🗞 What's New: Why Stripe just made the biggest Web3 acquisition in history

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Stripe just made its largest acquisition ever.
• Instagram's top exec shared how to get better engagements.
• Here's what AI made possible last week!
• $2M ARR. AJ, founder of Carrd, focused on just building a beautiful, simple product.

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It's official: Stripe is acquiring Bridge, a stablecoin platform, for $1.1 billion.

This will be Stripe's largest acquisition to date, as well as the largest acquisition in Web3 history. Which raises the question: Why?

Why would Stripe spend more than a billion dollars to acquire a stablecoin platform?

Here's a breakdown of the huge crypto trend Stripe is trying to cash in on.

Here are the top products that launched on Indie Hackers yesterday:

1. 🥇 VoiceTaking: Quick brainstorm with voice and AI analysis.

2. 🥈 Savvyshot: A simple, fast screenshot beautifier tool.

3. 🥉 LaterOn: A unified inbox for your newsletters.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, just shared a tip with his 2.7M followers: Carousels outperform single photo posts in terms of reach...especially carousels with music.

Carousels are Instagram posts that can include up to 20 different frames. It’s this very feature that makes them so powerful.

Here's how to take full advantage of carousels.

Last week brought several AI announcements that are highly relevant to bootstrapped founders looking to build new products.

From video avatars to YouTube music opportunities, founders should pay attention to these new developments.

Find new ideas here.

AJ had no intention to contend with the likes of Squarespace when he started building Carrd. That's probably why he hasn't invested any time or money into marketing.

Instead, he focused on building a beautiful, simple product that met the needs of a small, enthusiastic segment of the market. Now, he's at $2M ARR.

He shares his advice on nailing the perfect UX.

If a fear of judgment is stopping you from chasing your dream, is it really your dream?

A dream is something you love so much that the process is worth more than the outcome. It's something you do for its own sake. Even if you fail and are judged in the end, it's worth the ride.

If you don't feel that way about what you're doing, it's not your dream. —@csallen

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Stephen Flanders, Darko Gjorgjievski, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing