? 10 points to whoever has smooth sailing for the rest of the year. ⛵️

For anyone who runs a podcast, you know that it can be challenging to get listeners to review your show. Don’t believe us? Just read this on why no one should ever start a podcast.

But rankings on platforms like iTunes and other platforms are determined by reviews and ratings (as well as downloads and subscribers), so reviews remain an important part of podcast marketing.

“A lot of shows ask you to 'please leave us a review in iTunes' but it's not a very useful call to action because most listeners don't know how.” - James

To solve this problem (and help podcast makers get more reviews in general) James created Rate This Podcast, a tool that lets podcasters create a memorable link to read out to listeners at the end of every episode. It works by listing out the right apps for their device, explaining how to subscribe and leave a review, and then it sends them to the right place with a deep link. The links also prompts listeners to subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts.

“Ratings and reviews are important for improving the credibility of your podcast and they act as social proof for attracting new listeners.” - James

Other tools that will level up your podcasting game:

🎙 Descript is an all-encompassing tool for producing podcasts

🎙 Podcast Rental will help you find and rent podcast studios

🎙 Soundtrap for Storytellers is a podcast studio in the cloud

🎙 Anchor is a superrr simple tool for making podcasts

🎙 Zencastr lets you record crystal clear podcasts remotely (we use it for PH Radio)

🎙 Chameleon is like RapGenius, but for podcasts

Christmas came late.

Enter to win a brand new iPhone 11, courtesy of our friends at The Street Sheet, Titan, SheFinds, Newser and more. 📱

The winner will also get an annual subscription to DC Universe streaming service (worth $75). 🙌

If you're not an iPhone person, consider buying yourself a late Christmas present and get the minimalist Light Phone.

Note: Due to legal restrictions, this is only limited to U.S. folks. If it were up to us we'd be sending you all iPhones and kittens this year.

That is all. 🎁

Dear Product Hunt,

It's me, Product Hunt. Happy (almost) New Year! Tomorrow’s the first day of 2020 and I'm so excited for all the stuff we have planned over the next year.

As I'm writing this, I know you’re hard at work prepping the launch of something new in 2020. I hope everyone likes those pancakes you’re cookin’ up.

You’ve also been thinking a lot about how to bring Makers around the world together IRL. I can’t wait to see how the huge global meetup in January goes over with the community. And I'm of course excited for the Golden Kitty Awards. Am I nominated? 😉

Anyways, I’m glad you were born in the 2010s and I hope you have a great 2020.

Love,
Product Hunt

P.S. If you want to write a letter to your 2021 self, use this.

It's almost the new year (and the start of the 2020s!). Cue the 2019 reflections.

Instead of evaluating your old routines and habits, let's recognize the people and products that made a difference to you this year by giving them a shout-out here. Here are a few submissions from the Product Hunt community so far:

“Thanks to  @adamwathan for making Tailwind CSS it changed the way I build websites, and they look so much better!“ - Mubashar

“Thank you to @mijustin for the Mega Maker community, @marie_dm_ for Women Make and @anthilemoon for the Newsletter Geeks community. Being a solo founder doesn't feel as lonely with their support.“  - Veni

“I am so thankful for the @producthunt team and all of the members of the Makers by Product Hunt community. I want to personally send a thank you to @rrhoover @abadesi @aaronoleary and @amrith for being so communicative and helpful this past year.“ - Brendan

“I gotta give @philzcoffee and @jacobjaber another shout out. For 7+ years, I spend the first few hours of my day slapping the keyboard with a Silken Splendor.“ - Ryan

Add your shout-outs and we'll share some of our favorites on Twitter. 😊

That’s it! Our series on the most upvoted products on Product Hunt in 2019 comes to an end today. You can catch up on the top 25 most upvoted products here. And you can find the top five most upvoted products of the year below.👇

5. Basecamp Personal is a completely free version of Basecamp designed with freelancers, students, families and personal projects in mind. You can use it for things like side projects, hobbies, weddings, small events and volunteer gigs.

“This might be a game changer for my marriage.“ - Jimmy

4. Sheety turns Google sheets into APIs (for free). It's pretty cool — you can power a website or an app entirely from a spreadsheet.

“This is a great tool for fast prototyping.” - Stefano

3. Absurd Design is a collection of free surrealist illustrations. The idea behind the project is to give makers a new way to create creative landing pages.

“Looks really clean and unreal! I'm going to get our team to use these illustrations on the next landing pages.” - Charles

2. MixKit is a collection of high-quality stock videos that are completely free.

“This should become the unsplash.com for videos.” - Aladin

1. Checklist Design is a collection of the best UI and UX practices for production-ready design.

“The designer in me became a student going through the checklist. Mainly I loved the inspiration examples for all the UI/UX scenarios.” - Sharath

To celebrate the end of the year, we’ve been showcasing the most upvoted products from 2019 this week. If you missed yesterday’s list because of the holiday, you can catch up here. 👈

10. Growth Design Case is a collection of product case studies in comic book format. They break down how companies like Airbnb, Hopper, Zapier and Trello design and grow products.

“The user experience teardowns are full of insights that'll inspire any product person to improve their products.“ - Hiten

9. Marketing Resources List is what it sounds like — a huuuuge collection of free marketing resources. The team behind Marketing Resources List handpicked the best marketing templates across the internet and put them all in one place.

“This is a really amazing resource for founders and early stage employees. Its saves us so much time from either figuring out the right templates/structures/processes or looking around the internet to find something useful.“ - Satwick

8. Sizzy is an internet browser intended for designers and developers.

“SUPER CLEAN” - Zander

7. Nomad List surfaces the best cities to live and work remotely. The travel site has over a million data points for almost every major town and city in the world with a significant population. That's data that ranges from climate throughout the year, to gender equality, to the average income of people living in different cities.

“My favorite feature is the Passport filter — it's really helpful for me to know what countries my girlfriend (Thailand) and I (Canada) can travel to easily.” - Cam

6. Notion Template Gallery is an editable community gallery that lets anyone copy, customize, and contribute Notion creations they love.

“Notion continues to be one of the apps I use on a daily basis, and their commitment to consistently rolling out new features is turning me from a comfortable user into a raving fan.” - Micah

The countdown ends tomorrow. Tune in for surrealist illustrations, a personal project management platform, and a tool that turns Google Sheets into APIs. 👀

Happy Holidays, Product Hunters! 🎄🎁🎅❄️⛄️

We're so thankful for you and are pretty excited to see everything you'll launch in the 2020s. As promised, we’re continuing with our countdown of the top most upvoted products of 2019 (until Friday). Next up:

15. 100,000 Faces is a free resource of over 100,000 faces generated by AI. RIP stock photography.

“Wow, impressive ! A bit scary... but impressive.” - Ousmane

14. Startups 3 is an online bootstrap builder that comes with predesigned elements and templates.

“One word. Beautiful.” - Fajar

13. Jumbo is a powerful privacy assistant for iOS (made by the founder of Sunrise). As we wrote in April, “the app lets you simply and easily clean up your social profiles. You can automatically adjust 30 Facebook privacy settings, delete old Tweets and make new ones ephemeral, clean old Google searches and erase your Amazon Alexa requests.”

“PLEASE do Jumbo for e-mail. PLEASE.” - Daniel

12. Terms and Conditions Generator is an attorney-approved tool that generates professional Terms and Conditions in minutes.

“It is a really powerful tool for an inherently complex area when you build products.” - Jonno

11. VisualSiteMaps automatically generates sitemaps and high-resolution screenshots of any site or web-app, making it super easy to perform in-depth site audits for UI, UX, SEO, and marketing research.

“Was just googling how to build visual site maps, and by accident found this gem. Seriously impressed by it, and was even surprised it was not on Product Hunt already.” - Jean

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

ICYMI: We’re covering the most upvoted products on Product Hunt this year in this week’s newsletters. The countdown continues...

20. Stonly creates interactive step-by-step, embeddable product explanations. The product was created by the founder of Dashlane, and ultimately aims to help people who build cool things explain how those cool things work.

“I highly recommend Stonly to our portfolio startups wanting to optimize their support teams. Top-notch UX, interactive and time-saving.“ - Laetitia

19. Clean Mockups make it super easy to create mockups right from your browser. The idea is that you’ll spend more time on product thinking versus things like resizing and masking.

“Cool, sleek design with perky colors.” - Melissa

18. INK is a handy, writers-first tool that helps to optimize content for Google. It eliminates the need to rely on SEO experience to help content stand a chance in search, and improves content traffic by understanding what audiences want.

“I have been working with and using INK for the past three months. It has changed the way I want to write.” - Sarah

17 . Glaze is a library of royalty-free illustrations anyone can use in their products or presentations.

“These are great! Using them for a presentation I'm giving soon to evoke the emotion I want people to feel. Powerful for storytelling.” - Kunal

16. Webframe is a database of 800 web app screenshots to give you inspiration for your next app. The Maker wanted to help other makers avoid signing up for web apps when they want screenshots for #inspo, which in turn leads to being spammed forever and ever.

“There's a million variations of this idea but Webframe brings a new approach to the problem. It earned a bookmark in my browser.” - Aaron

In tomorrow’s (CHRISTMAS) newsletter: a privacy assistant, a useful comic book, and an attorney-approved product. 👀

It’s almost the end of 2019! Of course, you knew that already from all the end of the decade #content that’s undoubtedly in your inbox.

There are so many products we could share to wrap of the 2010s (we’re a product of this decade), but we wanted to give some love to the most upvoted products of 2019. We’ll be sharing the year’s top 25 products over the next five days, so stay tuned! First up:

25. Marketing Examples is a super useful gallery of real-world marketing examples from successful companies. It will help you improve your SEO, perfect your newsletter strategy, and grow your following on Instagram.

“Invaluable modern marketing lessons - the only marketing newsletter I subscribe to actually.” - Pete

24. Tesla Cybertruck launched in November (with a bang) and we’re still thinking about buying one. The $39,000 electric pickup truck is designed to look like a sports car but definitely looks like it belongs on Mars.

“It feels like Tesla is the Apple of the car industry. Right now it feels strange and unfamiliar, then suddenly other manufacturers will start to move towards a similar aesthetic and it will be the norm.” - Manny

23. Exploding Topics is an aggregator for trending topics like health, business, marketing and fashion, among others. The tool scrapes the web for what’s blowing up right now, sourcing from millions of data points.

“Wow. That’s like a pre-curated Google Trends on steroids.” - Dan

22. UserGuiding is a nifty no-code tool that helps product teams create interactive manuals that showcase how a product works.

“Although we are a technology-focused team, we decided to use UserGuiding because of their smooth, easy solution. We do not need to deal with complicated user guiding development any more.” - Osman

21. Product Resources List is a huuuge list of over 250 free product management resources. The idea is to help PMs save time in their day-to-day responsibilities.

“Incredible resource for people who want to know different aspects of product management.“ - Abid

In tomorrow’s digest: AI generated faces, interactive step-by-step guides, and a special tool just for writers. 👀