The Leaderboard

January is here which means it's time for...The Golden Kitty Awards! 😻

This marks our fourth year hosting the awards, which are a chance for you — our community — to celebrate makers' achievements over the past year. Previous winners range from tech giants like Elon Musk to indie makers like Pieter Levels.

This year is going to be our biggest Golden Kitty Awards yet with 22 (!) categories up for grabs, including 10 brand new categories. The new category additions are:

Audio and Voice — Apps you can hear and talk to 🗣

Diversity and Inclusion — Products making the world more inclusive 🌎

AI and Machine Learning — Projects powered by the robots! 🤖

Health and Fitness App — Things to help us lead a healthier life 💦

Smart Home — Gadgets to transform the home 🏠

Founder Books — Books for makers that we can learn from 📖

Fintech — Disruptive players shaking up finance 💸

Privacy-Focused — Apps and services prioritizing privacy 🔒

Made with Product Hunt API — Rad projects that use our API 😻

Social Impact — Projects that make the world just a little bit better 🙏

You can nominate makers starting TODAY until Tuesday January 8th at 6pm PT. We will announce the finalists for you to vote for on Wednesday January 9th and the final winners will be announced on Wednesday January 16th.

Start nominating your fav projects here!!!

“98% of offers to acquire your company or product don't work out and are merely a time waste (very often by a competitor).” - Pieter Levels

New year, new side project. But how much is your nights and weekends hustle actually worth? This calculator helps you figure it out.

What it takes into account:

💸 Net income (revenue/costs)

⏰ How much time you spend on it per week

📊 Multipliers by industry

📈 Growth rate multipliers

📱 Your users and following (MAUs, social media followers, etc.)

“I dream of this being universally adopted by 'open' makers everywhere so we all can work with standardized side-project profiles like accountants do with profit and loss statements or balance sheets.” - KP

“Love the simplicity! Reminds me of some financial tools I've come across” - Chip

Next step: Sell your side project in 2019.

A sampling of side project marketplaces to peruse in the meantime:

🏷 Transferlot carefully curates side projects for sale

🤑 Flippa is a large marketplace for buying and selling websites (with a 15% success fee)

😍 Borderline lets you sell your app and barter for someone else's that excites you

💰1K Projects is a marketplace of side projects for less than $1K

🔎 SideProjectors is like “the Craigslist of websites”

Dear Product Hunt,

It's me, Product Hunt. Tomorrow’s the first day of 2019. I’m so excited for all the things we have planned over the next year that I can hardly sleep.

As I write this, I know you're already cooking up something new for the podcast in 2019. 🎧

You've also been thinking a lot about how to help the community find the best products on Product Hunt. And how to give makers and startups better tools to acquire users and gather feedback. 🤔

Did you launch the new browser extension yet? I can’t wait to see how makers use it. 😉

Anyways, I hope you had a great 2019!

Love,
Product Hunt

P.S. If you want to write a letter to your 2020 self, use this.

ICYMI, Instagram caused some drama on the Internet yesterday.

The Facebook-owned app briefly switched to a horizontal feed (like the tap-to-advance layout in Stories), but then later confirmed that the rollout was actually bug.

In reaction, phrases like “purely evil” and “end of days” were thrown around. A conspiracy theory also hatched, claiming that Instagram purposefully rolled out the new format to test its reception.

“So did we just find out why the Instagram founders quit?” - Shira

“I’m not even joking this new Instagram UI discriminates against left handed people.” - Nate

“Everyone’s complaining they’ve replaced Instagram’s timeline with a tappy thing, but really this is YOUR fault for not spending enough Quality Engagement Time on the main Facebook app and threatening the company’s advertising revenue.” - Jim

Regardless, it has been previously reported that Instagram is testing a new tap-to-advance feed. The company could be trying to reduce mindless scrolling. Or expand on the success of the format for Stories. Or make more money. 🤷‍

The news comes on the heels of Twitter's new “sparkle button”, so a shakeup to the algorithmic feed may be in store for the 'gram in the near future. 😏

In the meantime, here are 10 tools to play around with on Instagram:

Auto Publish is a sleeek little tool that lets you schedule posts in advance 👏

Instagram.css is a complete set of Instagram filters in pure CSS 👀

Auditor lets marketers check influencers' accounts for fake followers 🔎

Nite Mode for Instagram is exactly what it sounds like 🌚

Maps for Instagram lets you see your pics on a map of the world 🌎

Unfold gives you minimal templates for creating gorgeous Stories

Blockai lets you claim Insta copyrights with a hashtag 💪

Prime helps you calculate the best time to post on Instagram ⏰

Top Nine for Instagram finds your best nine Insta moments from 2018 📸

Buffer Stories Creator helps you create beautiful Stories on Instagram 🙌

Cue the 2018 reflection, it's almost the new year.

But we've decided to run a little experiment ahead of 2019. Instead of evaluating your old routines and habits, recognize the people and products that made a difference to you this year by giving them a shout out! 🎉

“There are too many people to thank! This year I have had the pleasure of connecting with makers from around the world who have helped me build my startup and side-projects, and helped keep me accountable.” - James

“Massive shout-out to all the Maker Mag community of writers and editors. Reading our group chat with its mix of silly jokes and serious brainstorming sessions never fails to put a smile on my face. Excited for 2019! 😻” - Anne-Laure

"As a first-time founder, I am ever grateful for all of the sage advice I received from other founders this past year. Special thanks to @rrhoover @ericbahn @staringispolite @jimmydouglas @vinlin @jasonoliver @jenlufer @thepriyadarshy @travisawakens @fraywing @davidpanzarella @thianhlu @eusden @bebe_chueh @nzxtjohnny for keeping me grounded and focused. Excited for what 2019 has in store! 🙏" - Jonathan

"HUGE shout-out to the entire @ProductHunt team. We accomplished a lot this year, including reaching profitability (in large part thanks to @ems_hodge's leadership)." - Ryan

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

“Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it's become the coveted 'third place' for millions of people around the world” - Owen Williams

2018 was the year of Fortnite. Drake played streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. The game launched on iOS. And the Switch. And Android. It even partnered with the NFL. 🎮

Since the third-person shooter game officially debuted a year and a half ago, it has turned into a cultural phenomenon that now has over 200 million registered players.

But in the past week, we've read a lot less about the game itself but more about what the game has created — a communal “hangout” spot for players online.

In a nutshell, it's become a place where your friends are — and that sounds a lot like social media. 🤔

“Just speaking for our family, it's still clear to us that Fortnite needs tight rules in our house, but we've shifted to thinking about it less as a video game and more as we might think about a teen talking on the phone for hours.” - Ernie Tedeschi

Fortnite's success as a social network largely stems from that fact that it's really for anyone (even Drake) — it's free to play and available on every device.

This year, we also saw a few Fortnite-focused apps emerge specifically around community:

FortLeague is an iOS app that gives players rankings in the game 👀

Where Should We Drop decides where you and your squad should land on Fortnite 🙌

Happy Holidays, Product Hunters! 🎄🎁🎅❄️⛄️

As always, we're so thankful for you and are pretty excited to see everything you'll launch in 2019 😉

Love,

The Product Hunt Team

P.S. Something to reallllly get you in the Christmas spirit: a free, streaming service with a huge library of classic Christmas films. Enjoy 😊

HQ Words — HQ Trivia's first expansion beyond trivia — emerged out of beta last night. 😲

HQ Words is sort of a mix between Words with Friends, traditional crossword puzzles and Wheel-of Fortune.

How it works: Similar to HQ Trivia, players will join the game live every night to compete. The object of the game is to solve word puzzles by correctly choose what letters are hidden. You spin a wheel before the game starts to get an automatic letter revealed. Then the Host will provide hints about the word as a 25-second timer for the puzzle counts down. You lose by choosing three letters wrong or failing to fill out the words.

HQ Words will go live every day at 6:30 p.m. PST, right after HQ Trivia's broadcast. 🔊

While HQ Trivia was a phenomenon this time last year, the amount of daily players has significantly declined over the past several months. This launch will also be the first under CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupov, after co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll tragically died a few weeks ago.

The game is now available inside the existing HQ Trivia iOS and Android apps.

Since HQ Trivia became a hit in 2017, a bunch of apps have launched to become the next "HQ for X." Fall down the trivia rabbit hole here.

Earlier this week, Remove.bg launched and blew our minds.

“This is a huge time-saver for stock photos.” - Trish

“No more stupid work in photoshop 🕶” - Dariusz

“I was fully expecting this not to work, but it did it pretty much perfectly.” - Dan

Remove.bg is a simple tool that removes the background of any photo in 5 seconds.

According to the Maker Benjamin Grossing, Remove.bg was originally part of a bigger app, but they decided to release it as a standalone tool since removing photo backgrounds can get superrr tiresome. We're anxious to see what the “bigger app” might be....

Until then, some of the most recent photo editing tools out there to play around with this weekend:

📸 Lensa will improve your selfies with AI

📸 Affinitiy is a professional photo editing tool for your iPad

📸 Artini is a photo app for the ~artist~ in you

📸 Luminar is superrr easy to use and has AI editing features built in

📸 Lightroom — because it's a classic

CoinList wants to “bring decentralized markets to the masses.”

At least that’s the theme of its inaugural hackathon, which was announced yesterday in tandem with CoinList’s new online hackathon platform called “Build.”

A brief history

CoinList, which spun out of AngelList last year, has already helped 50 companies raise $450 million in token sales.

But beyond funding, teams need community to succeed. Build (initially) aims to help crypto companies spin up online hackathons in very little time — and ultimately grow communities by connecting teams with developers.

The details

CoinList’s first hackathon will take place next month with 0x, an open protocol that enables peer-to-peer exchange on Ethereum. To date, the team has built one of the most impressive products in crypto:

📈350K+ total transactions
💰$445M+ total volume
🚀Used by 30+ projects

The first hackathon will encourage participants to build projects in categories like:

✅ Compliance
🎮 Gaming and NFTs
💸 Decentralized Finance

The hackathon starts January 10 and will run for 3 weeks.

If you need some inspiration for your projects, check out this list 💡

The fine print

🤑The first prize is $10K and every participant that submits a project will get $100

🎤Winners will get featured on CoinList and Product Hunt

💻Participants will learn from top investors at firms like a16z crypto and Scalar, as well as designers from IDEO and 0x

If participants continue developing their projects after the hackathon has concluded, 0x is always looking to finance promising teams through their Ecosystem Acceleration Program.

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