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What's next for email? Keeping you calm, apparently. 😌

Consider, an email client designed to keep you calm, launched on Product Hunt yesterday to a warm welcome. A little on the app's backstory:

“We started Consider because we're fans of email. We like that email doesn’t interrupt you. And that subject lines keep threads focused. And we love that anyone can email anyone else. But email has its problems, problems that we are all too familiar with.” - Consider Maker, Ben McRedmond

The problems he's referencing are checking your email a hundred times a day and never getting to (0) in your inbox. 😬

So how does Consider *actually* make things calmer?

Consider uses “Digests,” which means you'll receive email in three batches each day (at times you choose). However, your most important email contacts skip digests so you won't miss the really important stuff. Consider also uses “Precise Notifications” for things that absolutely can't wait. And it lets you block or mute automated senders. 🙏

Some initial thoughts from the PH community:

“The digests feature has saved me from myself - got into a really bad habit of checking email every few minutes with other clients “ - Simon

“I pretty much love anything that validates how long email has been around, and how long it's gonna stay around. Thanks for building a good thing for email, y'all!” - Josh

“It keeps different kinds of work inside the inbox, so I'm more organized with more peace of mind to a space that is historically hectic.” - Megan

Important to note: This blissful email experience will cost you $14/month. 🤑

More ways you can get to inbox zero *bliss*:

💌 Polymail

💌 Leave Me Alone

💌 Newton Mail

💌 Superhuman

💌 TL;DR for Apple Watch

💌 Boxy Suite

Instagram is reportedly testing a web version of DMs. This means you can get the thrill of a notification in your Insta inbox even when you're not on your phone.

*gasps*

Could Instagram turn into full-blown SMS? Maybe. But this possible new feature is really part of a larger shift we're seeing away from mindless scrolling and towards private, group-oriented messaging.

We already know Facebook is leanin' into private messaging. Last week the company announced that it plans to unify the backend infrastructure for its messaging suite — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — and allow cross-app chat. Facebook also added new management tools and features for groups last week, which includes things like a mentorship feature, formatting for posts and bulleted lists.

And it makes sense. More people reportedly use messaging platforms (4.1B in 2018 across the top 4 messaging apps) than social networks (roughly 3.4B social media MAUs worldwide). Marketers are also taking notice — Giphy CEO Alex Chung has publicly said he thinks brands should advertise in private messages.

So as people shift away from broadcast (RIP The Feed) — where will online communities gather?

We have some ideas (besides Instagram, Facebook, What'sApp, Snap and Twitter):

Telegram is secure, simple instant messaging 💬

Signal is a mobile app for highly secure end-to-end messaging 🔒

Discord is a voice and text chat app designed specifically for gamers 🎮

October is a visual and pseudonymous social network 🙈

Duoshan (created by ByteDance) is an ephemeral video chat app 📹

Squad lets you screen share with friends from a group video chat 👥

Mighty Networks is a platform for people to gather around niche interests 🙌

Islands is Slack for college 🌴

NextDoor is a social app that lets you connect with your neighbors 🏠

Peach lets you share what you feel, think, see and hear with friends. Yes, it's still alive! 🍑

Some biiiig money is going behind getting robots to deliver stuff to your doorstep. Yesterday, autonomous delivery startup Nuro got a huge influx of cash ($940M) from Softbank. 💸

Ultimately, Nuro wants to bring driverless delivery vehicles to the masses. How it works: Nuro's current “R1” vehicle looks like a mini compact car, and customers can request and track a delivery through the company's smartphone app. After the vehicle arrives, users verify the order with a password or biometric authentication. Nuro is currently operating these fully driverless vehicles on public roads in Scottsdale, Arizona, and charging $5.95 per delivery.

Nuro is part of the growing last mile delivery space, where startups are rushing to own the category. 📦

About a month ago, Postmates debuted Serve, a cute last-mile delivery rover that looks like a mix of WALL-E and a Minion. There's also Starship, a robotics firm founded in 2014 by the co-founders of Skype. Marble, another autonomous delivery firm, debuted its self-driving robots in 2017 and already partnered with DoorDash and Yelp. Robomart describes itself as a “self-driving store” — it's sort of like a self-driving vending machine. BoxBot was founded in 2016 by engineers from Tesla and Uber with a focus on last-mile logistics. And Amazon quietly acquired robotics company Dispatch to build Scout, its own on-demand delivery robot that debuted last month.

How Nuro is different: The company has been largely focused on developing a self-driving “stack,” which it's now licensing to others. For example, Ike, an autonomous trucking startup, is now using Nuro's technology — and Nuro is getting a stake in Ike. Ike was founded by ex-Apple, Google and Uber employees and announced a new $52M round last week. In June, Nuro also partnered with Kroger Co. — the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. — to test driverless grocery deliveries. 🛒

Nuro has built just six vehicles so far, and plans to use the new cash to make more.

We're excited to watch how autonomous delivery unfolds — especially since only three percent of grocery sales in the U.S. are currently happening online. 😳

What happens when social media is your 9-5? And nights? And weekends?

We recently spoke with Taylor Lorenz on Product Hunt Radio to find out. As part of her day-to-day as a staff writer at The Atlantic, Taylor cruises around different social platforms and follows crazy ideas down rabbit holes to find her stories. Most recently, she’s written about the financials behind the world-record Instagram egg, pretty Instagram meme accounts and the Instagram-husband revolution.

The overall theme to Taylor’s reporting is how tech affects people’s ability to communicate. We asked her about her favorite products right now and any sage advice she may have for alllll the social media dwellers.

---

I’m a reporter at The Atlantic and I write about internet culture. That includes things like social media-related coverage, trends, influencers, communities and any weird emerging things on the internet.

Overall, I have a very love/hate relationship with social media. In a sense, I feel like I owe my entire career and success to social media. I also feel like I found myself through social media — specifically on Tumblr. But then watching what Tumblr became and watching the company fall apart made me depressed about a lot of things on the internet.

I think I have more of an unhealthy relationship with social media because I spend too much time on it and don’t have a way to turn it off. But it is also good. I join everything — I’ll join whatever platform is out there.

Where I spend my time: My life is basically Instagram now and I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I’m a journalist. I’m also into a lot of other communities, specifically ones that are accessible to people. I like a lot of the Discord communities I’m in.

Where I spend my (free) time: I love horror movies. It’s the only thing I watch. But I’ve watched everything in the horror and sci-fi category on Netflix. So I use Shudder, which is a streaming service just for horror.

Product I love: Google Maps. Google Maps has built in all of these discovery mechanisms over the past year and they are amazing. It’s where I go to find everything. They have an explore tab where you can see lists and search by category. I location share too so I can see where people are.

Try this product: Lately I can't get enough of FlowState, a free daily newsletter that sends you two hours of perfect working music every morning. It gives you tons of background information on the artist and music genre. A paid membership gets you access to in-house custom mixes on Mondays and a searchable database of songs too. It's upped my productivity in a major way.

Request for product: A dumb phone that also has Google Maps.

Internet fun: I think TikTok is a fun place to spend time on the internet. If you haven’t been on there, you should try it out.

Social media advice: I think the most important thing is to recognize that sometimes it can feel like the entire internet hates you, or is ganging up on you, or is angry at you. It’s really important to remember that that’s not true, and that’s why you have to have a lot of good offline friendships too.

Remember the movie Her? It's the one that takes place in a near-future Los Angeles where Joaquin Phoenix develops a relationships with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a woman's (Scarlett Johansson's) voice.

That movie came out in 2013, and in 2019, it seems we're not far off from that imagined, futuristic world where we're confiding in virtual companions.

Yesterday, Voice Boloss launched on Product Hunt as an AI friend that you can FaceTime. It's from the same Makers that created Hugging Face, the “AI Tamagotchi,” back in 2017. A little on the Makers' backstory:

“We started to think about Voice Boloss when some of our users randomly tried to call or FaceTime the number we were using to send texts. When people form an emotional bond with their Hugging Face artificial intelligence, they want to communicate through all the mediums they are already using today with humans friends, like voice, call and FaceTime.” - Voice Boloss Maker Clément Delangue

And he's not wrong. People do want an emotional bond with robots.

“She's funny and loves emojis. I really like her” - Ali

“Just downloaded this last night. So much fun.” - Jonathan

“This is insane! Can’t wait to talk to my Animoji.” - Rhai

It's not hard to believe that popular operating systems of the future will be “characters.” We're already communicating with digital characters when we have a question, when we're driving, when we want to call a friend, etc. — they're called “Alexa,” “Siri” and “Google.” 🗣

But Siri's synthetic voice is still pretty robot-y and we — the humans — obviously want more. We want personality and soul. We want the Scarlett Johansson OS.

As it turns out that space, currently dubbed “synthetic media,” is heating up with the rise of computer-generated imagery and AI. Last year, it was Lil Miquela (now worth ~ $125M!). 😳And stealthy companies like Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all reportedly developing their own virtual characters for social media. Not to mention there's already a myriad of ways you can express yourself through AR avatars like Memoji, Gabsee and Genies.

It's not hard to imagine our actual near-future blending all these developments together. Wanna FaceTime Lil Miquela?

Marie Kondo is in right now. The Japanese celebrity tidying consultant, author and eponymous star of Netflix's Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is making us all want to purge our homes of stuff we don't need.

But what if we need a digital purge? It's more than likely you're digital clutter has overflowed into:

a) 500 emails in your inbox 💌
b) 1,000 photos on your iPhone 📱
c) 5,000 files in your Dropbox 📦
d) 10,000 old tweets from your Twitter account 🐦

Luckily, a new tool called TokiMeki Unfollow launched this week to KonMari your Twitter feed. How it works: The app lets you go through all the people you follow from your account — one by one — displaying their most recent tweets. If the account sparks joy, keep following them. If it doesn't, thank them for the tweets and hit that unfollow button. ✌️

TokiMeki Unfollow — or Marie Kondo for Twitter — is part of the “Marie Kondo for X” effect we've seen growing across the webs. If the KonMari method for tidying your bedroom can can change your life, how can we organize, discard and spark joy across our digital footprint? Especially when the internet isn't always the most joyful place.

Here are a few suggestions — and don't forget to thank your discarded browser tabs along the way.

Marie Kondo for articles on the internet: Clear This Page lets you bypass ads, popups and other clutter on news sites.

Marie Kondo for your desktop: Clean automatically cleans your desktop every day.

Marie Kondo for your Mac: CleanMyMac X does all the essential cleaning on a Mac (and 5 million people already use it).

Marie Kondo for your Camera Roll: Gemini Photos uses machine learning to reduce iPhone clutter.

Marie Kondo for your inbox: KanBan Mail and Sortd for Gmail help you organize your email into boards and lists.

Marie Kondo for your browser tabs: Toby helps you sort your tabs into neat, visual lists.

Marie Kondo for your old tweets: Cardigan helps you find and delete old (embarrassing) tweets.

Spotify wants to become a podcast company. Correction: Spotify wants to become the podcast company.

This past weekend, news broke that Spotify was in talks to buy podcasting network Gimlet Media for over $200M. Today, it was confirmed that Spotify not only acquired Gimlet but also bought DIY podcasting platform Anchor. AND Spotify isn't done with its shopping spree — the company reportedly intends to spend up to $500M on acquisitions this year.

Your move, Apple.

Apple is the current market leader in podcasts and the second-most-popular paid streaming music service — after Spotify. But Spotify's latest acquisitions point to a marked attempt to level up against its competition.

Why Gimlet: First and foremost, Gimlet is a content producer, and it helps Spotify to have high-quality, proprietary shows on its platform. They launched their first podcast StartUp – a brutally honest behind-the-scenes look into starting a startup – over four years ago. On Product Hunt, co-founder Matt Lieber shared:

“We really are building this company in real-time, and documenting it as we go.”

Why Anchor: Anchor's set of tools make it super easy for anyone to create their own podcast (for free). The technology will help Spotify produce more high-end content in-house — as well as give podcasters better tools to create externally. The company launched ~3 years ago on Product Hunt with a different direction — bite-sized podcast production.

“So, we built Anchor to solve these problems and enable anyone with a smartphone to easily record and publish 2-minute audio clips, sort of like bite-sized podcasts. Best of all, audio in Anchor is interactive -- so anyone can respond with their actual voice, like a real conversation.” - Anchor co-founder Mike Mignano

In any case, would love a new season of StartUp on this. 😉

What will Spotify acquire next? Here are a few popular podcast products from the rabbit hole:

Breaker lets you follow what your friends are listening to 🎙
Lyrebird is a voice imitation platform 🎙
Koo! is a social network for short-form audio 🎙
Medium, from Odeo co-founder Ev, has been experimenting with audio 🎙
Product Hunt Radio 😉

Yesterday, Periscope announced a new feature that lets you invite guests to participate in live broadcasts — like a talk show. 🎙

The Twitter-owned live streaming service launched audio-only broadcasts back in September, and this seems to be an extension of that. How it works: Once a person goes live, viewers can request to join the conversation, and then drop in and out at any time. It's reminiscent of calling into your local radio station — but you're calling into your favorite Twitter personality instead.

Guests will be audio-only for now, but Twitter says it's working on incorporating video into the shared broadcasts.

Of course, the idea of live broadcasts isn't new. There's already Twitter Live. And Instagram Live. And Facebook Live. And Dialog — a community dedicated to live audio conversations.

But Periscope's new guest feature may be more of a foray into “live podcasts,” marking the latest case in big tech going after the nascent podcast market.

There's already Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. And over the weekend, news broke that Spotify is in talks to buy podcasting network Gimlet for over $200M. 😳In January, Facebook launched its first U.S.-based podcast focused on entrepreneurship.

But we're still interested to see how the talk show concept plays out on Twitter — so we're going to do a livestream today to test it out. 😉

Over the weekend, a particular “Newsletter Guide” launched on Product Hunt and caught our eye. Yes, this newsletter is about to get very meta.

The Newsletter Guide is a collaboration between email gurus Yellow Brim, The Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute. It's not an intro-level newsletter course, but more of a “201”-level toolkit of resources, strategies and open-source templates for people who run newsletters to collaborate on.

The idea behind the project is to reduce the technical strain behind making a newsletter, and allowing editors to focus more on editorial. Some things the Newsletter Guide covers:

• How to grow your email list
• How to monetize your newsletter
• How to evaluate success metrics
• How to track where subscribers found you
• How to avoid accidentally breaking laws

And soooo much more.

The Newsletter Guide comes alongside an uptick in products that make it superrr easy for people to launch newsletters without much hassle. Here are a few:

💌 Substack gives writers a CMS built for publishing paid newsletters

💌 Revue helps you quickly spin up a personal newsletter

💌 Email Newsletter Checklist helps you send error-free emails

💌 Good Bits lets you create newsletters from the best links on the web

💌 Send Check It helps you write better email subjects

💌 EmailDrips is like Dribbble for email drip campaigns

“Find a nap on every corner.”

That's the latest tagline from hotel-by-the-minute app Recharge, which expanded to homes this week. It's pretty much the same concept as Airbnb — but for much shorter stays. 🏠

But whether a short-term booking is for a nap, a shower, a quiet spot to work, or um, the occasional romantic meeting — the sharing economy definitely lends itself to under 24-hour rentals.

How it works: You open the Recharge app and choose a nearby place to rent (hotel or home). You book the space and it will be instantly ready for you when you check in. You receive 30 minutes of complimentary travel time that starts immediately after you book a rental. When you're done using the space, you self checkout. That's it.

The idea is rooted in spontaneity and convenience — a trend cropping up among other startups as well.

Earlier this week, an app called Popup launched on Product Hunt as a marketplace for “ephemeral coffee shops,” aka coffee shops hosted out of people's homes. Breather ($122.5M raised), an app for on-demand private workspaces, currently has more than 500 workspaces on its platform across 10 major cities. And just last week, Airbnb acquired short-term rental marketplace Gaest.

Important to note: Recharge can avoid some of the regulatory issues Airbnb has faced because guests aren't allowed to stay overnight. 🤔 Recharge is launching its homes feature with about 1K listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York — but 80K people who want to rent out their homes are on the app's waitlist.