🗞 What's New: Telegram continues its gaming push

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

• Telegram releases the “largest update in the history of mini apps."
• The largest copyright-free AI training dataset is out.
• $4M ARR. Laura Roeder built, then sold, her social media tool for small businesses.

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You may not realize just how popular Telegram is. With 950M monthly active users, it is the fourth most popular messaging app in the world. And, with 50M monthly downloads (more than any other messaging app), it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

However, Telegram doesn’t want to be just a messaging app. Its true goal is to be an “everything” app, much like WeChat: A place where you can keep in touch with your friends, send payments (mostly in crypto), and play games.

Telegram has just released a huge mini app update, making it even more appealing for founders to build on top of the platform.

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This issue is sponsored by StackBlitz

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AI company Pleias has published the massive copyright-free dataset that it uses to pretrain its language models.

Sourced from financial and legal documents, open source code, academic journals, and public domain publications, Pleias says it is the largest entirely permissible multilingual dataset available.

The dataset is designed for training generalist models, which can be used for all kinds of queries, plus tasks like writing and coding. Although it's mostly made up of English-language text, the dataset also contains a substantial amount of information in other languages, particularly French and German.

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Laura Roeder started out as a freelance designer and web developer. As social media was becoming a thing, many of her clients began asking for her advice about it. So, she transitioned into social media consulting, including training small businesses on leveraging social media platforms.

Laura eventually needed to automate the content sharing process that she already taught in her courses, so in 2014, she cofounded MeetEdgar with her husband, Chris. They invested a lot of money in paid acquisition to attract their initial customers, which is unusual for a bootstrapped company to do.

But it paid off: In under three years, MeetEdgar hit $4M ARR.

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