The Roundup

Golden Kitty 2020 winner, Zelf, is back with another colorful product that goes against the grain of traditional Fintech.

Rewinding to last year, founder Elliot Goykhman and a team of makers introduced us to Zelf, which gives users a digital debit card in less than a minute through chat apps like WhatsApp.

"Last year, the Product Hunt community helped us launch a neobank in messengers, bringing over 1 million registered users 🙏," Goykhman noted in last week's launch.

With MetaPass, Zelf is launching into Discord and “positioning itself as the first bank of the metaverse.” We told you to keep an eye out for a lot more products working on infrastructure to power the metaverse — Zelf is one to watch in this space.

With MetaPass, Zelf is not only making its service available in another chat app but is working to tackle the problem of scams within gaming. That's probably necessary for the persistence of the metaverse. We’ve discussed this before — gaming is fraught with fraud. Most newbies won’t want to stick around Decentraland (or any metaverse) if they get ripped off by another person.

As Goykhman explains: “The pandemic accelerated virtualization of our world, boosted gaming industry, NFT, crypto, sprouting play-to-earn games… [but] trading in-game assets outside games is currently a $20 billion gray market fraught with scam and outlawed by game publishers.”

Zelf is partnering with game manufacturers to make transactions more secure, so that when you buy a skin or weapon off of another player, you receive money into your bank account instantly, right within in Discord (or vice versa if you’re the seller). The demo video shares a view of the seamless process. Goykhman also shared with a commenter inquiring about apps beyond Discord that the startup is in the Apple Pay certification phase, and hopes to give users more options by the end of December.

MetaPass could also help power the growth of the budding play-to-earn space. Startups in this space, like Axie Infinity, exploded in popularity over the last year (see: its $152M Series B). In the Philippines, some Axie Infinity players made wages that paid three times better than minimum-wage jobs during the pandemic. In the future, Zelf could help gamers like these instantly cash out their winnings into real money.

The community response so far is 🔥:
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
“Cool to see how bridges between #fiat #blockchain and #metaverse are built.”

Share your own thoughts and questions:

It may sound like the crypto space is having all the tongue-twisting fun lately with DAOs, web3, NFTs — but IT teams have recently worked new jargon into their repertoire as well. It’s worthwhile for non-technicals to get acquainted with, because there’s a growing list of thriving startups in this space.

Observability, in the software world, is when you measure and track a system’s state from the data it generates. There are three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. If you’re not an expert, you’d be forgiven for explaining the concept as “monitoring.” However…

“Put simply, monitoring measures something and then evaluates the result of that measurement against a defined standard to tell you whether something is good or bad...” explains the Grafana website. “Observability refers to gathering as much information as possible... to ask questions across that information… These are questions that are not anticipated in advance, like monitoring presumes, but rather questions that arise due to unexpected or novel events within a system.”

Grafana was one of three most-promising observability startups to earn unicorn status this year (along with Chronosphere and Cribl) and announced partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon to bring observability services to Azure and AWS. Epsagon has enjoyed a great year too. The Israel-based company offers serverless observability, enabling companies to search and troubleshoot events across microservices.

Epsagon makers first launched the product back in 2018, and updated the tech community last week with Epsagon 2.0. With the new launch, Epsagon has updated its pricing model, giving everyone access its tool for free, with up to 10M traces per month and unlimited alerts and metrics.

This comes a few months after the team announced its acquisition by Cisco. Cisco’s Liz Centoni sums up the value of the technology well in a blog:

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue.”

A couple of teens have reminded us that age can be just a number when you’re a maker. First, SpaceHey from 19-year-old developer, An, started hitting headlines last week after reaching 200,000 users.

Then on her fifteenth birthday, Pranjali Awasthi beta launched Delv, an AI-powered engine that summarizes and graphs information to help you learn about complex concepts faster.

“Let's say you're getting into AI, you want well-researched information on a multi-layered concept like Classification Models, you plug in specific topics you want to know, websites you like reading from, Delv will build you a knowledge graph of connected concepts, with each node representing a highly relevant article's summary,” Awasthi explained.

Delv has been backed by Backend Capital, and Awasthi is an Entrepreneur In Residence at the early-stage VC firm founded by Lucy Guo and Dave Fontenot. In her LinkedIn description, Awasthi describes herself as an “AI/ML & Computational Neuroscience Enthusiast” — others have recently written she’s a “child prodigy” and “superstar on the rise.”

Awasthi was previously a research intern at the Schwartz Center for Computational Neuroscience and interned at the Neural Dynamics of Control Lab at Florida International University. There she worked in the overlap of neuroimaging and machine learning on a project that involved building a classifier to detect errors in cognitive tasks using EEG imaging, supported by a grant she received from the New York Institute of Technology.

While Awasthi’s age may surprise and inspire, the young founder supports efforts to introduce more young students to AI. She was exposed to academia at a young age via her mother and father.

“I feel we need to start even more early and introduce AI as a core subject even in elementary school starting from basic projects to increase their knowledge base,” she told Analytics India Mag (Awasthi moved to the US from India with her parents four years ago).

When imagi launched (and Instagram Kids stalled), we wrote about how kids are obtaining mobile devices at younger ages globally — in the US, half have a phone by age 11. Like founder Dora Palfi, Awasthi sees good opportunity among this trend, telling Analytics India that mobile devices can introduce kids to the algorithms behind their favorite apps.

Your developed brain may not be quite as malleable as kids these days, but if you're interested in learning about NLP models, for example, you can submit your request to Delv's beta now.

Earlier this year, you met a new search engine that’s challenging Google’s monopoly over search. Neeva wasn’t the first to take on Goliath, but the startup introduced a cohort of newcomers in the space that want to make the competition more… competitive.

You.com is here now too and battle-ready. It just launched the public beta of its new private search engine that summarizes the web.

Co-founders Richard Socher and Bryan McCann are AI experts. Socher is the fifth most-cited Natural Language Processing (NLP) researcher in the world. He was most recently a chief scientist at Salesforce, where he helped build Einstein AI after joining the team when Salesforce acquired his AI company, MetaMind.

Tech experts are pointing out that Google is feeling the heat under antitrust scrutiny — some would like to regulate the company’s monopoly on the market. That might make this a good time for competitors in that space, they say.

While that might be true, Socher is more focused on AI. In an article for Product Hunt, he wrote about how he believes there’s no better time to launch a new search engine:

“Without the surge of deep learning, unsupervised, semi-supervised and transfer learning, it would have been impossible for a small company like ours to build an entirely new search engine experience, from scratch.”

Socher also explained the many reasons why he finds Google’s dominance so concerning, for both users and businesses. One issue points to how Google serves as a gatekeeper to content.

“It keeps the bulk of search traffic to itself — nearly 65% of searches worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2020 were "zero-click," ending without that traffic going to another website… I predict the trend of zero-click searches will only increase, and ads will continue to proliferate in the search results.”

In addition to its web summaries, You.com offers “superior” (and optional) privacy choices, personalization, and 100+ apps that make relevant content readily available. For example, you can search Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, and Medium with a single query to explore one topic from different angles.

The startup is backed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff who’s leading a $20M funding round, and counts support from techies like Justin Kan, who hunted today’s launch.

What do you think of the new Google search competitor?

Every organization and division faces transition. Employees leave, new ones are onboarded, and projects are passed off. For software, the issue to speak of is introducing a new developer to the product’s codebase.

“First, let's level-set: Understanding codebases is hard,” wrote founder Shanea (King-Roberson) Leven with the launch of CodeSee last week.

CodeSee is a new tool to make codebases easier to digest with auto-generated, self-updating diagrams that help makers visualize an entire codebase. Developers and product teams can use CodeSee to create tours/visual walkthroughs of the code, add labels and notes with color-coding, highlight activity across a codebase, and more.

“With Maps, you can… provide context to other devs to support faster onboarding, planning, and code reviews,” Leven explained. Prior to CodeSee, she led product teams at Lob, Google, Docker, eBay, and Cloudfare.

Even if you’re not a developer, the value of a product like CodeSee isn't too difficult to see — even more so in the context of open source projects. Many makers now view open source as the only viable option for building their products, but when makers open up their codebases for modification, codebases can become difficult to navigate. Thousands of developers could be contributing to the project from all over the world.

Codesee is leaning into the inherent fit — the makers have also launched an open-source community called OSS Port to help developers participate in open source projects.

CodeSee is off to a strong launch, with makers of various backgrounds chiming in:

“Not a developer, but I've had to be very aware of our codebase in past projects. Something like this would've saved me so much time then!” Wilhelm Rahn

“It looks this will make my life easier, allowing me to highlight only the important files and tour about a project to get started. Congratulations!” Kristina Anderson

Leven wants to hear about the unique codebase challenges developers in the Product Hunt community face. Add your voice:

You aren’t the only one sick of forms. Autofill and password managers help but forms are so rampant online that they’re still a major pain point for everyone.

We wrote about one-click payments along with Bolt and Fast and even explored using robotic process automation in eCommerce earlier this year, but makers are making headway on form-skipping beyond your shopping cart.

Last week, a new platform for discovering and managing B2B content launched called The Juice. The tool curates and recommends content for marketing and sales professionals and enables users to search and filter by content type (eBooks, reports, podcasts, etc.)

The Juice also gives users the opportunity to speed past gated content, meaning they no longer have to fill out a lead generation form every time want to read an eBook. With a click, they can choose whether or not they want to share their data with the brand, and skip straight ahead to the article or file.

In August, we also saw the launch of Netherlands-based Chiff, a new tool for logging into any website using your phone’s biometric authentication tools. If a user is logging into a website on their desktop, a browser extension can send a notification to their phone, where they can use fingerprint or Face ID to securely log in.

Then there’s Transcend Content Manager. Cookie consent forms may not require much keyboard action but they still often result in a consumer experience nightmare.

Transcend uses a browser-level firewall to convert all tracking info into local, quarantined tracking events. Since data doesn’t leave the users’ devices until they’ve provided consent, Transcend enables makers to ask for consent in a less obtrusive way. They can ask visitors for consent later on in the user journey or embed consent into their existing UI.

Users will still have to click to allow or disallow their data-share somewhere, but that’s one less form to jump through.

Apple had another day of drops from its Unleashed event last week. Let's get right into the new hardware.

First off, Apple presented two more M1 chips, an M1 Pro and M1 Max. That's fast since it released the M1 just last year. The Pro model CPU is up to 70% faster, with a GPU up to 2x faster, and 32GB of unified memory while the Max has unified memory up to 64GB.

Apple made a new home for the chips in a new MacBook Pro, or what some are already dubbing “Notch Book Pro.” The newly-designed MacBook Pros increase screen size at the cost of a “notch” where the camera lives, not unlike the latest iPhones. Apple also brought back an HDMI port, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a MagSafe charger along with three Thunderbolt ports. The MagSafe charger can charge up to 50% in 30 minutes.

The new standard Apple Airpods look like the AirPod Pros, without the interchangeable tips. They’ve got spatial audio support and are sweat and water-resistant.

Those that love color may like that the HomePod mini speaker is now available in yellow, orange, and blue. Or maybe you’ll be bummed there's no purple option.

Before you head for the checkout, check out these new tools from the community that can make you an Apple superuser.

Unplug Alarm: This app sounds an alarm if your Mac is unplugged while you’re away
APEnabler: Add an Airplay button to custom online video players
Pareto Security: A checklist app that helps with basic security hygiene on your Mac
Ditto: Save open tabs, documents, and apps to a workspace; switch with a menubar click
Sensei Monitor: Monitor/optimize your Mac’s performance via widgets from the menubar
Almighty: 50+ superuser tweaks/utilities like keeping Mac awake or convert to plain text
AirBuddy2: See the status of your AirPods when you open the case + connect with a click
PairPlay Audio Adventures: Split AirPods with a friend for an “immersive audio AR experience”
Alfred 4.5: The Alfred productivity Mac app launched Universal Actions for performing actions on any text, URLs, or files using a hotkey from anywhere within Alfred or your Mac

You don’t see many companies squaring off to take on Amazon these days, but Bolt has been cooly assuming the position.

The “Amazon-like payments stack for everyone else” first launched on Product Hunt three years ago, after working for almost three years in stealth. Despite entering a very crowded space, it differed from products like Stripe Checkout.

“That's more of a lightweight way of collecting a credit card vs. this which is a robust enterprise-ready platform. Tax/shipping/discounts/platform-integrations… While also built to be super developer-friendly, this is built for retailers / e-comm companies first and foremost,” founder Ryan Breslow wrote back then (to its credit, Stripe has expanded since then).

Then earlier this year, it dropped Bolt One Click, a one-click checkout experience for shoppers, across anywhere where Bolt is used. Shoppers can save their passwords, personal information, and card details and check out instantly if using Bolt — even if they’ve never been to the shop before.

“Bolt One Click gives independent retailers a fighting chance... by enabling them to provide a return-like experience to millions of first-time shoppers. Shoppers get a fast checkout anywhere across the growing Bolt network, and retailers benefit from higher-converting shoppers. Everyone wins!” Breslow wrote on Product Hunt.

While “Buy Now” functionality might duplicate the success of tech goliaths, Breslow has set himself and the company apart from portrayals of Bezos and Amazon. He’s pursued creating a “conscious culture” which drives the way Bolt conducts business (with concepts like “conscious selling”) and manages its team members (Bolt introduced a 4-day workweek last month.)

That might attract burnt-out workers looking for new jobs. Meanwhile, investors note liking Bolt because it's focusing all its efforts on a 10/10 customer experience of the payments solution, rather than trying to do too much at once. The new $393M Series D drives the company's valuation to $6B.

Bolt is planning to use its new funding to expand beyond the US (you can expect to see Bolt debut in Europe in the first half of 2022). It does face competitors, including Fast — a Stripe-backed startup that wants to bring fast login to everything — and UK-based Checkout.com.

The good news: It’s getting easier to build great mobile apps.

Just look at FlutterFlow, a low-code platform created by two ex-Google engineers. The platform enables makers to build mobile apps with Flutter (the Google-made SDK for cross-platform apps) — visually with a drag and drop UI.

A feature that early adopters in our community have enjoyed most in FlutterFlow is the ability “to export code and fine-tune it without limitations.” Now Flutterfly has launched one-click deploy to the App Store and the ability to add Google maps, search (powered by Algolia), push notifications, and more.

If low-code makes you nervous, co-founder Abel Mengistu explained to one commenter, “You don't need to know programming. There's a learning curve that might be a bit steeper, but most of the apps in the showcase were built by our amazing designer who's not a developer.”

Still, no-code launches you can check out for building apps include Bravo Studio, Adalo, and Glide which enable no-code web app development, too. While you're at it, see no-code testing platform Waldo for creating and automating mobile tests.

And back to the bad news: Once your app is built, you still have to learn how to market it amongst the millions of apps in the Google Play and Apple App Stores.

There are resources to help new makers there, too. There are Udemy courses and SplitMetrics’ AppGrowthLab — even MailChimp has app growth courses. Today, a group of makers from Mobile Action have also launched Mobile Growth University, a nonprofit initiative and free resource for learning about mobile growth. Courses cover topics from app store search ads to monetization, and users can earn a certificate to demonstrate their proficiency in mobile app marketing.

“An awesome overview of what is arguably the hardest part of growing any business,” wrote one commenter.

We’ll leave you with one more applicable resource to help with your app marketing – AppLaunchPad. The design tool helps you create marketing assets for the app stores and launched new features in July.

Now, go and see what kind of apps you can build without much code.

Newsletters have done for email what social distancing did for QR codes. Your inbox made a comback from 1990's romcom nostalgia, and is now flexing on Slack and your DMs.

Don’t expect that to change soon. Along with newer tools like the Substacks of the world, Google is the latest big tech player to experiment with newsletters. It's got a new Museletter product in private beta that lets you publish a newsletter or blog from Google Drive (Notion users, try this instead?)

Newsletters aren’t just for niche creators; they’ve changed the way we digest journalism, too. Just look at Morning Brew and Axios, which recently hired 20 new reporters to launch local newsletters in 8 new cities, adding to its 14 existing newsletters.

To be honest, we’re here for it. Newsletters are a great delivery mechanism for the specific information that you care about. They allow for hyper-focus that’s curated by your subscription preferences, which offers a nice alternative to an algorithm.

With that, we bring you these 7 newsletter launches from the last year that our community thinks you should know about:

Unicorner: Up and coming unicorn startups, before they make it big
“Very impressed by the insights and in-depth approach that Unicorner takes”- Audrey Wu

Popcorn: Movie and TV suggestions curated for streaming platforms
“You made a product that can save someone's night!” - Easton Hunter

Munch by Moving: Crypto insights, trends, and analysis
“Robinhood snacks but for crypto, long-awaited!" - Mirza Uddin

Unboxed: Sneakerheads, this is for you
“Amazing newsletter! One of my favorite parts is “best sneakers to buy for retail or less”- Taylor Loren

Every: A writer collective covering productivity, strategy, and more
“Love the writer collective idea… Strength in numbers.”- Nicci Talbot

Tedium: Taking on the questions that “nobody thought to ask”
“It is simply a must-read. The more fascinating bits are his deep dives into the history of things that usually don’t have histories written about them.” - Gregory Bufithis