The Leaderboard

From Apple’s event to Y Combinator’s Demo Day, there’s been much to talk about in the tech world this week. Demo Day, a two-day event where YC’s summer 2022 batch pitched to a (virtual) room full of investors and press, especially drew our attention to popular YC S22 launches on Product Hunt.

This summer’s batch was 40% smaller than winter’s, which is a likely reflection of what’s currently happening in the VC market. B2B and SaaS still take the cake for most popular category, but Fintech also deserves a notable mention. And what really stands out? This batch sets a record for more Web3 startups than ever before. Creator economy startups? Not so much.

Here are some of our community’s YC S22 favorites:

Popsy, a Notion-inspired no-code website builder, launched last week and won Product of the Day. The makers set out to create a website builder that combined everything they loved about Notion and everything they saw was missing. They added the “ability to change fonts & colors, alignment, add navbar, buttons, icons, custom backgrounds and publish to a custom domain.”

Metafi Wallet SDK, a blockchain infrastructure for Web3 games, launched this week and also won Product of the Day. Makers Raimie Tang and Arvind Ramesh are both avid gamers and created Metafi after poor UX experiences with existing Web3 games. The tool helps game developers by letting them quickly embed a non-custodial wallet in their game, customize their in-game wallet theme, and insert a feature that lets their users buy crypto from the game using a credit card.

Poly, an AI-powered design tool, launched in August and ranked as runner-up for Product of the Day. As designers themselves, the makers channeled their frustrations and built Poly. An issue they noticed? The long process of finding assets and often having to create them from scratch. Poly helps designers “get unlimited customizable, high-res, commercially-licensed creative assets that match their color and style.” It’s also equipped with Figma and Canva plugins to help designers finish their cycles quicker.

The beginning of September marks a special moment for fall lovers and Apple connoisseurs alike. Apple’s Far Out event took place yesterday, and it unveiled the iPhone 14, new watches, and the AirPods Pro 2.

There’s always much debate around Apple’s yearly iPhone releases and whether or not they’re worth a purchase or upgrade. But this year, there’s a bit more buzz around some of the smallest feature updates. Here are some of the highlights:

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max—the stars of the show—packed in lots of excitement for a few reasons. For one, the notch that many dreaded is now gone and replaced with what Apple calls a Dynamic Island. The notch replacement consolidates your notifications, alerts, and activities and lets you multitask without changing between apps. Other features include an Always-On display that makes your lock screen “always glanceable,” crash detection calls, a camera with 4x the resolution, and a new colorway with “deep purple” and “space black” additions.

You won’t get a Dynamic Island with the iPhone 14, but you can snap better low-light photos and take advantage of the same safety features as the Pro. For those who want a tablet-like phone but can’t afford the Pro Max, the iPhone 14 Plus is a cheaper alternative but comes with fewer features. And as always, Apple’s base-level iPhone comes with vaster color options.

The Apple Watch 8’s major update is its new temperature sensor, which supports ovulation and menstrual cycle tracking. Geared towards athletes, the Watch Ultra is equipped with a durable titanium case and a bigger display. Both the Watch Ultra and Watch 8 are swim-proof and have similar “always-on” displays and safety features as the iPhones. The Apple Watch SE comes with the least new features, but it does share the same water-resistant capabilities and safety features as the others. With a new price drop, it’s also the cheapest option.

Music lovers are excited by the H2 chip that powers the AirPods Pro 2’s advancements. The new chip enhances sound, bringing more clarity and two times more noise cancellation. Apple also says that the buds come with personalized Spatial Audio for a more immersive listening experience. Touch control now lets you manage playback functions from the earbud’s stem and battery life is longer than the first generation of Pros.

Are you feeling any of these upgrades? We asked our Twitter community, and so far, the new iPhone has people most excited. Let us know what you think!

If you’re an online shopaholic, chances are you have all of your information saved into Safari or Chrome autofill. But what if the process could be even sleeker?

The founders of Sleek Pay, a YC S21 company, launched a new Chrome extension that promises to do just that. Maker Daniel Baum noticed that “‘fast’ checkouts aren’t [always] available at big retailers,” and that “autofill [can be] clunky and frequently wrong.” Sleek Pay’s solution? Enter your address and credit card information into Sleek Pay once and then check out with “1-click” at 50 different retailers.

As a browser extension, Sleek Pay pops up on the right-hand side of checkout pages and a “start checkout” button prompts the 1-click checkout process. Once that’s clicked, users can watch as their personal information automatically gets filled out and then place their order.

While 1-click checkout isn’t yet available everywhere, Sleek Pay also has a cashback integration that’s currently available at over 1500 retailers. Whether or not it’s a 1-click purchase, users can earn money back when they use Sleek.

For online shoppers that are tired of losing the high-demand item in their cart to bots or scalpers, it also makes us wonder if Sleek Pay could eventually make snagging hyped products a little easier. Sneaker bots are especially notorious for swiping hot releases from avid sneakerheads—in 2019, streetwear shop Bodega released a limited-edition New Balance 997S sneaker, and 60% of sales went to shoppers using bots.

Could Sleek’s promise for 1-click checkout change the game? While this year’s abrupt shutdown of Fast caused a lot of noise in the startup world, we’ve continued to see plenty of new launches in the eCommerce space that could point to a need for an easier checkout solution.

Still, Instagram’s recent announcement that it’s scaling back its shopping features might be a telltale sign that folks are shopping less amid the current downturn. What are your thoughts?

This year has been particularly interesting for folks interested in AI, especially when it comes to image generators. After OpenAI’s release of DALL-E 2 a few months ago, we’ve continued to see similar products spring up.

The latest one making the rounds on Twitter is Stable Diffusion, an image-generating AI from the DreamStudio team. What makes Stable Diffusion different is the fact that it’s open-source. That alone has brought up a lot of concerns as to how the tool could be used in harmful ways. But something that’s been even more controversial is how these types of AI tools might abolish creative jobs and stock image websites.

An interesting article from Washington Post tells the story of how maker Jason Allen, who runs a tabletop fantasy games company, submitted an artwork generated by Midjourney (another AI tool) and won a fine-arts competition. It’s hard to tell how this will play out in the long run and whether technology like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion will completely remove the need for creative jobs or will simply be used as a tool to enhance creativity.

Expert opinions seem to lean towards the former case. Back in April, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, shared his thoughts on the matter: “Although I firmly believe AI will create lots of new jobs, and make many existing jobs much better by doing the boring bits well, I think it’s important to be honest that it’s increasingly going to make some jobs not very relevant (like technology frequently does).”

Safety concerns around the ethics of AI could be what delays the process though. And just like ATMs replaced bank tellers, change is inevitable as technology advances.

Which camp are you in?

Ask any maker who’s been through it – fundraising is hard. In some cases, outright brutal. Still, it’s a necessary evil for those wanting to build and scale large companies. Many household brands you see today likely wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for some outside help.

That’s not to say lifestyle and bootstrapped companies can’t be successful. In fact, we’ve seen plenty prove external funding isn’t the only way to build a business. Just last year the biggest-ever exit by a bootstrapped business happened. Hint: it’s MailChimp, which sold for a whopping $12B to Intuit.

If you’re in the process of raising a round or are thinking about it, we’ve got some resources you may want to check out.

ScaleUp features fundraising templates and resources you need, in ClickUp.

Fundraising Template 2.0 includes an investor CRM, pitch deck content builder, templates for your email communication, and a due diligence checklist as part of a Notion template.

Venture Roof is a collection of fundraising guides that consists of a 20+ investor list, 500+ accelerators, and 7k+ start-up advisors.

Funden™ is a fundraising platform that helps you perfect your pitch, target qualified investors, and receive warm intros to a global network of 500+ partner VCs.

Fundraising Questions is a curated collection of 120+ questions VCs will ask you and that you can ask them.

deck.rocks uses GPT-3 to generate pitch decks from one-liner ideas.

And if you’ve already got the cash in the bank, check out how this company is helping founders get more from their investors.

Founders, if this week’s been nothing but crickets, it’s not you; it’s Burning Man week.

Unless you’re in fundraising mode, the quietness and calm of these past few days (no Twitter drama?) probably gave you a chance for some heads-down work. If you’re planning to keep that up and stay focused on building, we’ve got some interesting playbooks and resources for you to browse through.

This Project Proposal Pack offers 7 pages of templates for outlining project ideas, defining the work to be done, project schedules, and costs.

Avoma Sales Playbook includes actionable tips, tools, and processes for those in SaaS sales. “We analyzed hundreds of sales calls to come up with an actionable playbook for sales leaders, managers, AEs, and SDRs,” the makers share.

Also for SaaS companies, this Content Marketing Playbook walks you through tactics for attracting the right audience, driving qualified traffic, increasing user signups, and getting more paying customers.

Stripe’s Pricing Table lets you generate a table where you can display your pricing plans side-by-side. Once customers select their desired plan, they’ll be directed to Stripe’s conversion-optimized checkout page to complete the transaction.

Get some inspiration for your website’s Hero section from this collection of 240+ designs of leading tech companies like Github, Squarespace, and Expensify.

As much as we love fully-fledged, complex productivity apps that basically let you optimize your entire life, there’s something about simple, yet powerful browser extensions. They’re lightweight and usually don’t require you to do much, except for a few clicks – a true and tried “less is more” approach.

We’ve been watching the space closely and noting down interesting ones we’ve seen launch recently. Here are some that might make you want to go “Add to Chrome” (or whatever browser you’re using – we won’t judge, now that Internet Explorer’s dead).

AdGuard MV3 is “the first ad-blocker” built on top of Chrome’s Manifest V3. It lets you block ads, trackers, and social widgets, as well as self-defined web components and domains.

AI2sql uses AI to generate SQL queries from natural language input.

Depths is a bookmark manager for developers. The extension lets you tag all your saved resources and calculate an estimated read time, with full-text search enabled.

CSS Scan 3.0 helps you check the CSS of any element you hover over and copy its entire rules with a single click.

Slashy adds custom command functionality to Notion. It comes pre-packaged with plugins to make drawings within Notion and record your video and audio, and it gives you the ability to create your own simple commands or advanced plugins with its SDK.

Iago helps you learn new languages by overlaying subtitles on streaming websites like Netflix, Disney+, and Youtube, in both your native and target learning language.

In May, we launched Product Hubs for following along with your favorite products beyond launch day. Now you can do that and discover much more, wherever you are, with our entirely new Product Hunt mobile apps for iOS and Android.

“Looking at the data over the past few years, we noticed how much Product Hunt usage was coming in on mobile (apps and mobile web),” wrote Product Hunt CEO Ashley Higgins on today’s launch. “ To address this shift and best serve the Product Hunt community, we decided to build a brand new native mobile experience for iOS and Android!”

With the new apps, you’ll be able to discover products in list or card view, find the tools you’re looking for with an improved search experience, and catch up on Stories and Discussions so that you never miss out on the next greatest thing. Plus, you can do all of it without stressing your eyes — dark mode is finally here.

“This is just the beginning,” shared Product Hunt iOS Team Lead, John Grange. “ We are laying a really solid foundation to build whatever features we can imagine going forward, even allowing us to explore mobile-first features going forward.”

Grange and team worked alongside the Product Hunt community to ensure that the apps would first and foremost be a tool that helps empower makers. In addition to incorporating years of community feedback, we worked with early adopters in our Beta program who helped by submitting tons of feedback, reporting bugs, and sharing creative solutions (even wireframes!)

“The new android app for PH is literally amazing. It is about 10000x more useable on Android now, and the List/Card view layout swap is amazing,” shared Beta Program member, Tim.

We hope you feel the same as Tim. As always, share your feedback with us here or directly from within the apps, by going to Settings > Leave Feedback.

“Reddit launched NFTs. Notably, the term “NFT” is never mentioned,” shared one observant maker on Twitter (link added by us).

The company introduced its “blockchain-backed Collectible avatars” back in June, giving some away for free to its most avid users, and making them available for purchase by others. The NFTs are stored and managed in your Vault on Reddit and can be traded on marketplaces like OpenSea and SuperRare.

Despite skirting the buzzword, Reddit didn’t skip out on some NFT criticism and “backlash to the idea of additional DRM [digital rights management], how they play into the greater fool theory described by Bill Gates, and what blockchain energy use means for the environment,” writes Richard Lawler at the Verge.

Still, despite critics becoming increasingly vocal, the concept persists. Sure, some of these moments might elicit cringe — not everyone was impressed by Eminem and Snoop Dog’s weekend MTV VMA performance in the metaverse as their Bored Ape alter egos. Ironically, maybe part of the problem lies in the speedy path NFTs have had into the mainstream, with celebrity endorsements and over-hyped projects leaving new investors victim to scams. The mere mention of NFTs elicit eye rolls, but can makers change the conversation?

The question is whether a re-brand of NFTs and a low-profile on-ramping into “digital collectibles” on major platforms is a better go-to-market strategy. Meta is working a similar angle. It launched its own “digital collectibles” on Facebook and Instagram. The feature lets users connect their digital wallets to their accounts so they can post their NFTs across their profiles. Twitter added a similar feature at the start of the year.

TechCrunch coverage notes that “app sleuths have noted that [Meta] is also working on custom animations for NFT posts and digital collectible collections.”

So the bad news for “right-clickers” — NFTs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Just don’t call it an NFT.

Audio had its moment of glory during the first lockdown when Clubhouse reached its peak and podcasting blew up. But is it back? Tbh, It never really went away. According to Buzzsprout’s latest report, podcasting continues to be on an upward slope, with over one-third (104M) of Americans listening to podcasts regularly. It looks like more of these folks listen to podcasts than have Netflix accounts.

Youtube recently announced a dedicated podcasts page, which will allow users to explore new and popular podcast episodes, shows, and creators, as well as recommend podcast content. For creators, Youtube will also provide audio-first analytics. Earlier this year, an 84-page deck was leaked, which revealed the company’s plans for podcasts, including its focus on featuring new audio ads sold by Google. Hello, new revenue stream. 💸

Twitter is joining in the fun, too. On Thursday, the company announced the launch of a new version of Twitter Spaces, branded as Stations. Slightly different from traditional podcasting apps and feeds, Stations features topic-based playlists that will include both episodes from RSS feeds, as well as Twitter-native audio clips and recordings.

By the looks of it, makers are also excited by the future of audio–we’ve seen plenty of great launches recently that point to that.

Zencastr launched Zencastr 3.0, which now lets creators record, publish, and monetize their episodes all from the same place.

Galas helps podcasters receive more feedback from listeners by allowing them to create a forum-like page for discussions that can be added to their show notes.

EditEddy by Headliner lets you upload your audio, get a transcript, then edit your audio by editing the text. You can use it to remove filler words and correct any errors in the transcript.