550. Best new software products of 2024 💺
My own personal Product Hunt
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Best new software products of 2024
For several years now, I have sent a series of year-end Best Of lists for things like favorite books, tools, articles, and more. This year is no exception! So far I’ve published a list of favorite articles, a list of great advice I’ve received, and a list of all 66 books I read.
Now it’s time for the best new software products that came across my radar in 2024.
We run a pretty lean tech stack at Bonfire, but we’re always keen on trying new tools to enhance our creative process or save us some time. Here’s our standard stack:
Notion for our wiki and our notes
Slack for our day-to-day chat
Google Docs for collaboration
Calendly for scheduling
Circle for community
And the list below is full of tools that I’ve been trying, eyeing, and slipping into my workflow here and there. Hope you find something that piques your interest or brightens your day!
10 best new-to-me products of 2024
1. Sublime — A knowledge library for creative work
Website: https://sublime.app/
Sublime is the bookmarking site you always wished you’d had. It’s intuitive for saving bits and bobs you find around the Internet, and it has a robust community library of inspiring quotes, images, links, and stories. The Sublime team is among my very favorites to follow because of their refreshing approach to business-building; check them out here
. Case in point: They have one of the most original pricing models you will ever see in SaaS: a pay-what-feels-right sliding scale, complete with lifetime subscriptions.Other clip-and-save tools kinda like Sublime:
2. Raycast — The Mac launcher gets a major glow up
Website: https://www.raycast.com
A Mac launcher—a computer feature whose name I only learned about this year—is what you call the search box that pops up when you hit CMD+Space on your Mac (there’s a Raycast version coming for Windows, too). It’s a speedy way to open apps and search for files without having to click anywhere. Well, Raycast does the basics of your modern launcher and a ton more, like a clipboard history so you can copy more than one thing at a time, integration with ChatGPT so you can CMD+Space to talk to your bot, and one of my favorite features, the emoji picker! 🥳
Other Mac launchers:
3. Kick — An AI that does your business finances for you
Website: https://www.kick.co/
As someone who now does his own business finances, I can confirm that Kick is a great idea! How nice it would be to have an AI categorize all the expenses and run end-of-month reports and to never worry about human error (aka Kevan error).
4. General Collaboration — A single place for all your notifications
Website: https://www.generalcollaboration.com/
You know how we all have a million tools and all our tools have their own universes of notifications? I end up collecting all the dross in my email inbox, alongside real emails, which makes my inbox a mini-nightmare to triage. General Collaboration sees me and feels me: they collect all the notifications from everywhere and let you manage everything from one app, not a dozen.
5. Gatheround — A more cozy Zoom call
Website: https://gatheround.com/
We spend so much of our synchronous meeting time in the Zoom interface that I kind of crave a new breath of fresh air every now and then. (Google Meet does not count btw!) Gatheround is indeed fresh and unique—it’s a video meeting tool, which is especially great if you’re hosting calls and meetups and all-hands. The product recently got acquired by Donut, the Slack app that pairs people up for friendly chats.
Other Zoom-fatigue busters:
Boom — a more wacky Zoom call
6. & 7. Hardcover & Storygraph — A better Goodreads (w/ less Bezos)
Websites: https://hardcover.app & https://thestorygraph.com/
As evidenced by my 2024 reading list, I like to read books. And I am all ears always for any website that helps me read more and to find even more interesting stuff to read. Goodreads is the big-box store of online book communities, but if the Bezos-ness of Goodreads (which is owned by Amazon) weighs on your mind, then I found two alternatives this year that are pretty great and made by pretty cool people. Storygraph is a Black-owned business run by three amazing people, and Storygraph is the brainchild of a couple of book-loving dudes and their team has a Head Librarian on staff.
8. Krystal — Carbon neutral web hosting
Website: https://krystal.io/
I know nothing about how web hosting works, but I know how important climate stuff is! It does not surprise me that hosting a website uses up server space and that servers are energy hogs. It’s one of those invisible costs I never notice when I’m browsing the web (same with querying a GPT, which apparently uses 25x more energy than a Google search).
Pairs well with:
Fathom Analytics — Google Analytics alternative that protects people’s privacy
Ghost — An email newsletter / blog / membership service that’s fully open source
9. Granola — An AI note taker that won’t join your meetings #bless
Website: https://www.granola.ai/
At times this year, there have been more AI notetakers than human beings in my Zoom waiting room. I get it: taking notes is gross and hard, so why not let a robot do it for us? There are SO many options out there, but my favorites are the ones that don’t need to join the Zoom rooms and record all the calls. Like Granola! (Zoom has some built-in AI note-taking features that are pretty sweet, too.)
Other options:
10. Notion email — 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
Website: https://www.notion.com/product/mail
Notion email was announced this fall and is not available yet. But I have given them my contact details and asked them to message me as soon as it’s ready! I’m too frugal to pay for Superhuman or Hey, so I’m eager to see what a non-Gmail inbox might be like … especially one made by Notion.
Over to you
What were your favorite products of 2024? What’s in your go-to tech stack?
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
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