The Roundup

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.

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.

What happens when hundreds of thousands of products are launched or hunted over the span of eight years on Product Hunt? Well, for one thing, a standout community of ideators and makers is born.

Also, discovering new products gets a little hard to navigate.

We’ve watched products go from MVPs, hackathon submissions, and side projects to businesses, unicorns, and bootstrapped success stories since Product Hunt launched in 2013. We all love following along, but have had a hard time doing so.

“Just look at Framer — the team has dropped over thirty launches in less than a decade! ...We knew we needed to make some changes…“ shared Product Hunt CEO, Ashley Higgins.

So we did, and last week we got to be a little bit meta as we launched Product Hubs on Product Hunt.

We rolled up all the information that’s needed to learn about a product’s journey, from launches to reviews, into one hub. Now you can follow products and receive updates whenever your favorite launches something new. This feature was created for product stans and makers who build in public.

“Product Hunt shouldn’t just be where you launch your product, but where you can build a community,” shared Product Hunt PM, Michael Silber.

Product Hubs are a big change to how the platform is structured. “We had to restart it several times before reaching these results” noted Head of Design Julie Chabin, and “Migrating a lot of data related to the post to the product without breaking the models and bringing the site down was a significant challenge,” shared Engineering Lead Vlad Vladimirov.

We’re just getting started though and Product Hunt makers would love to get your feedback.

Scroll through LinkedIn for a couple of minutes and you’re bound to find one of those crazy corporate anecdotes and a bunch of variations of the “I’m pleased to announce…” post. While the platform is still one of the most efficient ways to find opportunities, some of you feel it’s “lost its purpose” and “has become more of a social network than being a top-notch professional network.”

That’s one of the areas Peerlist is hoping to improve. The community-led professional network has work profiles at its core, which are aimed at designers, developers, indie hackers, and creators. This means it enables you to showcase your work directly from Github, Dribbble, Substack, Medium, DEV, Hashnode, YouTube, and Product Hunt. You can also add custom projects and credentials.

As far as the social element goes, Peerlist helps you discover people based on the skills and work they are doing. You can keep your network organized by adding connections to custom lists. This kind of organization also extends to the feed, where you can contextualize your posts as opportunities, books, URLs, and events.

Social apps are notoriously difficult to build and grow. Peerlist’s focus on the utility of building a profile to showcase your experience is an interesting growth strategy. We’ve seen this in past successful companies – think filters on Instagram and video creation on TikTok.

Other similar platforms include Golden Kitty Award winner, Contra, which gives freelancers flexible, commission-free opportunities, and Showwcase, a professional network built for people who code. Polywork (backed by Youtube founders, among many others) is another popular LinkedIn alternative.

Deciding what to eat can be easy, but it can also be really tough. Some of us spend what feels like hours scrolling through food delivery apps and restaurant reviews, some look inside the fridge for inspiration, while others have their life together and meal prep. And let’s not forget about the meal-kit delivery services fans.

If you’re looking to cut down on costs, get inspiration, and enjoy more wholesome home-cooked meals, that’s where an app like Manna Cooking comes in handy.

The app takes users through the meal lifecycle: from search and discovery to shopping, cooking, and sharing. You can swipe on recipes that you’re interested in making, save them for later, or swap out certain ingredients to fit your eating requirements – think gluten-free, vegetarian, or lactose intolerant. This takes away some of the work that goes into finding the ingredients of that delicious-looking meal you saw on Pinterest or Instagram.

One of the problems that prompted the makers to start working on Manna is shopping for ingredients. According to a recent consumer survey, 80% of American shoppers use recipes as their starting point for online grocery shopping. Often that means searching for each and every ingredient and manually adding it to your cart. The app bypasses this by automatically adding ingredients in the right quantities of selected recipes to your Amazon Fresh cart. The team is also working on adding new vendors.

The food-tech space seemed to be quiet for a while, but some interesting products are launching nonetheless. Take yhangry, for instance, which launched a couple of months ago as a marketplace where you can book a private chef for your dinner party for $40pp. Instacart also recently confidentially filed for an IPO, despite seeing declining sales compared to the pandemic growth it experienced.

One disclaimer: swiping through the app might make you hungry. If you’re willing to take a chance, let the makers know which recipe you’re trying out tonight.

It sounds sexy, showering together, but is it?

Whether you're getting frisky in there or not, some couples see showering together as a way to nurture and strengthen their relationship. The problem is that most showers are built to support a one-person activity. That single stream of water leaves coupled cleaners with one person in the warmth and one in waiting.

The problem caught the attention of two engineers, Brett Skaloud and Jeff Feiereisen, who met while working at Amazon. Skaloud has over 15 years of experience designing products from the ground up, including Amazon Scout and Amazon Go. He teamed up with Feiereisen, who has worked as an engineering lead at Microsoft and Amazon (where he launched Amazon Go with Skaloud) to make Boona, a tandem shower.

The makers worked on numerous iterations of their product over the last year before launching it on Kickstarter. Now Boona has over 2,900 backers kicking in over $650,000 — over 65x their original goal, with a week to go.

So how does Boona work? It’s an after-market solution, meaning it was created to work easily within the setup you already have, making it an option for renters and homeowners. It fits like a tension curtain rod at the top of your shower, with two opposite-facing shower heads on either side connected by an insulted hose. There are three pressure settings and a valve allows you to adjust the flow of water between the showerheads.

And who said you can’t shower solo and enjoy two streams all on your own? No one.

Get more details on how Boona works.

It’s rough out there. While scrolling Twitter last week, you may have seen some founders announce they’re laying off parts of their teams. Significant cuts have been happening since the beginning of the year and we’ve already seen at least 22 companies join the list in Q2 alone.

If you’re curious to dig deeper into the data, one maker created a database tracking tech startup layoffs since COVID-19. Layoffs.fyi gets all of the information from public reports. It even shows a list of folks looking for new opportunities with contact information.

But why is this happening now, you might ask. One reason is that fundraising has slowed down. While global VC funding in 2021 was on a high, recent reports show that Q1 funding fell for the first time in a year. That, paired with bloated valuations, start-ups struggling to find ways to increase revenue or become profitable, and a looming bear market, might be bringing us closer to seeing the bubble burst.

We like to look at the positive, though. There are plenty of companies out there looking to hire. Fortunately, we continue seeing makers find smart, creative ways to gather opportunities and help those wanting to make a career change.

Take Honter, for instance. The app launched recently with an interesting discovery mechanism. “We found a good use for the matching system Tinder uses. We believe we can connect faster and better creative freelancers with potential new clients,” the maker shares.

Another tool worth mentioning is Himalayas, a remote job board that allows you to search 2,000+ open roles at 1,700+ remote companies. You can filter by time zone, visa, skills, company, salary, and tech stack. Alternatively, if switching to a career in Web3 sounds exciting to you, we recently wrote about it here.

Yours truly has some open positions, too.

Zenly is not a new app. We first saw its launch back in 2016, a year before getting acquired by Snapchat for a whopping $213M. Despite being an inspiration for Snap’s map feature, Snap decided to continue running Zenly as a separate product.

Recently the team launched Zenly 5.0 and earned Product of the Day. If you need some context as to what Zenly is – it’s a social maps app that marks all the places you and your friends have been. The app lets you see where your friends are, using always-on GPS, so no need for check-ins. You can then message them from the app to make plans and hang out.

The Paris-based team has been heads down working on its biggest redesign to date for its now 35 million monthly active users. One of Zenly’s makers shares “you’ll see new features like public profiles and auto check-ins for places (this is our antidote to curated posts on other social platforms). You’ll also find your footprints (your virtual scratch map) that show all the areas you’ve uncovered and haven’t yet been on your map.”

Looking at the versions side-by-side, the update feels a lot more grown-up, elegant, and aligned with today’s design trends. The initial playful, colorful, emoji-filled appearance has been replaced by a dark mode mixed with trendy gradients. As expected with major redesigns (remember Snapchat’s 2018 update?), reviews have been mixed, although most of its supporters seem to be excited about the new features.

If you haven’t heard much about the app, that’s not surprising if you’re in the US. Since its inception, Zenly has been mostly focused on growing in Europe and Southeast Asia, and it’s growing in popularity in Brazil and India.

We recently saw Snapchat's Q1 results show that the photo-sharing app is growing faster than its rivals Meta and Twitter. Snap’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, is taking over from Zenly’s founder soon, and it will be interesting to see where he takes the social app.

The social space is getting a lot of buzz right now, but it’s notoriously difficult for newcomers to break through. We’re excited to see new and old players build and innovate. What are your thoughts on Zenly’s take on social? Let the team know in the comments.