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.
Come visit the home of many of your favorite products (and TV show): Silicon Valley.
We’re giving away a free trip to San Francisco and tickets to the Habit Summit. Join Stanford professor and Hooked author Nir Eyal, the Product Lead for Google Photos, Netflix’s former VP of Growth, and other accomplished speakers sharing their tips for building engaging products. The package also includes:
✈️ $700 towards domestic round trip tickets.
🏘️ $500 Airbnb gift card for your stay in SF.
💻 A Microsoft Surface Pro from Microsoft, handy for taking notes (or browsing Product Hunt) on the go.
Put your name in the hat and if you win, remember to wear layers. 🎫
• CryptoKitties and Earn.com in Crypto ⛓
• Tixio and Gmail Unsubscriber in Lifehacks ⚡️
• Coinbase and Telegram for Breakout Product 📈
The most upvoted product of the year, Station held its lead over fan favorite Firefox Quantum to win Product of the Year. This is the first time the year’s most upvoted product is also the winner of the top product category.
Congrats to Telegram for winning Breakout Product of the Year, followed closely by category favorite, Coinbase.
In a shocking twist, Petcubes Bites beat out 2x Golden Kitty Award winner Elon Musk in the prestigious WTF Product category. In response, the Golden Kitty Awards veteran has pivoted The Boring Company's product (and fundraising strategy) from on-brand Boring Company hats, to less-boring $600 flamethrowers. 🔥
The Community Member of the Year is Kevin William David, just ahead of Hiten Shah, Kiki Schirr, and last year's winner, Chris Messina. The Maker of the Year award goes to Pieter Levels, followed by Lisa Dziuba, Mubashar Iqbal, and Jordan Gonen.
Check out the winners in all 16 categories. 🏆
Congrats to all the nominees and makers for building something awesome in 2017. 😺
This year we have 14 CATegories, including additions highlighting two big tech trends from 2017: augmented reality and crypto/blockchain, as well as:
🌟 Product of the Year
📱 Mobile App of the Year
🛠 Hardware of the Year
😍 Consumer Product of the Year
🏢 B2B Product of the Year
💥 Breakout Product of the Year
🌚 Side Project of the Year
🤖 Bot of the Year
🙀 WTF Product of the Year
⚡️ Lifehack of the Year
🖥 Developer Tool of the Year
🖌 Design Tool of the Year
💻 Maker of the Year
🤗 Community Member of the Year
Check out the complete list and upvote your favorites. 🏆😽
Voting starts today and closes Sunday January 28th at 12pm PST. The winners will be crowned with a one of a kind Golden Kitty trophy a week from today.
Irrespective of made up awards, big thanks goes out to the Product Hunt community and makers around the world launching new projects every day. It’s a great time to be a maker. ✌️
Most of our (globally distributed) Product Hunt team will be in town along with several internet friends. Here's what to look forward to:
🍹 Open bar (two drink max — be responsible!)
📸 GIF-powered photo booth
😎 VR games
😻 Kitty swag
💦 LaCroix (of course)
☕️ Fee-flowing Philz
🙌 Friendly folks
🤔 And a few other surprises
The event is free to join with an RSVP thanks to our awesome friends at: Google Play, Zendesk, Grammarly, Algolia, Intercom, Omni, and Spoke.
Join us and fellow makers, reporters, investors, and friends by RSVP’ing here. The first 100 people to arrive get a coveted kitty t-shirt. 😸
P.S. If you’re building an Android app you should know about Google Play’s Start on Android program which can help you recruit early beta testers, get direct UI/UX feedback from Google experts, potential Play store featuring, and $20k in Google Cloud and Firebase credits. Learn more here.
P.P.S. If you’re outside the Bay Area and want to host a Product Hunt meetup in your city, let us know! We’re happy to help.
These animated characters is a preview of our immersive avatar future, an evolution of digital self-expression and communication. The OASIS isn't far away. 😉
In the early days of the internet, online communities were text-based. We hung out on bulletin boards, IRC channels, and on AIM (RIP). As broadband and smartphones became more accessible, that’s dramatically changed.
Existing platforms, like Twitter and Messenger, adopted photos, GIFs, and stickers. Newer entrants like Instagram and Snapchat flourished as visual mediums, eventually introducing face filters, inspiring a waves of rainbow throw-up around the world. 🌈
The next evolution of communication will be driven by expressions, mirroring the fidelity of IRL interactions, without the anxiety and privacy concerns inherent with traditional video communication. All of the major players are weighing in: Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, Facebook’s AR Studio, and Snap's recently announced Lens Studio.
In the meantime, here are a few fun avatar apps to try:
💃 Gabsee: Put your 3D avatar in the real world
📺 Toonstar: Host a TV show with a cartoon (yes, this is weird)
😮 Mirror AI: Turn your selfie into an emoji (backed by YC)
🗞 Genies: Create a next gen bitmoji that reacts to the news
🎤 MyIdol: This is just creepy and awesome
Now for some fun: Share your avatar creation with us on Twitter as a photo or video. We’ll RT the most creative. 😸
⬆️ 2.5M+ upvotes were generously awarded from across the world. Go back in time to see what you missed.
🌎 4,500+ of you from 124 countries joined the Product Hunt Global Hackathon. Here are the winners.
🔥 5th most upvoted product of the year was Firefox's new browser (we didn't see that coming).
💰 800+ cryptocurrency and blockchain-related products launched. Sign of the times.
💌 260+ daily newsletters written. Explore them all here. This one was the most popular of the year.
📘 1 Product Hunt book published (so far! 😏)
📝167k+ followers on our Medium blog, which grew to the 14th most followed on Medium in 2017. 👏
👥 1M+ registered users reached (even though the majority of visitors never login). To see your user #, visit your profile.
On a more personal note, I'm pumped by the response we've received from Ship, our first paid offering. We introduced the private beta toward the end of the year, now used by hundreds of paying teams to build an audience and communicate with their users. We have a deep roadmap of improvements (hint: messaging is a big focus for us), focused on helping makers ship better products.
Today we're introducing a new program to help makers ship in 2018. If your New Year's resolution is to release a product for your startup or just a side project, take a look. We're offering a massive discount on Ship Pro plans, early access to Team Profiles, and kitty stickers to 50 applicants. Sign up here.
– Ryan Hoover ✌️
Over 4,500 makers from 124 different countries participated in the Product Hunt Global Hackathon this November, competing for $250,000 in prizes. According to the judges, the results were seriously impressive.
Today we’re excited to announce the 10 winning teams across 6 categories: Blockchain/Crypto, Social Impact, AI/Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Slack, and Google Assistant – in addition to the 3 grand prize winners.
Category Winners
💰 Blockchain/Crypto: Supermax
🙏 Social Impact: Donate Your Website and Sempo
🌐 AI / Machine Learning: Audify
😮 Augmented Reality: Scavengar
🍭 Slack: Klue
🗣 Google Assistant: Autometa
You can read a detailed breakdown of each of the categories and the winning teams in Winners of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon announcement on Medium.
Grand Prize Winners
🥉 3rd Place: Kenza is a plug and play application for data scientists and developers to quickly build, train, and deploy ML models at scale. The entire judging team was impressed by how easy this service is to use compared to existing solutions.
Thanks to our partners, the Kenza team will receive $15,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. Congratulations to Pavlos, Alex, Thelxi, and Joakim!
🥈 2nd Place: SweetBud is a magical coffee cup lid that makes any coffee taste sweet using electrical currents to stimulate your tongue. The entire team was impressed by the uniqueness of this solution and the amount of progress made in just a month.
Sierra and Simon will receive $25,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas.
🥇 1st Place: Token Tax files all of your cryptocurrency taxes for you, integrating directly with Coinbase’s API to import all of your investments and export a single PDF that you can submit directly to the IRS.
Huge congratulations to our top winners, David and Alex. They’ll receive a $100,000 in AWS credits to pursue Token Tax (or any other project you’d like), a fully-inclusive trip to TechCrunch Disrupt, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. 🎉
On Friday, Anil Dash tweeted: "Who is a person (not counting family) that opened doors for you in your career when they didn’t have to?"
The tweet has since gone viral, with thousands of replies pouring in. Anil has brought the same question to the Product Hunt community, asking you to show gratitude to the people who've opened doors for you in your career (we'll RT our favorite responses on Twitter).
Everybody who works in the tech industry has had their "big break" – a single, defining moment that changed their professional lives forever. Yours has just arrived.
We've partnered with General Assembly to let a one lucky winner attend one of the biggest tech conferences of the year. We can't say which event, but it rhymes with "Schmoogle Eye Oh". Enter to win.
The winner will also receive:
✈️ $500 airline credit from anywhere to Mountain View
🏨 Hotel and transportation credit around the city
🛠️ $200 credit for any General Assembly development class
😻 Meet the Product Hunt team in San Francisco!
The app looks a lot like Snapchat, Houseparty, and Facebook's Bonfire with a focus on playful face filters and group video chat. But unlike these incumbents, Messenger Kids puts parents in control, COPPA compliant so even children under 13 years old can participate.
Unsurprisingly, the app was met with mixed reactions. Cynics might criticize the app as solely a diabolical plan to incubate a new generation of Facebook addicts. Optimists see this as a way to empower kids to participate in our digital future, in a safe way. Regardless of your POV, this is a smart way for 14-year-old Facebook to bring a new generation of people into its ecosystem.
What do you think? Add your thoughts in the discussion. 🤔
Today's inaugural deal comes from Setapp. Described by The Next Web as the "Netflix for Mac apps" and upvoted by more than 1,000 people on Product Hunt, Setapp unlocks access to 100+ Mac apps for any task with a single $69.99 subscription for the entire year. Normally these apps would cost $2,850 if bought individually and includes:
🖌 Sip – Gorgeous color picker for designers
📸 Flume – Slick desktop app for Instagram
✏️ Ulysses – Writing app for pros with Medium integration
🖥 CleanMyMac – Frees up space on your Mac
🖼 Photolemur – AI-powered photo enhancer
To unlock this deal visit Product Hunt Deals. This offer expires in less than 7 days. 😊
