😸 Become the director

gm legends, happy Sunday.

Today’s standouts: a movie you don’t just watch—you steer; a bot that clears your inbox before Monday hits; and a tool to keep your brain from melting into weekend mush. Plus: how one maker went from quiet idea to 500 users and a buzzing feedback loop.

Top off the coffee. Set your status to off-grid. Let’s get into it.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Weekly

Leaderboard highlights

	Odyssey — AI video you can both watch and interact with in real-time Odyssey is a research preview of real-time interactive video powered by a world model. It generates fresh frames in about 40 ms as you steer with your keyboard, so the scene adapts on the fly.	▲ 260
	Perplexity Labs — Bring your projects to life faster than ever before Perplexity Labs is a Pro-only mode that turns your to-dos into done. Drop in your goal, pick Labs, and in about ten minutes you get reports, spreadsheets, charts, or simple web apps complete with code execution.	▲ 504
	Zero — AI native email client Zero is an AI-native email client that plugs into Gmail or Outlook, slurps your backlog, and starts classifying on impact. Real mail lands in Focus, newsletters drop into Later, cold spam goes straight to Done.	▲ 839
	brainrot — the more you brainrot, the more your brain rots Brainrot is a bare-bones iOS screen-time app. The more you scroll, the little brain avatar fades, cracks, and eventually keels over. Close the phone and it perks back up.	▲ 572
	Burner Bitcoin — A new kind of hardware wallet for gifting & stacking Bitcoin Burner Bitcoin is a plug-and-play hardware wallet you preload with sats and hand off like a gift card. No apps to install, no seed-phrase nightmares, just fund it, share the device, and the recipient owns the keys from day one.	▲ 119
Show More Products

MAKER STORIES

From 0 to 500 users

Alex Saint didn’t need another launch. He needed people.

He’d built solo apps before—put in the hours, hit publish, tweeted it out... and got nothing back. No users. No feedback. Just silence. What he really wanted was someone—anyone—to test things before launch day.

So he built IndieCru.sh.

It’s a space for indie hackers to find early testers. You share your app, open a feedback program, and start getting real input while it still matters. No more building in the dark. To make it fun (and keep people coming back), there’s a leaderboard, private test spaces, and a native token called $INDIE that rewards testers for actually being helpful.

Alex launched solo—no cofounder, no budget, just a livestream and an MVP. Somehow, it hit #8 on Product Hunt, pulled in 500 users, 80+ feedback programs, and 12 paying customers.

Now $INDIE keeps the whole loop running: devs use it to get featured, testers earn it by testing. And just like that, finding beta users doesn’t feel impossible anymore.

FROM THE FRONTIER

OpenAI is serious about hardware

OpenAI just bought itself a body—and hired the guy who dressed the iPhone to give it a soul.

A $6.5 billion all-stock deal folds Jony Ive’s 55-person hardware studio io into a new “io division” inside OpenAI. Ive stays an independent artisan at his firm LoveFrom, but gets the keys to every future OpenAI product, physical and digital.

Ive and Sam Altman have been sketching “beyond-the-smartphone” gizmos since 2023; think pocket-sized, screen-free companions that whisper ChatGPT in your ear rather than another glass rectangle. First reveal is penciled in for 2026.

Why pay iPhone money for a year-old startup? Owning hardware lets OpenAI skip the Apple/Google tollbooths and plant generative AI directly on your wrist, lapel, or dashboard—before Meta or Humane nail the form factor.

TRENDING IN THE FORUMS

Read-later emergency exit

Pocket’s shutdown notice landed like a punch to the tab—“Where do we park our half-read articles now?” The answers flooded in: Reader by Readwise for seamless cross-device sync, Instapaper for that no-frills scroll, Raindrop.io when you need folder zeal, and niche picks like Omnivore and GoodLinks for anyone allergic to corporate servers.

Migration dread ran through every reply—JSON exports that break highlights, missing tags, and years of bookmarks vanishing into the void. If your read-later queue is about to implode, this thread is the emergency exit you need.

Latest Emails from producthunt