The Roundup

The Makers behind DoNotPay, a “robot lawyer” that helps you dispute parking tickets and the like, launched a new product last week. It’s a  subscription sharing Chrome extension, where people can share their online subscriptions to services like Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney + and Hulu without giving away their password. 💬

How it works: Once you install the Chrome extension, you can generate a share link from whatever subscription service you’re logged in to. You can then copy the link to share or enter the email address of the person you want to share your account with, and that’s it. There isn’t a limit on how many people you can share the link with, but you may get booted off your account if you and too many of your friends are streaming simultaneously. It’s important to note that both the sender and the recipient need to have the Chrome extension installed to benefit from this arrangement, and that the actual account owner can revoke sharing whenever they want. And while the Chrome extension is free, DoNotPay plans to use it to publicize it’s robot lawyer services.

How it actually works: DoNotPay shares logged-in sessions by encrypting cookies for the website that is shared.

The idea is to help people save money by sharing and, ahem, trading subscriptions with each other. For example, if you have an Amazon Prime account but no Netflix account, you can swap access with your friend who has Netflix but not Amazon. 👀

Speaking of streaming, MSCHF (the “Banksy of the Internet” that talked to us a while back) just launched Allthestreams.fm, where they’re “pirating” content from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBONow, Prime Video and Showtime (because they have subscriptions). They’re essentially broadcasting a continuous stream of one random show from each “channel,” which plays live on their website. At the time of writing, The Office was streaming. Kind of brilliant. 📺

Happy (belated) International Women’s Day! 🎉

ICYMI: IWD was yesterday, and to celebrate we’re highlighting women makers and their infinite wisdom. Every day, we see women launch their creations on Product Hunt, where they’ve shared things like how to finance an at-home reproductive testing startup, how to make your startup safe for transgender people, how to make crypto useful for young people, how to build an unconventional product for women and how parenthood can change how you think about your job.

We’ve gathered some of our favorite nuggets of advice from empowering makers and startup leaders below. Enjoy! 💪

Cynthia Huang, CEO at Altcoin Fantasy, shares how becoming a crypto founder helped her get over her imposter syndrome.

“As a new founder, you now not only have to do that thing that you have no experience in, but you have to excel at it in order to make your company a success. The downside? It can feel like you’re constantly failing. The upside? Getting over your fear of failure really fast because it slaps you in the face over and over until you either adapt or stop being a founder.” 

Sophia Amoruso, CEO at Girlboss, discusses her experience learning the new meaning of “product,” and how she set out to build a product that’s accessible to everyone.

“For women who were able to buy my book — that was a luxury. I’ve had women tell me that they couldn’t afford my book, so they checked it out from the library, then were able to get a job, and then bought the book because they could then afford it. That’s the girl I want to make sure has the opportunity to be part of this platform because she’s the person who needs it most.” 

Check Warner, Partner at Ada Ventures, talks about how privilege has led to venture capital’s lack of accessibility, and what steps we can take to address societal inequalities.

“Unless we talk about this reality and take steps to address it, I don’t believe anything will change. Some of the key drivers behind venture capital’s lack of accessibility involves the money needed to have a seat at the table or start a VC fund in the first place. These roles are preserved for the very few.“ 

Steph Smith, Maker of FeMake, Eunoia, Make Yourself Great Again and nomad (hubb), shares her experience learning how to code, and how that taught her that she was often her biggest blocker.

“For years, I told myself that others who had found success in tech were cut from a different cloth, and given different opportunities than I was given. While some of these notions may hold truth in specific scenarios, I had built a habit of making these assumptions without properly vetting their accuracy. Most of the stories I told myself were myths.“

Jenny Gyllander, founder of Thing Testing, talks about how she grew her side project to a full-time gig.

“At the beginning, I struggled to identify if I was building this more for VCs or for consumers. But what I think is a common trait among VCs and consumers who follow me is curiosity. People tell me that they’ve bought things I’ve reviewed and founders tell me that VCs contact them after being reviewed. It’s great to be a part of that.”

Allison Esposito Medina, founder of Hire Tech Ladies, shares how she bootstrapped a business rooted in community.

“Although we've been profitable from day one, being bootstrapped means having to problem solve creatively, plan carefully, and make all the right bets at the right time (pressure!). On the flip side, being bootstrapped means we've had to be laser-focused and prioritize on an almost daily basis. Those are good things for any community and any business, so it's both a blessing and a challenge.” 

Last weekend, Binned Art launched with a novel approach to selling art. The curated marketplace lets artists sell their work anonymously (mostly to recoup the cost of art supplies) and helps patrons buy affordable, original art.

“As a fellow painter, I kept on cluttering my studio with unsold works. While I worked on refining my style and finding my artistic voice, I wished I could sell some paintings under a pseudonym to make room for more.” — Maker Adrian del Mar wrote on Product Hunt.

How it works: Instead of using galleries to sell art, any artist can submit their art (mostly paintings and drawings) to the marketplace. The prices of the painting are based exclusively on the size of the painting, and artists can calculate the accurate price to sell their work using a built-in calculator.

Ultimately, the idea is to help early-career artists refine their style while making money, and simultaneously help more people be able to afford original art.

More alternatives for purchasing *unique* art:

📹 Infinite Objects lets you “print video”

🖼 Art Bloom sources canvas prints from independent artists

👀 RARE Art helps you find limited edition digital art

💸 Artmood lets you buy or rent original art

🙌 Otis lets you invest in original art for as little as $25

Last week, engineers across the world took to Twitter in the name of salary transparency, sharing how much money they make annually with the hashtag #KnowYourWorth. 👀

The trend seems to have started with Slack developer Zac Sweers, who shared his education, years of professional experience, title, location, and compensation (including equity) like this:


As hundreds of engineers followed suit, there were very mixed reactions. Some people felt empowered, while others were disheartened by the hefty salaries that tech workers make at big tech companies in San Francisco and New York. But for underrepresented groups, this brief Twitter movement may have worked the way Sweers intended it to.

“I’ve seen an outpouring of gratitude, particularly from women, for folks sharing,” he wrote on Twitter. “Even in cases where they have reservations about the approach of efficacy, there’s an appreciation that those sharing are trying to be an ally.”

A resource called Know Your Worth then launched on Product Hunt to aggregate all of the data collected from the Twitter experiment. You can search salaries by country and city, and even see how much remote engineers make.

For more salary resources, check out LinkedIn Salary, Founder Salary Calculator and SalaryOrEquity. 💸

Hoop, an app that looks like Tinder but works for finding new friends on Snapchat, hit the number two spot on the App Store charts this month.

Why you should care: Hoop was created with Snap Kit, Snapchat’s developer tool kit that lets makers integrate Snapchat’s features (Bitmoji, Stories, Ads, etc.) into their own apps. We’ve seen Snap Kit catapult other apps — namely, Yolo — to the top of the App Store and into the internet zeitgeist among teens.

Hoop ultimately works a lot like Tinder (or Bumble or Hinge) and prompts users to swipe to connect with new people, who they can then message over Snapchat. Hoops makes you spend “diamonds” in the app if you want to reach out to people. After a certain amount of requests to chat, you can earn more diamonds by sharing and inviting friends to Hoop. The idea, of course, is to ultimately drive more users to Snapchat.

Hoop reportedly has more than 3 million downloads so far. Would you use it?

Some other apps integrated with Snap Kit:

👻 Brb

👻 Wavechat

👻 Stickered

👻 Wishbone 

👻 WYA 

👻 TOKO

👻 PicsArt

👻 Squad

Check out more Snap Kit apps here. 👈

Amazon Dating is going semi-viral rn. The site’s UX is so similar to to Amazon Prime it’s scary, but instead of books and electronics and toothpaste, you can buy a date. 👀

FYI: You can’t actually purchase a person on the site, in case there’s any confusion. The site is a parody, developed by makers Ani Acopian, Suzy Shinn, Morgan Gruer and the animation studio Thinko. The idea is to poke fun at dating apps, especially in a world where big tech companies are launching dating services.

When you click through Amazon Dating, each person’s page looks like a typical product page, complete with a price and description that lists silly personality traits like “owns every Glossier product” and “famous on TikTok” and “leases a Tesla Model 3.” The makers really went all out with this internet bit — they partnered with micro-influencers on Twitter for fake ads and there’s even a “ non-ghosting agreement” (NGA). If anything, the site will make you laugh.

We’ve actually seen a ton of full-blown parody products launch lately, with MSCHF notoriously leading the charge (read all about their “Banksy of the Internet” ethos here). But the idea behind this new wave of prank products — from GAN-generated foot pics to a stocks app based on astrology — is to spark cultural commentary, especially in an era where the consequences of technology seem increasingly dire.

In the comments of the Amazon Dating post, one PH community member speculated that the product’s launch would be more appropriate on April Fool’s Day. “We like to have fun more than one day a year,” Wojtek Witkowski, one of the Makers, wrote back.

TLDR; We launched something new.

Since Product Hunt launched in 2013, we’ve seen more than 150,000 products launch on the platform, upvoted by millions of people and discovered by several million more.

But we have many more ideas we want to explore around product discovery independent of producthunt.com. So we quietly started working on a new site and brand last year, taking our learnings from the past six years to build something new that we hope you’ll enjoy. We’re calling it YourStack and it’s a place to share and discover the products you use and love.

Why did we build this? The products we use have a major influence on our lives, and today we have more options than ever. Right now, we’re turning to our friends and experts offline and on broader social networks like Twitter and Instagram to ask things like:

“What workout apps do you use?” 

“Which smart home security system do you have?”

“What do you use to make coffee in the morning?”

“Which tools do you use to manage your startup’s distributed team?”

“What’s your favorite book on psychology?”

Our goal with YourStack is to create a home for these conversations, along with a community of people sharing and discovering the products they love. ❤️

How it works:

• Everyone has a profile to showcase their stack (aka the products they use). For example, here’s Ryan Hoover’s stack. Who knew he was such a big fan of the Corosi Air Fryer? And here’s Naval’s stack. TIL he’s a Rumble Boxing fan.
• Your stack might include things like the apps on your home screen, a book that changed your perspective, your favorite smart home gadget or your favorite beauty accessory. The more products you stack, the more useful YourStack becomes. 
• You can also use our ‘Pro Tips’ feature to learn new things about the products you already use. For example, did you know you check your AirPods’ battery level on your iPhone? Or did you know about the hidden ‘Concerts’ feature on Spotify? Pro tips are like a community-generated user manual of secrets, hacks, and how-tos. 

Similar to Product Hunt’s launch six years ago, we’re limiting the number of people that can join as we gather feedback and improve the product. Join us and share your stack.

Vine is back... kind of. The highly-anticipated reboot from the founders of Vine, a new app called Byte, is finally here. 🎉

The app debuted on iOS and Android on Friday with a “creativity first” mission. How it works: Byte lets you upload content from your camera roll or shoot media using the app’s camera. You then share your creations — six-second videos — just like you used to on Vine. It also sounds a lot like TikTok.

However, Byte’s founders hope the app will stand out from the pack by helping content creators actually make money (TikTok isn’t great at this right now). The app plans to launch a partner program in the near future that offers monetization option to popular creators on the app.

“We hope it’ll resonate with people who feel something’s been missing,” the Byte team wrote on Twitter.

Some early reactions:

“I was part of the BETA program during the last few months and Byte is really amazing: so much creativity bundled together.” - An

“This is the ‘TikTok’ killer. Vine should’ve never closed in the first place and swooped in.“ - Sean

“YouTube Byte compilations incoming...” - Andre

P.S. Follow us on Byte (@producthunt).

Over the past week, you all nominated your favorite products of 2019 across 25 CATegories. We tallied up thousands of nominations and have narrowed down the finalists by category. Here are the first five categories (keep an eye out in your inbox every day this week as we announce more finalists).

🌍 Social Impact 

🛠 Hardware 

📱 Mobile Apps 

🖋 Design Tools 

🖥 Dev Tools 

Today’s categories are sponsored by our friends at  Xometry,  monday.com and Dave. 

Voting starts today and closes Saturday January 25 at 7am PT. Upvote your favorites here.

Look out for tomorrow’s newsletter where we’ll be sharing the finalists for the next batch of categories (diversity and inclusion, crypto, no code, fintech, AI and machine learning). In addition to lots of love from the PH community, winners will receive a prize package with custom swag and a golden kitty trophy. 😸

Snap just made its latest acquisition. 💸

Earlier this month, news broke that the company has bought up AI Factory, a Ukrainian startup that will power a new animated selfie feature in the Snapchat app. These animated selfies are being dubbed “Cameos” by Snap — they map selfies onto videos and resemble, well, deepfakes.

AI Factory was founded by Victor Shaburov, who previously founded Looksery and sold that company to Snap in 2015. In case you don’t remember, Looksery created facial feature detection and manipulation technology which has since led to one of Snapchat most successful developments — “Lenses.” Remember when we all augmented our faces to look like babies? That was a lens, and it became so popular that it contributed to quarterly user growth at Snap last year. (Note: Snapchat  recently launched another face-aging lens to bring people back to the app.) 

The details of the deal haven’t been confirmed, but some reports speculate that Snap paid $166 million for AI Factory.

For alllll the Snap products — from automated ads to Spectacles — check out this list. 👈

For a similar deepfake-y product, try Morphin.