el producto #296 🚀
Revolut's one-click payment, New Apple products, WhatsApp shopping, Snap's AR glasses, Increasing product virality, Incorporating research in Product development & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend & welcome to a new edition of el producto.
🎰 The week in figures
$6T: New research claims that Apple Pay has surpassed Mastercard in the dollar value of transactions annually; Apple Pay is now the second most popular digital payment system, beaten only by Visa; the top-ranking Visa processes approximately $10T worth of transactions per year, with Apple Pay on over $6T
$300M: Mysten Labs, creators of the Sui blockchain, raised $300M Series B at a >$2B valuation; the startup was founded by five former Meta execs; its CTO, Sam Blackshear, is credited with creating Move, the coding language used by Sui and Meta’s now-defunct Diem (fka Libra)
$125M: VTS raised $125M Series E at a $100B valuation; the startup is a real estate platform that aims to increase profit for real estate companies
$100M: Bitwarden, an open source password manager for enterprises and consumers, raised $100M in a round of funding; California-based Bitwarden operates in a space that includes well-known incumbents such as 1Password, which recently hit a $6.8B valuation off the back of a $620M fundraise
$70M: Cybersecurity startup Cymulate raised $70M Series D at $500M valuation; Cymulate simulates cyberattacks so that companies can prevent and defend against them in the future
$60M: Automated spend management platform Mesh Payments has raised $60M in Series C; the New York-headquartered fintech firm reported ~$1B in annualized payment volume on its platform
-750: UK-based Cazoo is pulling out of European operations, cutting 750 jobs, and is attempting to end football club sponsorships; the online car seller will focus on the UK to preserve cash following a £243M loss in H1 2022
📰 What’s going on
~$10/mo Fitness+ service
AirPods Pro 2: personalized Spatial Audio for $249
iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max: animated notches, always-on displays, updated camera for $999 and $1,099
Watch Ultra: 49mm titanium case, second speaker, and extended battery life of 60 hours for $799
Instagram is planning to scale back its shopping features, and will sunset its dedicated “Shopping” page to focus on short-form video content that directly drives advertising revenue
Meta is hosting its Connect conference on Oct. 11; at the virtual event, Meta plans to explore the building of the metaverse and the future of AR and VR
WhatsApp and JioMart partnered to create an end-to-end shopping and payment experience in India
Snapchat released a video showcasing its AR glasses; the video shows several use cases of the glasses, dubbed Spectacles; as of now, the glasses are available to beta testers and creators only
Revolut is launching a one-click payment feature called Revolut Pay in a bid to rival PayPal and other tech giants at online checkouts; Revolut Pay has signed up retailers including Shopify Inc., Prestashop, WH Smith Plc and Funky Pigeon, and will be available within the airline industry in the coming months
Google expanded its pilot program offering alternative billing options to its Play Store's payment system to more countries.;the pilot was announced in March this year in partnership with Spotify
Uber Eats signed a 10-year deal with the autonomous driving startup Nuro with hopes of using vehicles to deliver takeout deliveries; the companies will deploy operations in Mountain View, California, and Houston, Texas starting in the fall
Google announced it is expanding its eco-friendly routing option on Google Maps to 40 countries across Europe; the feature first launched last year in the US
Twitter’s “edit tweet” feature will be available for up to 30 mins after posting, and users will be able to edit their tweets a maximum of five times; the feature will first be available to Twitter Blue subscribers in New Zealand
Robinhood is introducing an "Investor Index" feature, tracking the performance of the 100 most popular investments among its users; the platform will weigh stocks by customer "conviction," defined as the % of assets in a customers portfolio devoted to a stock
Netflix is overhauling its operations to cut costs following a ~1M subscriber loss in the June quarter; the company will be scaling back real estate, limiting cloud-computing costs, and hiring more junior staff
LG Electronics launched the LG Art Lab, an NFT platform that allows users to buy and sell NFTs on their smart TVs; the company partnered with the Hedera network, which charges low transaction fees but is only available to U.S.-based customers
Polygon is looking to hire 200 staff members for remote positions worldwide; the company hired 30 new staff members sourced from One Planet; Polygon is increasing its headcount by 40% this year, with a mix of full-time and contract-based roles; the company is looking to hire engineers and managers to oversee partnerships in the ecosystem
Y Combinator’s S22 batch includes 30 crypto startups marking a 5+ company increase from its W22 batch, despite the industry downturn; YC invests $500K in each accepted startup
📚 Good reads
Research twice, build once: how to know your users as you grow. Ryan Glasgow writes for Future on how research can fuel the right decisions at every stage of growth
Undifferentiated heavy lifting in Fintech. Finding opportunities in building services for fintechs. There are core competencies and activities that fintechs should build in-house, and then there is everything else. In that latter category, rading off the scalability of a specialist vendor for the customizability of building something in-house almost never makes sense in the long-run
How to increase product virality by escaping network saturation. Timothy Daniell shares some examples of how jumping networks (e.g. leveraging a b2b environment to expand a b2c app) could help opening up new paths for virality
Best practices for API Product Management. Badaru Aramide put together a brief yet useful guide to help PMs involved in API products
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email
Angel
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