The Roundup

In one of the best product explainer videos we’ve seen in a while, Phil Libin of Evernote fame, introduced his latest project, mmhmm. The name is cool but more importantly: it could be a game changer for video calls and presentations.

Here are some initial reactions from the community:

“That's an impressive innovation in a cluttered field.”- Guillaume

“Congrats on the launch! Love the 'daily show' format. Excited to try this out.” - Paul

“I can think of dozens of use-cases for myself, but I’m really excited to see this used in educational contexts.” - Lucas

Of course, there are many options to host your video calls right now, including Zoom, Slack, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Around, Tandem, Remotion, Brave Together, Pragli, Jamm and even Facebook (among many others). But mmhmm is unique, focused on making presentations more engaging. There will be no Zoom fatigue on your next company all-hands.

How it works: Select a room with a virtual background to set the tone for your meeting. Then project a screen to host your presentation inline, similar to old fashioned news anchors reviewing the weather forecast. The app also supports “Jedi-Ghost mode” (see the video) and on-screen floating.

With so many competing technologies hoping to make our remote work-life more interactive (looking at you, Snap Camera), working from home in our new normal could become more engaging and connected than ever before.

Today Uber announced it’s acquiring Postmates, the SF based food delivery startup, for $2.65B in an all stock deal.

Postmates first launched on Product Hunt 6 years ago and according to cofounder, Bastian Lehman, the app was already soliciting addictive behaviour from its users even then:

“Food has a long tail just like books or music. In other words, everyone has a favorite restaurant and if you give them the ability to order from that place, they will. We have done deliveries from over 25,000 places. The more often you use Postmates, the more often you keep using it. For example, if you have used Postmates five times, you will (on average) continue to use it at least once per week.“

This is big news in the battle of the food delivery giants, with Uber having missed out on acquiring GrubHub earlier in the year to JustEat for $7.3B. JustEat is one of the biggest companies in Europe in this space, competing directly with Deliveroo and UberEats.

The food delivery industry is big business with a couple of dominant players emerging after a few key acquisitions. We saw DoorDash acquire Square-owned Caviar just last year for a reported $410M. Amazon even tried to get in on the game with Amazon Restaurants a few years back, although has since removed this from its online shopping empire.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen a rise in home cooking as people shelter in place. It might be a good time to invest in some Our Place kitchenware or buy a fancy June Oven. Or you could just...

Last week, AWS entered the competitive world of no-code app builders with its launch of Amazon Honeycode.

Using tables to input data and a drag and drop style interface to set layout, AWS VP Larry Augustin claims that anyone can build apps in Honeycode for both web and mobile.

Currently in beta, Honeycode is free to use for teams of up to 20 users and 2,500 rows per work load.

The launch is a surprise to some given Amazons historical focus on more traditional developer tooling. Although perhaps it shouldn’t have as more big co’s are investing in no-code solutions.

Earlier this year we wrote about Google’s acquisition of the no-code builder, AppSheet, for an undisclosed sum marking Google’s continued investment into the no-code/low-code space. What on the surface looks like a competitive move by AWS against existing no-code platforms like Webflow, Bubble, Airtable, Intermal or Retool.

But ultimately Honeycode is competing with the spreadsheet, the leader of no-code tools.

Every few years a new email client captures everyone’s attention. Yesterday HEY launched with hype, and for good reason.

HEY was created by Basecamp, the 21-year-old company led by Jason Fried and DHH. It’s the freshest take we’ve seen on email since Superhuman, but HEY isn’t just an email client, it’s an email platform. This vertical integration gives them the ability to do things others can’t.

Here are a few features you might love:

• “Imbox” screening – Only people you’ve approved get into your imbox (aka, inbox)
• File browser – Every attachment is indexed and easily searchable across email threads
• Reply later workflow – Rather than chicken peck your way to inbox zero, HEY offers a slick UX for batching replies
• Built-in spy blocker – By default, spy trackers are blocked so senders don’t know when (or where) you opened their email
• Silent by default – Push notifications are off by default to avoid repeated distractions throughout the day

Thousands of folks signed up on the waitlist for the $99/year service. But if you’re looking to explore other email tools today, here are a few other recent entrants you may not have heard of:

• Tempo takes a very minimal, zen-like approach to email
• Twobird bundles email with to do’s, reminders, and collaborative notes

But if you’re eager to claim your firstname@hey.com vanity email, check out HEY sooner than later.

P.S. If you’re curious how Basecamp built HEY (and its other products), read ShapeUp, a free book for startups and makers.

If you’re new to remote work, the endless options of where you could move can give you FOMO.

The remote work revolution started “gradually, then suddenly,” as penned by Matt Mullenweg. Within a few weeks, everyone from Square to Shopify was announcing permanent or extended WFH policies.

Here's a list of tools for digital nomads looking for a change:

First, start out with the practical stuff. Take your list of dream cities and plug them into a Relocation Calculator to find how far your salary goes on the basics. 💸

If early retirement is high on your list, scout out cities with a lower cost of living with this Financial Independence Calculator. 🏖

Timezones become really important with a distributed team so you’ll want to look closely at timezone overlap with your teammates.⌚️

A little tip: plan a trial trip before you lock it in. Test out a new city first by staying at an Outsite with fellow nomads. 👋

All this said, it’s still a tricky time to move right now, especially internationally. Keep tabs on travel restrictions for countries on your dream list with MayWeLeave. ✈️

We had to cancel our regular team offsite for Product Hunt this year, so we’ve been looking for fun ideas for a remote retreat. Since the social part of our retreats are the best bit, boring apps have no place here. 🙅

Here’s a preview of some quirky remote apps and games we're exploring:

• Brightful Meeting Games introduces icebreaking games to “super serious” business meetings

• Buzzfeed Quiz Party to test the team's knowledge on important things like, “Which Nicholas Cage character are you?’” and “What’s your British name?”

• MerryMint brings IRL activities online. Hire a magician for a magic lesson, invite a chef to teach how to make the perfect pancake, or get a mixologist to spice up your Friday happy hours

• Goat 2 Meeting sends an invite to a real goat or llama to join your video call (photo above)

• Moonshot is a virtual escape room. Join your team on an important space mission where you must escape. You can play this one with up to 100 people

We’re looking forward to a highly productive year following this retreat. 😆

Black Lives Matter. Period.

Product Hunt is a global community of people from all ethnicities, colors, genders and backgrounds connected through a shared love of products and technology. We hurt when people in our community hurt, and today, we like many of you, are hurting.

In today's email we want to celebrate Black makers from within our community. Here’s a small sample of the awesome products built by Black makers over the last few years:

🖤 Nappy - Beautiful high-res photos of black and brown people for free

🖤 While at Home - Stay up to date on all available resources during the COVID-19 pandemic

🖤 Calendly - Simply book meetings without the back and forth

🖤 People of Color in Tech - Join a growing community of People Of Colour working in tech and startups

🖤 Dream Big Hustle Hard - The millennial woman's guide to success in tech by Abadesi

🖤 The Bootstrapped VC - The official podcast of Backstage Capital hosted by Arlan Hamilton

🖤 Indie Hackers - Work together to build profitable businesses & side projects

🖤 Blacks Who Design - Highlighting inspiring Black designers

Let’s support more Black makers, together as a community. If you’re Black and made something you’re proud of, let us know on Twitter.

Lastly, if you have the means consider donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, ACLU Foundation, The Bail Project, or many of the other organizations fighting for equality. You can do so on Every.org, a non-profit that makes it easy (and social).

Facebook just announced their big play to own ecommerce last week. 🛍

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.

Shopify’s stock price over the past year has been going up and to the right. 📈

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. 👀

The one thing that has the potential to dramatically increase the value of your brand, the impact of your marketing, and the conversion of your products is simple: better copywriting.

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. ✍️