el producto #362 🚀
Apple Journal app, Spotify AI-playlists, Mixed reality Office, Thinking First Principles, Growth tactics, The science of decision-making, A useful AI Chrome extension & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$10B: TikTok reaches $10B in gross revenue, including $3.84B in 2023, $3.32B in 2022, and $1.72B in 2021, making it the fifth mobile app and the first non-game to do so
$840M: TikTok will spend $840M to acquire most of GoTo’s Tokopedia, Indonesia's biggest e-commerce platform. The move will allow TikTok to relaunch TikTok Shop, its online shopping business, in Indonesia after the country banned e-commerce transactions on social media platforms
$415M: Mistral AI, a Paris-based startup that provides technology for businesses to implement AI-driven chatbots, search engines, and online tutors, raised $415M. The company is now valued at ~$2B
$307M: SumUp, a fintech startup that provides payments and related services to 4 million small businesses in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, raised $307M. The company has now raised $1.5B
10M: Jagat, a location-based social network that focuses on real-life connections, surpasses 10M users globally
33%: US teens survey: 93% use YouTube, 63% use TikTok, 60% use Snapchat, 59% use Instagram, and 33% use Facebook; ~33% use at least one of these “almost constantly”
📰 What’s going on
Spotify confirms the testing of an AI playlist feature where users can build playlists with prompts
Apple has started releasing iOS 17.2 to all iPhone users, featuring its new health and wellness-focused Journal app and other updates. Apple says Journal, a core iPhone app, allows users to "reflect and practice gratitude through journaling." Users can create their journal entries using text, voice notes, photos, or videos
Microsoft launches the basic Office suite on the Meta Quest store for free; all three apps run in a mixed-reality environment, and all Quest headsets are supported
Instagram introduces a gen-AI-powered background editing tool, allowing users to change background images through prompts for their stories
Instagram launches customizable ‘Add Yours’ templates, allowing users to make their own meme-able stories for followers to participate in
Meta has officially launched Threads in the EU. Threads, a competitor to X/Twitter, debuted globally in July but was delayed in the EU due to regulatory hurdles. To comply with EU rules, Threads users in the region can browse the app without needing a profile
Meta adds multimodal AI to its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses as an early access beta in the US, letting Meta AI answer voice queries by taking and analyzing photos
Google added buy-now-pay-later options to its mobile wallet via Zip and Affirm
Google DeepMind used its FunSearch model to solve a famous problem in pure mathematics, the first time an LLM solved a long-standing scientific puzzle
Google will no longer have access to users' individual location history, and will not be able to provide such data to law enforcement. The update will be rolled out in 2024
Google is rolling out a Docusign competitor which adds e-signature functionality in Docs. The latest update includes an audit trail report, the ability to sign via PDFs and access for non-Gmail users
Netflix publishes its first What We Watched report, detailing the most-watched content from January to June 2023; The Night Agent was #1 with 812M+ hours viewed
Netflix is expanding further into live sports with plans to stream a tennis match between champions Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz in March. The move comes after Netflix aired a recent celebrity golf tournament, “The Netflix Cup,” featuring Formula One drivers
Amazon launches Your Books, a feature that lets users organize all their books, including print, Kindle, and Audible titles, while providing recommendations
Airbnb launched pay-over-time in partnership with Klarna in the UK
Snapchat is launching more AI-driven features for its premium subscribers, including the ability to create and share AI-generated images from text prompts. To create original images, users can choose from a selection of prompts or write in their own text prompt. The AI-created images can be edited, downloaded, and shared with others
BeReal plans to add Behind the Scenes, an iOS Live Photo-style feature, and RealGroups for smaller groups; Pew estimates 13% of US teens aged 13-17 use BeReal
Waymo, launches curbside robotaxi pickup at Phoenix airport. Waymo’s new airport service, which is fully autonomous (meaning no human safety operator behind the wheel) will only be available to a select cohort of active riders in Phoenix
Toy startup Curio launches three AI-powered plush toys, including a $99 one called Grok, that use OpenAI's tech to converse with kids and are voiced by Grimes
📚 Good reads
Slack’s CPO on how to take bigger, bolder bets. You can’t experiment your way out of every product problem, says Slack’s CPO Noah Desai Weiss. So much of decision-making comes down to what informs your choices — our outputs are only as strong as the inputs we are given
Elena Verna’s favorite go-to growth tactics. Building a predictable, sustainable, and competitively defensible growth model is always a priority to any company’s long-term success. Smaller-scale growth tactics can make a huge difference as well, and here are few examples
When and how to build second products. Why do we even care about second products? Don’t some of the best companies in the world win with one dominant product? Well, increasingly that’s not the case. Companies can rarely ride one product into the IPO sunset anymore. In this piece, Casey Winters explains 6 ways to expand product offerings
Thinking First Principles, by Julie Zhuo. “Think from first principles reminds you to be skeptical, to not take anyone else’s assertions on its face value. Start from known truths (aka “first principles”) and build the assumption chain link by link. For each assumption, ask yourself “Do I believe this? What explanation convinces me to believe in this?” The more convincing the explanation, the stronger the link in your chain.”
The Best of Lenny’s Newsletter 2023. Lenny has organized his most popular publications in a very useful way, indicating how each article can help you
The science of decision-making: why smart people do dumb things, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Poor decision-making is not necessarily due to a lack of intelligence or information but is often influenced by mental baggage, analysis paralysis, overconfidence, information overload, and lack of emotional or physical resources. Decision-making styles can be intuitive vs. rational, maximising vs. satisficing, and combinatorial vs. positional, all of which can shift based on the situation and various factors. Understanding one's decision-making styles is essential for making better decisions, as it allows for tailored approaches to different types of decisions
🧑🔬 Cool Products I’m using
Merlin. As described by their team, Merlin is an all-in-One AI extension to write, summarize, code & play. While I still curate the newsletter manually and write most of the notes myself, I’ve been using the extension to summarize long articles / documents before deciding whether I want to spend 10+ minutes reading them. I have their Chrome extension for about half a year, and it has become an essential tool to make me more productive preparing the newsletter. It’s also cool to see how they have been adding new functionality overtime, like the video summarizer for YouTube, or the assistant for social media content
This is not a sponsored post. Just a honest recommendation of a product I’ve been truly enjoying
That’s all for this week! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel