About The Weekly SaaS Hunt
The Weekly SaaS Hunt is a Youtube Series created by Biro, founder of Goosly and Jexo. Every day he chooses up to 3 product launches happening on Product hunt and on fridays he dedicated a livestream to go over them and their features. He also logs his daily finding over his Goosly calendar and tags them as free, paid or fremium.
Watch the Stream on Youtube👇
About Biro
With a background in technology and engineering, Biro has spent the last 6 years helping teams improve how they deliver work with software solutions.
He gained significant knowledge in project management practices and co-founded Jexo to help enhance Atlassian Cloud products with the ultimate vision to transform work management into an exquisite art form in Jira.
Biro spends his spare time riding his electric bike and creating video content.
Transcript
This week we got two main themes on Product Hunt: Mucho free tools and resources and heaps of email marketing-related launches. I think you'll find it interesting.
Abbot
When starting Goosly originally I was considering Slack as a community where we could help users, share tips and roadmaps etc. As well as support channels
But because of the lack of community-focused features and most importantly the fact that is not really a customer support portal. We decided to stick with Jira Service Management for support portal and Discord for community discussions.
The main reason why I didn't find Slack suitable as a support portal was the lack of SLA features and support insights. If I knew about Abbot back then probably I would've taken another look at Slack for customer portal.
Abbot helps teams that serve customers through Slack stay on top of their conversations with automated customer messages, automated staff notifications, and tracking and reporting on support engagement.
If you're considering slack as the channel to service customers or already using it give this tool a try.
Play Spotify together in Remotion
So we use SLack intensively, all our conversations that are not calls happen there. And given we're all remote you can imagine we have Slack channels for just about anything, from sharing pictures of pets, random jokes or sharing music we're listening to.
This feature from Remotion caught my eye because it allows you to play spotify or Youtube music together in sync which is neat. Got a release happening in 30 minutes, play Europe - The Final Countdown on repeat to everyone and launch in style.
Apparently, it needs no Spotify premium, can be used with a free version and the Remotion tool is also free for now while in Beta.
Speaking of Remotion, I discovered the service with their new feature launch and I'm super inclined to test it out with the team. As a fully remote team one aspect we're missing is the office vibe where you feel proximity to your colleagues, where you can hop on various watercooler discussions and listen to music together. This tool sits as a sidebar on your mac and should help with that.
Remote Browser Embed
I'm intrigued about this function of embedding browser sessions because we've been looking at creating sandboxes where our leads could explore our apps and try them before signing up.
This Remote Browser Embed feature from RemoteHQ allows you to embed a chrome browser anywhere in your app. What I need to figure out is if I can program it to launch a session specifying an URL as well as some sort of authentication mechanism. Hmm
Right but anyways, I'm sure this can be useful for others for many other reasons like offering support directly to customers on the app and we'll explore that option too.
I looked at RemoteHQ and I like the service, it has a lot more features and so many cases you can use it for. With an asterix. Because for example Zoom recently launched the ability to control remote screen. However, this is a more specialized service if you do this kind of engagement on a regular basis with your customers and colleagues.
Cycle
I almost skipped this one as just another product management all in one suite. Very well put together and appealing option to try if you're thinking of building a product and want an end-to-end platform to help you take care of customer feedback, build phase, launch, and post-launch comms.
However, even dough it looks really appealing and well put together there are other solutions out there and many of us in PM for a while already have a stack we work with. WHat make me stop and have that AHA moment and really consider giving this a try was reading their principles, which where'nt very visible in their formal messaging on the website and video assets.
And this is because I resonate with these principles they talk about, here let me read them out:
- Collaborative. A natively collaborative doc as atomic unit as opposed to a task, issue or ticket.
- Flexible yet opinionated. A No-Code framework opinionated on product management.
- A hub, not a terminal. Highly integrated with an API-first approach.
- Design-first. A delightful user experience all around.
Pretty strong and authentic value proposition, which not many all-encompassing tools that they compete with can eco. So I think these should be more present in their official messaging.
But yeah, looking good and has Product of The Day on merits.
Playbooks, by GoSquared
I know James the founder of GoSquared for quite some time now and have seen the evolution of his solution from great to greater. So the launch of this set of Playbooks for customer engagement and onboarding is the cherry on top for me.
It comes at the right time, too as we're just starting to update some of our customer success strategies, and being as nimble as we can is a must for a small team like ours. Having predefined, tried, and tested customer engagement recipes is a yes please for us.
Also while you're on the GoSquare platform, have a look at the rest of their product, they have a suite of tools for your business like analytics and customer chat.
Bend
A brilliant product I found on Tuesday that needs more exposure. Bend helps you figure out your Carbon footprint by reading your bank transactions and figuring out emission numbers based on the supplier company and type of service. With these estimations based on transactions then you get a report that you can share with customers, partners or investors.
This is so relevant in today's world where sustainability is a pressing subject and we all have a responsibility to fix the environment, no matter if your a big enterprise or a start-up. SO why not use a service like Bend to really understand what you're consuming and offset. They also offer the option to pay to offset for the calculated consumption.
We use Ecologi ourselves at Jexo to offset an estimated consumption per employee but the company expenses is not calculated in that.
This topic is quite important to me and I work with a couple of founders who are sustainability-focused to help their businesses success. So I love seeing startups like Bend.
Better Outreach
Better Outreach is a really cool and free collection of outreach email templates so you don't have to waste time coming up with your own. There are categories like Sales, Followups, and Demo request emails you can quickly copy and use. But the coolest thing about this is that anyone can contribute with their own templates.
Having this outsources and open like this is exciting and I'm looking forward in seeing it grow. We'll probably also contribute with our own email templates there.
Thank you for the contribution and putting this together Slintel team.
Warmy.io
I must admit I had no idea what email warm-up was when I checked out this launch. So I had to Google it!
Apparently, when you create an email inbox, you can't just start sending thousands of sales emails at once, which is called cold emailing. You have to build trust and gradually send more emails out and get replies opens etc. That's what email warming is.
Warmly comes in super handy to help you set the email warmup on autopilot. Given I don't know much about this topic I'll let you explore the tool if you're looking for something like this.
Email Flows
So I feel this week is the email marketing week on Product Hunt with so many great resources, Email Flows being the 4th Email-related launch this week.
And holy grail of free resources, what a brilliant set of guides Mail Modo put together. You can find email funnels for FIntech, SaaS, Ecommerce and many more industries. ANd each has a diagram showing you the email flow usually used for that specific industry. Then you can drill down to each stage of the flow and see another diagram explaining the steps for that stage and every email you need to craft. Mind bending level of detail put into this reasource.
The kind you pay big bucks for to learn in various courses. But guess the price of this? Zero, nada, is completely free to navigate and use. Yeah have a look cause I'm clearly excited about it.
Keyboard Yoga
I love the concept of Keyboard Yoga from ZSA.io. Spend 10 minute going trough this experience to help you connect with the physical aspect of what you do the most in your day: typing at your desk.
This can be a very relaxing experience, as yoga usually is, however, I'd suggest to not erratically type random keys while doing this but find a rhythm and strike the same keys.
I was just randomly typing and I actually got tense and tired mid way. I do really think they need to add instructions about typing style in the website otherwise it ruins the purpose of the experience if folk just type fast random keys and waste to much energy and focus on typing rather than sensing their bodies trough the session.
But anyways, yeah give it a try and let me know if you find it relaxing. Just try not to focus on the typing part to much.
Zones
Zones is a mac and ios app that gives you options to easily and quickly understand the time in other timezones. You can set timezones of interest and you'll get widgets, menu bar apps, reminders and so on.
Reason I chose this app launch for today is because we have a fully remote and distributed team across 9 countries and I know is always a pain to sync on time be it about meetings, or discussions that indluce time like deadlines, launches, social media posts, events and the list goes on.
I use this tiny timezones widget on my Google calendar but it means I always need to open the calendar for every time I communicate time to someone across the world. This app gives you that information at your fingertips.
New Hire Buddy for Slack
The digital work force is moving to fully remote. And as compelling as that thought is, it comes with challenges. Especially on the side of building authentic connections with the people you work. And I think how daunting it can be for a new hire coming into a team that you get to see and engage with only on a virtual stage and even that just occasionally. Does that person like me? Do they think I don't belong? Am I making my voice heard?
When you're in the same office you have casual conversations while making a cup of coffee, you invite or get invited for lunch with one or a couple of colleagues. All these settings are opportunities to understand how others in your team think, how they see you and build connections.
In the digital world is not as easy or straightforward, tools have been trying hard since the pandemic but we still have a long way to go.
Luckly there's apps out there like New Hire Buddy by Spring Works to help us get there. They just launched a completely free Slack app that enables teams to talk to each other more often on various topics.
One primary example is having a new hire joining, this Slack bot will automatically pair the new user in private conversations with various team members trough out the span of a week while also providing some ice breakers to start the conversation.
I think this is super useful especially for new joiners, getting them to quickly warm up to the team. We do have activities for team bonding for example every month we spend time as a team and play some games to help us socialize and get to know each other. But I do think this SLack app can help have that get to know each other happen a bit more adhock as well.
SaaS Blocks 2.0
Now, if you're looking for a really cool, comprehensive list of SaaS tools, other than the list I'm building here on Goosly with these launches, of course, you can check out SaaS Blocks.
SaaS Blocks is a collection of over 300 products ranging from Analytics, Developer Tools, User Onboarding and many many more categories. The choice of services listed here also ranges between open-source and paid.
I like the map feature allowing you to scan through categories and tools and I also like that they add screenshots from the actual tool.
What I'd like to see in here is a label that lists: Paid, Freemium, Free as well as a filter for that. I use it for my list here and think is important for those that are looking for a specific pricing model or lack of. And speaking of pricing maybe adding info about actual cost so we don't have to navigate to the service.
Other than that, I think I'd add sorting on the lists and maybe better description of the tools. Some seem very shallow explained.
But nonetheless a great hub for you to check out.
Track Manual
This last mention is more because of my personal interest.
With this evolution in popularity of Formula 1 more folk are interested in motor racing. But do you know what's needed for you to get into racing? There's racing clubs, and tracks usually have this concept of track days where you can take your sports car or racing car on track for the weekend.
Well, Michael launched a manual online with everything you need to know about safety, car prep, track conduct, and racing techniques.
If you want to learn more about racing, beyond what you see in F1 transmissions and series like Drive to Survive, check out this free resource.
End
That's all for this week then. Let me know in the comments which one is your favorite launch this week on Product Hunt and if I missed any that you found interesting.
Listen to Chill Hop music to focus
By the way, the music in the background is actually our Chill hop music for focus that we launched yesterday as a live stream and is been playing for more than 27 hours. Is also stream inception I'm streaming here and playing music from the streaming platform. Anyways, we publish sessions often to help you focus and be more productive so if that's of interest hit that subscribe button and the notification bell to get notified when we launch new videos. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you live next Friday.
