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Today we're getting real and showing you how to get rid of FILLERITIS* 😶

*noun. The verbal habit of using an excessive amount of filler words in one’s sentences. An inflammation of filler words. 

OpenAI has been making headlines the past few weeks and not only because of AI-generated art. The San Francisco startup launched OpenAI Startup Fund last year in partnership with Microsoft on the premise of making ‘big early bets’ on the best and brightest in AI. They recently announced Converge, a $1M equity investment and 5-week accelerator for early-stage AI companies. Last week we learned they led Mem’s $23.5M Series A, and this week they announced leading a sizeable $50M Series C for Descript.

Descript is a video editor to make editing recordings as easy as editing a doc. YouTubers, podcasters, and influencers have been using and loving it since its first launch in 2017. The latest update has a lot of folks excited. The New Descript uses AI to edit the "ums," "likes," "you knows," and "uhs" out of your recordings and clones your voice to add new lines to your script. There are 30+ new features, which also include the ability to insert media into your project with keystrokes, green screen your background away, and add stock b-roll footage.

The relationship that Descript is building with OpenAI could give the video platform an edge. Startups in the OpenAI Startup Fund don’t just get the boost in funding – they also get early access to OpenAI’s future systems. Descript CEO Andrew Mason defines OpenAI as part investor, part partner, highlighting that “Sometimes you find investors where there’s also strategic overlap.”

The team is running a live tutorial and AMA on Thursday if you want to get a closer look. Or just get to it and…

We’ve seen AI do a lot over the past few years, from creating houses out of thin air, to generating weird and wonderful profile images, to becoming your second brain for work.

Now Notion just dropped their latest feature: an AI assistant built directly into your workspace. Notion AI is currently in Alpha, but it can handle quite a lot already. It’s kind of like a new co-worker that lives in Notion and saves you a ton of time or helps you spend it more wisely.

What it can do: Co-Founder Ivan Zhao gave a taste of Notion AI in a demo video, which included summarizing those long Zoom meetings, instant language translation, automatically generating a list of ideas about any topic to get those creative juices flowing, and even being your personal editor.

What we’re watching for: We’ve seen A LOT of AI writers launch over the last few years. What will it mean for them, now that workspaces like Notion are building AI directly into their products? Google, of course, already integrates some AI into your docs (thanks, autocomplete), but it's only a matter of time until we see giants like Google with AI integration at Notion’s scale.

Notion AI is currently using a waitlist but Notion said it's giving more people access every day.

Don’t you love it when you design a beautiful landing page, show your friends, family, co-workers, or anyone who will take a peak, and then remember you have to do it all over again, but this time using code?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Fortunately, the times are changing. FUNCTION12 is off getting attention with its launch today. It automates the design to developer workflow by taking your handcrafted designs and exporting production-ready code in an instant. As founder and CEO Shawn Park put it “based on our beta testing, a mobile screen that would normally take 6 hours when coding in hand took only 16 minutes to export.”

Why people care: What makes FUNCTION12 unique is that there are no plugins or apps to install. Once you’re happy with your design, simply copy your Figma file link and paste it onto the FUNCTION12 landing page. You’ll get a platform to nail down the nitty gritty such as inspecting your components, configuring your layout, and adding actions before exporting your code.

Worth it? At $1 per month, FUNCTION12 could be worth trying out, especially if you have been delaying coding up that landing page of yours.

Who doesn’t like seeing their face on camera or hearing themselves talk? 🙋

Unfortunately for those of us in that boat, there’s no substitute for capturing knowledge via video. That’s why How-To videos are the top-4 category on YouTube, according to the team at Guidde.

The Guidde browser extension is attracting new users with its launch today, and not just because it lets you skip having your voice and image in your recording. Guidde helps you create guided How-To videos that would normally require multiple tools and hours of animation with ease. As one user put it, “Finally someone created a tool that lets me easily generate a video without the hassle of a video.”

How it works: When you record a video with Guidde, it automatically creates highlights and call-outs for your workflows. You can then edit and enhance your videos like you would a PowerPoint. When the video is done, you can share it in a click as a GIF, share it as a page with steps automatically broken down into its parts, or export or embed the video file.

When to use it: Guidde doesn’t have to be a literal alternative to video recording tools like Loom (even the Guidde demo video itself is a screen recording with voice-over.) But it could help team members who tend to revert to text and screenshots over video to explain themselves. Many users also instantly saw the immediate benefit of using such a tool for their help centers and support channels. And don’t forget about those YouTube videos.

The extension is free, so go ahead and it a try for your next explainer.

We’ve covered the recent tech layoffs from companies big and small. It’s been a rough few weeks, and many startups are going into cockroach mode to survive. That often means cutting costs, reserving cash, and prioritizing revenue. With VC funding slowing down (though not as quickly as projected) startups have to be laser-focused to ride out the storm and keep investors interested. In times like these, sales can be a hail mary that adds months (or hopefully years) to a startup’s runway, and revenue begets funding. 

So how can startups increase sales? One way is to combine a great product with trustworthy testimonials to woo leads into that pipeline.

The problem is: High-quality, engaging testimonials don’t come easy. Even if you have an avid fan base, you have to put resources into mobilizing your users, capturing content, and getting it ready for your website and channels. 

Vouch strives to make getting those quality customer testimonials as easy as sending a Calendly link or scanning a QR code. It’s built to offer a simple experience for customers creating testimonials, with features like in-browser recordings, pre-written questions, recording durations, and Speaker Prompts to keep customers on track. Companies can record their own intro videos and generate testimonial links that can be shared with unlimited customers–a huge timesaver, especially for small marketing teams. Video snippets are then saved to the Vouch library and instantly available for editing and sharing via social channels.

Another in this space is StoryPrompt and both tools can be used beyond testimonials. They can boost your engagement across your org by applying them to your strategies in content creation for comms teams, community building, and recruitment.

Steve Wozniak says he hasn’t been this excited about an innovation since Apple II.

He’s talking about Air (via Cameo video for today's launch of Air for Teams).

Let’s back up. Air launched three years ago, looking to fix clunky cloud storage experiences. “Three years, and nearly 100,000+ users later, I feel confident in saying: we found the better way,” co-founder Shane Hegde shared.

If you’ve been seeing more of Air lately, it's probably because the team closed a $10M "Operator Round" in January and announced plans to use the capital to accelerate the company's go-to-market motion. Prior to that, Air said over 90% of its growth was organic thanks to traction within the D2C community in New York and word-of-mouth. Many of those early adopters are chiming in today to praise the simple UI.

For those who are new to it, Air isn’t just storage — it’s similar to Notion and Airtable in that it’s a cloud-collaboration tool, plus it's a digital asset management system (DAM). Users can import videos and images and Air automates organization with image and color recognition. Boards help teams collaborate and distribute content, and today’s update adds integrations that make the process even easier.

Real-time sync means that your assets stay up to date while you work with editing tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and more. Slack integrations help you work faster. And this might be what Woz is most excited about: “Air flow” lets you view, search, and manage your “Airpsace” right from Apple’s Finder. There are also saved filters and new private spaces and permission levels are coming soon.

“Air wouldn’t be what it is without our community,” ends Hegde. So the team is offering up a discount today and asking what you want to see next.

It’s been a rollercoaster year for Crypto from meme coin pump and dumps to a $2 trillion crash. And just when you think you can take a sigh of relief, buckle in because we’re about to hit the drop.

Yesterday, in the latest shockwave to the crypto world, Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, announced its intent to buy one of its main rivals, FTX.

FTX, once valued at $32 billion was (seemingly overnight) on the verge of total collapse due in large part to rumors of FTX’s finances, which led to massive withdrawals totaling over half a billion dollars according to crypto research firm Nansen. Naturally this led to an even greater demand for withdrawals, which led to FTX issuing a halt, compounding their problems.

What does this mean for crypto? Well, in the short term it means more pain for the markets with Bitcoin dropping a whopping 10% and Ethereum going even further and dropping more than 17%. In the long term, it’s anyone’s guess but this could affect the U.S crypto regulation discussions and it settles any doubt that Binance is truly the powerhouse of crypto — for now anyway.

To buy or not to buy? As they say, the best time to buy is during the dip. But what if you didn’t have to buy at all? Lolli recently dropped their mobile app that rewards you with crypto.

The concept is simple: Go about your day and if you shop online or in-store at 10,000+ plus stores, Lolli will give you up to 30% in Bitcoin or cashback rewards. Of course, we definitely wouldn't blame you for skipping the coaster. What do you think? Is it worth the...

UX is a team effort — as we all know from watching Twitter transform before our eyes with a leaner team (perhaps, maybe too lean).

Whether that team is full of experts or multi-hat-wearing generalists, UX work often spreads across documents, tools, and people. We’ve seen a few seamless solutions recently that make UX/UI collaboration a delightful experience itself.

Frontitude launched today with one place for all of your product copy. The tool lets makers build a library of copy components, so they can loop in someone from legal or a copywriter into one spot and then re-use copy across the project, all while keeping designs and the codebase in sync.

Play had a strong debut in September by throwing away the idea of emulating a native app experience. The founders say Play is “the first native iOS design tool.” Makers can design with real iOS materials and experience the design as they create it on their mobile device. Designers can then easily share work to the device it was meant to be viewed on, and feedback can be left by your team.

Overflow is a diagramming tool for designers but its latest launch, Stories, helps those designers create self-guided tours of their designs to better present their work asynchronously. Tours let your add context into an interactive, self-paced presentation.

Ballpark came from the team at Marvel after interest in its user testing features took off. It lets you capture feedback on Figma and Marvel prototypes, designs, and marketing copy as you survey users. Features include a simple survey builder with templates, heatmaps, the ability to add context to questions/tasks with video guides, and stats like drop-off rates.

New to UX? You can start off with this collection of 100 UI/UX tips to make your interface better.

AI this, AI that… You’ve heard us talk about it all year long. Creepy pictures of bunnies in space, beautiful sceneries of utopic worlds, and more recently, sharp profile pictures for your social media.

If you’re a regular here, you don’t need another recap of the awesome tools utilizing the latest developments in image generation. Today, we’re going old school.

Here are 7 design tools that caught our attention recently:

• tinykiwi is an image editor that lets you design anything from eye-catching screenshots for social media and blog post covers to open graph images.

• html.to.design converts any website into fully editable Figma designs. 

• This pack of holographic abstract 3D backgrounds for Figma from Wannathis is 🤌 chef’s kiss.

• Pixelied's free mockup generator helps you produce designs using editable mockup templates.

• Womp Alpha is a new browser-based 3D creation and publishing app. 

• Tylify helps you create seamless patterns (SVG, PNG, CSS) and is available as a Figma plugin and a standalone web app.

• Mockups by designstripe is an in-browser tool for designing device mockups. 

What did we miss?