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Together With:

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Hi there, 👋

Happy long weekend (if you're reading this from the USA).
We appreciate you stopping by.

We hope you're not missing any packages that were supposed to be delivered?
Don't worry. Photojournalist John Schreiber found them.
​Almost all of them…​
(Check the snippets for a mail story which highlights a potential win).

In this issue:

• A purpose-built platform for SaaS founders
• Investing in farmland: AcreTrader raises
• Republic upgrades its domain
• Matt Diggity's 7 figure investment portfolio

From the snippets: buying a business that isn't for sale, a Web 3 power player, LooksRare challenges OpenSea, and treasure at the Post Office.

As always, thanks for being here.
Juliet Lyall

P.S. Want to get your product, service, or content in front of an audience of 12,000+ founders, investors, and entrepreneurs? Our new sponsorship page is live!
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Built for SaaS Founders

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A new company is targeting a popular startup niche.

​Arc wants to help early-stage SaaS companies with their financial needs.

From a news release:

“In partnership with Stripe, Arc is building a first-of-its-kind fintech solution where software founders can borrow, save, and spend on one comprehensive digital platform.

Its introductory product, Arc Advance, allows SaaS founders to seamlessly convert future revenue into upfront capital without dilution at the click of a button.”

Arc is not the first company to offer a means for SaaS companies to grow without dilution. Buzzy fintech Pipe was founded in September 2019 with the mission of giving SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront.

But, Arc believes that its vertical focus on SaaS sets it apart:

"Leveraging Stripe’s banking-as-a-service technology, customers can store and spend their funding from Arc on a single platform designed for software companies. By building on top of these technology solutions, Arc has turned financing on its head, allowing founders to borrow against the future revenue of their company and grow efficiently."

Since the company launched, more than 100 startups have signed up for the Arc platform. Their largest partnership today is with Y Combinator, which is promoting Arc across its portfolio of thousands of software companies.

Two of the three founders worked in private equity and investment banking in New York, collectively raising tens of billions of dollars of capital to finance mature, late-stage companies.

Even with those credentials, emerging from stealth with $161 million in funding is an impressive feat for a "startup."

(How much money does a company have to raise before we stop calling it a startup?)
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Support Your Web Visitors

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Discord is a brilliant way to hang out with your community, but it's not designed for chatting to your website visitors.

With the Chatlike bot, you can answer questions and offer support to your site visitors.

The widget lets you manage multiple conversations in Discord with web visitors who need your attention.

Every new conversation is contained within a thread on a text channel in your server. And when your visitor disconnects, the thread is automatically archived.

Plans are available from $29/month.
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A 7 Figure Portfolio

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Matt Diggity is serious about investing.

In this video, you'll see the six different asset classes which Matt includes in his portfolio, as well as the proportions he dedicates to each.

Find out how Matt invests in real estate, crypto, alternatives, angel investments, and more. There's a ton of info packed into ~12 minutes.

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Together With MicroAcquire

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💲10 Alternative Ways To Boost Your Revenue

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Acquiring your first business is a thrill.

Your new business shows all the signs of potential growth, but what happens next? How will you increase your return on investment without spending a stack of cash?

Your first thought might be to launch an extensive marketing campaign, but it’s also an easy way to burn money.

For example, you’ll struggle to squeeze extra revenue from a business with high market penetration without dropping a small fortune on advertising and promotions.

The Acquisition Playbook by Andrew Gazdecki, gives you ten alternative means to boost revenue that require little to no investment.

These methods may also help you to identify acquisition opportunities or improve the revenue of a business you've run for years!

Whether you’re buying your first or fifth business, this free resource will help you find success post-acquisition.

And, if you find yourself inspired after reading, head over to MicroAcquire where your next venture is waiting for you.
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🤘Free Download: The Acquisition Playbook​
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Handy Alternative

Let’s say you've found an app or website that's nearly right, but it's missing that one thing you need.

Head over to AlternativeTo to see similar options.

Can you believe that there are over 100 alternatives to Slack?
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Bullish on Land

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If you have a hankering to invest in agricultural real estate, you're not alone.

​AcreTrader, whose mission is to make investing in farmland easier and more efficient, has raised a $40 million Series B round led by Anthemis Group, and joined by all existing previous institutional investors.

AcreTrader utilizes proprietary technology to access investible farms and gather important data about farm sustainability.

The company says it plans to use the funds raised to further scale its platform, grow its team of technology, finance, and agriculture experts, and work with more farmers and landowners.

Anthemis discusses why they invested in AcreTrader.

Related: Farmland Values on a Rocket Ship.
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Domain Snacks

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👉 Private investing company, Republic, has finally upgraded its domain name. The startup had been using Republic .co for its website. We're guessing that they spent a chunk of change to acquire the brand match Republic .com domain name.

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👉 Last month, Thought Convergence held a group of auctions on NameJet / SnapNames to sell its domain names. A number of exceptional domain names were sold in the auction. Elliot Silver got his hands on a list of the top 12 sales.

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👉 Two of the higher reported .app sales have taken place in the first two weeks of 2022. First Brandforce sold Hookup.app for $45,000 and then Top .domains sold Snap.app at the same price.
The dot app extension has only ~250 reported sales at Namebio.

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👉 NameSilo published their marketplace report for December 2021. 13 character domain names saw the highest volume.
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Easier PDF Editing

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Free PDF editors are often clumsy to use and lacking in functionality.

The Sejda PDF Editor markets itself as the “easy, pleasant, productive” PDF editor, and it earns that title well.

Sejda not only allows you to fill in and sign documents, but also to create your own forms by adding fillable form fields to an existing PDF.

If you store sensitive information - like professional or financial data - then Sejda is a secure option because all files uploaded to the platform are wiped from its servers after two hours.

It's easy to save and access your PDFs to Dropbox, Google drive, or on your computer.
Sejda has a free service for documents up to 200 pages, or 50 Mb and 3 tasks per hour.

Their paid plans include 7 days access for a one-time payment of $5.00.
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Brought to You by Smash Digital​
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🦄 SEOs with Skin in the Game

​Smash Digital - a growth agency, filled to the brim with unicorn images and SEO memes.
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A team of SEOs with actual skin in the game, ranking their own portfolio of profitable businesses, and offering the exact same services to clients.
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An agency with so much link juice you’ll need a mop and bucket to clean it all up.​

​Check. Them. Out.
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✅ Snippets to Send You on Your Way

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​🔹 Not for sale: Joel Holland discusses How To Acquire A Startup That Isn’t For Sale. In the beginning, Holland didn't consider raising funds, but here’s what influenced him to make a $37 million deal funded by private equity.

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🔹 Homies in Dreamland: 83-year-old Tommy Chong and 75-year-old Cheech Marin have reunited to create NFTs. The legendary comedy duo will launch a collectible brand titled, "My Homies" on January 25. The first series will be an NFT art collection titled "Homies in Dreamland" with art by Jermaine Rogers. (You're never too old to start on Discord)

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🔹 OpenSea challenger: After airdropping its LOOKS token to OpenSea users, LooksRare racked up $110M in Ethereum NFT trading in one day. This type of launch is called a “vampire attack” - that is, an attempt to pry users away from a successful platform by providing them incentives in the form of tokens. Watch out: The project is unaudited, and its GitHub repository is still private (at the time of writing).

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🔹 All your shopping needs: The Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta, Georgia, (the USPS's "lost and found") receives around 67 million pieces of undeliverable mail annually. What do they do with it? They auction items via a contract with GovDeals - a government surplus auction website which sells them off in lots. It seems like there’s some valuable stuff in those lots. For example, this lot of “Trading Cards, Sports Memorabilia, & Novelty” contains approximately 250 pounds of trading cards which have skyrocketed in value during the pandemic. (As soon as another auction is live, we'll go treasure hunting).

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🔹 Web 3.0 power player: If you haven’t heard of Animoca Brands over the last year or so, you haven’t been paying close attention. Operating as both a publisher and, increasingly, a buyer of blockchain assets and tokens, its ballooning portfolio includes Sky Mavis, (the developer of global sensation “Axie Infinity”) the popular metaverse startup The Sandbox, and stakes in OpenSea and Dapper Labs. Animoca’s holdings were worth around $16 billion as of late November, 2021.

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😂 Fabulous faceplant:

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Not financial, investing or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly for information, entertainment and education purposes. Nothing in here is investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your professional advisors. Do your own research.

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