The Roundup // Is Product Hunt dead?

Hi, hi! Welcome to the first edition of our reimagined weekly newsletter: The Roundup.

Every Sunday, we’ll provide an overview of what you missed last week on Product Hunt: five of our favorite launches, spicy community discourse, key trends on the site, and long-form articles we've recently published. Think of it as your way to stay up to date, without the endless scrolling. Grab a hot beverage and let's dive in.

This is our “staff picks” section — five products that stood out to us this week, whether because we think they’re especially promising, unique or delightful. 

With: 200+ curated questions designed to deepen emotional intimacy and self-awareness. 

This product won’t change the world, but it could change your relationship. The design is gorgeous, and the questions provocative. We think it’d be a perfect date night or dinner party activity. 

ChatGPT Canvas: A new interface that lets you and ChatGPT work side-by-side on documents or code. 

OpenAI is on fire — product-wise, but maybe also internally. (What was the deal with all those resignations?) Canvas comes just a few days after Advanced Voice Mode rolled out to most users. We’re most excited about its writing shortcuts, which include inline edits, automatic reading-level adjustments, and integrated grammar and clarity checks. 

Wispr Flow: A Mac dictation app with autoedits, AI commands, and support for 100+ languages. 

This is a speech-to-text app designed to speed up typing. It works across basically any CMS, and has a word-per-minute output of 220 — around three times faster than the average human type speed. Has writer’s block met its match?

CharacterSDK: Lets developers create multimodal AI characters capable of contextual understanding and real-time interaction. 

There are tons of use cases here, from personalized customer support at scale to task automation, but we can’t help feeling like the biggest potential beneficiaries here are…waifu lovers. You know, people who are in relationships with fictional characters — who have a waifu (or husbando), in Internet-speak. Replika was the go-to, but it might just have some competition. 

Graphite Reviewer: A high-signal AI code review companion. 

Our engineering team is stoked about this launch. Check out the long-form section below for their detailed take.

Usually we’ll feature an insightful or spicy comment thread from the site here, but this week the drama on Twitter/X was just too juicy to ignore.

Of course we, the Product Hunt team, don’t think we're dead. But last week, after a maker took to Twitter/X to air his grievances when one of his products wasn’t featured on the homepage, “Product Hunt is dead” did become something of a meme. At least for the day. 

In response, our CEO, Rajiv Ayyangar, explained that we’ve raised the bar for what gets featured on the homepage and gave personal feedback to the maker. (But btw, our Featuring Guidelines are public.)

And it’s true: Product Hunt is evolving because builders are better than ever. Our job is to be a site where the most interesting, impactful, creative products rise to the top. We can’t just feature everyone’s AI wrapper. Sorry, anon.

Anyway, many makers saw an opportunity to jump into the arena and build a potentially better version of Product Hunt. To that, we say go for it. Launch them on Product Hunt too. Competition is great. It’s the OG spirit of Product Hunt. Go forth and disrupt.

We’ll feature any interesting trends we’ve recently noticed on the site here.

Music tools have been popping up everywhere recently. Need new song recs? Try Spotify’s AI Playlists or — if you prefer human curation — BBC’s Orbit (tagline: “No algorithms, no genres and no personalization”). Looking to integrate sound effects into your product? Try MiniTAP, a browser extension that turns your keyboard into a sequencer. Long-distance with your bandmates? Try Jammin, a real-time collaborative music platform.

We’ll plug articles we’ve published on the site here, and occasionally feature longer staff write-ups, like the engineering team’s take on Graphite:

15 years ago, code version control was a wild west. There was the old and reliable CVS. There was the middle-aged and popular SVN. And there was the distributed, rebellious Git. Over the past decade, Git won the battles and became the de facto standard. While Git is not super intuitive to newcomers (though it has gotten much better over the last decade!), it becomes deeply ingrained in most developers’ brains after a year or two.

Git dominance has opened the door to a renaissance of developer tooling and, specifically, collaboration tooling. This renaissance has been turbocharged by a growing number of developers hungry and willing to pay for better tooling. And there’s no shortage of ideas for improved tools. For one, as multitudes of FAANG engineers graduate from their corporate jobs, they’re eager to build public versions of proprietary tools they used in their big companies.

Graphite, one player in the space, has clear opinions that they believe make teams move faster: Small pull requests are easier for reviewers to approve and more approvals leads to more shipped features. This idea and the downstream implications, called stacking, isn’t a new concept, but it’s always been tough to handle manually with vanilla offerings. Using the Graphite CLI on top of your tried and true Git workflows makes this all much more manageable.

For some developers, the change might take some getting used to. For folks who prefer a GUI to the command-line, there’s a VS Code extension to help. Graphite hopes to be more than just a means to stacking too. Their web interface is already filling a ton of gaps that aren’t filled by the first-party Github site. And this week, they entered the crowded AI code review space with a better-than-the-rest reviewer.

I suspect Git-in-terminal will go the way of Emacs-in-terminal. There will continue to exist dedicated gray-beards, but most developers will use a higher level tool. Graphite is nicely positioned to compete for users in that transition.

— Product Hunt’s Engineering Team

New on the site:

A Better Way to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers by Chris Bakke (Founder, Laskie and Interviewed)

The Cold Email Template that Got Me an 8% Reply Rate by Xiaohan Shen (Founder, Coldreach)

That's all for this edition! Since you made it to the end of the newsletter, here's a little treat: UserInyerface, a worst-practice UI experiment. Now go crush your week.