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It’s time to get real. Short-form content like TikToks, Reels, and YouTube Shorts have slowly but surely narrowed our attention spans. If you haven’t fast-forwarded a movie scene recently or got bored of a 10-minute video in the first two, congrats. You’re likely consuming a healthy amount of catchy, bite-sized content. For the rest of us, some tools can help.

Upword, for instance, takes long-form content like articles and webpages, uses AI to summarize and extract key ideas, and lets you annotate, edit, share, and listen to these. When asked about how the summarizing process works, the maker shared that “the model learns from real people who summarized documents and huge amounts of training data.” You can also contribute to this by leaving feedback for each AI-generated note.

Once a written summary of your document has been created, you can add comments to it, edit with your annotations, and highlight it. A text-to-speech AI will also read the content out loud for you, which sounds strangely human. Upword comes with a Chrome extension that you can use to add links to your library.

This reminded us of a recently launched tool from Typeform. Relayed turns Zoom meetings (audio) into written summaries. In short, it’s like Upword in reverse. You can use it to communicate with your team asynchronously and conduct user interviews and sales outreach.

How do you ensure you’re getting the most out of the knowledge you consume?

The founder of Tinder is switching lanes and going into the wearables market.

Sean Rad, who founded the dating app back in 2012, is launching the Happy Ring, together with the Happy Health team. The device uses AI and biometric sensors to track your mental health. These include a custom electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor that looks at how your stress levels change in real-time. In short, it monitors your sympathetic nervous system to detect when your fight or flight response gets triggered. You know, the thing that keeps us alive in dangerous situations.

While the design itself might remind you of the Oura ring, the team reassures those interested in using it that the form factor was a constraint – research led them “specifically to the finger, as it is the gateway to the autonomic nervous system allowing for the most accurate monitoring of the wearer’s mood state.” They also add that the Happy Ring has more sensors than existing health tracking devices out there and focuses primarily on one’s mental health, rather than physical stress.

The Happy Ring doesn’t only tell you about your mood on an ongoing basis. It also uses AI, which constantly adjusts based on what it learns from you, to provide personalized exercises that can help lower your stress levels, like breathwork and journaling.

Apart from Sean Rad, makers of the product include Dustin Freckleton, former co-founder of BioTech company LVL Technologies, and Sue Smalley, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA.

We’re curious to see how the new gadget will measure up to existing ones. In the meantime, here’s a great thread on how other makers are taking care of their mental health while building.

According to Eric Glyman, Ramp’s co-founder, the average finance team spends 520 hours/year paying bills. That’s the equivalent of three working months out of the year spent wading through invoices and figuring out due dates.

Ramp Flex launched yesterday to help these teams save time and automate how they pay vendors. Flex allows finance teams to pay bills and manage cash flows directly from Ramp's platform. Embedded into Bill Pay, Ramp pays your vendor up front. You can then pay them back in 30, 60, or 90 days for a small fee.

“When we talked to founders and entrepreneurs, we noticed that cash flow management was a common theme — businesses wanted a way to line up the timelines of their ‘cash out’ with their ‘cash in’ so that they could grow efficiently, without the headache of toggling between multiple solutions.” the makers share.

Flex is not the first to offer companies the “buy now, pay later” option. We recently talked about a YC company called tranch, which enables SaaS and Service providers to be paid upfront while offering their customers payment flexibility. Customers can spread invoices from $10k to $250k over 3-12 months.

On the consumer side, things don’t seem to be looking too bright. In a recent round of financing, Swedish BNPL service Klarna’s valuation plunged 85% to $6.7 billion. Whether this is due to overall market sentiment or the multitude of new entrants in the space remains to be seen.

What’s your take?

The cool thing about the Internet is that it’s infinitely scalable. SaaS is one business model we’ve seen skyrocket in recent years. With a global market value of over $170B, the SaaS space has increased in size by around 500% over the past seven years. Not surprising, as 80% of businesses use at least one SaaS application.

Here’s a rundown of recently launched SaaS tools we think you might want to know about.

Zeda.io has been designed to help product teams collect feedback, define goals and initiatives, plan roadmaps, and write clearly-defined specs for developer and design teams to execute.

UpLink lets accountants, auditors, and lawyers request hundreds or thousands of documents from others. This removes the need for the back and forth with the client, which is usually done over email while keeping track of status in Excel.

Snackeet allows you to integrate Instagram-like stories to your website, so you can boost engagement rates, sell products, get feedback from customers, and get more leads for your business.

Changelogs & Idea Management by Ignition helps you collect and organize feature requests and prioritize your roadmap. You can use it to then announce new features via custom branded changelogs.

Kinde provides founders with the infrastructure for authentication, user management, feature flags, and billing. Kinde uses an API or SDK to integrate with your product.

Creabl is a user-behavior analytics tool that lets you know who your customers are and why they convert, monitor mouse trails and clicks, group users in specific segments, and track retention.

What do hacking (no, not ethical hacking) tools and big tech have in common? Collecting information on what you type on your device while visiting external websites might be one thing.

You know those in-app browsers that pop up from time to time when using mobile apps? According to Felix Krause, a former Google engineer, it turns out that some of them might be getting to know you a little too well. His recently published research shows that TikTok’s in-app browser can track all your keystroke (think passwords and credit card information) by injecting Javascript code snippets into external websites.

Despite these findings, there isn’t any way of knowing or proving whether TikTok and other big tech companies are using this data in a malicious way. The video-sharing app shared that they “do not collect keystroke or text inputs through this code,” and that the Javascript snippets are only being used for troubleshooting and testing. Ongoing data privacy concerns over the Chinese-owned app don’t make this situation any rosier.

If you’re still feeling uneasy, Krause created InAppBrowser.com to help you verify what apps do in their webviews. You can test this by opening the app you want to analyze, sharing the InAppBrowser.com URL through a feed post or DM, and tapping on the link inside the app to open it. The code of the website is open source, which allows the community to improve its efficiency over time.

As part of his research, Krause included a FAQ for the non-techies, explaining that you can protect yourself by making sure that the app you’re using offers a way to open links in your default browser, rather than the bespoke ones.

Open-source software continues to grow in popularity and is even seen by many as an essential way to develop software.

A survey by the Linux Foundation, the New Stack, and the TODO group found that 63% of companies consider open source programs as critical to business. The model allows developers to easily access a software’s source code and modify it. It’s also seen as a way to expedite development and catch issues early on, allowing companies to save time and money on programming. Instead of starting from scratch, developers can pick from other open-source software to fuel their next project.

Here are some recent open-source launches that could help spark some innovation (or just serve as a useful tool):

Medusa is an open-source alternative to Shopify that allows developers to add their integrations and use “building blocks” to own their setup. ”[W]e learned how important it is for fast-growing e-commerce businesses to be able to change out parts of their tech-stack in a quick and efficient way so we have built Medusa’s architecture to allow for exactly that,” shared the makers.

If you’re stressed out by form-building, snoopForms might be able to help. The open source alternative to Typeform lets users create no-code or code forms that pipe submissions to one central hub for managing and forwarding data. The tool emphasizes forms as a data source and focuses on offering a single place to manage, analyze and forward that data. The makers plan to offer more interfaces such as Vue, React Native, and Email embeds to collect form data down the road.

Acapela co-founder, Heiki Riesenkampf, recently introduced his latest creation, clientdb—an open source, in-memory database for enabling real-time apps. Fueled by problems faced while building Acapela, Heiki sought to create a solution that quickly fetches and updates data in real-time so that developers don’t have to write server-side code.

Will you give any of these a try?

Sleek slide decks are like a form of art. You know it when you spot one, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes it so visually appealing or how to replicate it. They’re also a time suck – writing the content is one thing, but getting it to look cohesive on a fixed canvas? That’s a whole other beast.

Gamma launched yesterday to make the latter quicker. The tool lets you focus on writing and uses flexible cards and fluid layouts to automatically align and fit the content. The makers liken it to building a Notion doc that converts into a presentation. It lets you embed GIFs, videos, charts, and websites, and has a “one-click” feature that allows you to restyle the entire deck without having to rework it each time. You can measure and understand engagement through built-in analytics and collect feedback from your collaborators using comments and reactions.

First-time founders Grant Lee, James Fox, and Jon Noronha met while working at Optimizely, an A/B testing tool that was acquired by Episerver in 2020. After coming out of stealth a year ago, the team raised a $7M round with participants including Airtable and Patreon founders, as well as Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan, and LinkedIn’s former CEO, Jeff Weiner. “While we're still super early, we're excited to open things up today, and wanted the PH community to be among the first to try out the product,” Lee shared on yesterday’s launch, which racked up 1,200+ upvotes.

The team also shared a little behind the scenes of building Gamma: “We ‘eat our own dogfood’ / ‘drink our own champagne’ here; every week, someone makes a deck and presents on it. Topics have been as varied as the History of McDonald's McRib, UFOs, woodworking, and tattoos.” We might give this a try for our next team gather.

We’ve covered alternatives to Google Slides and Powerpoint in the past, so seeing new tools wanting to disrupt the space feels exciting.

What do you use?

We’re big fans of remote, asynchronous communication. As much as that enables us to do deep, focused work, it can get lonely sometimes. This means that any chance to brainstorm as a team is always more exciting. One way of doing this is through whiteboarding, which is a handy way of enabling collaborative free-form thinking that lets you map out new ideas.

Canva launched Whiteboards yesterday with the community and is currently available for free on the web, desktop, and mobile. The new tool uses an infinite canvas that lets teams collaborate in real-time through stickies, voting graphics, shapes, as well as Canva’s library of 100 million images, videos, and audio tracks.

Canva’s new tool comes at an interesting time, as Apple’s preparing to launch its new similar feature, Freeform, on iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura later this year. According to Apple, Freeform is set to be a “flexible canvas that gives users the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts and page sizes, and with full support for Apple Pencil.”

If you’ve been watching the whiteboard space, you might also remember Eraser’s soft launch last year, as well as news of the product hitting the 1M users mark. The team is now back with Eraser 2.0, which focuses on distributed engineering teams. What makes Eraser different from other tools is its ability to support markdown, code blocks, cloud icons, and code-generated diagrams. It also takes a keyboard-first approach – you can draw an entire diagram without your hands leaving the keyboard.

How do you brainstorm? If you’re curious to see what else is out there, here are some community-sourced resources.

You’ve got a great product idea, now what? Going from the scratchpad to a finalized product isn’t a self-explanatory process. Luckily, makers are constantly developing tools to help other makers develop and launch their products:

Ross Chaldecott (ex-Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, Shopify) and his co-founders (also from Campaign Monitor) felt that launching new software products was a complicated process with many barriers to entry. In hopes of making the SaaS building space more accessible, they built Kinde—a development infrastructure for software teams. The goal is to get “SaaS products to market faster with all of the building blocks software teams need in one place.” Kinde is equipped with user management tools, feature flags, monetization tools, and the ability to acquire users with passwordless authentication, all on one dashboard. The all-in-one platform can help makers building SaaS products save time on building infrastructure so they can focus on the core offering of their product.

FlutterFlow 3.0, a no-code Golden Kitty winner, is back with more features to help makers launch cross-platform apps too. The makers introduced a marketplace of plugins and templates (like Google Maps, Stripe, and Algolia) and the ability to build and deploy web apps. Makers can also use FlutterFlow to quickly translate their app into 100+ languages, collaborate in real time with their project team, add custom code, generate code with Codex by OpenAI, and more.

In the post-launch stage? Ignition launched a changelog tool to help makers collect customer feature requests, allow customers and teammates to vote, discuss, and prioritize feature requests, and more.

Now is a great time to be a maker. If you try these out for your product toolkit, make sure to leave feedback for the makers and let them know what you want to see.

Nothing freaks out email marketers as much as poor deliverability. Social media’s great, but email still seems to be one of the stickiest outreach methods makers and companies resort to. It’s personal and it’s effective. Given the abundance of writing tools, the challenge is no longer writing a captivating email, but getting it into people’s inboxes. We did some digging, and here are a few tools to optimize your email marketing.

Email Warm-Up by Snov.io helps you “warm up” your email to increase your deliverability rate. “Using a network of real human accounts, Email Warm-up automatically sends out realistic AI-generated emails that are then opened, starred, and replied to using the same AI conversation builder. Basically, your email gets the superstar treatment until email service providers can no longer deny you entry to the Inbox,” the makers explain.

The team behind Email Flows spoke to 100+ email experts and created 50+ plug-and-play email automation sequences for use cases like eCommerce, FinTech, Real Estate, and EdTech.

Email Testing By Inbox Pirates lets you test, preview, and analyze emails before you send them into the wild. According to the team, many people read their emails directly from their notifications bar (guilty!). The tool adds a big preview button inside your browser that lets you see what your email looks like from the notification bar and where it gets cut off in popular email tools.

If you have more email-specific questions, today we’re joined by Toby Howell, who previously worked on Morning Brew’s newsletter. Toby now leads Content at Launch House and writes the Homescreen newsletter. Ask him anything about newsletter and email growth strategies in Discussions.