This week on Product Hunt I found bots, new websites, business tools, and podcasts. There were a lot of folks launching amazing apps that were beautiful, helpful, and also some which were very focused. I’ve picked a handful of top apps, news, and podcasts from this week to feature. There were many more hunts I wanted to include, but these were the top ones I loved.
If you don’t know what Product Hunt is, I wrote a little description to help you understand:
Product Hunt is a service where you can share and discover new products. The site was founded by Ryan Hoover in November of 2013, with funding from Y Combinator. The basis of the site is users submit a fresh podcast, an innovative app, other tech products, or wild gadgets. From there other users upvote the products onto the front page. The whole process feels a lot like Reddit but with a focus towards discovering products within the technology community.
I’m active on Product Hunt as @leonhitchens, where you can follow me!
Let’s hunt together!
The Ringer
Bill Simons is back with a new website and a new team to talk write and talk about sports, pop culture, and Game of Thrones. A new website is exciting or innovative these days, but The Ringer is based solely on Medium – the social blogging platform everyone folks to write their think pieces. The site is relying on Medium for ads and monetization, along with sponsorships from Budlight nd others. They’re using Medium, Soundcloud, and other online services for their hosting of content.
NBA Bot on Messenger
Bots are all the rage these days, and with them being directly in Facebook Messenger you’ll want to use them all the time. The NBA Bot will send you highlights from your favorite teams and players just in time for the 2016 NBA Finals. The bot is also able to send you video highlights, so you’re not just seeing text but seeing the best dunks during the game. It’s a great tool if you cannot be in front of a TV during the Final games. I’m going to subscribe to some of the notifications to keep up with the games.
Flume 2.0
Flume is an Instagram app for Mac, which allows you to post and look at the post on the social network. The app is engineered from the ground up after Instagram announced they’d cut off their API to third party apps. While the app doesn’t have any way to make money or stay alive when Instagram changes their avenues for getting information into the app, but the app is a passion of love, so they don’t want to see it go under just because of an API change.
Google Lost Phone Finder
Type into the Google search bar “I lost my phone,” and the search will return the phones location and ability to ring it or lock it. Google’s long had a phone manager to find your lost phone, but you needed another phone with the app install to access the features. Now, you’re able to do the commands directly from a browser or mobile phone via Google search – as long as you’re signed-in to your account. The feature is also slated to come to iOS, but the features will likely be limited to locating and possibly ringing the phone, as Apple doesn’t have an API for locking the phone.
Startup School Radio – 46
Startup School Radio is a radio show and podcast from Y-Combinator. The partners at Y-Combinator are hosts in the series who talk to startups that they’ve funded and helped grow. This episode they spoke to Detour and Groupon. Detour is a app which talks users on audio based tours of cities or historic areas. Groupon is a deal and coupons based app which has struggled over the past few years. The insights the hosts have, allow them to ask profound questions about the startups and understand what has taken to get their startup off the ground.
The Skimm Live Chat
Danielle Weisberg & Carly Zakin are co-founders of the Skimm, which is a daily newsletter with everything you need to know to make you smarter. They’ve gone from doing the newsletter as a fun daily task to transforming it into a business where millions wait for the email to come. They’ve expanded to include an app and full website. They’ve built a full community, and you can ask them any questions about their journey or what they’re doing now.