Product Hunt Roundup (Week of April 4th)

QR codes, time zone trackers, and ownership 2.0

May 11, 2020

A note from Mat: On June 1st, I will be adding a paid tier of Forward Thinking Founders. I am going to bucket together my podcast, community, and newsletter into one plan for $30/mo (with mega discounts for people who subscribe in June and July). I’ve been writing on the internet for over five years, podcast for two years, and this is my first time I am asking my readers to pay for the value I provide. If you’ve enjoyed my newsletter, podcast, or if you want to support me as a creator, please read my plans for Forward Thinking. On, June 1st, I will ask you to subscribe. Note, there will still be a free newsletter and podcast option

For those who don’t want to scan every product launch of Product Hunt, don’t worry. I do, and I include the most interesting potential venture scale startups here, with bullets on why I think they could be be big.

Top 3 potential venture scale products

Tap - QR based operating system for drinking fountains

  • The founder, Samuel Ian Rosen, founded Makespace previously, which raised $87M. Tap currently has 3 followers on Twitter, so this is a gem in plain site.

  • QR codes are a hit in China, so I am confident they will catch up here, especially now that iPhones can registers them automatically.

  • Y Combinator added a Request For Product 3 years ago. The category? Water.

Time Lines - Making time zone conversions and comparisons easy

  • Beautiful app, which is needed as they are a targeting consumers and need a great UX to get the critical scale needed to be venture scale.

  • As remote work continues to grow, people will realize that time zones are insane to work with, and a billion dollar product will be built solving the problem.

  • The moat is that people can’t leave because their whole team will be on it. Could have the Slack effect. Also, every other product in this space has .001% market share each. There’s room to run.

Troav - Get paid for investing in the future of ownership

  • There was VC appetite for this concept with Omni, which failed. But maybe these founders can learn what went wrong and try again a different way.

  • Millennial and Gen Z don’t want to own more, and I feel like there is a more a trading/renting culture with the rise of the internet

  • The founders all go to Harvard, and the company was founded in its innovation lab. And the founders are developers, not MBAa.

Honorable mentions

Bard - A place for readers to discover content and support writers

Journey App - Social network that pushes you toward your goals

Here are a few posts I think you will like that are free/open now, but will be behind the paywall starting on June 1st.

And many more….