The Roundup

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.

2019 was the year of the “sober curious” movement.

We saw product launches of all stripes in this space, from Kin (a non-boozy alternative to alcohol) to Haus (a low-ABV option) to a cannabis-infused social tonic.

So it’s appropriate that there’s now tools that promote wellness around alcohol consumption. Notably, Less launched last week to help you become more mindful about drinking. The app was created by the makers of Zero, an app the lets you track your fasting.

How it works: As you log drinks through the app, your daily intake affects a weather simulation where you’re on a metaphorical sailboat. To keep “skies sunny and the wind at your back,” you have to stay under your alcohol limit. The app then organizes your drinking data in graphs so you can watch things like how many drinks you have per week and how much money you spend on alcohol over the course of a year. There’s also a “Tips” tab that has a selection of drinking-related articles, mocktail recipes and advice from medical experts. 🙌

Some early reviews from the PH community:

“I’m pumped for this. Use Zero religiously.” - Justin

“I really appreciate this app and I wish I had a product like this when I decided to curb my drinking a few years ago.” - Zak

“Just embarking on dry January. Less is going to be in my pocket and on my side“ - Carrie

Would you use this? 10 points to whoever has smooth sailing for the rest of the year. ⛵️

“Although there are some robocall blocking solutions out there, most of them just flag suspicious calls by adding something like ‘Scam Likely’ to the caller ID, but they don't actually stop the calls from ever (annoyingly) ringing your phone. Rather than selling vaccinations, they're selling medication.“ - Pepper Maker Ethan Naluz

Pepper is the latest product attempting to solve robocalls, due to the fact that there are over five billion robocalls each in month in the U.S.. And this number is set to hit 62 billion (in total) by the end of 2019. Why? Because robocalling is a cheap and easy hustle. Every successful spam call brings in an average of $430.

So Pepper works like an email spam filter.

“Instead, of warning you that a call *might* a robocaller, Pepper blocks robocalls from ever ringing your phone in the first place, so you don’t even get call notifications unless they’re confirmed to be from a human.” - Ethan

According to Ethan, not a single robocall has gotten past Pepper’s technology. The service currently works in the U.S. with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and the company says it will expand internationally if there is enough demand. Would you use this?

It’s worth highlighting a few other clever products in the space, which all of their own approach to blocking unwanted, spammy calls. Mostly notably, there’s RoboKiller, an app which has devised a smart SEO strategy to get in front of folks looking for a solution.

According to the predictive trends newsletter Glimpse, 89% of RoboKiller’s traffic comes from search, but searches for ‘RoboKiller’ only account for about .5% of traffic. Instead, RoboKiller uses landing pages for individual phone numbers (the company has created about one million of them) that people commonly search after getting a robocall. Using this approach, the company’s site visits have gone from 375,000 in May of this year to 2.5 million in October.

A few other options to block those robocallers 🚫

📞 Numverify

📞 CallHero

📞 RoboStopper

It’s almost the end of 2019! Of course, you knew that already from all the end of the decade #content that’s undoubtedly in your inbox.

There are so many products we could share to wrap of the 2010s (we’re a product of this decade), but we wanted to give some love to the most upvoted products of 2019. We’ll be sharing the year’s top 25 products over the next five days, so stay tuned! First up:

25. Marketing Examples is a super useful gallery of real-world marketing examples from successful companies. It will help you improve your SEO, perfect your newsletter strategy, and grow your following on Instagram.

“Invaluable modern marketing lessons - the only marketing newsletter I subscribe to actually.” - Pete

24. Tesla Cybertruck launched in November ( with a bang) and we’re still thinking about buying one. The $39,000 electric pickup truck is designed to look like a sports car but definitely looks like it belongs on Mars.

“It feels like Tesla is the Apple of the car industry. Right now it feels strange and unfamiliar, then suddenly other manufacturers will start to move towards a similar aesthetic and it will be the norm.” - Manny

23. Exploding Topics is an aggregator for trending topics like health, business, marketing and fashion, among others. The tool scrapes the web for what’s blowing up right now, sourcing from millions of data points.

“Wow. That’s like a pre-curated Google Trends on steroids.” - Dan

22. UserGuiding is a nifty no-code tool that helps product teams create interactive manuals that showcase how a product works.

“Although we are a technology-focused team, we decided to use UserGuiding because of their smooth, easy solution. We do not need to deal with complicated user guiding development any more.” - Osman

21. Product Resources List is a huuuge list of over 250 free product management resources. The idea is to help PMs save time in their day-to-day responsibilities.

“Incredible resource for people who want to know different aspects of product management.“ - Abid

To get the rest of the top products from this year, subscribe to the Product Hunt Daily here. 👈