The Leaderboard

“Look cool, wear pizza, support the AI fashion scene” - David

Yesterday, a new t-shirt company launched on Product Hunt. The twist? All of the shirts are designed by AI, having learned from a training set of over one million open source images.

In fact, the entire company — from the logo to the marketing copy to the brand name (“Cross & Freckle“) — is generated by AI. Don’t worry — the makers behind the project, Paul Blankley, Tyler Becker and Sarah McBride, are real humans.

“The original idea was simply to use AI to generate the doodles. Then we started seeing other generative websites and tools pop-up on PH, like Hipster Business Name and Talk to Transformer and so we decided to see just how much of a startup you can generate with AI.“ - Sarah

How they did it: The team trained a machine learning model on Google Creative Lab's “Quick, Draw!” dataset. Then they trained the model on NYC-themed drawings, with the output being minimalist doodles of rats, dogs, pizza and pigeons.

While the concept of generating an entire retail company — from clothing design to brand name — is a novel one, the intersection of retail and AI is a growing sector.

Retail spend on AI is forecasted to grow to $7.3 billion by 2022, a significant bump from the $2B spent in 2018. As retailers are learning to leverage artificial intelligence, the customer experience gets more personalized, brick-and-mortar inventory can be optimized and marketing investments can be hyper-targeted.

And some big retailers are already doing this; Levi’s uses AI to recommend ideal sizes and placements for inventory within its stores, North Face uses IBM Watson’s cognitive computing to make personalized recs on what coat customers should buy, and online consignment store ThredUp recently released “Goody Boxes,” which use an AI algorithm to remember customer preferences.

“The applications for this technology are two-fold: as a creative tool and as an efficiency tool. For example, a designer could use a training set of trending Instagram photos and generate ideas for new clothing items based on what people are already wearing and responding to. From an efficiency stand point, such a generative algorithm could feasibly take a core design created by a brand and apply it to many different clothing item designs and dimensions, cutting out the manual and labor intensive work that is currently required to do so.” - Sarah

IKEA just introduced the “world’s comfiest font.” Why? Memes.

Earlier this week, IKEA unveiled “Soffa Sans,” a font born out of the internet memes from its digital “Design your own sofa” tool. The planner allows people to configure different sectionals, and showcases the final product in 3D. IKEA doesn’t put a limit on the size (or cost) of these online couches, so of course the internet had a field day.

So IKEA — always the *hip* brand — made a font where each letter is formed by pieces of a sofa. You can download it for free here. Want more weird fonts? We obviously have got you covered. Some to check out:

👀Airbnb Cereal

👀Pokemon-font

👀Color Dot Font

👀Saucy AF Font

👀YayText!

P.S. The first 3D type foundry launched today. 🚀

Yesterday, GANpaint launched on Product Hunt and shows how creative tools of the future may work. 

The tech uses AI to add, delete and edit objects, and draws with object-level control using a deep nueural network (a GAN). More specifically, this tool takes the natural image in a specific category — let’s say churches — and allows modifications with brushes that draw things like trees, domes, brick-textures, etc.

GANpaint is the latest in a slew of creative, experimental AI-driven tools aiming to be the next Photoshop.

It’s worth noting that Photoshop got an update with a “magical” AI-powered selection tool in early 2018. If you’re an artist or a designer, try some of these out to see if they save you some output:

📸 Remove.bg uses AI to quickly remove the background from any photo

📱 BG App does the same thing for photos on iOS

😁 Lensa is an AI-powered photo editing app for selfies

🌄 Nvidia GuaGAN uses AI to turn sketches into photorealistic landscapes

👀 Mosaic uses AI to make your Insta feed better

Remember Evernote?

Spoiler alert: It’s not dead. If you weren’t (or aren’t) a die-hard user, it’s a note-taking up that was hugely popular a few years go. The company was founded in 2008 and reached unicorn status in 2012. To date, the company has raised nearly $300M in venture backing.

However, Evernote’s growth began to slow in 2015, and the company went through multiple rounds of layoffs over the past few years. According to a recent NYT article, Evenote is joining a cast of dying unicorns, or "zombiecorns," which also includes once-hot companies like Foursquare and Quora.

Some comments from Evernote’s 2014 PH launch:

“Great piece of kit, would certainly recommend! I'm a premium user, and it's worth every penny.” - Giacomo

“Still my fave. Very easy to use. I have premium subscription so I am very satisfied.” - Liz

“The second brain” - Felix

And what users thought of Evernote’s reboot in 2017:

“I want to love you again Evernote” - Brian

“I too want to remember everything! Always love you Evernote... sometimes you make it difficult, but always love.” - Austin

“Great to see Evernote doing something new. I love it as a service. It's like Dropbox for my brain.” - Samuel

With fierce customer appreciation, Evernote continues to serve a dedicate pool of users. Today, Evernote’s apps are still downloaded 50,000 times per day, but the company faces stiff competition. Other popular apps in the world of note-taking:

Notion combines the best features of Dropbox, Excel and Google Docs 🗒

Google Keep lets you save your thoughts wherever you are 💭

Taskade lets you create tasks, notes, and video chat on the same page ✔️

Bear is a well-designed, flexible writing app for notes (and prose) 📝

Things is a productivity app for the hyper-organized 💯

Milanote is a notes app for more ~creative~ work 🧠

Todoist makes entering new tasks lightning-fast ⚡️

Tell us what you think of Evernote today here.

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

The challenge: Startups need tools for growth that are designed to be both fast and scalable, especially when it comes to customer acquisition and retention.

A solution: HubSpot for Startups.

How it works: Startups can manage contacts through HubSpot’s (forever) free CRM, sell better through a suite of sales tools, manage all marketing through marketing automation software, and close the loop with customers through service tools. This makes getting your first customer, or getting your 100,000th customer (and keeping them happy) much, much easier.

The really good news: They have a special offer for the PH community. Startups are eligible for up to 90% off HubSpot software, free programming, education, events, over 300 integrations, as well as the opportunity to build an integration on HubSpot. Apply here.

And another thing! Anyone who applies for HubSpot for Startups through this link will receive a free Community Pass to INBOUND, HubSpot's 24,000 person event this September in Boston. Founders and startup employees will have unique opportunities to meet other founders, investors, and get valuable startup-only content.

About two years ago, the Product Hunt community got a first look at Superhuman, an app that promised to be the “fastest email experience in the world.” 60,000 people subscribed to get access.

Today, Superhuman remains invitation-only and its larger waiting list is 180,000 people long. How? There’s evidently a demand for a faster and more sophisticated email client than the 15-year-old Gmail.

“So...Superhuman has basically changed my life. 10/10 would recommend” - Camille Ricketts

“‘Sent via Superhuman’ is the blue checkmark of email.” - Leah Fessler

"I've been using Superhuman for a couple weeks now. When people ask me what it does for me, I reply 'Superhuman is like the Marie Kondo of email'" - Alexandre Scialom

So what happens when you do get that coveted Superhuman invitation (and pay the $30/month price tag for access)?

Superhuman plugs into your existing email account, but only works with Gmail and Google G Suite addresses right now.

Some of the app’s features: Superhuman lets users undo sending an email, track email opens and send follow-up reminders. 👋 It’s more ~unique~ features include keyboard shortcuts for everything, “instant intro” for moving introductory email senders to bcc and a scheduling tool that automatically pulls up your calendar when you’re typing out a day of the week. 💪

Today, Superhuman announced a $33M investment by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the company’s total funding raised to $51M. The company is valued at roughly $260M.

We spoke with Superhuman founder, Rahul Vohra — who previously founded Rapportive (another email startup that sold to LinkedIn in 2012) — about the news, as well as the lessons he learned building a product that hasn’t actually launched yet.

“You'll see that folks love Superhuman for three main reasons: they get through their inbox twice as fast as before, they respond to important emails faster, and many see Inbox Zero for the first time in years. The funding will be used to double down on all three. Superhuman is already the fastest email experience in the world, but we are going to make it even faster” - Rahul

Read the full interview here.

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

For anyone in tech, a constantly changing day-to-day is just par for the course. One day you could be focused on big picture road-mapping and the next day you might be working on company culture. But in startupland, there simply isn’t enough time to do it all. That’s where Vettery comes in. 👀

The company streamlines recruiting with machine learning to help companies hire. To date, Vettery has partnered with over 15,000 companies (including Fortune 500 firms) across North America, Ireland and the UK. With over 31,000 candidates in its database, Vettery has a lot of data. And they want to share some of it.

You can download Vettery’s 2019 Tech Salary report here to get a comprehensive guide to the numbers you need to help build a top-notch recruiting strategy, including average salary by role, premium programming skills, and more. In other words, it’s everything you need to hire talented software engineers, data scientists, and designers.

A few weeks ago, we pulled off the covers off of v2 of the Product Hunt API and challenged you to surprise and inspire the community with your creations. As expected, you all delivered impressive results in the latest Maker Festival. Tbh, this is our favorite fest to date.

So without further ado, here are the winners and runners up across the festival's seven categories.

Third party integration 🛠

Winner: Makerbox lets you create and manage Product Hunt Maker Goals, all from Slack. Made by Rishikesh Gorantala.

Runner Up: Makergoalbot is a Maker Goals bot for telegram. Made by Knight.

Browser extension 👀

Winner: P-Block replaces online ads with Product Hunt posts. Made by Matt.

Runner Up: Let Me Product Hunt That For You is an extension that provides Product Hunt info about a website. Made by Angela.

Data visualization 📈

Winner: Maker Network lets you explore your Product Hunt network. Made by Mubashar.

Runner Up: Buzzwords lets you check out the most used words in product descriptions. Made by George.

Desktop apps 🖥

Winner: Maker Goals Menu Bar lets you manage your goals from your Mac menu bar. Made by Ferenc.

Runner Up: Yac Bot for Product Hunt lets you hear the top product of the day in Yac. Made by Justin.

Mobile apps 📱

Winner: Makers for iOS is a full-fledged mobile app for Maker goals. Made by JPEGuin.

Runner Up: Cheerswipe lest you swipe to cheer a Maker. Made by Arthur.

Web apps 😻

Winner: Maker Goals is a new way to manage your PH goals. Made by Nikolay.

Runner Up: Maker TV is videos of the best new products in tech. Made by Raghuv.

Everything else 🙃

Winner: Product Hunt Higher Lower is a game that tests your PH knowledge. Made by Roland.

Runner Up: Peek-a-week tracks your productivity week by week. Made by Raghav.

Thank you to all of our community members who voted and a big shoutout to everyone who contributed a project. We hope to see you all at our next one - stay tuned!

Face-changing tech continues to fill our stories and camera roll. Beyond Snapchat’s viral gender swap and baby face filters (which are expected to boost the company’s Q2 numbers), AI-powered face changing is on the rise.

Last week, Photo Creator, an AI-based photo editor with face swap and background removal, launched on Product Hunt to shake up stock photos. What people think:

“Looks like the future of stock photography market to me” - Julia

“Face switching features are incredible — super easy to use” - Andrea

“So cool I can create the images I need for specific articles.” - Marina

For more face morphing fun, a few more to check out:

🙃 Reflect Step I: Face Swap lets you swap faces with Elon Musk (or anyone)

😯 Face Swap Live lets you switch faces with your friends in real-time

😁 Emojiface turns your face into an emoji

🙃 Zepeto turns your selfie into a Pixar character

😍 Lensa will make you even more beautiful

😎 Swapped lets you change faces with celebrities and friends

😉 Muglife lets you create 3D characters from any photo

😳 Deepfakes web α lets you create deepfake videos

😀 Snap Camera is Snapchat Lenses, but on desktop

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

With Libra’s launch from Facebook earlier this week, cryptocurrency has been top of mind.

But beyond the hype, the blockchain and decentralized architecture that is often used in cryptocurrencies have a lot of exciting use cases beyond tokens.

If you’ve been following Product Hunt's work on App Mining with Blockstack, you may have tried one of the over 140 apps in the wild that solve a number of problems inherent to our current internet, and empower people to connect and collaborate in new ways. These apps are built so that your fundamental digital rights remain protected, meaning you own both your identity and data from the start.

Curious how that’s possible? You’re in luck. Blockstack breaks it all down and makes it easy to try it for yourself. The TLDR: the traditional model of a central entity controlling everything is gone and the underlying network puts users in charge.

And if you’re the type that just likes to jump in and play around, here are some of our favorite new apps that (quite literally) can’t be evil:

💌 Dmail is a privacy focused email provider

🙌 BitPatron is a decentralized censorship-free Patreon alternative

🔒 Closet is a password and secrets manager for teams

💸 Lannister Capital is the simplest wealth manager and financial planner

👏 Blackhole is a blockchain-based file transfer tool for everyday use.

💵 Paid lets you sell anything and pocket everything

🔮 Predicto makes predictions about future events to earn money

You can check out all 140 of them here.

P.S. You still have time to submit an app to Blockstack’s Can’t Be Evil contest (there’s over $15,000 up for grabs).