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What happened this week on Product Hunt!? Here’s a look at the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches. 👇

Electric Vehicles 🚘 

Tesla just revealed their futuristic “cybertruck,” a new ($39,000) electric pickup truck designed to look like a sports car. While debuting the truck onstage, Elon Musk asked Tesla’s lead designer, Franz von Holzhausen, to showcase the truck’s “Armor Glass” by throwing a metal ball at the driver window. It...cracked. Musk asked Holzhausen to throw the ball at the passenger window. That cracked too. Elon then proceeded with his presentation in front of a truck with two broken windows. ‘Twas a Silicon Valley gift.

The Weird and Wacky 😜

The crypto sock market is a thing. Unisocks ($SOCKS) are tokens that get you one (real) pair of limited edition socks. Each purchase and sale will move the price.

“Ethereum, but make it fashion!” - Deana

MSCHF, the creative team behind Bull & Moon and  Netflix Hangouts, had an unexpected drop this week — you can text a selfie to their hotline and they’ll have it professionally edited live on camera. They’re calling it “Facetune.tv.“

Self-Care 🙌

Tiny Spells is a daily email that comes with three actionable tasks that help you look after you.

“What a clever idea! I've been a long-time gratitude journal user (and founder) and I think there's something interesting about starting your day off with ideas to make it better. Journaling has helped me do more of this but I like the idea of having specific intentions each day.” - Matt

Moodboost is like Cards Against Humanity but for Snapchat. How it works: Post questions on your Snap Story and have friends reply to make you laugh. BTW, the app detects if you smile.

Big Launches 👀

Warby Parker launched Scout, the company’s first-ever daily contact lens.

“Hoping Scout delivers the polished experience Warby is known for.” - Mary

Synthetic Media company Rosebud AI launched a database of over 25,000 AI-generated stock photos. Rest assured, there are no real people in the database.

“We focused on bringing forth a way to diversify stock photo content since it was a need we heard voiced by stock photo users.” - Rosebud AI founder Lisha Li

Predictions 🔮

Dating apps will invest more in video.

This week, dating app The League launched "live” video dates, a feature where they pair users for two-minute live video chats. The idea is to cut back on bad first meetings in the age of internet dating.

Facebook Dating also touches on this, allowing folks to view each other’s Stories before meeting.

Some other stuff from this week...

A podcast on the future of podcasting (meta). An article from a former Olympian turned tech founder. And a discussion about experimenting on your own body.

Please share your honest feedback about this newsletter here. 🙏

PayPal made its largest acquisition yesterday.

The online payments company bought promo code-finder Honey for $4 billion, betting that the Chrome extension and mobile product will give PayPal a leg up in deal discovery. 💸

A brief history: LA-based Honey was founded in 2012 and has flown somewhat under the radar since its launch. But early adopters quickly “got” Honey’s value — it saved them money while shopping and made googling promo codes a thing of the past.

“I was buying a GoDaddy domain, Honey automatically plugged in a bunch of promo codes and tested them all out, and I saved 14 dollars on a $15 domain. I only paid $1.24!” - Izzy

“Product discovery, where the right consumer has access to the right solution at the right time, is essential. Honey has the solution that people want, now it has to make sure it reaches all the interested folk through channel partnerships.” - Manisha

Honey now has about 17 million monthly active users, who are mostly on the younger side. Similar to an affiliate marketing model, the company takes a commission from merchants when shoppers use Honey (or its rewards program Honey Gold) to make a purchase. The product has saved shoppers over $2 billion to date and generated $100 million in revenue last year. 🛍

PayPal’s plan: PayPal (which currently has 300 million users) will add Honey to its own product line, which includes millennial-minded payments app Venmo. While Honey currently works with around 30,000 merchants, PayPal works with about 24 million merchants, and will now be able to offer more targeted coupons to shoppers.

While investors have historically discounted Chrome extensions, maybe this deal will change things. Some other extensions worth checking out:

💯 Grammarly helps you type mistake-free writing

🙌 Lolli lets you earn Bitcoin when you shop online

👀 Response Viewer shows you multiple screens in one view

🗞 Reader Mode removes clutter and ads from any article

Would you take $10,000 to leave the Bay Area? This isn’t a rhetorical question — a new experiment called MainStreet will actually pay you to do just that. 🧐

MainStreet’s actual mission is to create more jobs and opportunities in rural and suburban communities in the U.S.

“Our goal as a product and as a company is to link the talent that lives in these communities, with the jobs that are based in expensive urban areas like SF and NY.” — Maker Doug Ludlow wrote on Product Hunt.

Doug and his two co-founders, Dan Lindquist and Daniel Griffin, are all ex-Googlers who want to replicate Google’s remote-friendly culture on a larger scale. They’re starting by bringing together tech companies that don’t want to (or can’t afford) to pay Silicon Valley salaries with employees who are willing to move out of the Bay Area to work remotely. Besides career matchmaking, MainStreet will also train tech workers in remote best practices (like video conferencing) and put them up in a brick-and-mortar MainStreet office with other remote workers. These shared work spaces will first show up in Sacramento, Portland and Salt Lake City. 👋

MainStreet’s longer term goals is to create one million jobs in rural and suburban places over the next decade.

The $10,000 bit is part of MainStreet’s launch strategy — the idea is to draw attention to their mission, and ultimately make people realize that they don’t have to live in the Bay Area (or New York, or Los Angeles) to succeed professionally. According to Doug, the program already has thousands of applicants, a large portion of which are “highly-skilled professionals like engineers, PMs, attorneys, etc.”

Would you do this? We really want to know.

Product Hunt members had some suggestions and questions for the MainStreet team.

“I’d love to see this expand to giving money to people who are actually from SF who have been displaced by the immense gentrification.” - Max

“I'm currently buying property in Maine because I can't handle the tiny apartments and concrete of NYC anymore. Over time, I have a (very ambitious) plan the make the area into a little bit of a hub because I know I will miss the community I have in NYC. I'm curious how you're working with places to make this happen.” - Lola

Share your own thoughts here. 👈

If you’re happy where you’re at, you could always work remotely like we do at the Product Hunt team (across 9 countries). Check out AngelList’s remote job board if you’re looking. 

P.S. Makers Festival voting is open! Vote for your favorite product here to determine this year’s winners. 

Facebook is launching apps left and right. Last week we wrote about the company’s two new experimental apps, AUX and Bump. Now Facebook has quietly launched Whale, an ad-free meme maker.

Whale lets users overlay texts and effects over their own images or images from the app’s stock photo library. The idea is that users will then share their meme creations on other Facebook apps (like Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp). Whale is currently only available in Apple’s Canadian App Store. If you’re in Canada, tell us what you think. 👀

All three of these apps came out of the company’s ‘New Product Experimentation’ (NPE) team, a group building consumer-facing apps to test out new ideas. AUX and Bump have reportedly not gained any traction yet, and Facebook says that all of these experimental apps could potentially shut down. FWIW, Facebook has been doing this type of thing for years — Moments, Notify, Lifestage, Slingshot, Moves and Hello have all shut down. 👋

Facebook is testing in public in order to identify new services that people might like, especially among younger crowds. In particular, it seems Facebook is fighting to stay relevant in the age of TikTok (don’t forget about Facebook’s own TikTok competitor Lasso).

Patagonia’s mission statement is to “use business to protect nature.” And they’ve been delivering on this idea for a while.

In 2017, the company launched Worn Wear, a marketplace of second-hand products made from refurbished old clothes. When customers start to notice holes or worn fabric on their jackets or vests, Patagonia will also have it repaired. But with the rise of sustainable clothing brands — and the pressing need to avoid sending old clothes to landfills — Patagonia has a plan to recycle your old clothes that are truly beyond repair.

That plan is called ReCrafted, a clothing line that recycles “unusable” clothes into one-of-a-kind products. Each piece of clothing is made up of between three and six pieces of clothing, and ranges from items like puffer vests, t-shirts, jackets and bags.

The price point is high ($257 for a repurposed vest, for example), but this type of line could become less expensive as more companies focus on extending the lifespans of garments. For the most part, folks on Product Hunt appreciated Patagonia’s initiative, despite the expense.

“There's a lot of labor involved so I don't think it's an unreasonable price.” - Christine

“Patagonia is awesome. Still rocking my first Skinny Lin's thanks to their lifelong free repairs. Now they even stepped up their game. I hope this can be scaled immensely.” - Dario

Some other products in the business of saving your old clothing (and the planet):

💡 Lunation Lab designed a system of iron-on vinyl to revive clothing

👋 Cutso wants to eliminate fashion industry waste through voting

🙌 Rent the Runway lets you rent clothing (instead of buying it)

👕 Kidizen is a marketplace for pre-loved children’s products

👀 Poshmark is a huge marketplace to buy and sell used clothing

👖 DrobeUp lets you buy, sell and donate women’s clothes locally

What happened this week on Product Hunt? Here’s a look at the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches, along with a few other things you may have missed. 👇

Big Tech 💻

Yesterday, Apple released a research app that lets Apple Watch and iPhone users participate in three health data studies. The app will track users’ heart health, collect data on headphone usage and track women’s menstrual cycles as they relate to certain health conditions. It’s worth noting that data from only people who own Apple products isn’t representative of society as a whole, but the research app is a step in the right direction.

“Hey, at least Apple is requesting our participation.” - Lydia

Apple’s other announcements this week came with the release of the new MacBook Pro and Apple Music Replay, which is the company’s competitor to Spotify Wrapped. You can relive the music that defined your year here.

Speaking of Spotify, the music streaming service is now a part of Magic Leap. You can now virtually pin your music on the wall with AR.

Predictions 🔮

We’ll all be controlling our computers with hand gestures soon. The Gestoos app lets you connect hand gestures with a command or shortcut installed on your computer, meaning you can interact with your device hands-free.

“I always wanted to be a Jedi” - Keisha

In other news, all of our smartphones will probably become foldable soon (more on that here). The iconic Razr flip phone returned in foldable glory this week.

“I can see myself flipping this open in middle of an all-hands meeting feigning nonchalance” - Abhinav

Productivity ✍️

Basecamp launched a free version of Basecamp, designed with freelancers, students, families, and personal projects in mind.

“I've always struggled finding the balance for personal project management between to-do list tools (urgh) and full-blown team project management tools which tend to be overkill. Going to give this a try.” - Marcus

GitHub has gone mobile. It’s the first version of GitHub for iOS and Android and it’s heavily focused on collaboration with peers on issues and pull requests.

Adalo launched this week and made waves in the no-code world. Given that less than 1% of the world knows how to code, Adalo lets you create mobile and web apps without technical know-how.

“Since founding Adalo, our mission has been to create something simple enough for anyone to use, but powerful enough that you could create some pretty complex functionality, and we think we’ve come pretty close” - Adalo CEO Jeremy Blalock

The Weird and Wacky 😜

MSCHF, the company behind Bull & Moon, M-Journal and Netflix Hangouts, revealed their latest drop on Tuesday. It was a "restaurant" that let you funnel corporate meal perks to political candidates and it already got shut down.

MSCHF is historically secretive about how they build products, but they talked to Product Hunt about their "dopamine and waiting" strategy to growth and why they consider themselves the 'Banksy of the internet. Read the article here.

Some other stuff from this week...

An article on brand strategy in the “death tech” industry. A discussion on selling $1 billion worth of e-commerce products. A podcast on the early days at Facebook and advice on pitching VCs. And a survey — would you join a PH meetup in your city?

Please share your honest feedback about this newsletter here. 🙏

Could Facebook take users away from popular payments platforms like Venmo and the Cash App? We’ll see.

Yesterday, Facebook took the hood off Facebook Pay, a new feature that lets you pay other people on Facebook via Messenger. While Facebook already had “Payments” through Messenger, Facebook Pay works with credit cards and will maintain your transaction history. The news comes only a few months after Facebook’s big Libra announcement, which is currently facing regulatory roadblocks. It’s worth noting that PayPal (the owner of Venmo) just backed out of the group backing Libra.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Facebook Pay will apparently be separate from Libra. 
• The new payments feature is rolling out on Messenger in the U.S. this week. 
• Facebook users can use it to pay for game purchases, event tickets, and person-to-person payments (including on Facebook Marketplace). 
• Facebook plans to expand the service to WhatsApp and Instagram. 

On Product Hunt, reactions to Facebook Pay were mixed.

“If data is a person's most valuable commodity and FB have consistently proven they can't be trusted with it, why would I ever consider using their payments system for my money?” - Connor 

“Don't be surprised your family members sending you Christmas money through Facebook Pay.” - Edison 

“Makes sense, it can easily compete with Venmo/Cash app.” - Thiago 

Do you think you’ll use Facebook Pay?

Chroma Stories is an Instagram competitor built by insiders, meaning lead developers behind Instagram Stories and Boomerang. The group of former Instagram and Facebook employees — Alex Li, Joshua Harris and John Barnett — left their jobs to start a new venture building features for the growing Stories revolution.

Chroma Stories operates as a stories-adjacent tool — it offers a variety of templates, motion presets, filters and text tools to level up your stories (whether that’s on Instagram or elsewhere). On Instagram proper, you have five fonts you can work with in your Stories. On Snapchat there’s nine. On Chroma, there’s 20 fonts and over 150 templates (for free), and even more when you opt for the app’s $30 annual subscription. 📱

Chroma is joining an interesting space. It’s part of a group of startups that aren’t trying to build the “next big social media company” but trying to build the next big tool for people already using Facebook, Instagram, Snap, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube or whatever. The Chroma folks want to be competitive by making social media users feel unique in the sea of Stories, posts and likes. This type of tool is in the same vein as VSCO, the photo editing app currently has 40 million monthly users (with 75% of them under 25).

Some other apps we’ve seen in this space include Unfold (recently acquired by Squarespace), Buffer Stories Creator, Kapwing Story Templates, Featured.

Disney’s standalone streaming service Disney+ is HERE. Starting today, folks in the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands can tap into Disney’s vault of animated classics, TV shows, and new originals, as well as content from Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic. 🎉

The streaming service plans to expand to the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain on March 31st, 2020, and different content will be available in different countries (like Netflix).

A slew of services have entered the streaming arena lately, including HBO Max, NBC’s Peacock and Apple TV Plus. While some may be hesitant to add yet another streaming service to their life, Disney holds a certain legacy power over viewers. For families with children, it’s a gold mine. For everyone else, Disney movies are the best form of nostalgia.

FYI: Disney+ will run you $6.99 per month. 👀

Some initial thoughts from the PH community:

“I think what's interesting is that their relatively limited catalog (compared to Netflix) is an advantage for them, as I suspect their viewers repeat view a lot.” - Steven

“I like the quality over quantity approach! I also wonder how fast movies will show up on Disney+ after being shown in the theaters.” - Elena

“While I'm not super excited about having yet another separate streaming service, I do think that this one has a good price and offering. I just hope they don't keep anything in the Disney vault and actually make their full catalog eventually available.” - Jake

Will you pay for Disney+?

P.S. If you’re not into paying for streaming services at all, try Pluto.TV for a free way to flip through channels. 📺

Facebook has two new experimental apps — AUX and Bump. The apps quietly launched out of Facebook’s new ‘NPE Team’ division, a group building consumer-facing apps to test out new ideas. So what are they? 👀

Bump is an anonymous chat app geared at helping people make new friends through icebreakers online. The idea is to make connections through dialogue versus appearances — conversations in the app are plain text with no images, videos or links. Users can only have one chat going at a time and there’s a time limit unless both people in the conversations actively engage. Facebook really wants us to be in their app.

“Giving me YikYak / After School vibes.” - Ryan

AUX is a Turntable.fm-esque app (RIP).

If you don’t remember Turntable.fm, it was basically a social network that allowed people to DJ in virtual “rooms.” It was sort of like if Spotify had chatrooms with bobbing avatars and it shut down in 2013.

AUX is launching with a similar idea — it’s a social music streaming app where users can DJ for their friends. The idea is also similar to apps like Roadtrip and we:fm, two apps that let folks DJ commutes, workouts, etc. within their social circles. What makes AUX unique, however, is that it’s going after a niche — kids and teens. And Facebook is enticing them with a “party” everyday in the app at 9:00 p.m. At the end of the party, a musical winner is chosen by how many claps they receive from their friends.

This is seems like it could turn into a popularity contest, which goes against Facebook’s recent moves to “depressurize” their apps. On Friday, news broke that Instagram would start hiding likes in the U.S. this week to make social media sharing less of a competition. Will you still post on Instagram?