don't be the sucker, negotiating with FBA aggregators, domain investing mistakes & record-breaking sales.

Hi there, 👋
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If you've been following our updates on 'Alice,' you'll know that this iNFT had reached a bid of $42,000 last Monday.
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The night before this auction closed, the top bid for Alice was $55,000.
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We're sure the creator was feeling a bit disappointed at that point.
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But, it's amazing what can happen in a few hours.
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After some frantic bidding on Thursday, Alice eventually sold for $478,800.
No word on the buyer.
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What we found for you today:

• Does your startup pass the toothbrush test?
• What you should know about the secondary market
• How to sell your business to an FBA aggregator
• Domain investing mistakes
• Adjusting for inflation

And, all the investing news you might have missed!
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As always, thanks for being here.
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​P.S. Not one, but two of our community members made it into our snippets section today.
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​P.P.S. Our newest sponsor suggests something different for your investing portfolio.
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Passing the Toothbrush Test

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Don't worry.
We're not about to discuss your dental hygiene.
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Last Thursday, we talked about the Google cemetery, and how Google has shut down 100+ products and acquired businesses.
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That's why we were curious about how Google decides upon which companies they should acquire.
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​Google’s CEO, Larry Page, doesn’t care much about the financials or sales when he's looking at companies to acquire.
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He cares about innovation and potentially great ideas.
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Page has one very simple rule:
"Is this something you will use once or twice per day, and does it make your life better?"
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In other words, if you create a product or service that’s used once or twice a day - the same way you would use a toothbrush - you have the potential to own a billion-dollar company.
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​This is The Toothbrush Test.​
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Google acquires companies for countless different reasons, but they usually offer a product that solves a problem well and is vital to your daily business habits.
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If you want to build a startup that people cannot live without, apply the toothbrush test to your idea.
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​Read this story.
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Don’t Be the Sucker

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​"If you sit in on a poker game and don’t see a sucker, get up. You’re the sucker.”
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As investors and entrepreneurs, we not only enjoy building our own businesses, but also seek to invest in promising companies built by others.
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Buying private equity (PE) shares from startup founders and investors is usually the only way for investors to make an early exit from their companies.
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This type of trading is known as the secondary market.
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This secondary market covers shares in single private companies as well as shares in private equity funds that raise capital from institutional and individual investors - called limited partners (LPs).
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Because investors are required to commit capital to private equity funds for ten years or more, the development and growth of a secondary market was necessary and inevitable.
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Not understanding how the secondary market works can hurt your ability to navigate it.
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​Find out what you need to know in this thread.​
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This Popped Up

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Popups are proven to increase subscribers to your mailing lists and generate leads on your website.
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​Poptin is simple to embed on any website, and frees you from having to involve graphic designers and developers.
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You don't need coding or design skills because poptin popups offers a multitude of spectacular templates tailored for numerous industries.
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​You'll see slide-in forms, floating bars, (not the swim up kind) full screen, mobile popups and more.
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The drag and drop interface lets you customize your popups and forms by changing any background, image, text, field or button.
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The free plan allows you unlimited poptins for up to 1,000 site visitors per month.
​Annual plans for larger visitor numbers start at $15 per month.
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Land the Best Deal

In recent weeks, we've covered several stories on Amazon aggregators, what these companies are buying, and how much money they've raised.
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​Successful third party sellers who want to exit their businesses must do their homework before accepting an offer.​
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If you understand your options, you’ll be in a much better position to negotiate favorable deal terms and a higher selling price.
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FBA roll-up firms aim to buy Amazon businesses at the cheapest price.
When added to their portfolio, the business immediately becomes significantly more valuable.
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​Dealing with an aggregator has both upsides and significant downsides.
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On the one hand, they pay you cash, close deals in ~30 days, and cut out broker fees.
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On the other hand, they usually require a few months’ worth of inventory and will hold back a portion of the deal as a “stability payment.”
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QuietLight has put together an excellent guide on evaluating and negotiating with FBA aggregators.​
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The article also covers important considerations when valuing your business, and the type of deal structures on offer.
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Having this information may help you choose between the traditional marketplace route for a sale or discussing your options with an FBA roll-up firm.
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More on QuietLight.
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Breaking Records

Record #1
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A non-fungible token of a digital artwork called a "CryptoPunk" was sold for $11.8 million on Thursday. The NFT was sold as part of Sotheby's online auction "Natively Digital."
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This was the same auction that featured the iNFT called "Alice."
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​According to Reuters, the CryptoPunk was bought by Israeli entrepreneur Shalom Meckenzie, who is the largest shareholder of digital sports company DraftKings.
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​Record #2​
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Meanwhile, "Doge," the image of an excited-looking Shiba Inu has sold as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for $4 million, making it the most expensive meme NFT of all time.
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On Friday, the auction winner, @pleasrdao, placed a winning bid of 1,696.9 Ethereum, according to the auction site Zora.
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The meme was first put up for auction last Tuesday by Atsuko Sato, the owner of Kabosu, the dog from the image, and ran for roughly three days before being sold.
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Inflation up = Returns down

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With a massive increase in the money supply, a weakening dollar, and a supply chain that is only now beginning to find its footing, higher prices are likely to impact the US for a little while.
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​If sustained, an elevated inflation rate will impact your savings, even if asset prices don’t move.
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A price spike in a single consumer category is not responsible for rising inflation, but overall increases still matter to your actual returns.
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​What are the considerations for your investment returns?
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If inflation is 0% then earning 5% on your portfolio gives you, predictably, a 5% real return.
Economists use the term “real” to describe the impact of your return after inflation.
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​Now, with inflation running at 5% you’d want a 10% return on your money to preserve your spending power at the same level.
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Even small increases in the inflation rate can erode the value of your money much faster.
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This short article from Simon Moore is a great explainer for beginner investors who are unsure about the impact of inflation on their investments.
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Give Me 10 Minutes

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When you sign up for as many tools and resources as we do, there's nothing worse than clogging up your primary inbox with downloads, confirmation messages and often spam.
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That's why we love 10 Minute Mail.
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​This service provides a free, anonymous and temporary email address for those occasions when you give an email address to a website you don't fully trust.
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Many of those websites will either send you spam for years or, even worse, sell your address to large scale spam operations.
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You simply copy the unique email address provided by 10MinuteMail and paste it into the website that is asking for your details.
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Then, you can read and reply to any email or forward anything to your personal account that you need to save.
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The email address provided self-destructs after 10 minutes.
​If you need longer, there is the option to reset the countdown timer on the site.
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​No sign up needed.
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Random Tweet

You'll see more on this in the snippets below.
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Quick Gifs

Have you ever wondered how people create short, animated Gifs for their blog posts?
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We found a simple solution at ScreenToGif.
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This app lets you record your screen, webcam or sketch board drawings and produce short animated content to use on your website or share on social media.
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ScreenToGif is available as free open source software that also allows you to edit and export your recordings as Gifs, video, images and more.
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This tool is complex if you need it to be, but it's surprisingly easy to produce great quality Gifs in a short time.
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​Discover the features.
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✅ Snippets to Send You on Your Way

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🔷 Money Minx is building a “Personal Finance OS.” Hussein Yahfoufi (one of our investing.io community members) said, “we built Money Minx to help people cover all their bases, better understand their personal balance sheet and grow their net worth.” The Money Minx tool is an easy way to track investments across multiple platforms. TechCrunch.
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🔷 Filling the sports card tech gap: Loupe Tech is the latest live e-commerce streaming platform, built for sports card collectors, to receive venture capital investment. They've raised $12 million in Series A funding to help collectors view, purchase and connect as a community with one tool. Collectors will get access to new products as soon as they hit the market. Crunchbase.
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🔷 From $4M to $85M in revenue: The CEO of AppSumo, Ayman Al-Abdullah talks about how to grow an 8-figure business, the highlights and lowlights of running AppSumo, and why he's leaving. He speaks with Noah Kagan (another community member) in this insightful podcast.
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🔷 Sweet providing NFTs for Dave & Buster’s: New York-based Sweet, a broad-scale enterprise NFT tool is working with entertainment giant Dave & Buster‘s to offer NFT/digital collectible coins and cards that can be claimed as prizes.
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🔷 Seven Seven Six's new fund: Alexis Ohanian’s bid to be part of VC’s new wave - Seven Seven Six - launched last Thursday by announcing it had formally closed its first fund. With $150 million to play with, Seven Seven Six will look to lead or co-lead seed investments. One of the firm’s largest checks was a $20 million investment into Alt, a sports card business. See how Ohanian aims to shake up the VC industry.
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🔷 Domain investing mistakes: Domain industry veteran Dan Cera posted his thoughts on the two biggest mistakes he believes a domain investor can make. One is related to buying domain names and the other is related to selling domain names. Elliot Silver thinks there is an even bigger mistake that investors can make.
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🔷 Building a startup in a mature market: Andrus Purde was head of marketing at Pipedrive. Now, he's building yet another marketing tool in the crowded marketing tech space. This podcast discusses Purde's latest startup, Outfunnel, and how he is building a business in a mature market.
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