The Roundup

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 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 Gamma's launch, which racked up 1,700+ 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?

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.

We’ve covered all kinds of tools recently, from no-code tools to AI tools. Depending on where you are, you might've entered 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 last weekend reminded us of Spotify's latest 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.

If Product Hunt ever made a game, it would likely be something like Stray.

The third-person indie adventure game that took the Internet by storm recently follows the story of a homeless cat roaming a robot-filled cyber-punk world. If this isn’t enough to whisk you away, the cat is cute (but equally ferocious) and ginger.

Without giving away too much, it seems like some of the game’s popularity stems from it catering to both hardcore gamers and those of us who can only think of The Sims when we hear video games. The endearing story has players exploring a post-apocalyptic city, as well as completing missions and tasks. Still, you don’t feel the same sense of impending doom as you do with most adventure games. You also get an unlimited number of lives, which leaves you time to take in the enthralling visuals.

Stray was developed by BlueTwelve Studio, an indie game team from the south of France, who spent six years perfecting the storyline, graphics, and meows. Reviewers are raving about it on Metacritic. So are critics. Alyse Stanley, Editor at Washington Post’s Launcher shares that “‘Stray’ is an enrapturing experience, the kind of game that doesn’t leave your brain after the credits roll.“

Maybe one of the best things to come out of Stray’s launch is the number of feline pictures we’ve seen on Twitter. The cat puns, too. Knowing the Internet, seeing an account dedicated to real-life cats being mesmerized by Stray wasn’t that much of a surprise.

Have you played it yet? What did you think? Let us know.

We’re a little more than halfway through the year and have already seen tons of cool developments in the world of AI. It might seem like many of these are the result of the metaverse craze the social media giant ignited at the end of last year. In reality, a lot of the bigger projects like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Codex, Google’s Imagen, or Meta’s latest No Language Left Behind have likely been years in the making.

The topic of AI is a hot one already. Recent claims from one Google engineer arguing that the AI he was working on became sentient aren’t putting minds at ease either. While most of us can’t get our hands on these (somewhat) dystopian programs, makers have found day-to-day use cases for AI that remove some of the manual work and let you focus on the high-impact things instead.

ICYMI, Copilot by Github x OpenAI is now available for all developers to suggest code and entire functions in real-time.

Slogan Generator creates a catchy one-liner for your business from a short description you input.

Typeform launched Relayed, a tool that captures real conversations (via async talking or a meeting import) and summarizes them to help your team stay up to date.

Code Language Converter uses AI to convert code snippets from one programing language to another. Similarly, AutoRegex uses OpenAI's GPT-3 to produce regular expressions from plain English.

Also using OpenAI, this tool suggests namings for your GitHub repositories.

Octie.ai is a free marketing assistant that writes emails, product descriptions, social media captions, and subject lines for you.

What did we miss?

Most days we bring you the deets on all the cool software makers are launching, so each time we see new, shiny hardware, it’s a little extra special. If you haven’t felt excited by new phone releases in a while, these announcements might do the trick.

First up, we have the highly anticipated Nothing Phone (1) from OnePlus co-founder, Carl Pei. The device stands out with its “glyph interface,” which consists of a set of light strips on its rear. These act as notifications for things like the state of your battery and incoming calls.

When the device goes on sale at the end of July, it will be available in the UK and parts of Asia and Europe, at a mid-range price of about $475. Nothing seems to be betting on its distinctive design (it’s transparent) and powerful integrations with third-party products and technologies, like Polygon, instead of costly (yet cutting-edge) processors.

Xiaomi also launched its 12S Ultra flagship phone recently, which sports an impressive, custom-built 50.3MP 1-inch camera sensor from Sony that lets you take crisp images in low light, adding depth to your shots. In contrast to Nothing’s device, the 12S Ultra comes with the new, energy-efficient Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor.

If you’re an old soul and like to describe yourself as quirky, the Nokia 5710 XpressAudio might be a better choice. A blast from the past, the device brings back the traditional keyboard, but with a twist. The back of the phone has a built-in charging case for the earbuds it comes with.

In a world where giants like Apple and Samsung reign +40% of the smartphone market, seeing companies like Nothing try to disrupt feels exciting. Will you be snagging any of the above?

Believe it or not, we’re already halfway through the year. Last week, cap table management platform Carta launched its H1 2022 compensation report. If you’re a big data nerd, you’ll love this. The company utilized more than 127,000 employee records from startups that use Carta Total Comp to paint a picture of where startup compensation is at, what jobs are most in-demand, and which cities are the highest paying.

When it comes to salary trends, it looks like it’s a good time to be in legal, strategy, product, or engineering, in that order. All of these functions have a median salary of over $150,000. Still, according to Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta, “Product actually fares even better than third if you just look at companies worth over $1 billion. Median salaries in Legal and Strategy are high in the dataset because often small startups only have a single lawyer (and they are very senior).”

Product touches so many areas of a company that it makes sense to be so highly valued. If you’ve been pondering switching to a job in Product or are curious about what it takes, we have a few resources for you to check out.

Future of Product Management Report 2022 surveyed 5,000 PMs to provide a deep dive into Product-Led Growth, key stats, and trends to look out for.

Speaking about Product-Led Growth, this book will teach you the importance of PLG, how to showcase value through your product and help you assess which free model is right.

But if you’re more of an audiophile rather than a bookworm, Lenny Rachitsky recently launched Lenny’s Podcast where he interviews product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable and tactical advice to help build, launch, and scale your product.

This Notion Pack for Product Managers includes a collection of curated templates for daily standups, agile retrospectives, and 1:1 meeting planners.

One of the biggest struggles amongst people with a tight budget is coming to terms with how much is actually in their account. The looming possibility of an overdraft means having to always be aware of the peanuts left in your pocket.

That’s why a maker by the name of Jonathan created Cashews.

“The first little seed of Cashews started way back in 2014 in response to my growing anxiety around my personal finances. I had a young family and was feeling increasingly stretched money-wise. We were leaning more on credit cards, less cash was going into savings, and it was literally keeping me up at night.”

So Jonathan started scraping his bank info and texting his balances to himself each day. Over time, with requests and feedback from family and friends, he turned the concept into Cashews.

Unlike other financial tracking and planning apps, Cashews doesn’t offer an “insane level of customization” and is “user friend as f*ck,” according to the makers. It connects with 12K+ banks and shows you precisely how much you can spend to take the stress out of your cost of living.

Those (pea)nuts reminded us that it’s been a while since we checked in on Acorns, the micro-investing app that lets you invest your spare change on auto pilot. The company was planning its initial public offering by SPAC last year, but backed out earlier this year citing volatile market conditions — it feared being lumped in with other companies with inflated valuations. Nonetheless, the team has pressed on, saying the process got them IPO-ready, and instead fundraised $300M, earning its unicorn title as a privately-held startup.

Of course, every penny counts so no judgement if even the smallest investments are causing you stress. Start off by finding out how much you have to begin with.

Many of us are still using Microsoft Excel or its direct competitors, despite the fact that it takes an influencer to teach many of us how to use it.

We’ve been highlighting promising nextgen spreadsheet software (Equals, Rows, ActionDesk) as it pops up, and last week a new product in this space caught our attention because of its focus on using the power of the spreadsheets without much of the traditional spreadsheet UI.

Causal is a new tool for working with numbers but unlike Excel or Sheets, it enables you to write formulas in plain English and create interactive dashboard reports where you can play without breaking things. Live integrations pull data from your accounting system, CRM, HRIS, or data warehouse. One early adopter's favorite feature is the ability to bake uncertainty into your models: “Instead of saying our cost of showing 1,000 ads (CPM) is $10, we can say it's $8 to $10 and then everything downstream that references that will show a range too.”

We first met Causal a couple of years ago when the makers, Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis, launched its browser extension for Google Sheets. The London-based team has since closed a Series A, grew its team to 50+, and last year added 30% more customers month-on-month.

The tool is meant to be for just about everyone at your business. Founders can use it to forecast runway, sales teams to forecast pipeline, marketing for performance planning, and of course, financial teams for budgeting and beyond.

Of course, when it comes to non-numbers people actually being able to work with numbers, the proof is in the pudding. When asked by a Product Hunt community member if the tool is easy to use, Abdaal shared, “There's a bit of a learning curve but you can understand most of the concepts in 15 mins or so!”

The demo video will show you an example of how users can create new visualizations in plain English.

Earlier this month, 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.