The benefit of the working in the startup world or contracting is that you get a wide exposure to products and can easily get hands on experience before it gets mainstream. Also you start looking at products differently - track the feature progress, release notes and make mental notes of key UX aspects (good, bad,ugly) to draw inspiration from in your work domain.
Here's my list of the top 3 really good tools/products I would happy advocate :
How much time do we spend in adjusting sections and layouts for presentations (be it Google slides or ppts) only to realise we now have more content to accomodate and rework ? The hours might add up to light years! Which is why Beautiful.ai has been a breeze of change for the better - layouts that adjust effortlessly and templates to create glossy presentations in literally minutes.I am not looking back to Powerpoint ppts / Mac Keynotes / Google Slides anytime soon.
Even though Wise is not a start up but a scale up now, it's still a mention worthy product. I have been a loyal user since two+ years now and have loved every interaction with it. It has got brownie points from get go - the ease of creating an account in a matter of minutes, the simplicity of transfers and of late the ability to hold multi curreny accounts accompanied by a sleek UI makes it a real winner. Bye bye big4 banks, hello neobanks !
I also had Miro and Otter.ai as close contenders - gaining quite a lot of traction and on my radar.
Slack, Canva, Trello are no doubt great products but they have been around for a while now and well on their path of becoming soonicorns.
Talking about soonicorns and minicorns, the Australian startup space is shaping up really well : Take a look ... Aussie, Aussie , Aussie oi oi oi !