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Samsung’s annual Unpacked Event was this week and the main stars of the show were its upgraded foldable phones.

The Galaxy Z Fold—probably the most coveted item at the event—comes with minor refinements, but are they enough to convert naysayers?

The tablet-phone hybrid now has a wider screen creating a more desirable user interface, which is also more durable. It’s the first smartphone equipped with Android 12L, Google’s custom OS for foldable devices, giving the phone a PC-like bottom taskbar. If you’re here for the camera, the Z Fold 4 is equipped with a 3x optical zoom and Samsung’s 30x Space Zoom, so you can see the moon up-close and personal. One thing that hasn’t budged—the sticker price. At a $1799 price tag, many still think the Z Fold 4 is too much of a niche luxury.

For the flip-phone nostalgics, the Z Flip 4 is equipped with similar durability improvements as the Z Fold 4, is water-resistant (5 feet of water for 30 minutes) and has better battery life — a criticism of the Z Flip 3. The Z Flip 4 promises to reach 50% charge in only 30 minutes and to better sustain its charge.

People also tuned in for the new Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro, both boasting bigger batteries, which will hopefully translate to a longer battery life. Similar to the phone upgrades, both watches have a more durable display, but the 5 Pro offers the most protection with a bezel that’s raised around the screen. There’s also improved health features—the Watch 5 is said to come with more accurate readings and the Watch 5 Pro comes with GPX compatibility to track workout routes. Post-workout, expect to receive customized water consumption recommendations.

Samsung’s smallest gear comes with a price hike. The Galaxy Buds 2 Pro retail for $229, which is $30 more than its predecessor. It may be worth it if you’re into the new matte finish and enhanced comfortability—Samsung says the buds are 15% smaller and promise to reduce pressure and limit movement in your ear. For the audiophiles, the buds now support Dolby Atmos and 24-bit Hi-Fi sound quality.

What do you think about this year’s Unpacked?

Yesterday, Stark, a design tool centered around accessibility, announced its $6 million seed investment, along with a new suite of tools.

Stark first launched as a color-blind simulator and contrast checker for Sketch. Today, the new Stark suite is equipped with more features that can be plugged into more design tools, such as Figma and Adobe XD. Teams can also now use Stark for browsers like Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Opera.

“[T]he whole philosophy is that we hook into the tools that your product team is already using, whether you’re the designer, developer, project manager or QA expert, and stitch them together into an accessibility workflow,” Benedikt Lehnert, Stark’s chief design officer, told TechCrunch.

Stark gives teams the opportunity to tackle accessibility from start to finish, with the ability to measure a design’s typography, contrast, colors, and more. It tackles an issue that co-founder and CEO Cat Noone said is “not a small problem. It’s part of what we call a company’s internal PSA — privacy, security, accessibility — and accessibility [stands] right alongside privacy and security as one of these three major issues in software development that’s been ignored.” The company itself has a diverse team—a majority of the people on the team have a disability and it positively contributes to product development.

With at least 1.5 billion people in the world having at least one disability, Stark is taking on an issue that many might think is too much to handle. The good news? Bigger companies are now making progress.

Last month, Twitter Accessibility announced its new image description reminder. The feature went live to 10% of users, reminding them to add image descriptions to their photos for blind or low-vision people using screen readers. Twitter is also exploring live captioning for Spaces and profile photo image descriptions.

TikTok also recently added auto-generated captions that now allow viewers to turn on closed captions, as opposed to leaving it up to the creator. Translation is available for captions and video descriptions, helping content reach more users.

These updates signal that accessibility software and content is being seen as less of an option and more of a necessity for large companies. Tools like Stark make it feasible for everyone. Let the makers at Stark know what you’d like to see next.

You’re probably no stranger to data leaks. Twitter just confirmed a breach exposing 5.4M accounts. It happens too often.

One of the ways cybersecurity experts work to prevent this from happening is through penetration testing. Pentesting involves discovering vulnerabilities in an environment with the purpose of taking control of a system. Ethical hackers, also sometimes referred to as “white hats,” often play a role in this process. They employ the same techniques as a malicious hacker to exploit weaknesses in a system.

Makers Sebastian Brandes and Anders Skovsgaard noticed an opportunity in the market and worked for 6 months to launch Heyhack—a new, automated pentesting solution.

Cybersecurity consultants and ethical hackers can be inaccessible to companies with small budgets. Moreover, “automated vulnerability scanners test just a tiny part of your web app and these solutions won’t let you look into the process of how testing was conducted,” explains Heyhack in yesterday’s launch video.

“Realizing this, we set a goal to build a 100% transparent product with complete coverage and minimal configuration,” wrote Sebastien. Sebastien is an AI professional and former Tech Evangelist at Microsoft, while co-founder Anders is a pentester with 15 years of experience.

Heyhack spins up browser instances on virtual machines in the cloud and navigates your application like a real user, interacting with every element it finds on your web app. It captures screenshots of daily tests that “surpasses the level of hackers.”

Makers in the comments have shown excitement over the tool’s ease of use, clean UI, and accessibility for startups and bootstrapped teams. Heyhack says it “requires zero technical knowledge” — when a vulnerability is found, the tool sends a notification with technical details and “complete guidance” on how to fix it.

Think it looks easy enough to use too? If you give Heyhack a try, be sure to let makers know what you found in the comments.

Let’s check in—how are your New Year's resolutions going? If you’re anything like the majority, your resolutions were probably abandoned around February or March.

Keeping up with resolutions in this hectic world (where there seems to be a crazy new development every day) is difficult. The last thing you’re thinking about is getting your daily water intake in.

If you’re overwhelmed by life and the state of the world, chances are you’re not feeling motivated to stay on top of your goals. Buddy Crush is a new accountability tool that might help by letting you track your habits with friends. And if you really need a burst of motivation? Maker Marc Lou built the app in 24 hours on a plane from Bali to Paris.

Buddy Crush offers a fun, competitive approach to accountability. You and your friends challenge each other to keep goals and healthy habits alive. You can engage in various accountability groups, like career or educational ones, and track your progress against your friends’ to see who has read the most books— or who’s on a consistent workout streak.

If one of your resolutions was to get out of your comfort zone, you can join an existing group to make new friends and track your goals with them.

This isn't Marc Lou's first time indie hacking a helpful habit tool. 50 Hacks (which garnered 700,000 likes on Reddit) lets the internet upvote their favorite productivity hacks, and Books Calculator lets you see how many books you can read in a month, year, or lifetime with just a few minutes a day.

Think of Product Hunt as the non-judgmental Breakfast Club. You like to spend your money on JPEGs? Carry on. Maybe it’s jewelry or maybe it’s art. You do you. In fact, we’re always on the lookout for interesting products that think outside the box and challenge how we perceive wealth.

VALT caught our attention. The asset management app is part of Vincent, a search engine and database that allows you to discover and analyze $6B of alternative investments across 150 investment platforms. VALT came as a response to feedback the makers received about Vincent – “I’m kind of busy with my day job and I’d like to just send you some capital and have you invest it in the best deals for me.”

The platform lets you invest in alternative assets to diversify your portfolio. It gives you access to assets typically reserved for institutions and the ultra-wealthy, like rare art, collector’s items, pre-IPO ventures, and NFTs. VALT has an in-house portfolio team that sources these and provides in-depth analysis. Investors can access private calls with the team, investment memos, weekly performance updates, and news alerts.

It’s not the first rodeo for some of the makers behind VALT. Slava Rubin and Eric Schell co-founded the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, which has helped companies raise over $1.5B in funding.

If you want to try your hand at investing but need to do some research first, check out Revenue Watcher, a curated database reported directly by the founders of startups and indie projects. Revenue numbers are sourced from platforms like Twitter, Hacker News, YouTube, Starter Story, and Indie Hackers. Bear in mind, this isn't financial advice and you should always seek professional advice before committing to any risky investments.

Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimized by feedback surveys. They pop up at the most inconvenient of times and tbh, usually don’t give that much context to product teams either. As it turns out, there are right ways and wrong ways you can approach usability testing and collecting feedback.

Sprig seems to have figured out a solution and amassed over 1,000 upvotes on its Sprig Concept & Usability Testing launch yesterday. If you need a little refresher, Sprig used to be called UserLeap. It since rebranded and consolidated all of its offerings into one platform that helps you through the product research process, from start to finish. You can conduct video interviews, target specific users for microsurveys, and use AI to analyze findings.

Sprig Concept & Usability Testing takes concept testing a little further. The new tool allows founders, designers, and product teams to test ideas and prototypes before writing any lines of code. Testing happens in-browser, so participants can review concepts, complete recorded usability tasks, and provide feedback via text, voice, or video without downloading plugins or extensions. Say you want to validate a feature name. You can do so by embedding your Figma prototype and asking users questions like “What do you expect clicking on X would do?”

According to a TechCrunch interview with Sprig’s founder and CEO, Ryan Glasgow, what’s different about the product is its ability to enforce surveys depending on very specific trigger points, like not using a particular feature. This allows teams to save time and cash, instead of spending it on building “an in-house survey tool, which requires a dedicated team of engineers to operate and maintain it.”

Glasgow, who was also Weebly’s first Product Manager, shared that the company recently closed a $30M funding round from the likes of a16z, Accel, and Figma Ventures.

The Internet is probably one of the best and worst human inventions. While it’s made life easier for many (no more hauling yourself to the library just to research something), it’s also introduced layers to already-complicated things. Writing is one of them.

Content optimization isn’t a new concept—a 1940s New York Times columnist likely understood the need to create compelling content that garnered lots of attention. With the development of online publications and the ability to discover anything with a simple Google search, your content is now just one tiny fish in a vast, barely-discovered ocean. As interesting as your blog may be, have you optimized it for SEO and speed?

If you have, it probably felt like 100 steps. As a longtime blogger and technical maker, Sai Krishna dealt with this without a lot of experience in marketing, which is why he created Superblog— an alternative to WordPress and Medium.

“It is very painful to optimize WordPress or any other blog installation every time because the blog is not my core product but still my products depend on the blog,” says Sai.

Superblog is an SEO-focused blogging platform that automatically optimizes for SEO and speed, taking the hassle out of hiring someone new or using another platform to optimize content. It fits somewhere between Medium-style blogs, which keep readers on their own platforms, and website builders that allow for optimization and supporting users with things like hosting on your subdirectory, server performance, and integration without branding.

If you want to try out more tools to help you create SEO optimized content in just a step or two, check out GrowthBar, Frase, and ContentPro.

While most creator platforms out there seem to be going all in on video (ahem, Instagram and then not Instagram?), it looks like Pinterest is still placing some of its bets on good ol’ photos. The image-sharing decacorn soft-launched Shuffles yesterday, an app that helps you create collages and moodboards. If you think about Pinterest’s early user base (mostly DIY lovers), the company’s move in this direction makes a ton of sense.

Shuffles comes out of Pinterest’s recently created in-house incubator, TwoTwenty, and is currently available by invite or by joining the waitlist on its home screen. Although the company’s been rather quiet about its new app, the App Store listing notes some of its features and uses cases. You can use Shuffles to cut out objects from images, add animations and effects, and share your creations privately or publicly. That’s not to say Pinterest doesn’t care about video anymore. In fact, last year it announced Pinterest TV, which gives shoppers and sellers a glimpse into live shopping.

Despite the current state of the ad market, Pinterest’s deep push into eCommerce and advertising seems to be paying off. “Pinterest achieved 9% revenue growth year over year in Q2, or 10% revenue growth on a constant currency basis” Bill Ready, Pinterest’s new CEO announced in the company’s Q2 earnings report.

If your creative juices are overflowing and you can’t wait to get your hands on the new collage-making app, we recently covered some great alternatives for moodboarding. Check them out here.

Have you tried Shuffles already? Let us know your thoughts.

Along with learning how to create a profitable business, community-building is at the core of almost every entrepreneur’s priorities today. The presence of a strong community one can make you the star of your own show (see Beyoncé and her Beyhive — or Gru and his #gentleminions).

We’ve seen many makers leverage their communities to help skyrocket growth, from D2C brands like Glossier to Apple’s die-hard fanbase, and Notion reminds us regularly that even workplace SaaS can bring people together socially. You may be asking “How do I do that?” Many makers have shared their secret sauce. There are also a host of tools that empower current and prospective community-builders.

Threado launched today as a “command center for community builders,” founded by Pramod Rao who was formerly a VP of Marketing at Zomato (India’s food-delivery unicorn turned public company). Nowadays, makers use so many different platforms to create online communities — and Rao recognized that as a pain point for community managers trying to manage their followings. They're often overwhelmed with trying to dissect engagement data across platforms.

So Rao and his co-founder, Abhishek Nalin, created a way to get actionable insights, automate workflows and activate members across channels including Slack, Discord, Discourse, Twitter, and GitHub. The goal is to help community-builders effectively measure member needs and expedite community growth.

Threado launched its first product back in November, a workbook of community tools on Notion. Today is its big debut follows a $3.1M fundraise. The makers say they power over 260 communities so far.

Backspace is a new addition in this space as well. It helps creators build and monetize their online communities “without having to use an overwhelming stack of tools and platforms.” Backspace and Threado join a growing number of community management tools, like Orbit and Geneva.

Feeling inspired to build your own Beyhive?

We’ve covered all kinds of tools recently, from no-code tools to AI tools. Depending on where you are, today might mark the first day of the last month of summer. We’re taking this chance to do something a little more laid back and fun, like a round-up of recently launched music apps.

The celebration of International Friendship Day over the weekend reminded us of last week’s Spotify launch, Friends Mix. The new personalized playlist allows you to discover new tracks based on Blends you’ve created with your friends. According to TechCrunch, “Spotify says there are more than 11 million user-generated playlists with the word “friend” in the title. The company also notes that there has been a 35% increase in streams of these playlists in 2022 in the United States, compared to last year.”

MD Vinyl has skyrocketed on the App Store charts, becoming #1 in the US, overtaking TikTok and BeReal. The iOS widget connects to your Spotify or Apple Music app to sync the song you're playing and display it as a vinyl in the widget. Pretty retro, huh?

sona’s music-based digital therapeutic app is aimed at helping relieve anxiety symptoms. The music is created by Grammy-winning producers and artists, using a composition process backed by leading neuroscientists.

If you’re feeling brave and want to create the music yourself, Chord Genius helps you learn songs on the guitar, using chords and lyrics that move along. You can stream music from Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube and change the playback speed so you can learn at your own pace. You can’t rush art, after all.

Inspired by Mother Nature, earth.fm is like Spotify for natural soundscapes. Its interactive map takes you from listening to birds in the Congo basin rainforest to albatrosses in the Indian Ocean. Bonus points for partnering with charities focused on creating jobs, protecting ecosystems, and helping mitigate climate change.

Finally, ICYMI, check out Limewire’s comeback.