el producto #215 🚀
el producto moves to Substack, iPhone 13 mini, Google Maps transportation+parking tickets, GetYourGuide funding, Figma and Canva success & more
Welcome to a new edition of el producto!
Last few days I received some questions about what happened to the newsletter on Medium.
Two weeks ago, after the weekly email got wrongly flagged and blocked by MailChimp’s fraud-prevention algorithm (and the fact that it took them 3 days to resolve the incident), I decided to migrate it to Substack.
In order to simplify things, I will keep Substack as the single source for both the ‘blog’ edition and the mail list.
Below you will find a preview of this week’s version. You can find the full edition on Substack here.
🎰 The week in figures
$1T: Bitcoin market cap passes $1T for the first time as the price for a single bitcoin reaches $55k; the price passed $51k for the first time on Wednesday; follows several large and high-profile investments, including Tesla’s acquisition of $1.5B in bitcoin in February
$2B: Chinese grocery delivery company Xingsheng Youxuan raises $2B at a $6B pre-valuation led by Sequoia Capital China; Tencent participated; Xingsheng Youxuan reported $6.18B GMV for 2020; claims 8M orders per day; this unconfirmed round included, the company has raised $3.9B to date
550M: ByteDance-owned short video app Douyin reports 550M MAUs for its built-in search feature; compares with 544M MAUs for Baidu’s main app; Douyin, which is often described as the Chinese version of TikTok, added a search function in 2018. ByteDance is in early talks to list Douyin in the US
$120M: London-based crypto exchange and noncustodial wallet provider Blockchain.com raises $120M from Lightspeed, GV, and others; the company originally launched as Blockchain.info, providing a blockchain explorer; now claims 65M wallets; raised $190M to date
€80M: Germany-based travel platform GetYourGuide secures an €80M credit facility; GetYourGuide lets travelers find and book tours across multiple cities
$21M: UK-based decisions platform Peak AI raises $21M Series B; the startup offers an AI-powered service for helping enterprise customers make data-driven choices; has raised $43M to date
👩🏾💻 Good reads
The importance of Human-centered Design in Product Design. Miklos Philips says: “Involve your customers and collaborate with them from the start. Otherwise, you are designing without understanding the whole picture”
Scaling Product delivery at Stripe, Credit Karma and Wealthfront, by Andy Johns and Matt Greenberg. A good (and perhaps controversial) read from its start: “The dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that most great product teams follow a system that resembles waterfall (gasp!) to launch new innovative features/products repeatably“
You can read the free and full version of the newsletter here.
