The Leaderboard

Email is one of the few things in tech that has withstood the test of time. It’s also a good example of “die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.” Not many things in life are as annoying as spammy, unwanted email. These makers are working on a solution to clean up your inbox for a good cause.

Gated helps keep your inbox free from unwanted and spammy emails. Each time you get an email from an unknown address, that sender is challenged to donate ($2 minimum) to your chosen nonprofit in order to deliver their message.

Maker and CEO of Gated, Andy Mowat, was previously building sales and marketing engines at companies like Upwork and Box. “My teams have sent billions of emails and caused a lot of pain,” he admits. The idea of decluttering your inbox is not necessarily novel though. “[It] has definitely been tried before and I have studied every attempt (we even have some of the folks who tried before as investors). Our approach isn’t about locking down your inbox but reducing the noise to help everyone,” he adds.

If you already have a handle on your inbox but want more ways to up your email game, we’ve seen a few interesting launches recently.

Skiff Mail is privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted, Web3-native, open-source email that keeps your inbox private with 10 GB of storage, instant search, and three aliases.

InboxPro offers a suite of tools to improve your email experience with an AI-powered email assistant, calendar scheduling, templates, follow-ups, and email analytics.

Email Signature Generator by Reply lets you pick a layout option, customize the elements, and generate your own email signature.

No matter how intuitive most tools claim to be, there’s almost always a learning curve. Tutorials and demos help, but sometimes the questions you have are just too specific. That’s where a tool like the one we saw launch today comes in handy.

Hopps connects you with US-based vetted experts to help walk you through strategizing, setting up, and optimizing over 30 commonly used tools. Some of the ones you can get help with include Mailchimp, Google Ads, and Hubspot.

“This is like instant ‘therapy’ for not-so-tech-savvy folks in the workforce,” one commenter notes.

After choosing which tool you need help with, the platform matches you with a live expert in under three minutes. They join a 1:1 where you can start sharing your screens and walk through the issues you’re experiencing. If you don’t have time to talk now, Hopps also allows you to schedule a call for later.

What’s cool about on-demand tools and services is the lack of commitment they require. Most such products don’t involve recurring subscriptions and don’t tie you to a contract.

Jam Genies launched with a similar concept last year, providing you on-demand access to experts that will help you build a better website.

“Say you’re a founder and you’re about to fundraise. With Jam Genies, you can now book a session with an investor like Erik Torenberg and get his take on how your website comes across to investors,” wrote maker Dani Gran.

According to the Hopps team, the average employee uses over 20 tools at work every day — anyone on your team need help? 👇

Last week we recapped all the new, shiny products and features Apple is working on. Today, we’re looking at some of the 2022 Apple Design Awards winners and finalists that the Product Hunt community has supported over the past year.

In the Inclusivity category, Procreate snatched its second award for its new accessibility features such as tremor and motion filtering, an in-app assistive touch menu, audio feedback, and color blindness settings. Other finalists include transcription and live translation for FaceTime app Navi and anagram game Letter Rooms.

Interaction Design winner Slopes uses the GPS on your iPhone or Apple Watch to keep a diary of your skiing and snowboarding. Gibbon (also a Social Impact winner), which we saw launch earlier this year, is “a hopeful game about the beauty of wilderness and the destructive force of human civilization.” Also notable in this category, Transit+ is a multimodal urban travel planning app, while Vectornator’s iPad app lets you design vector graphics.

Shinning a light on crucial issues, Rebel Girls shares the stories of history’s most influential women such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Simone Biles, and Frida Kahlo, through rich audio. We wrote more about it here. Empathy and Headspace were also nominated.

As far as Delightful and Fun apps go, (Not Boring) Habits took the stage with its habit-building app. If you’re looking for visually appealing graphics, Halide Mark II is a camera for your iPhone and iPad that offers an intuitive experience to both novices and experienced photographers.

Making use of Apple’s latest technology, Innovation Winners and finalists include Odio’s virtual 3D soundscape and Focus Noodles, an app that helps you focus by not allowing you to touch your phone.

Looking at your investment portfolio may trigger debilitating anxiety right now. We get it and we’re intrigued by this product that we saw launch yesterday.

Legends Solar lets you buy equity ownership in real, operating commercial solar panels. The platform was built to help those who would like to install solar panels but can’t because they live in a city or are renting. If you’re thinking about taking a break from coins and stocks, or want to help the environment while making some cash, it might interest you.

The way it works is pretty straightforward. Once you purchase a panel (or a rooftop's worth) you can start tracking your investment on the Legend Rooftop monitoring software. That’s where you’ll be able to see how much cash your panels are generating and withdraw through monthly dividends.

Legends is currently beta testing the product with private investors who are looking to invest $100k in each solar panel but are planning to open it to the public soon. You can currently claim early access and reserve a panel here.

Other tools we’ve seen recently might help you make new investments and keep track of existing ones:

Trading Across Brokerages by Front lets you see and trade all your assets in one place.

Deciml automatically rounds up your online transactions and invests the spare change.

With Backed you can invest in private companies and benefit as they grow with CompanyCoins.

According to Elon Musk, "time is the ultimate currency." We agree. Now what? Making sure you’re spending it on the right things can be tough. Distractions don’t help either. Imagine the stuff you’d get done if you closed that Twitter tab.

Enter Flowace. For individuals, the productivity app helps manage and optimize how you spend your time by automatically tracking and categorizing it. For companies, this means receiving real-time accurate cost assessment on projects and alerts when they exceed budgets based on time spent. The product integrates with apps you already use like Dropbox, Adobe Creative Studio, and Microsoft Office.

Similarly, Assista automatically tracks your actions and gives you a detailed view of what you’re working on. The app embeds with your Trello workflow so you don’t need to log in any timesheets. “Nobody really needs time-tracking software. What we need is the data - knowing how much time a specific task took. Checking what you worked on last Thursday while the kids were at home and needed your attention,” one of the makers notes.

We get that time tracking can be somewhat controversial, especially when it’s a team-wide practice. If you were hoping to try out something for personal use, these could interest you.

Apps Tracker tracks the time you spend in every desktop app. The app focuses on your privacy so all the collected data stays on your Mac and is not shared or uploaded anywhere.

Timecap’s focus is on helping you build good habits by understanding which activities you spend most of your time on.

KosmoTime’s calendar lets you time block your activities and mute distractions like Slack and open tabs.

Do you think you’re spending your time well enough? This maker took the question to a more philosophical level and is asking: do you ever feel like you're running out of time? Join the conversation.

There are many ways you can annoy a developer. The one that probably strikes a chord the most is reporting a bug they can’t reproduce. As frustrating as bugs can be, “the login doesn’t work” is simply not a valid explanation. What’s not working? What happens when you log in? Do you see an error page?

Brevy tries to bring some peace and clarity among product, design, and engineering teams. The app lets you record your screen from your browser so you can report visual issues easier. Sounds familiar? “This pitch might remind you of Loom, and yes, we are similar. But Brevy makes four major improvements,” one of the makers argues.

Brevy automatically includes console logs and technical information in your recordings. If a video is not necessary, you can opt to annotate an element directly in your browser so the rest of the team can take a look. Annotating also works for recorded videos – you can leave comments specifically tied to a region in your video to give more context. Finally, any errors can be pushed directly to your issue tracking tools like Jira or project management apps like ClickUp and Asana.

This is Brevy’s second time launching – it debuted its Beta a year ago, which was less focused on video and more on leaving feedback on web pages. With this public launch, the product seems to be geared towards product teams collaborating on feedback, in contrast to Loom, which we see teams use for various different use cases.

The team will be around to answer questions so jump in and add yours here.

Nothing messes up your Friday like realizing it’s only Thursday. Add a never-ending to-do list and you’ve got yourself the perfect panic-induced end of the week that not even coffee can fix. Fortunately, we’ve got plenty of makers working on products to get us out of that productivity slump.

Here’s a list of ten recently launched, popular productivity apps that might’ve slipped under your radar.

Magical lets you automate tasks by moving data between tabs. You can populate messages, sheets, and forms without the time-consuming copy-paste.

Reclaim is a Google Calendar add-on that integrates with all of your task management apps to automatically find the best time for your to-dos, recurring events, 1:1s, and breaks.

stagetimer.io is a countdown timer that you can control from any device.

Lazy Search by SigmaOS acts like a search engine for your browser to help you find what you’re looking for in tabs, bookmarks, searches, and commands.

Acapela helps you get to Inbox Zero across all of your collaboration apps, like Slack, Notion, GitHub, Figma, Jira, and Linear.

Muse lets you work with visuals, text, and ink on freeform spatial boards.

Summari is a web and mobile app that summarizes long text articles into bullet points.

Join one of 200+ Flow Club Lounge live co-working sessions to get work done thanks to a silly little mind-trick called social accountability.

The Aroma API integrates your calendar, CRM, project management, and communication tools to standardize the data so you can update and migrate it from one software to another.

Communicate with your Woice by recording and sending audio notes to your co-workers.

Depending on where you are in the world, it might be getting toastier outside. If you’ve been working remotely long enough, it’s likely the FOMO will get to you. Seeing others soak in the vitamin D outside your window could even (dare we say it) make you wish you went into the office.

You might want to try Feeting.app before making any rash decisions. The app helps you take any of your meetings outside, while you’re walking. The audio-only, hands-free meetings come with your own AI assistant that automatically summarizes things like important topics, follow-ups, actions, sentiment, and speaking times. The team calls the technology “Feeting Gems™.”

The app works in different types of environments, whether that’s a peaceful forest, the loud streets of NYC, or windy Chicago. “We try to block all background noise and with Voice Isolation,” one of the makers shares.

There’s also a certain level of gamification embedded into the experience. You can join your colleagues in different challenges and see how much carbon dioxide your team’s saving by walking. The app syncs with Apple Health and Google Fit to help see your progress over time. With every 1,000 steps you “feet” together with your team, everyone earns ƒ0,10, which you can spend on sustainable products.

Since you’re already moving your body, you might want to check out some other ways to get rewarded for it. Fitmint, for instance, is a Web3 fitness and lifestyle mobile app with inbuilt NFT gaming which lets you earn rewards in cryptocurrency by simply working out.

Apart from spending too much time indoors, what other challenges do you see working from home? Join the conversation.

It’s the day after Apple’s WWDC, one of the biggest tech conferences of the year where the company announces its latest, shiniest software (and sometimes hardware) releases. Or, in other words, it’s like Christmas Day for developers.

The announcements created quite a bit of buzz, maybe even more than usual. Some folks are arguing that certain new features are trying to monopolize individual markets and existing stand-alone products like Buy Now, Pay Later apps, whiteboards, and password managers. Here are some of the highlights.

As part of iOS 16, Apple introduces Safety Check, meant to protect people in abusive environments by allowing them to revoke access to passwords and apps. Focus Mode is leveling up, allowing users to customize their lock screen and create more boundaries to only display certain content. Notifications will also roll in from the bottom to keep them from obscuring your photo. iMessage is getting a makeover, too. This includes marking text threads as unread, unsending messages, and an edit button. Twitter, we’re looking at you. 👀

The new M2 MacBook Air sports a 13.6’’ display with a notch, MagSafe, a 1080p camera, and fast charging. The all-new M2 chip debuts with a CPU 18% faster than its predecessor, 20B transistors, 50% more memory bandwidth than the M1, and 24GB of unified memory. In addition to silver and space gray, it now comes in a dark blue called “midnight,” and a light gold titled “starlight.” Soon enough you’ll also be able to upgrade to the new macOS Ventura.

For the health fanatics out there, watchOS 9 introduces more customizable watch faces, an enhanced Workout app, sleep stages, a first-of-its-kind (FDA approved) atrial fibrillation history feature, and an all-new Medications app.

Other key announcements include the iPadOS 16 with Freeform, a Miro-like whiteboard tool, a major update to CarPlay that allows for deeper integration with your vehicle, Apple’s fitness app coming to all iPhone users (even if you don’t have a watch), and the new macOS will allow you to use your iPhone’s camera as a webcam.

What are you most excited about? Let us know.

Every year, Wikipedia runs an annual fundraising campaign imploring you to ensure the future of free information. Despite the urgency, Wikipedia is actually doing pretty well, but regardless a product that suggests it could help fund the internet's favorite free encyclopedia piqued our interest.

Yep is a new search engine built by the team at Ahrefs, a company that helps you improve your search engine ranking with a toolkit of products and resources. Ahref tools are powered by big data, collected by its very own crawler.

“We crawl the entire web 24/7 (much like search engines do) storing petabytes of information about live websites — how they link to each other and what keywords they rank for…” explains the website In fact, Ahref processes so much data, they spun up their own data centers too.

So what’s a company to do with all that information and infrastructure. Why not start a search engine? One that doesn’t rely on Google or Bing APIs, as many do.

Amazingly, Ahrefs is able to do so with $60M of its own money after bootstrapping and re-investing its revenue. That’s a ton of money but Ukrainian founder, Dmytro Gerasymenko, is betting big on the same “content creators [that] made Google rich.”

More than three years ago, Gerasymenko introduced his new search engine concept, noting in a blog that Google “convinced us to write, produce and publish content on its behalf without paying a dime.” He questioned why Google never took up YouTube’s revenue share model after acquiring the company back in 2006.

Look at featured snippets on Google. Though they provide easy (sometimes incorrect) answers for search users, they take away traffic — and therefore revenue — from the creators and small businesses who are pulling together all that information.

So Yep's biggest differentiator is that it will share 90% of its ad revenue with content creators. The logistics of how this works aren't clear yet, but we’re looking forward to a bootstrapped startup throwing its hat in the search ring.