The Roundup
Everything you missed this past week on Product Hunt: Top products, spicy community discourse, key trends on the site, and long-form pieces we’ve recently published.
Businesses can now turn Facebook and Instagram pages into online shops. They also joined forces with Shopify, who recently released their Shop app, to allow merchants to leverage their shipping, inventory and fulfillment features. The aim is to help new shop owners and small businesses to leverage their existing audiences to compete with Amazon.
This comprehensive shopping rollout will no doubt have big algorithm implications on Instagram and Facebook. Early reports are showing how a “shopping” tab might interact with the “activity” tab on Instagram to increase the focus on commerce for businesses and their followers. Soon you'll see Shops appear in stories and promoted ads.
Facebook Shops will eventually be integrated with WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram DMs, so you can browse store catalogs and make purchases through chats. The influencer marketing industry is set to benefit too as live streaming and shopping will be pairing up.
Shops started rolling out on Facebook yesterday in the United States and they are set to come to Instagram this summer.
They aren’t the only game in town either. We’ve seen a surge of indie e-commerce makers stepping up to help store owners:
• Elliot creates simple product landing pages with one-tap checkout
• Storr is for mobile commerce, so you can set up a store from your phone
With this launch by Facebook, commerce and community are finally starting to play nicely together. We’re hoping this gives small businesses a much needed edge.
They’ve been on fire these past few weeks. Between business surging with the pandemic pivot to ecomm to being named Canada’s most valuable company, they somehow found the time to ship an impressive product too.
That product is Shop, formerly known as Arrive. It’s like a personal shopping app that learns more about you as you use it, and it makes the shopping experience pretty seamless with no form-fills. You can follow brands on Shop to watch for new drops or choose to shop locally and find online stores near you. When you use Shop you’re automatically offsetting the carbon emissions your deliveries produce, which is pretty neat too. 🌿
“I’ve been using this app (it was called Arrive) for a few months and it’s seriously awesome for automatically tracking packages from Amazon, UPS, FedEx, etc. Plus, it’s so simple and beautiful!” - Nick
We’ve also seen an upswing in products launched for Shopify by partners and the maker community. Promo launched a video-maker so that store owners can create pro-quality videos to embed on product pages or use for social posts, and OneSignal built a tool to remind shoppers about abandoned carts through push notifications. Square made a product photography robot to take better photos for your store without the overhead of a pro photo shoot.
And while we’re at it, we wanted to refresh your memory on the lesser-known launches by Shopify:
- Burst is Shopify’s answer to Unsplash with thousands of free stock images for store owners
- Hatchful is a free logo-maker that auto exports social media icons
- Draggable creates custom drag and drop experiences with a library of options
Keep an eye on the PH homepage for all things Shopify, we have a feeling more launches are coming soon. 👀
If you spend your time anywhere in the early stages of launching a company, honing your writing and your pitch can be a big help with acquiring customers long term.
If you already have copy to work with, a good way to find out if it’s working for you is to test it with your audience, and that’s what Copytesting is doing. Although much of what you can do in startups is inherently measurable, it’s really tricky to get data around your copy.
Another copywriting product that caught our eye this week was Gramara. If english is your second language, this will be particularly useful, it was built to help english-learners specifically. Gramara uses natural language processing and AI to increase the fluency and clarity of your writing. It will catch not only errors but will intuitively draw conclusions on what you meant to say to suggest the right corrections.
The maker, Jack Qiao, was inspired by his ESL family who was having trouble with the mainstream grammar apps like Grammarly “They assume that your writing is mostly correct, and don't perform sentence-wide changes that are sometimes necessary. They don't parse your text for semantics, and most of the time they simply can't detect that anything is wrong at all,” says Jack.
If your english is already pretty good, you can use Gramara to generate paraphrases in alternative writing styles. See what works for your audience, and you’ll be golden. ✍️
Recently Cent launched a Patreon competitor to support not only creators but also early backers.
Today creators have so many ways to make money on the internet, but it's still very hard. Artists have been shapeshifting to adjust to new platforms and scale up their audiences to monetize their content.
With Cent, the creator and their work is at the forefront. The system is designed to provide income for both the creator and the fan through two mechanisms:
1. ‘Seed a Creator’ and get rewarded
2. ‘Spot’ a post, and show you like it.
By backing creators early on, fans can also “earn” in their eventual upside. That incentivizes fans to become evangelists, meaning everyone wins in the production of new creative work.
The PH community certainly seems intrigued:
“This is the most interesting thing on Product Hunt today, imo" - Ryan
“I've seeded five creators and got seeded by five users, so far so good.” - Samuel
“Cent has one of the coolest concepts I've come across recently. It's like Patreon on-the-go where you can support your favorite creators.” - Hady
It’s early days for Cent, and we’ll be watching to see how their beta is received, but it’s a promising step towards funding the arts in a sustainable way.
“Many creators not only share their final work, but document the steps that went into creating it. Fans seem to really connect with creators more as they learn more about their process, and it's also the perfect way for aspiring creators to learn. I think this is missing on other platforms,” Pavan, the maker said.
Rt.live is a COVID19 tracker, focused on measuring a key statistic about how fast the virus is growing.
The value they track, Rt, is the average number of people infected by someone carrying the virus. If the Rt number is above 1 in any particular state, community spread is active and accelerating fast, so extra precautions are needed. If the number is below 1, it’s a positive sign that transmission is down and aggressive measures are starting to curb the growth.
You can see the state by state curves over a monthly timeline to help visualize the spread and get a more accurate picture on where things stand today.
Right now, Nebraska has the highest Rt in the U.S. at a 1.29, whereas New York has dropped down to 1.06 with a previous peak at 4.47. This data is extremely useful in understanding if stay-at-home orders are having an impact, and help inspire people to do their part.
As per TechCrunch, “Kevin has been writing and publishing open-source data analysis notebooks on how to calculate Rt on a daily basis. We wanted to take that work and visualize it so anyone can see how their state is doing at curbing the spread,” says founder, Krieger. You can check out their Rt.live modeling on Github.
This launch is quite a departure from the founders’ photography roots, but the virality they experienced at Instagram inspired them to apply concepts from growth modeling to the cause.
“As states decide whether and how to open back up, they’ll have to manage their infection rate carefully, and we hope dashboards like rt.live will be helpful in doing so” Krieger says. From
From symptom trackers, to trend watching, to crowdsourcing for a cure, we’ve seen some incredible products launch in the wake of COVID19.
If you read last week’s digest, you will remember YUR, a virtual watch that tracks your health stats when playing games in VR. We also covered Instagram’s exploration into co-watching parties.
While we’re all in lockdown together, we wanted to share a few more recent launches we can all enjoy together online.
🏡 Last week Airbnb joined the trend by moving Experiences online, connecting hosts to new audiences remotely. You can book a magician to teach you magic tricks, learn how to cook with a Moroccan family, or even train with an Olympic athlete.
"Kudos to the Airbnb team and the hosts for creating an online experience to the people staying home and enjoy the experiences.” –Divyansh Patel
💇🏻♀️You probably need a haircut offers guided haircuts from hair stylists remotely. Alternatively, you could use Snap Camera to cover your shaggy head at your next Zoom birthday party.
“This is such a neat idea! I gave it a go yesterday and cut my husband’s hair and beard with the guidance of an amazing hair stylist.”–Aiman Batool
🎥 Vemos launched last week making it easy to watch movies with your friends and family. This free, open-source browser extension brings Zoom-like features to streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Hulu and Disney+.
"This is a great piece of work by @nolaneo, highly recommend checking it out during this insane time in the world.”–Des Traynor
📚Goodnight Zoom connects isolated seniors to families with children so they can read bed-time stories together.
“This is the most heartwarming idea I have ever seen! This is such a uniting platform - in current times more than ever.”–Anastasia Orgaz
Calling all couples: Facebook has a new app for you. 👋
Facebook (quietly) released a new app called Tuned — it’s a multimedia messaging app designed to help couples talk to each other. The move comes seven months after Facebook Dating (remember that?) launched, but instead of a matching app, Tuned is more of social network for *experimental* exchanges. 👀
From the app, people can share their mood, exchange music (via Spotify), share voice memos and create a digital scrapbook, among other things. Facebook is calling its messaging features a “private space” for couples to connect.
The app reportedly doesn’t require a Facebook account, but users’ data can still be used for ad targeting by the company. Tuned also comes out of Facebook’s ‘New Product Experimentation’ team, a group building consumer-facing apps to test out new ideas. Previously, this team built Aux, Bump, Hobbi and Whale, which we’ve written about before.
The app comes at an interesting moment, and is probably best served for couples who don’t live together right now.
Would you use this? Tell us here. 💕
“Over the course of the last quarter we've seen an incredible shift in the world due to COVID-19, people are looking for new avenues to stay active while at-home.” - Dilan Shah co-founder and Chief Product Officer at YUR
YUR is a VR fitness tracking tool that just rolled out a “virtual watch.” How it works: YUR lets you track fitness metrics (heart rate, daily calories, squat count, etc.) with any wearable heart rate monitor while you play VR games that keep you in shape. Note: It only works with Oculus Quest right now.
The virtual watch interface is definitely novel and might be a fun way to enhance your at-home workouts. To date, YUR reports that over 5.1 million workouts have been logged on their system by over 60,000 users.
Some early reviews from the PH community:
“The YUR app is amazing to stay motivated. Amazing to see it in this format! Guess I won’t need an Apple Watch soon.” - Naomi
“Now I can keep track of my fitness metrics without wearing any physical watch. The future is here.” - Robin
“This product will change the way VR is used!” - Sahin
Some other cool VR products we’ve seen launch in the last 30 days (if you’re looking for some futuristic activities):
👀 VR-OS is an operating system that replaces monitors with a head-mounted VR display.
👏 CoBlix VR lets you create your own virtual world, and then view it in VR.
🎮 oQQur is a community for VR streamers, bringing technologies and artists who want to want to create immersive experiences together.
🛋 Couch Live is a virtual living room for watching TV with friends.
🙌 SPACES lets you have a Zoom chat in VR.
In the sudden age of all
Zoom everything,
Around wants to make video meetings “less.”
From a UI perspective, Around looks different than traditional video conferencing software, prioritizing AI-based camera framing that finds your face as you move, cropping out the background behind you. There’s also optional filters to set a “vibe” for the call, meaning nobody has to feel “vampire-awkward” when tuning in at night due to different time zones. Around also has an auto-mute feature that uses AI to eliminate common background noises like sirens, dog barks, washing machines, smoothie blenders and laptop fans to prioritize the human voice (sort of like
Krisp). On top of that, Around’s signal processing technology lets multiple laptop microphones and speakers stay enabled in the same room without echo or feedback.
“Around respects your time and privacy, and that's why we've built all the technology behind it — to make it even less distracting than any other video calling products on the market. Around is primarily a hard tech company — great audio and video is a real science, and off-the-shelf services and libraries are far from great. So we went heads down for two years and wrote all the audio and video greatness ourselves,” Around CEO Dominik Zane wrote on Product Hunt.
Similar to video conferencing apps like Zoom, users can simply share a link (or fire it up from Slack) to start an Around call. 👋
Here’s what early adopters think:
“This is an amazing antidote to being stuck inside a rectangle and unable to collaborate. Zoom is good but Around is essential for actually doing work like you are sitting next to someone.” - Garry
“Cool UI and AI features. How do I convince people to use this over from Zoom?” - Al
“One of the worst things about video conferencing is the failure to create a persistent or ambient connection. Sometimes you just need to have someone feel like they're with you for a while without really saying anything or disturbing you. This looks like it might really help with that.” - Dean
Would you use this?
Let us know. 🗣
Well, this was well-timed. Slack released
its biggest redesign last week, making improvements that specifically target those new to Slack given the recent change to mass remote work.
For Slack veterans, you’ll find new navigation, a new compose button, custom sidebar sections, a new shortcut button for apps and new themes are coming soon. Overall, the stripped-down redesign aims to be more customized and simplified, addressing the less intuitive ways the messaging app works for Slack neophytes. 💬
“These changes address a basic challenge that has grown naturally with Slack: with size comes complexity. As different product teams added new capabilities piecemeal, Slack started to feel not intuitive for people trying it out for the first time,” the Slack team
wrote in a blog post.
We’ll see if the new Slack design appeals to a wider range of business users, given that more and more industries have made the recent shift to a distributed workforce.
Speaking of new releases, Apple just unveiled its new iPad Pro. The iPad resembles a laptop more than a tablet; it comes with a new “magic keyboard”
Check it out here. 💻
