My 30+ favourite product launches in March 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.
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. Product Lessons
Real examples and stories of career strategy, frameworks, analytics & more. Level up in 5 minutes, once a week.
Very Interesting guides for product managers not only about concepts and frameworks but rather how to build a career and develop skills described in a very applicable manner. I really recommend to have a look at the library section that is also categorised nicely.
2. Common Killer
Find a drug-free way to get rid of headache.
Getting rid of headaches is interesting in itself but the crowdsourced way of collecting advice is a good example on how to provide value in a very simple manner. Maybe some people can find a cure here for a very common problem.
3. Work Styles
What’s Your Work Style? Learn more about the way you work with Teal’s innovative assessment.
Everybody loves self tests and especially in the work context it is really interesting to get results that can help you to improve.
Teal is a very good example of providing value to users and try to convert some of the users to an even deeper offer with a paid membership plan. I tend to see this approach more and more and I think this is exactly how to build a product that is fully scalable without creating to much operational work in the beginning.
4. Brunhilde
Get more out of your YouTube comments! Enter a link of your YouTube video and let us analyse your comments and show you what your audience thinks.
Youtube video comments are so messy and I can imagine that there are nice tools out there that can give some good sentiment analysis to show what are the most important aspects of the comments. Brunhilde is one of them that does this in a very clean and easy way.
5. SocialSizes 4.0
Image and Video sizes for Social Media.Templates for Sketch, Figma, XD, Photoshop & Illustrator.
I was in the situation so many times that I wanted to help designers to use the right size for the respective ad platform. SocialSizes solves exactly this.
6. MarketPlan
The All In One Marketing Platform. Plan, execute, project, and optimise your entire marketing strategy all from one powerful place.
The most important thing in a leadership role in marketing is to visualise and communicate your efforts and results. MarketPlan can definitely help doing this. The question is certainly if this is easily maintainable at all times. But the funnels visualised there should definitely always be at least in your mind as a product and growth manager.
7. ProductFlair
Discover more than 193+ hand-curated Product Hunt launch examples. Get ideas and inspiration for your next launch.
A nicely curated list of product hunt launches along with best practices. Very nice to apply when actually starting a product hunt campaign.
8. Moonshot Library
Moonshot Library is a curated collection of resources to grow, execute, and lead in a zero-to-one startup.
Nice content curation for early stage startups.
9. Uptime
Thousands of 5-minute Knowledge Hacks from the world’s best books, courses and documentaries, for free.
The so-called “knowledge hacking” app received a lot of funding recently. Content nicely visualised and explained in tiny bits sounds like Blinkist but I think the smaller sizes make uptime a really nice alternative. What I think is an important part for using tools like this is to actually build a habit around the consumption of the content. It would be nice to also build this into the digital experience.
10. Around
Gather in ultra small groups, infuse fresh energy into creative sessions, and get things done in real-time with real results.
Around is offering a better video experience than zoom and everyone knows that there is a lot of room for improvement and better tools to support productivity at work.
11. Failory 3.0
The All-In-One Newsletter for Startup Founders. Every week, I’ll send you Failory’s latest interviews and articles, curated resources for founders, and updates on how I’m growing the site to $10k/mo.
Nice newsletter and also very good content on the site itself.
12. DPO as a Service
GDPR Compliance for your business in Europe with Data Protection Officer (DPO) subscription for $119/month. Fast, reliable, affordable. At least 5 times more efficient than hiring a DPO in-house.
RegTech and all sorts of GDPR services are important and will become more and more important especially in Europe. DPO as a service is a very interesting approach to solving some of the challenges for companies and startups.
13. WeLoveNoCode Community
One single place to discuss, learn and unite with other great nocode developers. It’s free, community-driven with NO paid memberships.
All No Code Communities are highly appreciated and should be supported :)
14. Screen
The fastest way to create screenshots of your app for product pages on Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Microsoft Store, etc.
This tool solves a major problem when creating product pages for the app store. I know there are a lot of Figma tables out there but a tool like this makes it even easier to create simple product pages.
15. Keep Up
KeepUp embraces brain exercises via VR/AR-based games, diet programs and physical practices tailored to the needs of the user. The progress reports for the user, the care giver and the doctor give a view of improvements or alarms regarding the user’s condition.
Many people are very afraid of ending up with dementia. An app to reduce the risk of this disease is an extremely good idea. Debatable is certainly the effectiveness of this tool.
16. Pry
Pry Instead of using Excel, Founders and business owners can use Pry to manage their budget, expenses, hiring plan, and cash runway.
YC W21 startup solving an issue for founders in various business models. Especially in the beginning of a new company organising finance and accounting can cost a lot of time. This tool can help to prevent this.
17. Archimedes
Archimedes is the investment learning hub for everyone. Make investing a bigger part of your life by learning from a personal curriculum of bite-sized lessons, fun gameplay, and from a trusted community. Sign up and become a better investor today.
I love the idea of solving the financial literacy puzzle and I am always interested in new efforts. I am always asking myself how you can best cater towards all sorts of segments for users interested in finance and investments. Archimedes delivers a gamified approach that can certainly help with community building.
18. TrackingPlan
Get a living snapshot of all your analytics. Just copy and paste a single line of code to your Website or App and, within minutes, all your events will be monitored and automatically added to your tracking plan.
Tracking Plans are so hard to maintain and I am not sure how exactly to solve this for companies in different stages. A simple solution like TrackingPlan is exactly what can solve this challenge. The sample tracking plans on their landing page is a really nice way to make users understand what is the ultimate deliverable of this product.
19. Ark 7
Ark7 is a real estate investment platform where you can buy property shares at as low as $5 to earn passive monthly income and future appreciation. In the meantime, you don’t have to worry about property management because we take care of it.
Investing in real estate is a big thing currently, especially in Germany. I am not the biggest fan of it, however, Ark 7 shows a nice way to illustrate the analytics involved in a real estate deal and can be a good inspiration for many companies working in this context.
20. So Syncd
Fed up of meaningless swiping? You no longer have to leave love to chance. So Syncd’s unique matching algorithm helps you find love faster.
I recently watched “The One” on Netflix which is based on actual DNA matching for couples. The consequences of the existence of such tools are super scary but it would be super interesting to actually see if So Syncd is more successful than other matching solutions.
21. Sleepedy
Sleepedy provides personalised sleep therapy by connecting you with a sleep coach and automatically tracking your sleep with wearables like the Apple Watch and Oura Ring. If you don’t have one, we’ll lend you an Apple Watch.
Sleep is such an important topic and I am always interested in new physical devices and also digital ways to improve sleep quality. Providing sleep coaching like Sleepedy is certainly an interesting way to deal with the challenges of users affected by insomnia and also really understand their needs and pain points. I think, however, it is also important to find a way to measure in an automated way in how the sleep quality improved.
22. Email Growth Playbook
Implementing a great email program is the most effective way to grow your business.
Discover 60+ growth tactics to increase your email ROI based on the strategic goals you want to achieve, such as: improving deliverability, increasing open rates, and more.” “A nice guide issued by pathwire with best practices around all elements of email marketing. I still think email marketing is the most underrated marketing and retention element and should be an essential part of product development as well.
23. The Wealth Pool
Join The Wealth Pool to help you plan and make better financial decisions by benchmarking your financial health against “pools” of original, crowdsourced household data. Learn how others manage their finances to help better handle your own.
I think an important element in the personal finance space is to compare how you are doing in comparison to peers. This is a trend I noticed especially when looking at Finance Influencer content or in the personal finance community. It makes a lot of sense to build a nice tool around that! I think The Wealth Pool offers a nice approach around that.
24. minipoll
Create simple shareable polls in seconds. Share your polls across all of your channels — newsletter, group text, Twitter, etc. No sign up required.
A nice tool for creating quick surveys online. It is especially nice that the interface is very clean and you can create polls even without a sign up. This is definitely a growth feature since it will help spread the word about minipoll.
25. Macro
Macro Macro helps teams supercharge their manual and repetitive processes. Our powerful checklist allows teams to quickly document processes, assign tasks, track progress, and automate common actions.
I am a big fan of the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Especially for operations it makes a lot of sense to think in checklists for complex and seemingly easy processes. This will both help the operations unit to make fewer mistakes but also to have a description ready to build this process into the product at some point. Macro put all this into a tool with a nice and modern interface.
26. Bounty
Bounty lets you get paid for referring friends to jobs. If you don’t know someone you can refer, share the bounty and get a cut of the prize pool.
Referral is such a big thing when it comes to hiring. It plays a major role for every senior hire and I think it is a sign of good recruiting to do a background check in form of reference calls as well. Bounty makes sure that this happens on their platform which is a development that can be observed for many HR startups at the moment.
27. Superbuild
Learn to rebuild Product Hunt’s top products with No-code.
I believe a lot in the no code community and I also believe that there will be the need and demand for the usage of tools like webflow, bubble and other tools which are not that easy to understand. Superbuild is a nice example to offer guidance to new users and create a course around that by letting users build PH products.
28. Inspirational A/B Tests
Inspirational Tests is a free compilation of different A/B Tests conducted on the copy, CTA/Pricing page, and UX Design of different landing pages.
Real and authentic A/B tests are very hard to find. Inspirational A/B tests offers some of them and show how powerful they are and what you can learn from them.
29. Listnr
Start a podcast without recording anything It is so nice to create content and make it available in various ways.
Listnr allows to transform all articles in a podcast. Actually it would be nice if this would also work the other way around and I could just record a podcast and an article or video would be created at the same time and be published automatically.
30. Allo for Desktop
It’s time to build the common ground between remote teams. The only place to truly work together across roles without juggling many tools. Allo is your first remote workspace.
I am still trying to find the perfect solution for reducing the amount of maintenance and tool switching time for product teams. Allo is very interesting also because it has nice usable templates that can be easily implemented in product processes. Definitely a trend that can be seen for internal tools currently.
31. API Connector
API Connector is simple solution for data importing from any JSON API to Google Sheet, Airtable, & Webflow.
Allowing to push JSON data into google sheets or Airtable was a heavily requested feature by the nocodeapi community. The reality is that often also some important analysis are stored ultimately in google sheets or similar. It is nice that the API connector offers that also data from any HTTP API can be imported there now.
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.
