TL;DR:

• Trend: Some of these mini-apps are printing money

• Interesting: Figma had a $20B exit last week. I broke down why it worked.

• Not to be missed: Russia, Iran, Afghanistan (and others) were not invited to the Queen’s funeral.

• Yes: School wants us to write 5 pages whilst the world struggles to finish a 5-minute article.

Read time: 3 mins

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Now onto this week’s T.I.N.Y blog ↓

The Rise of Web-Apps

Lately, I’ve been seeing more examples of these web apps and Chrome extensions absolutely crushing it.

I’m not talking a couple of thousand dollars per month. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (or more).

Adblock & Grammarly are two on the larger end of the scale but I bet they’re much bigger than you think.

Look at this:

Grammarly launched in 2009. Nice.

It took 6 years to get to 1M daily active users (DAU).

In 2015, Grammarly released its Chrome extension.

The result? Hockey stick growth.

Between 2015 and 2019, they grew from 1M daily active users to 20M daily active users.

Grammarly’s revenue is $88.7M/year. And valued at $13B. It’s basically a Chrome extension with 30 million users and quietly crushing it. 

If you or someone you know are building something like this (in the extensions and web apps space), DM me on Twitter or reply to this email. Would love to chat.

Figma, a $20B exit

For those that aren’t familiar with Figma…

It’s a design tool. It grew in popularity over the last six years (launched in 2016).

And last week, it was acquired for $20 Billion dollars (by Adobe)

Pretty insane right? $20 Billion in 6 years.

But wait — I’ve got more stats for you:

1. Figma raised $332.9M.

2. Figma’s ARR (annual recurring revenue) is $400M. And it sold for $20B. That’s 50x. For reference, most SaaS valuations go for about 3-10x.

Both of these stats were astonishing.

I dug deeper into why I think Figma worked.

Tl;dr:

1. It’s free to use for individuals and students (people loved the free product)

2. It’s a beautiful collaborative experience. Your experience becomes better as more of your friends use it. So you tell your friends to use it. It’s called product-led growth.

I dive deeper in this thread:

Countries That Were Not Invited to Queen Elizabeth’s Funeral

The Queen’s funeral was yesterday.

I found an interesting map of countries that were and were not invited to the funeral.

Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Belarus and Myanmar were not invited.

Just putting it here if you were wondering.

Writing in School Versus Writing in the Real World

Yes.

That’s it for this week.

See you next Tuesday — Aadit

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