😸 Group chat podcasts

Happy Hump Day! The homepage is teeming with great products today, like the one I’m covering below. It’s a bootstrapped social audio app that lets you create mini podcasts with your friends. But first…

Some headlines: 

💗 Tinder has a new AI tool that helps you pick the best pictures for your profile. 

📹 Instagram now allows users to add multiple songs to the same reel. 

💰 According to some sources, GitLab is exploring a sale after being valued at $8B.

Audio-first social apps are still a genre that founders and builders worldwide are trying to crack. Remember Clubhouse, the serendipitous voice-only group chat app that took off during the pandemic? More recently, Naval launched Airchat, a kind of audio-first Twitter-style experience, and now we have Roads Audio.

Roads Audio is an entirely bootstrapped take on an audio, social app. It aims to help you foster deeper connections with friends and family, even if you’re busy. It’s designed with busy professionals and creatives in mind who might not have the time to catch up on the fly. 

It’s kind of like an asynchronous podcast app. It enables private, podcast-like group chats between you and a group of friends you want to be included.

The founder, Dave Failskie, came up with the idea when he and a few friends tried recording a podcast. He says, “Roads Audio began when some friends and I tried to start a podcast. Since we were living in different parts of the world, we would record 10-15-minute stories and upload them to a shared Google Drive.”

So, how does it work? When you first launch the app, you will be prompted to set up your first channel (the app’s name for groups). You can add a title, description, and a channel photo. You can then add your friends, family, and coworkers just by sharing the channel link. From there, you can make your first recording, which will live within the channel for people to listen to. 

Users can also contribute to each other's recordings by creating a “road.” A road is like a break in the conversation, similar to real life. As you’re listening, you can add your own thoughts mid-conversation. Other users will then encounter your note while listening to the root note. 

If you’re interested in trying it out, Roads Audio is free to download, and the maker is eager to hear people’s feedback on the launch page. 

If you’re in San Francisco and looking for something maker-orientated to do, you should join the Product Hunt team on July 23rd for our next AI demo night hosted in the Solaris AI offices. There’s pizza, drinks, and even the opportunity to demo your own product. 

DEVELOPER TOOLS 

PullNotifier is a Slack app that allows teams to view pull request statuses within their workspace without getting spammed with notifications. 

CommandAI is a set of command line tools designed to make your life easier and your workflow smoother, whether you’re querying databases, running shell scripts, or chatting with an AI.

MAC TOOLS 

Fast Text is a Mac app that lets you create custom shortcuts for some of your most frequently used text snippets. It’s designed to speed up your writing process and increase productivity.

Emoogle is a desktop application for quickly finding the emoji you’re looking for. With a simple keyboard shortcut an emoji tab will pop open where you can search for the one you need by description. 

DESIGN TOOLS

Fonts Ninja is kind of like Pinterest but for finding new fonts. You can browse a catalog of over 50,000 different fonts, find similar ones with AI, and even create different boards to group them. 

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