el producto #298 🚀
Spotify audiobooks, Web3 in data, AR running glasses, WhatsApp<>Salesforce integration, Canva websites, Hypergrowth mistakes, Ways to influence & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend & welcome to a new edition of el producto.
🎰 The week in figures
$810M: Mexico-based Kavak raised $810M; Kavak operates as a buying and selling platform for used cars; the startup also reconditions the vehicles for sale in its own centers
$200M: Atlas Technology, a cloud HR platform, raised a $200M Series B; Atlas operates subsidiaries in 160+ countries
$145M: Opto, a private market access solution for investment advisors, raised a $145 million Series A
$119.2M: Brightflow AI has raised $119.2M; Brightflow AI offers software that helps businesses predict their revenue, demand, and KPIs; its platform integrates with Facebook, Google, Xero, Shopify, Amazon, etc
$112M: RappiPay Colombia, which is the Colombian Banco Davivienda and Rappi’s fintech, has obtained a $112M financing; the fintech allows users to create digital accounts to send and collect money, pay utilities, transfer to other banks, and more; RappiPay has already delivered over 200,000 cards in Colombia, and 40% of users report that this was their first credit card
$100M: Seattle-based Swiftly raised $100M Series C at a $1B+ valuation; Swiftly provides brick-and-mortar grocers with branded phone apps designed to help retailers gather customer data and earn from advertising while improving shoppers’ experience in the store; the apps can help consumers find what they’re looking for in the aisles, recall past purchases and skip lines by scanning products and paying with their phones
$50M: Apple and the NFL have signed a reported ~$50M multiyear deal for Apple Music to replace Pepsi as the Super Bowl Halftime Show sponsor; this is Apple’s first high-profile event sponsorship since the 2016 Met Gala
$2,000: Analysts estimate that Apple's forthcoming headset will cost around $2,000-$2,500 and that Meta's Quest Pro headset will debut for approximately $1,500; according to these estimates, the next-gen of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets are far more expensive than Meta's popular — and affordable — $400 Quest 2 HMD
10%: Meta is looking to cut costs by at least 10% over the next few months; according to sources, the cuts will affect overhead and consulting budgets, particularly staff cuts; the company has also asked many of its employees to apply for other roles within the company; affected employees were given a limited window to apply for jobs
📰 What’s going on
Spotify has launched its audiobooks business, which includes 300K audiobooks in the US, the company will not use a subscription model to start, allowing users to purchase and download individual audiobooks instead; in 2021, Spotify acquired audiobook startup Findaway for ~$119M; Spotify is not including discounts for premium subscribers and will not include advertising to start
Social app BeReal is considering adding in-app payments for exclusive features to avoid ads; the app grew from ~10K DAUs last year to >15M; BeReal raised a $30M Series A in June
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke announced a change to its compensation package which allows staff to choose cash vs equity; the move comes as tech stocks see continued volatility; Shopify’s shares have dropped ~75% this year
YouTube is planning on allowing Shorts creators with at least 1,000 subscribers and 10M+ views in a 90-day period to apply to join its Partner Program; Shorts partners will get a 45% cut of ad revenue; YouTube started integrating ads with Shorts in May, and will roll out the Partner Program expansion in early 2023
Google has started rolling out an Android tool enabling users to remove search results containing personal info, called “results about you”; the feature is not yet widely accessible but is reportedly available to some users in the EU and US
WhatsApp introduced a new integration that enables Salesforce clients to communicate with their customers via the popular messaging app; businesses will be able to manage their conversations from the Salesforce platform
OpenAI open-sourced an automatic speech recognition system that claims to enable “robust” transcription in multiple languages and can translate those languages into English; the system, called Whisper, was trained on 680K hours of multilingual and “multitask” data from the web
Starting Oct. 5, Apple said it will raise prices on apps and in-app purchases in countries that use the euro; Apps that cost 99 cents will rise to €1.19, for example; the price hikes will also take effect in Chile, Egypt, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Poland, South Korea, Sweden, and Vietnam
Runners can now view their Apple Watch data in augmented reality(AR) with ActiveLook's latest iOS integration; the program projects real-time running stats onto the user's field of view
TikTok is planning to turn off ads and monetization features for individual politicians and parties, and will ban soliciting campaign donations; accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties will also have to apply for verification; TikTok is also now rolling out globally a comment "dislike" button; the number of dislikes is not displayed publicly; TikTok says this will avoid demoralizing creators or creating "ill-feeling" among users
Coinbase Cloud has launched Node, a developer platform that lets both enterprise and open-source devs build apps from one platform, projects can get up to 120K free daily blockchain queries, which Coinbase says can scale to thousands of users, before being charge a usage-based monthly fee
Canva introduced Canva Websites, a new offering to build responsive and interactive websites for any device; Canva Websites allows users to buy their domain names without leaving Canva, and offers a free hosting service
Helium Network creator Nova Labs is partnering with T-Mobile on a 5-year deal to launch Helium Mobile, a 5G service for smartphones that combines coverage from the both company’s networks, which will offer crypto rewards to users
📚 Good reads
Lessons from Fast’s implosion. Fintech engineering manager Francisco Javier Arceo, currently at Affirm and formerly at Fast and Goldman Sachs, wrote up his Lessons from Fast’s Implosion. The story of Fast, the one click checkout company which folded at the beginning of the year, should be a cautionary one for high-growth fintech startups: raising too much, over-hiring, lacking focus, high churn, and a confusing product can all be signs of trouble ahead
Offboarding friction and pains. Growth.design looks at Adobe’s offboarding flow, notorious for its friction to cling to customers
7 ways to influence. Influence—the most difficult, and powerful, PM skill. Lenny Rachitsky (and Frodo Baggins) have something to say about that
🔮 Emerging trends
Observations by Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures:
2.5m wallets are DAU across web3. Flat wallet count likely means relatively constant GDP in the ecosystem. We need more products to attract new users to bring in more GDP
Binance, Solana, Polygon, & Ethereum wallets represent +80% of those DAU
Centralized exchanges manage roughly 100m total active wallets
Trading volumes are down 60% which is mostly driven by asset price reductions. DEX average transaction size declined from $8k to $1.4k
Centralized & decentralized exchanges trade at the same multiple & move in lock step
NFT buyers outnumber DEX traders about 35:1 over the last 6 months but the traded volume is roughly equal between the two groups
NFT trading volumes have fallen 97% from the top
40% of NFT buyers use Solana. Because the average Solana NFT is worth 10% of the average Ethereum NFT, Ethereum retains 90% of NFT traded value
L2s (Arbitrum & Optimism) account for 30-40% of all transactions on Ethereum, but consume only 2% of the total gas, cementing their value
About $250m flows into L2s each month
MEV (maximum or miner extracted value) has tapered off due to FlashBots’ searchers. Lower MEV means users pay lower fees when they trade because the market is more efficient
Developers push about 300,000 smart contracts to Ethereum every month, a figure that has been flat for the last five months
Roughly 5,000 developers push code to web3 every week, down 20% from the beginning of the year. This number needs to increase significantly for the ecosystem to thrive
Web3 companies (aside from L1s) have begun to trade at similar multiples to their web2 counterparts
Web3 multiples are increasingly correlated to revenue. The investor community has matured its understanding of how to value a web3 company. This milestone will begin to shift the early & late stage private markets’ valuations
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email
Angel
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