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Feel free to read our newsletter on the web ​

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Hi there 👋,

Some rules limit our upside.

Rules are good, but you have to know when to bend and break them. That’s why we enjoyed Sahil Bloom’s 15 Life Rules Worth Breaking.
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In this issue:

• 📈 Market Moves
• 📰 News & Views
• 🤝🏿 Deal Summary
• 🧰 Cool tools
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Don’t miss: Giving everyday investors a seat at the VC table, savvy yield farmers, AI tech for every e-commerce store, and a new Angel syndicate.

As always, thanks for being here.
Juliet Lyall
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​P.S. Do you have important news to share about your business or startup? We’d love to feature you. Hit reply and tell us about it!

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Newsflash: Did you see that Richard Patey has joined Flippa as their Director - Investor Community? He’s also writing about alternative assets in this re-branded newsletter.

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📈 Market Moves

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👍 Bitcoin | $38,032.80 | +0.84%

👍 Ethereum | $2,618 | +0.017%

👍 Shopify | $681.05 | +0.45%

👎 Coinbase | $174.32 | -0.58%

👎 Meta | $208.43 | -0.95%

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📰 News & Views
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Recent stories that resonated with us.
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Open To Everyday Investors

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— Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

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​Sweater, a fintech company building the first fully-managed venture capital fund that is open to everyday investors, closed a monumental $12 million series seed round of funding.

Sweater's mission is to accelerate generational wealth creation through venture investing. It aims to level the playing field and give everyday investors a seat at the VC table. By democratizing VC, Sweater's vision is to sew a "tight-knit" community that brings investors, founders, and the companies they're building closer together.

Sweater is targeting a $10 trillion industry of retail investors that is already starting to take advantage of alternative investing opportunities in real estate, art, collectibles, and hedge funds.
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They believe venture investing is next, and so do the 50,000+ people on their waitlist. GlobeNewswire.

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Levelling the Playing Field

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— Oliver Edholm, ‍CEO & Co-Founder at Depict
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Amazon makes one third of their revenue through their product recommendations.

According to a McKinsey report, 35% of Amazon’s revenues can be attributed to its recommendation engine, a service primarily driven by the massive amounts of data the company has amassed.

With the vast majority of e-commerce merchants lacking not only this catalogue of data, but the technical capabilities to successfully implement it, they’re operating in a game where the deck is already stacked against them.

​Depict wants to give your store a chance to compete.
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The company is providing e-commerce merchants with an "Amazon quality" recommendation engine service, with no need for historical sales data. The startup claims their data is so accurate that customers report sales increases of 4 to 6 percent.

Depict.ai just raised $17 million in a Tiger Global-led Series A funding round.

Fun fact: Co-founder Oliver Edholm is only 19 years old!
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Best of the Rest

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🔹 Pre-Pre-Seed Investments: There’s no widely used term for the round between friends & family and pre-seed.
This round is not for general angel investors or VCs. The company is too early for them. The key investors in pre-pre seed are an extended network of industry insiders. DC Palter discusses these insiders and how to raise a pre-pre seed round.

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🔹 Savvy Yield Farmers: There are ways to generate yield using alternative strategies that are not entirely based on token emissions.
Although these strategies are more complex and can require far more active management than set it and forget it traditional farming strategies, (TradFarm, if you will) they enable farmers to generate yield in a more sustainable way using strategies that can work regardless of market conditions.

Read: A Guide to Generating ​More​ Sustainable Yield​
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🔹 DeFi: Here’s a great twitter thread from Sean Lippel about DeFi. His bio says he’s a former poker player and an investor at Fintech Collective where he does crypto investing in DeFi protocols. Shout out to Milk Road for the tip.
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🔹 New Angel Syndicate: 32 Belgian entrepreneurs, operators, and industry experts have banded together to form a new angel investor syndicate, Syndicate One. Syndicate One plans to make pre-seed and seed investments ranging between €50,000 and €100,000, in addition to providing portfolio companies with real-world operator know-how.

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🖐 Five of the Best

These are the top, verified picks from Flippa this week:
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1. Ecommerce. 4 year old Latina Fashion Biz Making 330K Annually​
​Asking:$355,000​
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The metrics that matter:

• Average monthly profit: $14K
• Loyal customer base: 48% return rate
• Strong social following: 56,000 Instagram followers
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2. Amazon Affiliate. Content site in the cycling niche with excellent organic search position​
​Asking: $67,000​
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The metrics that matter:

• Strong domain authority: 38
• 107,000 page views monthly
• TTM Revenue of $57,000
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3. SaaS. Digital Asset Protection Plugin for bloggers and small businesses
​Asking: $1,390,000
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The metrics that matter:

• Annual revenue: $429K
• Excellent profit margin: 80%
• Free version lead pool: 1.2K active users monthly
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4. Service Biz. Vacation Bookings. Fantastic upward trend.
​Asking: $135,000​
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The metrics that matter:

• TTM of $68K
• Profit margin of 64%
• Four revenue streams
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5. App. 2-year-old growing mobile application with a monthly profit of $5,000+ ​
Asking: $115,000​
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The metrics that matter:

• Making 5-6K monthly (ads + subscription)
• 40,000 downloads 4.6 star avg. rating
• Nearly 6MM ad impressions monthly

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👉Want more inspiration?
​Check out the latest episodes of The Exit podcast.

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🤝🏿 Deal Summary

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🔒 = Accredited Investors Only

None of these deals is a recommendation from investing.io. This content is for information purposes only. All returns listed are estimations from the respective platforms, and not advice from investing.io. Do your own research. 

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➽ Bizfluence is a business-oriented social network, a community, and a platform. The company has already raised over $500,000 through investments from friends, family, and its 15,000+ users. Other social media platforms are dominated by large corporations, while Bizfluence prioritizes the needs of small business professionals. Startengine.

Price per Share: $1.50​
Minimum Investment: $300.00​
Offering Type: Equity

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➽ The Postage: Digital solution for creating, storing, and updating an end-of-life and estate plan that has raised ~$1.2MM. The company generates revenue in three ways: Initial flat fee, subscription revenues, and partner revenues. Microventures.

Minimum Investment: $100​
Security Type: Crowd Note

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➽ Untitled by Mark Rothko (1968): Mark Rothko is a pioneer of the New York School and remains one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Overview on WithVincent.

Minimum: $5,000
​Appraised Value: $8.8M
​Historical Appreciation: 13.6%

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➽ Real Estate: Whitney at the Heights is a multifamily value-add opportunity in the top-tier urban submarket of The Heights in the Houston MSA. This 186-unit 3-story garden-style urban property is 100% unrenovated with massive rental upside.
​Crowdstreet. 🔒

Minimum: $25,000
​Potential Return: 16.60%
​Targeted Equity Multiple: 1.6x

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➽ Xiggit provides employers with a low-cost, administration-free benefits platform that includes a suite of benefits built specifically for hourly workers. Founders have 3 exits, SAAS and FinTech experience, and the company just released an industry-first robo-advisor retirement benefit. Republic.

Minimum investment: $100
​Funding goal: $25K – $500K
​Type of security: Crowd SAFE
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👩🏽‍🌾 Top Yields on Stablecoins
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• USDC/MAI - SpookySwap (Fantom) - 32.12% APY
• USDT - Bancor (Ethereum) - 28.94% APY
• USDC - Bancor (Ethereum) - 27.07% APY
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💲 DeFi Yields

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• ​Hundred.Finance (Fantom Chain) *note: We list the fully-boosted yields here MIM: 36.93%, DAI: 16.64%, FRAX: 11.59%, USDC: 13.34 %
• Pangolin via YieldYak (Avax Chain) UST-USDC: 20.05 %
• Axial via YieldYak (Avax Chain) AM3D: 15.9 %

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🧰 Cool Tools

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»» Reform has reimagined form building. Putting together clean, on-brand forms for your business should be easy, but most form builders are clunky, use boring designs, and are difficult to brand.
This no-code app is great for early access pages, lead capture, onboarding surveys, customer research, and more. Reform offers a 7-day free trial.
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»» E-commerce: Varos helps its users understand their own performance vs. direct competitors by unlocking data that is currently stored in different silos.

Stop guessing if your customer acquisition cost is too high. See KPIs pulled directly & securely from marketing tools of hundreds of e-commerce & SaaS companies in the same vertical and spend level as yours.

Varos is currently free for brands, but that won't last long.
​Note: Varos recently emerged from stealth with a $4MM seed round.
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​»» Supercharge Google Trends: Glimpse adds enriched data to the default Google Trends experience. You get absolute search volume, related trends, longtail keyword analysis, and more.
The tool is commonly used for SEO keyword research, finding new business opportunities, investment research, and ecommerce product selection. Available as a Chrome Extension.

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🤦🏽 How was work today? FREE ROLL​
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🦄 SEOs with Skin in the Game
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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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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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