My 25+ favourite product launches in April 2021
I really like product launches and I always get inspired when looking at all sorts of product launches to derive experiences for the products I am currently working on. I actually think competitor research and staying up to date with the newest developments or trends in the product space is an important aspect in the work of a product manager.
Recently, I started to do this in a more structured way and created some lists with the product launches that were particularly inspiring for me for various reasons. I think the ideas and comments about the launches I describe can also be inspiring for everyone else and thus I might just share this list and maybe even create some discussions around it.
Have a look at the March 2021 Edition, too!
The products here are in no particular order. However, if you are interested in the categorised Airtable list that can be sorted and copied, I am happy to share this with you. However, as I am building an audience it would be great if you could also follow me on LinkedIn and Medium in order to support me in exchange ;-).
1. Great Recruiting Emails
Pitching talented candidates is tough — few people get it right. At Dover, we’ve helped more than 150 companies reach out to candidates in highly personalized and thoughtful ways. We compiled this shortlist of stellar outreach emails from some of the best companies in the world to serve as the gold standard of recruiting emails.
I got a lot of very nice outreach emails from recruiters but some of them were rather blunt. But it is so easy to create a nice personalised but also scalable outreach message that can really make a difference. Dover prepared a nice list of best practices. Worth to have a look for everyone who needs to do cold outreach recruiting.
2. Adept School
An online community where your degree doesn’t stand between you and your next position. We help self-taught developers and Bootcamp graduates build a network and find opportunities.
Nowadays it is really not so important what kind of education you were fortunate enough to receive and if you have a university degree after all. Especially the rise of the coding camp allowed many people to start another career and due to their high intrinsic motivation they are usually always very good and fast-learning developers. Adept school give companies a platform to recruit exactly those developers.
3. Writing Prompts
Why struggle to come up with fresh writing prompts when you can get them in an instant? It makes a wide variety of topics and themes available at the touch of a button.
Practicing creative writing is really nice and sometimes you just lack a very general topic. Writing prompts help out here and provide some topics that are worth writing about. I think this also makes a lot of sense if you are practicing a new language and want to practice creative writing in this language.
4. Verte
Analytics for your Segment events. Prepared analytical dashboards built for your collected Segment events.
Segment is such an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately. More and more tools come up that automate not only the flow of the data but also the analysis. Verte allows the user to easily create dashboards based on segment events that are already flowing in the tool setup anyway. The pricing seems a bit high but can still save a lot of pain in setting up and maintaining dashboards later.
5. Resoume 2.0
Build Your Online Presence. Create a beautiful website, portfolio and resume with ready made templates. Be prepared for your next job interview.
I like online resume software and I think it actually solves a huge pain point. It is just nasty to format your CV with a doc template. Resoume 2.0 facilitates this and on top of that also allows to create online portfolios which is also an important element not only for designers and engineers in my opinion but also for marketer and product manager.
6. Operator
No more dead ends. More happy customers. Operator is an easy-to-use tool which allows you to create and maintain redirects in a simple and intuitive way.
It is such a pain to maintain your website structure and even though it sometimes seems very easy because there is not much on your landing page, it is difficult to make sure that you have no dead link in your online presence. Operator provides a tool to identify these dead ends and creates redirects for them. Definitively worth a look if you work a lot with landing pages and experiment a lot with web content.
7. Movie of the Night
Insert any preferences you have such as streaming services, genres, keywords, actors, release years, age filters, runtime; and Movie of the Night will instantly find the best shows for you to start watching right away instead of browsing catalogs for hours.
Choosing a nice movie for the evening has become very important in times of the pandemic. I am pretty sure there are many solutions for this out there, however, I always tend to forget about them. Movie of the Night can help out here. Especially the API that they provide is really nice and can make sense for many other services.
8. UX Challenges
Done reading about UX? Start doing it. Practice with real-world exercises.
Train yourself in crucial skills and tools. Take away portfolio-worthy deliverables. Useful for beginners and experts alike.
The challenges section by UX Tools is really nice because it offers the possibility to get concrete praxis example of tasks that are typically performed by UX designers. I also really like the style of the cards that describe the different challenges. Really nice idea that can be used to practice.
9. Missinglettr
Create dozens of posts with a single click, curate the hottest content in your niche, and schedule your entire social output months in advance with Missinglettr.
Missinglettr is a nice content hub and can help a lot of influencers and users that want to increase their social media presence. I am a big fan of curation and I think providing a content hub like this really helps a lot to provide nice and easy to use content for users of the platform. However, it is quite an invest to use a tool like this.
10. Empathy
Losing a loved one is hard enough. Empathy is here to help you with everything that comes next. We guide and support you along your journey of loss, giving you the tools to navigate and prioritize every task.
The Death Tech industry is extremely interesting and I am watching startups from this area a lot. I think what Empathy is doing very nicely is that they outline what exactly is to do when losing a loved one which is not that straight forward and I really wonder if traditional funeral services can also offer these kind of services. Also empathy just raised $13M this month.
11. Manufactory Illustration Constructor
Illustration constructor is the simplest way to get unique stories about your dream team with amusing characters. Compatible with Figma and Sketch. PNG scenes are free.
Very interesting for creating an artefact for your product vision. There are many ways to do this but most of them actually cost a lot to manufacture. This tool provides a solution in which you can do this completely by yourself and independent.
12. TrendExplore
TrendExplore is the perfect solution to detect the most valuable online business among over 50 millions websites across the world. Our algorithm sorts out the trending websites into smart business models: — Product reviews — Online stores — Saas & startup.
TrendExplore offers another scalable and structured way to get business and startup ideas. It is actually possible to get one free report on current trends on the web page. Surely worth to have a look to get ideas.
13. GetKeywords
The Internet is changing constantly, but somehow we feel that our SEO tools are still living in 2007 — Boring, Complicated & Outdated. GetKeywords provide Intent-Focused Keyword Research with 100k+ Locations around the world with Unlimited Free plan 🚀
SEMrush just did an IPO but still when I look at their interface I think there are many things that can be improved. I am happy that competitors like GetKeywords try to solve this for users with special interests like for example local keyword research. Another example for tools and companies going more and more vertical.
14. Duuce 2.0
Duuce is a dedicated marketplace to buy and sell newsletters. Start or sell your newsletter with Duuce — 100% free.
I have known Duuce for quite a while. I think this shows a nice development for the maker industry. It is easy and straight-forward to sell your digital product. MicroAcquire is a similar tool. The newsletter valuation is also a very nice lead magnet. Should be positioned more prominently on the webpage in my opinion.
15.Chess Opener
By connecting an openings database to the Lichess API, and using that to fetch instructive opening information, such as statistics and top games, I was able to create a web application where users can easily explore, analyse and practice chess openings.
I really loved queens gambit and the focus on the chess game. I am really not that much into chess but I loved the kind of special community that they created in the series. A big part of it are the chess openings and this is nicely illustrated in this tool.
16. The 2021 Conversion Benchmark Report
Find out what a good conversion rate is for 16 industries, and get easy-to-understand recommendations to build your highest-converting campaigns ever. With insights from 44k+ landing pages, and 33m+ conversions, start working with conversion intelligence.
Unbounce issued a very nice report that you can use when benchmarking your CRO metrics against industry benchmarks. Always nice to have a look for reference and get inspiration as well.
17. Paywall Screens
Everything you need to design the perfect iOS paywall screen.
Get inspired by browsing a categorized collection of the best paywall screens in other apps. Design your own screen using the Figma template that includes dozens of examples and components.
Super nice and specific samples for paywall screens. I actually did my own research some time ago and found there are many patterns that you can find for paywall screens especially for content mobile apps. Definitely worth to have a look here to get more inspiration.
18. Landing Page Checklist
Landing Page Checklist is a curation website that provides over 100+ tools in 16 categories to help you to build your best landing pages.
A list with everything you need to build a nicely converting landing page. And yes, you can basically just use it as a checklist. Being able to build landing pages is really an important skill for almost everything. Choose a tool you like and build around 20 landing pages. This will give you some nice practice.
19. Slash
With Slash, issue joint cards that you and your friends “co-own.” Spend a fraction of what you otherwise would on subscriptions by seamlessly splitting costs with friends.
Slash is a very nice solution for users sharing subscriptions. I also really like the illustration of the functionality which is not so straight-forward for everyone I think.
20. 100 in 100 Challenge
Get 100 new paying customers in 100 days. That’s it. That’s the challenge. Hold yourself accountable with a public commitment and a private support group.
Nice example of an accountability group that pushes the member to achieve 100 paying users within 100 days. Interesting development in the maker space.
21. Product Management Exercises
Master Your Product Manager Interview Skills. The ultimate resource to help you prepare for your PM interviews.
The job of a product manager still needs to gain additional awareness especially in Germany and so does the interview process around it. The resources provided here are very helpful for young professionals trying to prepare for interviews and challenges in their PM job.
22. FigJam by Figma
FigJam is an online whiteboard for teams to collaborate, brainstorm, map out flows, and more. FigJam is easy to learn and fun to use, so anyone can participate and share their ideas.
Figma takes on Miro. Very interesting development in the remote collaboration space. I am excited which user segment is most attracted by which tool. I think Figma has good chances because the UX designers are usually already familiar with the interface. The big question is the performance of the whiteboard itself though.
23. Meet for Slack
Start Google Meet instantly with one command right inside Slack. Use ‘/meet’ to set up a meeting, start it and send invitations. All at once. Works in personal DMs, group DMs and channels. Yes, this does one thing and does it really well 🚀
A very simple but super helpful tool to directly start a google meeting in slack. I never saw someone solving this problem and I was very happy when I saw this exists. Definitely worth to use when you are using Slack + Google Meet in your organisation.
24. Wortharead
Mainstream news sucks. And if we’re being honest, most non-mainstream news sucks too. Try Wortharead to discover newsletters and blogs that are *actually good*.
It is always nice to find a good newsletter and I think providing a meta service curating some of the best newsletters around makes a lot of sense. Wortharead does this really nicely.
25. Memegine
Memegine is the only full-text search engine for internet memes allowing you to search through millions of meme images from all places of the internet.
A search engine for memes. Very nice idea!
26. Startup Video Directory
This curated directory of the best product videos features 40+ tech startups. It includes answers from the creators themselves and will bring you some inspiring insights.
Product video are such a powerful marketing instrument when executed nicely. I really liked the list provided in the directory and it is really worth it to look at several of these videos and derive the main elements of a successful product video.
27. Venture Capital Interview Trainer
You want to get into venture capital but don’t know how the interview process will be like? We collected 60+ real questions VC firms ask their candidates during the application process.
A nice and free resource to look at some of the standard interview questions in a VC interview.
I hope you enjoyed this compilation. If you are interested in receiving my Airtable list containing all those products with preview, additional comments and sortable categories just follow me on LinkedIn and Medium.
