The Leaderboard

We’re trying something new in the newsletter today.

Instead of a deep dive on one particular product (our usual style), we’re recapping the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches, along with a few other things you may have missed across the Product Hunt ecosystem. We hope you dig it, but please share your honest feedback here.

 Big Tech 💻

Facebook News, a dedicated place for journalism on Facebook, just arrived. The “News Tab” is available today to certain U.S. users, and will roll out more widely in the coming months. The idea is to drive revenue back to media companies — the Facebook News homepage will by curated by journalists with “editorial independence.” Tell us what you think.

Google launched a new set of apps designed to help you balance your life with technology this week. The “Digital Wellbeing” experiments debuted in the Play Store, and include apps like “Unlock Clock” to tell you how many times you unlock your smartphone per day, “Post Box” to control when (and how often) you get notifications, “Morph” to show you different apps based on the time of day, and “WeFlip” to help you unplug during IRL time with others.

Productivity ✍️

Coda, a startup reinventing docs, just took the hood off of a refresh. The update is sleeker, simpler and faster to give makers a more efficient space to collaborate on projects. Todoist also released a big update, which includes new task views and the option to create sections for to-do lists.

“Well, this update is simply great. Love it. I used Todoist since 2010, closed 39'840 Tasks and reached a Karma of 58'480. But I have to say that this update is almost perfect.” - Daniel

Kapwing made a splash this week to introduce real-time collaboration on multimedia projects. With its new tools, creaters can edit video, animate, add music, caption images, make ads, design graphics, create memes...should we keep going? Since Kapwing came out of stealth about a year ago, it’s grown 10X (to more than 1 million users) and just raised a $11 million Series A.

Hardware 👀

Fujifilm is making interesting moves. Their new X-Pro3 digital camera is reverting, in a sense, to include more analog features. The idea is to replicate a film-like experience on a digital camera, meaning make it slower and more deliberate. When you want to review your photos during a shoot, you have to actually stop and “open” the screen.

The Weird and Wacky 😜

An unexpected pairing: an app that recommends stock investments based on your astrological sign. Will it actually help you make money? According to Maker Daniel Greenberg, the answer is yes.

“For a Leo born on August 18, 1997, Bull & Moon’s algorithm recommended 6 stocks. Over the duration of Q3 2019, the portfolio returned 7.47% versus a market baseline of 1.7% in the same quarter.” - Daniel

Predictions 🔮

The first analytics tool for TikTok influencers just launched. We think we’ll be seeing a lot more of these type of tools in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Some other stuff from this week...

An AMA about fundraising, intellectual property and mixing nostalgia with tech. A debate on paying for ad-free YouTube. Some honest feelings about AirPods. And a podcast about growing from zero to eight figures in 24 months.

Over the past two years, our Makers Festivals have encouraged makers to build, tinker, and launch products in just four weeks. It’s like a hackathon but online and open to people from all backgrounds, not just software development. From there, we’ve seen everything from walkie-talkie apps raise $400,000 to writing communities garner thousands of members after launching out of the Festival.

The literal prize at the end of each Festival is a silver kitty trophy, but the larger win is all of the amazing products that launch in such a short amount of time.

Needless to say, we love partnering with companies that share our love for building new things. That’s why we’re super excited to announce that we’re teaming up with Snapchat to bring you the biggest Makers Festival yet. 🎉

This month, we’re encouraging makers to flex their creative muscles using Snap Kit and create fun/useful/weird apps for the hundreds of millions of Snapchatters around the world.

But first, what is Snap Kit? 

Snap Kit is Snap’s collection of developer tools that help third parties build integrations with Snapchat. Makers can bring some of Snapchat’s features into their own apps, as well as integrate their apps or websites into the Snapchat experience.

More than 450 apps integrated with Snap Kit to date — here’s a few of our favorites for some #inspo (you can find the full collection of apps here).

🤳 Squad lets you screen share with friends in a video chat

🛍 Wishupon lets you create and share shopping lists

🎙 Breaker is a social podcasting app

👻 TOKO lets you make polls directly in your Snapchat Stories

👀 WYA is an events app for Snapchat

🎨 PicsArt is a social photo editor

💬 YOLO lets you receive anonymous questions from your Snapchat followers

We’re giving makers five categories to build for this time around, including:

Creative Tools

This is for the most creative use of Snapchat’s Creative Tools (Stickers, Captions, Filters, and Lenses) accessed through Creative Kit. You can check out Creative Kit for Web as an additional resource — it’s a newly released toolset for sharing webpages and web apps to Snapchat.

Bitmoji

This is for the most creative use of the Bitmoji avatar that is compliant with Bitmoji Guidelines. Special consideration will be given to apps that use Bitmoji in an innovative way beyond their use in chat and communication. This category also includes Friendmoji, stickers co-starring a users and their friends.

User Experience

This is for a seamless, excellent user experience in your Snap Kit integration.

Snap Kit Combo

This is for the best use of multiple Kits that work together to create a great product.

Anything Else

Feel free to build a product outside of these themes. Go crazy, get creative and have fun. 😻

Prizes

Each category will have a winning product, which will receive the coveted silver kitty trophy.

The most ingenious Snap Kit product will also receive two pairs of Snapchat’s new Spectacles.😎

The Snap Kit Makers Festival starts now. You can register here.

Registration closes the 31st of October at 11pm PT (spooky, right? 👻). 

We cannot wait to see what you build. 🤗

The Squarespace of social media might actually become...Squarespace. 👀

The company just announced that it’s acquired Unfold, a toolkit of templates that people can use to make beautiful (really beautiful) Instagram Stories.

Unfold was founded in 2017 by Alfonso Cobo as an app originally built for designers. It took off when Cobo partnered with Andy McCune, the person behind the Instagram account Earth (which currently has over one million followers). By 2018, the company was on track to bring in $2.6 million for the year, had 11 million users and garnered about 100,000 app downloads per day.

Some reactions from their initial PH launch:

“Well, this social media marketer will be using it ..beautiful.” - Jayne

“Would strongly suggest it to anyone looking to ‘tell a story’ on instagram, the format is all about storytelling“ - Dina

When Unfold refreshed it’s app last year, McCune wrote on Product Hunt that the app had grown to nearly 20 million users (including people like Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian). 🤳

Now, Unfold has reportedly been used to create more than 700 million Instagram stories. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it does seem like Squarespace has been expanding its suite of products as of late. The company recently acquired an online scheduling tool and launched an email marketing product last year. It makes sense — landing page creation is becoming an increasingly competitive space, with Carrd, Wix and Webflow as viable alternatives.

Pablo Stanley believes in the idea of open design. Pablo (the maker behind Buttsss, Humaaans, Bottts and Avataaars, among others) recently launched his latest (seemingly controversial) project, Open Doodles, a collection of “open-source” illustrations that others can copy, edit, remix, share or redraw for any purpose without restriction under copyright or database law.

“I hope that this kind of resource makes it easier for designers to show the value of illustration in their mockups, or just add a bit of quirkiness to their products. Maybe this will encourage others to create their own kit and share it with the world,” Pablo wrote on Product Hunt.

It seems Figma shares his sentiment. Today, the startup is taking the hood off Figma Community, a public space where people can publish live design files.

How it works: Because Figma has a free tier and is web-based, anyone can inspect, remix and learn from the work shared. This means diving into layers panels or clicking through nested design elements to understand how a design was made. Designers can duplicate those works to their own Figma account when the licensing allows for it, and companies can create public profiles to share their teams’ designs out in the open.

“Designers are opening up. They’re welcoming non-designers into their process. They’re co-editing with teammates. They’re sharing what they do and how they do it with the community. And they’re setting a new standard for the next generation. So, today, Figma is evolving to make it even easier to open up the design process," says Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field. 

Out of the gate, a number of tech companies and designers are sharing their work (and how they do it) through Figma Community. 👀

Slack is publishing its UI kit to help its partners build better Slack apps. Lambda School is publishing free design learning templates for students to adapt and play with. Dropbox is sharing culture kits for design managers to use at their own companies. Zach Grosser, a designer who runs his own presentation design business and formerly led communication design at Square, is publishing a few of his most popular slide templates to generate leads. Artist and designer David Kulakevich recreated a painting in Figma a few months ago and is will open up the file in Figma Community so every can see how it was made. The Square Crypto team is even researching methods for designing Bitcoin, and is working with Figma’s new platform to explore ways to do that.

The boom in open, free illustration kits is certainly heating up. At Product Hunt, we’ve seen over a dozen collections and tools in the space launch over the last year. You can browse them all here. 👈

It’s been about a year since Apple announced new iOS tools to help iPhone users understand the time they spend on their phones. The idea was to help people manage their screen time and reduce interruptions with things like Activity Reports and App Limits. But are smartphone users actually disciplined enough to use these tools in practice? We polled the PH community.

We specifically asked folks if they use screen time limit notifications on their smartphones. The results:

• 54 percent don’t use screen time limits. 
• 32 percent do use them, but ignore them (yikes). 
• Only 14 percent of smartphone users we polled actually follow the screen time limits they use. 

“I also turned this on for Instagram and Candy Crush. When it cut me off the first time — it was so abrupt (it was like only 10 a.m.!) and I felt cheated. Now it's much much, much easier and most days I don't even get to the time limit anymore.” - Lanre

“I feel guilty for ignoring it sometimes. It somehow already became muscle memory to just ‘Ignore it for 15 minutes.’" - Kevin

“I use this for Instagram — but I pretty much always hit the time limit and ignore it” - Taylor

“I didn't know they made notifications, I just check the screen time hours each week! I'm going to start using them though” - Sarah

Do you use screen time limits? Take the poll.

If Apple’s built-in screen monitoring tools don’t work for you, here are a few alternatives to consider:

⏰ Screentime is a Chrome extension to track your time on websites

🚫 Go Fucking Work is a website blocker to help you work smarter

📱 Detoxify creates fake apps to replace addictive apps

📹 YouTube Rabbit Hole limits you from going down a YouTube rabbit hole

👀 Trackr helps you track the time you spend on certain websites

📈 Rescue Time gives you analytics on your daily online habits

⏳ Hours is a sleek and simple time tracker

“Why get a check when you could get a checkbook?” - Naval Ravikant

That’s the sentiment powering Spearhead, a bold new approach to venture started by AngelList co-founder Naval and Accomplice founder, Jeff Fagnan. Spearhead was founded on the notion that startup founders make the best investors, and companies founded by a team with both founder and investor experience have a sort of startup superpower. 🔥

Spearhead launched in 2017 and originally provided founders with $200,000 in investment capital from its first fund. This week the firm announced that it plans to give its founders 5x more capital to play with — $1 million to 15 founders, to be exact.

How it actually works: This group of founders will get their own fund so they can learn the craft of angel investing to increase their chance of future success. To be eligible to become a Spearhead “lead,” you must live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or New York City and run (or very recently have run) a startup. Once a founder goes through the two-year program, he or she can also apply for $10 million (to invest) after graduation. 35 founders have completed the program so far, and Spearhead just opened up applications for its third cohort.

The Spearhead leads have invested in 160 companies to date, including startups like ZeroDown, Cloosiv, O.school, PopSQL, Sword Health, Superplastic, Height, AirGarage, Scythe and Altitude Networks.

With infrastructure like Spearhead, AngelList, and scout networks available, there’s more early-stage investors than ever. If you’re interested in learning the investing ropes, this is a good guide to understanding how early-stage funding works and this will teach you how to invest.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Blockstack.

It’s no secret that there’s a new class of apps on the rise.

They’re user-centric, privacy-first and regulars on Blockstack’s daily charts for most of 2019. Everyday, these apps hand over new types of control to their users as they slowly trickle into the mainstream.

If you haven’t taken the reins of your own online identity and data yet, it may be a good time to get started (before the next large-scale data hack, leak, etc.). To get you going, these apps are all accessible with a single Blockstack ID:

👀 Trove is a privacy-focused, decentralized bookmark manager

📞 dPhone makes secure calls directly between you and the other person

⚫️ BlackHole  is an easy, secure, and server-less file transfer

📖 Gekri is an encrypted private diary

📸 EZResize lets you quickly resize your photos without prying eyes

💬 Land Ho! lets you keep your searches to yourself

🙌 Xor Drive lets you own your data, always

😃 Nomie is a private mood tracker

If none of these strike your fancy, there are over 270 more to play with and, if you’re a builder, you can get paid to build these types of apps through Blockstack’s App Mining program.

Google’s latest smartphones finally arrived yesterday, along with a bunch of other new products that were announced at the Made by Google hardware event in New York City. 👀

Here’s what you need to know:

The Pixel 4 📱

The official Pixel 4 reveal was preceded by plenty of leaks, but it’s still a pretty exciting update. The device’s new hardware features include an extra camera lens, an infrared face scanner to unlock the phone and computational photography to automatically process images to look more professional.

The Pixel 4 also includes a Recorder app that can transcribe speech in real time, without an internet connection. You can then search through all past recordings for a particular word — this is a Google product after all. 😉

Do you think the new Pixel is similar to the iPhone 11?

Pixel Buds 👂

The new Pixel Buds are Google’s competitive answer to AirPods. They integrate with Google Assistant, and sit snugly in your ears. Google says that the headphones can stay connected to your phone (via Bluetooth) up to the length of the football field. The buds will be available in Spring 2020 for $179.

Something fun: They come in an array of different colors, including black, white, mint green and coral.

What do you think? Better than AirPods?

Pixelbook Go 💻

The Pixelbook Go is Google’s most affordable Chromebook to date. The laptop will start at $649, and it’s important to note that it doesn’t rotate into a tablet. The Pixelbook Go is ideal for traveling and moving around — it has a rubbery bottom (which is ribbed for an easier grip) and can last 12 hours on a single charge.

Would you use this as your travel laptop?

Nest Mini 🔊

The Nest Mini is a tiny new speaker, and it’s smarter and faster than its predecessor, the Google Home Mini. They (mostly) look the same, but the new speakers have a bass that’s twice as strong and come with a wall mount. In typical Google fashion, the smart speaker is available in a few cute colors — coral, light blue, light gray and black.

Which voice platform team are you on? Take our poll.

Nest Wifi 👀

Google also released an update to its original WiFi router, unveiling the new and improved Nest Wifi. The system has a powerful router and comes with companion extenders called Points. These Points each have a speaker and microphones that support Google Assistant, so they’ll essentially double as Google Homes.

Bonus Announcements 🎉

Google also announced that its new gaming platform Stadia is officially launching on November 19th. The company will be phasing out its virtual reality platform Daydream.

The founders of ASYSTEM (pronounced “a system”) have a new term for men’s wellness. It’s called “betterment,” a descriptor they’re using to sell subscription-based skincare and vitamin supplement products. 👀

ASYSTEM just launched on the heels of a $4 million seed round from investors like Firstminute Capital, S8 Capital and PLG Ventures. They’re entering a crowded space, where multiple companies are competing to challenge our dated notions of what it means to be a guy. So far, we’ve seen launches from startups like Hims ($197 million raised), Ro ($176.1 million raised), Keeps ($22.8 million raised), Dadi ($7 million raised), all of which have made inroads to help men deal with “wellness” areas like hair loss, erectile dysfunction, sperm storage, etc.

“Hims is a fabulous company that makes men's wellness a priority for an affordable price. Honestly, I was skeptical at first, but with consistent use of their hair products and diet/ exercise, I was able to turn some balding around.” - Noel, on Hims

“Really excited to be an investor in Roman. There really hasn’t been any kind of trusted brand for men before. This is great example of a beautiful, needed services designed for the digital age.” - Alexis, on Roman

“What I like about Keeps is how easy the process is to find a right treatment.” - Dave, on Keeps

“Love this idea. It’s so hard to take charge of this otherwise — it can be confusing, expensive, embarrassing.” - Tom, on Dadi 

ASYSTEM’s product offerings are less taboo, a key differentiator for the startup.

The company’s vitamin supplement package promises improved “focus, stamina, energy, recovery, mood and sex drive,” and will run you $75 per month. For $45 per month, you can buy ASYSTEM’s 3-step skincare package. The “Total Body System” (both packages) will cost you $99 per month.

ASYSTEM’s founders, Josh Levine and Oliver Walsh, are both veterans in the lifestyle business; Josh is the former founder of Frame Denim and Oliver was formerly the CMO of Aritzia.

Would you try ASYSTEM? Tell us here.

There’s nothing quite like a reminder of your mortality to start the week.

ICYMI:  You Will Die in X Weeks just launched on Product Hunt to help you interactively visualize how many weeks you have left to live. 💀

Maker Shah Galeeb Ahmed says he hopes this “scares people into not wasting time.”

“I had a similar graphic on my personal site that counted down the weeks left in my life, and lots of people found it either awesome or scary. So I thought I'd let others build their own.” - Shah

Other comments illuminated that these types of products typically get two types of responses; some people enjoy this strange form of motivation and others hate visualizing their life passing by. Which one are you? 🤔

If you fall in the former group, you can try out Population Project to see how much of the world’s population is younger and older than you. You’re getting old is another fun (or terrifying) tool for a snapshot of world events and statistics around your birth date.

For more constant morbid reminders, try Death Clock, a Chrome extension that reminds you of life’s fleeting nature every time you open a new tab. And of course there’s WeCroak, the app that makes the reality of death inescapable. The app sends you a reminder five times a day at unpredictable intervals, but always with the same message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

“The idea is, when you contemplate mortality 5 times a day, it's easier to pay attention to what matters, and let go what really doesn't.” - Manasvini