The Roundup

“This is my life's work and I can't tell you how excited I am to finally be able to talk about it publicly,” Nader Al-Naji, aka Diamondhands, wrote on Product Hunt.

We first wrote about Bitclout in April, a buzzy, fresh product with the goal of putting social media on the blockchain. Last week, Al-Naji revealed himself as its creator along with the blockchain that Bitclout is built upon, DeSo.

DeSo, short for “decentralized social,” is a new blockchain built from the ground up in order to make the concept of decentralized social a reality. As DeSo explains it, social applications generate a lot of data and existing blockchains weren’t equipped to handle it.

Anyone who wants to use the DeSo blockchain, from Bitclout users to makers, has to hold its native cryptocurrency called DESO (a rebrand from the token’s original name, CLOUT). The founding makers raised over $200M in funding by selling $DESO to over 44K users, including big names in VC like a16z.

Besides Bitclout, over 100 apps (NFT platforms, trading tools, etc.) have purchased $DESO and started building on top of the blockchain. Al-Naji partially credits his initial anonymity for that initial success — he believed people felt more empowered to build on top of an ecosystem where they’re weren't relying on a centralized entity to call the shots.

This launch comes after what some had felt was a chaotic entrance earlier in the year. For his part, Al-Naji recognized concerns around Bitclout’s tactic of baiting celebs to the social network with dummy profiles were valid.

Some of the primary concerns from that time have been sorted out, like the ability to exchange your $DESO (formerly $CLOUT) for other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH. I.e. You can get your money out of Bitclout if you want to. Others still remain, like environmental impact — Al-Naji says he plans to switch to a more environmentally-friendly mechanism for validating blockchain transactions, proof-of-stake, by the end of the year.

Ready or not, a new wave of social products is coming — what questions do you have for Diamondhands?

We recently wrote about how startups are tackling employee onboarding challenges caused by a remote workforce. There’s another culprit at play here — the fact that we use so many apps.

On average, small to large businesses implement 73-175 apps. As we mentioned, documentation is one solution to helping teams manage buried knowledge among all these tools. Another is search.

A search tool for your work apps might feel like déjà vu if you read our newsletter on Qatalog. The “work hub” pulls together all your tools and has a master search function. Last week we also met Glean.

Glean calls itself a “work assistant.” The hero feature today is the ability to search across all of your work apps, and there are discovery and connection functions for team members, too. This part slightly resembles a social or LinkedIn profile, but Glean says the product reveals insights and helps you find people who can help with whatever it is you need at work.

“Glean can search across the entire breadth of your company... It understands who you are, what you’re working on, and who you’re working with, to deliver highly personalized results,” CEO Arvind Jain wrote.

The makers’ expertise is reflected across Glean. Jain himself founded Rubrik, a cloud data management company, after serving over a decade as an engineer at Google. He’s joined by several other ex-Googlers and Facebook engineers.

Glean and Qatalog are after your holistic workspace, but we’ve seen several other tools launch this year to make information more accessible through search.

Jadoo - Search and manage your mobile screenshots
Findem - Search for the ideal job candidate with the exact attributes you need
Bloop - In-IDE code search engine that retrieves JS and TypeScript code examples
Vehicle Listings API - Programmatically search cars and trucks available for sale
SaveCmd Terminal Search - Search command history from other clients from the command line

Now we just need a product that searches our brains for names we just learned.

Bartering is the comeback kid of twenty-first-century commerce, even without too much help from technology beyond the internet and its forums.

The continuous growth of sharing economy startups has helped re-familiarize people with the idea of not buying new stuff, but trading without money is still largely left to Craigslist, Facebook Groups, Nextdoor comments, and the desert city of Burning Man.

Now that social distancing and tough times have given people extra incentive to swop stuff, there could be enough demand for better tech.

Enter Swop.it, a new app for exchanging items based on location and interest. Is an app dedicated to bartering enough to take people away from the familiarity of apps like Facebook?

Here’s what makes Swop.it interesting. Along with baked-in shipping, audio, and video calls, Swop.it can create a chain of exchanges where the initiator doesn’t have to negotiate along the way.

“We engineered a mechanism in which [the] user chooses desired item, but if he doesn't have a same-value trade for it or interests simply don't match — we find people with goods that can be placed in-between to complete the deal,” maker Julie Bonbina shared.

We’ve all read those articles — the ones where someone swops a bobby pin for bigger and bigger items until they end up with a house. They’re fun, but gimmicky too. Swop.it doesn’t seem to be too interested in gimmicks. Bonbina explained that the service is designed for individuals, not resellers. Also...

​​"The morale [of those stories] is the exact reason why we engineered our product in a way where not only one person can get something valuable from the deal and enjoy it, but many."

We’re all content creators. Whether you’re a student writing a research paper, Redditor, or marketing professional, you most likely spend a good chunk of your time organizing your thoughts or research to put something back into the world.

We’ve covered a lot of tools that help with production: video editors, podcast tools, community management — but there’s a big space between having an idea and putting pen to paper, metaphorically speaking. In fact, maybe you don’t even have an idea yet and your content is just a to-do on your checklist.

Here are 4 of the latest tools for stimulating or organizing your thoughts.

Genei - A research tool that pulls together your content (webpages, PDFs, etc.) so you can search, summarize, and keyword it. Genei topped TechCrunch’s list of its “Favorite Startups from YC’s Summer 21 Demo Day.”

DataHerald - A self-service software that lets you leverage the world’s data by creating interactive data visualizations from live data feeds, without coding. “Think Tableau with thousands of pre-populated data sources.”

Research AI - A tool to help students get rid of writer’s block by providing title ideas, paraphrasing, and helping to write paragraphs with text completion.

Heights - These “smart supplements for the brain” are made to help sharpen focus, support deep sleep, and balance mood to soothe stress and anxiety. Cofounder Dan Murray-Serter, explains that unlike other Nootropics (supplements that improve cognitive function), Heights isn’t focused on a quick-fix, but long-term “brain care.” The founding team is supported by advisor Dr. Tara Swart, an Oxford-trained doctor and neuroscientist.

Though it's unrelated to today's topic, the second startup on TC's list was Playhouse. We covered the "Zillow meets TikTok" app here.

“Product Hunt is where we first launched just 1.5 years ago,” wrote Eric Glyman, Co-Founder and CEO of Ramp, in last week's launch of Ramp 2.0. The company also announced it raised $300M at a $3.9B valuation.

In its original launch, Ramp’s product was its free corporate card. Its north star has been to help businesses spend less through unlimited cards, 1.5% cash-back on everything, and insights to reduce wasteful spending. New features like merchant blocking have been added at the request of users.

The response has been good. Ramp reported a 5x increase in cardholders since the beginning of 2021 and a 1,000% increase year over year in transactions.

With Ramp 2.0, its hero product still stands, but it wants you to know: It’s not just a corporate card. It’s a finance automation platform.

"[W]ith Ramp, you’ll get corporate cards and payments with built-in expense and accounting automation software, all in one well designed, easy-to-use, and free solution,” Glyman explained. As the launch meme puts it, finance teams can make siloed finance tools disappear with a Thanos finger snap.

Ramp 2.0 adds negotiation-as-a-service for software procurement into its platform, too. That was part 3 of its announcement tied to its positioning — the company acquired Buyer, a startup we watched launch on Product Hunt just one year ago.

In most articles about Ramp, you’ll find a reference to its competitor Brex. As both grow, the differences between the company’s strategies diverge. Brex announced a $475M raise at a $7.4B valuation in April, as well as its first paid tier. It made its first acquisition too — a startup called Weav with a universal API for commerce platforms. Signs point to Ramp serving larger companies, and Brex focusing on small businesses.

Fin-techies are wondering if Ramp will continue to ride its free model to exit, or introduce paid features into its growing software functions to morph into a freemium model.

You can click through to check it out now, while we know it’s still free.

Project management is a space in non-stop iteration mode. Every once in a while, a product like Slack or Trello revolutionizes the space. It’s followed by a series of “If X and X had a baby” products that combine and iterate core concepts.

That’s not to downplay the latter. Makers come to the table with fresh product design and development perspectives for incorporating emerging tech and trends.

In project management, those trends currently include spatial note-taking, real-time collaboration, AI, automation, and whiteboarding. A few new noteworthy contenders have launched with a combination of such features.

For engineering teams, there’s Tara AI, a product that’s coming straight for Jira. The company just launched its second version after incorporating feedback from the community last year. With a vision for “a ticketless future,” Tara AI 2.0 includes automatic status updates based on Git events, auto-sprinting, and progress views with live pull-requests and commit statuses.

Clover is a creative workspace that combines notes, whiteboarding, todos, and a daily planner. Clover's spatial and real-time workflows give it brainstorming, diagramming, and collaboration power in addition to task management.

“At the core of Clover is a new type of document called a Surface. It combines the power of a modern text editor with the flexibility of a whiteboard (think Dropbox Paper meets Figjam).” Co-founder Tom Giannattasio shared.

If Clover is a creative workspace, think of Infinity Maps as your knowledge workspace – “if Miro and Notion had a baby.” Infinity Maps is bringing together whiteboarding, diagramming, and real-time collaboration.

Like Clover, Infinity Maps is hoping to tap into your “sense of space” to help bring structure to projects that are complex and scattered, without stifling ideas and creativity. Infinity Maps is in its 1.0 launch phase and Clover just opened its beta — the perfect time to test and share highly impactful feedback with the makers about what you need.

Infinity Maps also has a pretty loveable video, and we love a good launch video.

Redfin and Zillow have tangentially benefitted from the cultural phenomenon of the real estate market, but have they really leveraged it as the content machine it is?

HGTV figured it out early. The network's breadth of both filler and compelling content propelled it to a top 5 cable network in the US. Competitors like Netflix followed their lead, and also figured out that social media is as much a powerful content generator as it is a distribution channel. In today’s world, influencers get contracts to host design shows and popular accounts are adapted to TV shows.

“Real estate is not just a transaction. It’s an entire culture,” wrote Alex Perelman with last week's launch of Playhouse. The makers of Playhouse spotted a gap between all of the home-related content you consume and transactions IRL.

“Maybe you saw an amazing house tour, but is it even in your state?... This one company does incredible tile work, but dang, not in your zip code. And so on it goes... a missed opportunity to connect millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses with potential customers in the real world.”

With the Playhouse mobile app, users can browse video listings like they would TikTok.

“Our vision is a real estate app that is both entertaining and practical. The content is fun and addictive like TikTok, but also practical and actionable like Zillow or Yelp.”

Would social and local content make your home browsing easier or more enjoyable? Let the makers know what you’d like to see from the app.

TikTok is getting lots of attention, as usual. Last week it announced ephemeral Stories and we all had something to say about it.

Last month, the company started testing a job application tool with the likes of Chipotle, Target, and Shopify. Now Gen Zers are landing jobs through #winning TikTok videos. Techies are predicting LinkedIn will follow with a similar feature soon.

Sure, PDF CVs have felt passé for a while, but we still send and upload them regularly.

CV first launched on Product Hunt 8 months ago with its new solution. Maker Andy Chung explained he wanted a simple page where he could edit and share his CV that wasn’t “heavy” like LinkedIn, but wasn’t a PDF either — a more “link-in-bio sized” resume.

The makers have now returned with Read.cv which includes social features to enable “meaningful connections” among users. Maker Joey Flynn explains how their approach is different from LinkedIn. The most important point is that “no one, including [the makers], can muck up your profile.” He explains:

“No one can endorse you for random stuff, no upsells, no banner ads... If read.cv is going to work, you're going to need to be able to send anyone your profile and know exactly what they're going to see — we will always preserve [that] at all costs.”

We are all about a clean, digital CV, particularly if it means finally putting an end to the miserable experience of uploading a PDF, then re-inputting all the same info into fields again.

On that note, another new launch, Job Tracker 2.0, is making job searching less painful. The Chrome extension and platform allows you to track and organize your applications across the web.

If you’re not a job seeker now, bookmark these or be a good friend and pass them on. Friends don’t let friends search for jobs unequipped.

If you are searching, psst... we're hiring!

If you had doubts about no-code’s future, perhaps $100 million could persuade you?

Last week, Bubble announced its Series A, following a 2019 seed round, preceded by 7 years of bootstrapping. Founder Emmanuel Straschnov told TechCrunch how they’ve been using the seed money.

“In our business, it’s a features game. [Our users] are not technical, but they have high standards.”

We’ve been introduced to some of those new features on Product Hunt; Bubble’s integrations for Zapier, Airtable, and Figma all launched in the last year. Like Zapier, Bubble also wants to invest in education through its own content and university partnerships.

Despite a growing list of competitors, the new features aren't necessarily part of a race to the finish.

“I don’t look at all the no-code players as competition… the true competition we have is code.”

In that spirit, here are five recent launches from startups on a similar mission — to democratize software development (or burst the tech bubble).

Adalo - Build apps for every platform

Glide 2.0 - Create web apps from Google Sheets (now without Google sheets, too)

Softr 2.0 - Build web apps & portals from Airtable

Noloco - Build custom web apps quickly

Dorik 2.0 - Build websites with unlimited pages without code

If you’re new to this or overwhelmed, you could check out No-Code Stack for tool recommendations, practice with Bubble’s step-by-step How to Build guide and recreate Twitter, or dive right in with the latest...

When Ryan Hoover introduced me, Josh Buckley, as Product Hunt’s new CEO a few months ago, he teased a big vision for the future. I’m incredibly excited to finally be able to share some of that vision with you.

Say hello to Hyper, a new kind of early-stage venture firm inspired by the awesome community of makers and early adopters at Product Hunt. Hyper’s investments are about a lot more than just money — we provide startups with the things they need most in today’s tech ecosystem: a great mentorship program, a helpful community, and unique distribution partnerships, among other things we’ll announce later this year. And what makes Hyper really interesting is how we plan to reinvest our fund profits back into the ecosystem.

We’re going to invest in a small number of startups four times per year, with the first group starting our 8-week founder program on September 10th. Applications for Hyper’s Fall season are open as of today, so if you’re a startup founder, or if you’re thinking of starting a company, you should apply now.

Read more about the Hyper team and how it works, and let us know what you think. We're excited to see what the tech community (like TechCrunch) and Product Hunt community are saying about our launch so far:

"Congrats! Brilliant move for the Product Hunt community 🙌" - Ben Lang

"Congrats to you Josh & whole PH team. Excited to see this one. Applying it right away :)" - Dheeraj Mehndiratta

Stay tuned for more announcements in the coming weeks. We have some exciting news that I can’t wait to share with you.