The Roundup

We know how this community loves an open-source alternative. Medusa’s launch may strike a chord with those who run or support a business on Shopify, as it did for this commenter:

“This looks great, I'm a huge fan of Shopify and ran a store for nearly 8 years. I agree that I've written some horrible code to get Shopify to do what I want…” - Simon Barker

Maker Sebastian Rindom explained that he and his cofounders were motivated to create Medusa, a headless commerce platform, after often finding themselves hacking together solutions that left them “cringing while writing the code.”

If you’re feeling bad for Shopify, we’ll take a moment to remind you that they’re doing well. Shopify enables 1.75 million businesses to sell to their customers in 175 countries worldwide. The tech giant also consistently explores new partnerships and features to support sellers, making it a favorite tool for businesses and makers.

While Medusa’s solution offers out-of-the-box building blocks for your store along with plug-n-play integrations, similar to Shopify, the startup promises more customization that developers can leverage (“when you need to you can take full control over any part of Medusa and make it your own.”)

Anyone can checkout Medusa’s code (as open-source goes) and at least a couple of makers already took a peek under the hood and are feeling good:

“I'm really impressed by the architecture and code quality,” Cristian Toba commented.

Head to the link below to check out Medusa and leave feedback for the team.

Or, if you clicked on this email hoping to see a lot more open-source, we direct you now to Open Source Alternatives, a resource to find open-source tools by topic, from newsletters to observability platforms.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen this much discourse on Tech Twitter. Calendly took the spotlight recently as the most discussed product. It felt somewhat reminiscent of the 2015 “The Dress” viral phenomenon (is it blue or gold?!) dividing the Internet, except this time, the debate was focused on the question of "is sending a calendar link rude?"

The discussion stems from a post by former Facebook VP, Sam Lessin, arguing that Calendly is “The Most Raw / Naked Display of Social Capital Dynamics in Business.” The Twitter crowd can’t really agree on a consensus either: some shared a satirical response, while others offered up alternative products.

The Calendly team has been addressing concerns like these through a Calendly Etiquette series they started last November.

Still, if you side with Lessin or are just looking for an alternative calendar experience, here are others to check out:

Cal.com is an open-source Calendly alternative that you can self-host and integrate into your business. It's also launching Cal.com for web3 today. 👀

SavvyCal overlays your calendar and your recipient’s calendar, giving them the choice of how long the meeting should run.

Coffee Chats helps you build a no-code website that is connected to your Google Calendar. Think Carrd meets Calendly.

Zcal offers a free Calendly alternative that allows you to customize your booking page.

Hera Calendar was built with remote teams in mind, allowing you to schedule meetings and share availability across all accounts and timezones.

Woven Calendar leverages group polling to find the best time for larger teams to meet.

Speaking of The Golden Kitty Awards, what did you think?!

We’d love to hear your feedback so we can make next year’s ceremony even better. Please take a moment to fill out this survey and be entered to win one of two $100 Amazon Gift Cards we’re giving away.

The 7th annual Golden Kitty Awards are over. We kicked off this year's celebration when you submitted over 13,800 nominations to tell us what products were your favorites from 2021. You're clearly bullish on web3. It was the category with the most nominations at 11,497, followed by Productivity and Mobile Apps.

From the list of semi-finalists, you chose the products you wanted to see win an iconic Golden Kitty Award. Tens of thousands of votes later, we made it to the ceremony.

We had a blast on Thursday — we’re still talking about the winners, magician, and Sahil Bloom’s outfit. You can watch what you missed or relive the highlights here. You’ll find a list of all finalists there too, so make sure to browse through all of the products your peers love.

Thank you to everyone who attended — you made it a truly special event. Without further ado, here the winners are…

🗣 Audio & Voice Tool of the Year: Podcastle

📱 Mobile App of the Year: Obsidian for Mobile

🙅‍♀️ No Code Tool of the Year: Flutterflow

👩‍💻 Productivity Tool of the Year: Cron

⛱ Work from Anywhere Tool of the Year: Sessions

🙀 WTF?! Product of the Year: The Table™️

🤖 AI & Machine Learning Product of the Year: Uizard

💸 Fintech Product of the Year: Carta Launch

🛠 Hardware Product of the Year: Opal C1

🔐 Privacy Tool of the Year: Drata

🥕 SaaS Product of the Year: Lucky Carrot

⛓ Web3 Product of the Year: ConstitutionDAO

👥 Community & Social Tool of the Year: Canva Video Suite

👪 Children & Family Product of the Year: Brickit

✍️ Creator Tool of the Year: Contra

💻 Developer Tool of the Year: DhiWise

🛍 eCommerce Tool of the Year: Mode Magic 2.0

📚 Education Product of the Year: Odyssey

🏋️‍♂️ Health & Fitness Product of the Year: Loóna

🎥Product Video Demo of the Year: tl;dv
Watch all finalist videos here.

👀 Side Project of the Year: Workspaces Newsletter

⚤ Diversity & Inclusion Product of the Year: leap.club

🌳 Social Impact Product of the Year: Crewdle

🎨 Design Tool of the Year: Clover

🌟 Maker of the Year: Savio Martin

🙋‍♂️ Best Community Member: KP

🏆 Product of the Year: Softr 2.0

Finally, thank you to our sponsor, Flatfile — make sure to check out the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60 seconds.

Let’s take 2022 to the moon!

We have two more Golden Kitty Awards categories to introduce you to before the big day.

Check out the finalists for 2021’s Best Community Member and Maker of the Year.

Unlike the other awards, finalists and winners for these categories are selected using data like comments, upvotes, and product launches from the past year. Winners will be announced very soon…

About that big day:

The Golden Kitty Awards 2021 virtual ceremony is THIS Thursday, January 27th at 9:00am PST. RSVP now or forever hold your FOMO. We’ll enjoy literal magic, live music, a panel with Ryan Hoover, and a couple more surprises. Our hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom (who you know from the "Where It Happens" podcast among many other things) will guide us through it all, handing out Golden Kitty statues to the best products of the year along the way. We’ll all end up in the Doge Temple for a legendary afterparty.

From London to Austin, people in the community will be gathering to watch and celebrate one heck of a year in tech. There’s still time to host a meetup in your area, virtually or safely in-person.

Our friends at Flatfile are the champs helping us make it all possible. They’re the makers behind the unified platform that SaaS companies use to import customer data in less than 60 seconds.

Now, let's go!

The humble widget has viral potential. See: Locket, a widget that has unexpectedly risen to the top of the Social Networking category of the App Store. The widget shows live pictures from your friends, right on your home screen. Maker Matt Moss shared:

“I had graduated from UCSB that June, but [my girlfriend] was going back to school in the fall... We started using the app every day to stay in touch… Once our friends started asking to try it, we decided to release it on the store. Since then, a few viral TikToks have catapulted the app to wayyyyy more users than we ever expected :)”

“Simple but beautifully executed” is the popular opinion on the widget thus far.

Here are seven more mobile widget products from the last year you should check out to simplify your mobile experience.

Pretty Progress - Personalize your own countdown & progress widgets
Learn Geography - Put a country quiz on your home screen
Home Widget - Control all your HomeKit devices right from your home screen
Deliveroo Widget - Reorder from your favorite UK restaurants and grocery stores
Usage - Monitor your device with stats like storage and battery life
Meep meep - Track activity of any Instagram account
Wyd? - A widget “for smartphone addicts” to encourage you to do one thing

Last week, you nominated your favorite products for the Golden Kitty Awards 2021. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have the finalists for the first six categories!

Starting now, you can vote for the best in...

Mobile Apps
Audio & Voice
No Code
Productivity
Work from Home Anywhere
WTF?!

Voting closes Sunday, January 16 at 11:59pm PT.
Put everything on hold for a few minutes and go vote HERE.

Winners will get to share their acceptance speeches LIVE during our virtual awards ceremony. You're invited to join us in a global celebration. Expect...

🧠 Hosts Greg Isenberg and Sahil Bloom to drop insights
😺 THE Ryan Hoover to share his 2022 outlook as he hosts a panel
🪄 Magician Johnny Wu to leave us speechless
🤔 Fierce competition on tech-themed trivia with the Big Quiz Thing
🎤 Grooves from up-and-coming musical artists via Sofar Sounds
🐕 Doge overload with an after-party in the Doge Temple
❤️ Appreciation for our sponsor, Flatfile, the onboarding platform for importing customer data in as little as 60s

Tbh, missing this would be CATastrophe, so head over to the website to register.

We’ll be dropping the next handful of categories in tomorrow's Daily Digest so make sure to check back there for updates. Now, go choose the best.

We spent all of last week counting down the top 25 most upvoted products of 2021 in our Daily Digest newsletters here.

Without any further ado, your top five:

5. Lucky Carrot is an employee engagement platform that enables peer-to-peer recognition (with redeemable carrots) and promotes company values.

“Like your powerful insights on employee interactions…, predicting possible turnover. Great to bring visibility to employee relationships. Your "Interaction Graph" is supercool 🤩.” arakelyan

4. Typedream is a website builder with a Notion-like interface for making any website look good with minimal effort.

“Man, such a great match between how my brain structures and how websites render. Love it.” Daniel Shein

3. RobinWho comes from investing app Qooore, which wanted to release a product that (hilariously) weans you from making money on the stock market.

“Finally, a product that won't let me get to the moon with all my $DOGE. Having a job to attend and debts to pay, there's no time to get rich.” Jay June

2. Tango automatically creates step-by-step how-to guides as you complete your work, with screenshots, links, and descriptions.

“Awesome stuff! Superfast way to document processes — and even faster for the viewer since it focuses on the important highlights. Better than video for sharing step-by-step workflows!” Mark Lamb

1. Sprig (formerly UserLeap) is a product research platform that lets you run microsurveys within your product, record interviews, and test design concepts.

“Recruiting and creating authentic context are my two most significant pain points when doing user research; I'm thrilled to see a product that seems to address both 🎉” Josh T

Until next year!

Not sure about you, but we live in the gray space between mindlessly scrolling and absorbing everything the internet has to offer. We feel good when we’re able to dismiss those iPhone screen time reminders and chalk up at least some of that time to reading.

The problem is, we know much of it doesn’t stick. Time is wasted scrolling past unworthy reads to get to the good ones. And then we don’t always even read the best stuff — thank U headline, next.

Fortunately, this year brought a ton of products that are designed to guide our modern reading habits. Here are 9 of them (time to consider a New Year's reading resolution?)

Alfread: Manage your read-later queue with quick actions for archiving and snoozing using a familiar Tinder-like interface.

ReadBit: Upload or scan books and documents — ReadBit uses NLP to give you the key points of each chapter, tracks your progress, and more.

Thank you for Reading: Get one weekly Substack email digest from your favorite Substack writers.

Dark Reader: Choose a dark, dimmed, or colorful theme for every website on your iPhone and iPad running iOS 15.

Volv: A news app that gives you the latest stories (from election updates to Supreme's collabs) in 9-second reads.

Readwok: Upload your text (e-pub, text, etc.) and read it with progressive reader mode, paragraph by paragraph.

The Juice: Find marketing and sales content relevant to your work with curated lists or by searching by type (eBooks, reports, etc.). Then skip past content gates.

Context Note: Take notes on the web with their context with this Chrome extension that includes a tag system to manage your notes.

Bookstash: Read short ideas from books, podcasts, videos, and other online stuff and keep track of what you read.

It was only a matter of time before we saw no-code builders focus on web3 products.

Software that lets you build marketplaces and apps without code are still evolving within web 2.0 (i.e. the current phase of the internet that drives online collaboration). Now, as a wave of blockchain tech pushes us towards the next phase of the internet, no-code is perfectly suited to play a big part. No-code democratizes creation, and web3 is all about democratizing the internet.

Enter: thirdweb, a platform for building web3 apps and games without code. It launched last week alongside its announcement of closing a $5M funding round from high profile investors like Mark Cuban and Gary Vee (and Ryan Hoover).

thirdweb’s founders are Steven Bartlett and Furqan Rydhan. Bartlett previously founded a marketing agency called The Social Chain, and those in the UK may recognize him as the newest — and youngest — investor to join the "Dragon’s Den" (the "Shark Tank" of US or Tigers of Japan). Rydhan is a serial entrepreneur: the co-founding CTO of Bebo and then AppLovin. He started an incubator, Founders Inc., which is where the idea for thirdweb emerged.

“We've spent the last 18 months, in my incubator, working with a bunch of teams who are trying to launch NFT and web3 projects. During that time we learned the biggest barriers for developing these experiences is learning new programming languages and blockchains,” shared Rydhan.

thirdweb facilitates deploying smart contracts (using your own wallet) so that you can use widgets and interfaces with web3 features in your product, whether that be an app, game, or DAO. Makers can use thirdweb to launch NFTs, marketplaces, social tokens, and more.

The platform is free to use until royalties and fees are programmed into the sales of NFTs that are launched. thirdweb takes five percent of the royalties of secondary sales. At least one commenter expressed some disappointment with this model, but the makers support it, saying that it means the company's revenue is in direct proportion to the success of its customers.

Feedback otherwise has been overwhelmingly positive, with multiple early adopters commenting on the company’s strong customer service experience via Discord.

It’s of note that we did also just see related launches from Tellie, InLoop, and Nifty Generator, so if you’re building or integrating products in this space, check those out next.

Yes, we’ve covered new meeting software ad nauseam at this point, but can we help it if there’s still so much to surface here?

Last week, Headroom debuted its meeting software to the community. At a time when Zoom is still making headlines, what makes a competitor like Headroom stand out?

The tool is focused on filling user experience gaps, using AI to power the real-time legwork that goes along with having a meeting. And the founding team is stacked with AI expertise.

That includes co-founder Andrew Rabinovich, an ex-Google software engineer who worked on computer vision and ML algorithms for photo and video annotation. Prior to starting Headroom, he spent five years at Magic Leap where he was the Head of AI. Co-founder Julian Green is also an ex-Googler where he launched computer vision products like the Cloud Vision API and managed deep-tech moonshots (i.e. "innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.”)

“Headroom uses real-time AI to make video conferencing smarter and more natural,” wrote Green on the launch page. That includes “enhanced video and audio quality at lower bandwidth, real-time transcripts, one-click notes, gesture recognition, real-time share of speaking time by participant, cloud video recordings and replays, searchable transcripts and notes.”

The demo illustrates the features, and we have to agree with the video that “the best part” seems to be that everything (across transcripts and collaborative notes) is searchable.

While we haven’t seen real-time gestures before (which are fun and much easier than finding reactions on your keyboard), we have been watching makers launch real-time, collaborative note-taking Zoom apps over the last year. Just last week we also saw Richard White's launch of Fathom, which shot to #1 Product of the Day and aims to eliminate note-taking on Zoom calls.

So if you want to keep Zoom at the top of your work vernacular, you can “circle back” to some of those apps. If you want to try Headroom, now’s a great time to do so and share feedback with the makers. The tool is free.

Green also threw out a challenge to “discover the 4th gesture recognized in Headroom meetings… 👍 👎 ✋ ? ... No, not that one!”