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.
We've partnered with HBO's Silicon Valley to give away an all-expenses paid trip to the 22nd Annual Webby Awards, honoring the most excellent sites, products, and apps on the internet. 🏆
You and your guest will win:
🎫 2 VIP Tickets to the Webby Awards Show in New York City
🍸 VIP treatment at the official Webby afterparty and cocktail hour
✈️ Round-trip airfare from anywhere in the US
🏨 3 nights at a hotel, stipend, and dinner at a Webby-winning restaurant
Show off your Patagonia vest and honor the best on the Internet. 🤗
On April 1st 2014, Google Maps: Pokémon Challenge was announced, teasing generations of fans with real Pokémon hiding in tall grass around their neighborhoods. Pokémon Go launched for real in 2016, and the entire world called in sick to catch Zubats. Mobs formed in Central Park.
Gmail and Amazon's Dash Buttons were originally announced on April Fool's Day too, to much skepticism.
In honor of products that must be fake, we've combined our favorite April Fool's launches with real products launched in the last year.
Can you pick the fakes?
1. Beer that teaches you a new language, or a beer that's designed to be enjoyed in the shower. 🚿
2. A crypto-only Lamborghini store, or a genetic test that reveals your perfect car based on your DNA. 🚗
3. A drone that pitches journalists, or an app that hacks your dreams. 😳
4. A bad joke detector from Google, or an app that finds your doppelgänger from hundreds of years ago. 🖼️
5. A service to pay for Amazon orders with cash, or ATM drones that deliver cash anywhere. 🚁
April Fool’s may be behind us but there’s no need to wait another year to prank your friends and coworkers. Here’s a collection of (real!) prank products. You know what to do. 👹
Startups have the potential to make the world a better place, so we’d love to help you get started on your own startup.
We just partnered with our friends at Amazon to secure up to $7,500 in free AWS credits for makers, available to our annual Ship subscribers.
Product Hunt runs on AWS, and you can too. You'll also get access to the full suite of Ship tools, including:
🖥️ Landing pages – Create a lovely landing page in 60 seconds to capture interest and emails for your project.
🔖 Surveys – Gather feedback from your users and use their answers to deliver segmented email messages.
💌 Email messaging – Broadcast product updates, chat with your users 1-on-1, and send targeted emails based on survey responses.
Claim your $7,500 in free AWS credits today. ⛵
Today, YC’s bi-annual Demo Day kicks off. Over 100 founders will take the stage, pitching a room packed with investors and journalists at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
We've put together a collection of some of the startups coming out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch, from wild AR apps to AI assistants that watch you in your home:
📈 CoinTracker is a cryptocurrency portfolio tracker that will do your taxes for you automatically. Supports 2,000 tokens. That's a lot of tokens.
🚭 Quit Genius gives personalized and proven advice on how to quit smoking, founded by a doctor.
📝 Slite is a beautiful note app for teams. Launched with 1,800+ upvotes.
👉 Piccolo lets you control your IoT devices just by pointing at them. Imagine if Alexa had eyes that could see evvverryyything you do at home.
📰 Substack will help you launch your own paid newsletter. Create your own Stratechery like Ben Thompson.
📹 Arrow for iOS lets you add AR text and emojis to your videos.
💌 EasyEmail is a Chrome extension that will write your emails for you.
🤖 Molly is an AI version of you that can answer everybody's questions, so you can focus on building. It's like a cookie from Black Mirror. 😳
They also figured out why Alexa was randomly laughing at people. Creeeeeeeepy. 👀
We have a secret: you can save up to 35% of every Amazon order using a little-known site called Purse, if you pay in bitcoin.
Purse finds people who want to trade their Amazon gift cards for bitcoin, so everybody wins in the end. They integrate directly with Coinbase too, so you can buy and spend seamlessly.
If you're looking for easier ways to shop on Amazon:
- 🤖 Earny gives you money back on purchases when prices drop
- 💳 Amazon Prime Rewards Card gives you 5% cash back
- 🐪 Camel alerts you in advance when a product's price drops
- 👀 WikiBuy finds you lower prices from across the internet and displays them directly in Amazon
- 😀 Smile Always redirects all purchases through Smile.Amazon so you're always donating to charity
But... AI isn't just about efficiency. Here are 15 products to help you design and build beautiful things, powered by Machine Learning:
🎹 Play a piano duet with Google's AI on your laptop.
🎥 Your SO will love this: AI for picking the perfect movie. Solving the biggest 1st world problem of our generation.
😂 Your SO will LOL at this: AI for generating only the best memes.
📸 Shazam for fonts, so you can find every font with just a pic.
📝 Then find the perfect font pairing with this tool from IDEO.
👀 Use with caution: you can now clone anybody's voice (to make them say anything). It's like Photoshop, but for audio.
Justin at Algorithmia curated the 15 most creative AIs, just for you 🤖
Yesterday, we launched our new iOS and Android app so you can discover the most best products, everywhere. We even support the notch.
Every new app needs a new phone. Enter to win a free iPhone X and AirPods, thanks to our friends at GQ and Digg:
😺 Animoji support, so you can make the best faces.
🔒 Perfectly secure with only your face.
✨ The most stunning, bezel-less screen.
🕺 Dance anywhere with Apple's "best cordless product ever."
New app, new phone, new headphones. Boom. 💥
🍎 Apple launched a social video app.
🤖 Elon introduced a new startup to turn us all into cyborgs.
🛠 Stripe created a platform to help makers start a company.
😘 Giphy continued to make GIFs cool.
✏️ Google flexed its AI doodling technology.
🙀 This Y Combinator backed company freaked everyone out.
💰 Earn launched their crypto-powered LinkedIn InMail competitor.
🌭 HBO's Silicon Valley released a much-needed hotdog app.
🖌 A small team in the Ukraine built a handy tool for designers.
...and many more.
Today we're releasing our second book*, celebrating the most upvoted products from 2017. It's free to download.
*ICYMI, download our first book on How to Build a Career in Tech or share with a friend.
Black Mirror is real, and it's backed by Y Combinator. 👀
Meet Molly, a startup that's building an AI-version of you. It's already live with Gary V, Michael Seibel (President of Y Combinator), and 100s more.
Molly learns from everything you've ever done or typed on the internet, so it can answer questions for you using machine learning.
Molly was launched by a small, talented team including last year’s Golden Kitty award winner and long-time community member, Chris Messina.
You'll soon be able to ask the best founders and investors anything. Since Molly is like a "download" of one's brain, it can answer questions 24/7... even from those that are no longer alive. Freaky.
Get early access and reserve your name on Molly by signing up here. 😎
Despite the price swings and frequent comparisons to tulips, Bitcoin and the blockchain is here to stay. Microsoft is now selling Blockchain-as-a-Service and Robinhood's new cryptocurrency trading platform has 1,000,000+ users waiting for access.
Many of these currencies don't have world-changing use cases yet, but the first wave of blockchain Beanie Babies has definitely arrived.
🌷 Design and trade tulips on the blockchain. Powered by the same browser-based software as CryptoKitties, you can now breed your own unique digital tulips on the Ethereum blockchain. Tastefully ironic.
🐶 Breedable dogs on the blockchain. Chinese tech giant Baidu launched CryptoDoggies, a near close of the adorable, collectible CryptoKitties whose transactions almost broke Ethereum this summer.
📸 Famous celebrities on the blockchain. Elon Musk, Angelina Jolie, Kanye West, and Vitalik Buterin are all available for sale... well, sort of. Crypto trading cards of your favorite celebs are here.
🦌 Alpacas on the blockchain. Adopt, breed, and feed adorable alpaca that live directly on the blockchain. From the comments: "My GF always wanted her own alpaca and her birthday is coming up. Perfect timing!" 😂
🦎 Pokémon on the blockchain. Every Pokémon Go fan wanted to battle their captured monsters: now you can. CryptoFighters are trainable, collectible warriors that live in the Ethereum blockchain.
Not sure how blockchains work? Here's a beautiful visual demonstration of the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more. ⛓️📦
