Tech Rundown: Trump's Twitter tanks

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Here’s today tech rundown — everything you need to know from the world of tech in 3 minutes!

In today’s email:

• Trump’s Truth Social on the ropes

• Gmail to purge millions of accounts

• Camps for future YouTube stars?

The Lead Story

Donald Trump is learning the lesson that many 20-something founders know all too well: building a tech company is hard.

It was reported this week that Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company that owns the conservative social platform Truth Social, is in dire straits.

TMTG has lost $73 million in the past 2 years, and only recorded $3.7 million in sales. Those are WeWork-esque ratios. It’s believed that without the proposed cash injection from a friendly SPAC, Truth Social will go under.

In fairness to Trump, his platform isn’t the only Twitter copy-cat in trouble.

Pebble, an alternative social media site, recently closed. Threads (Meta owned) has a deep user base, but engagement is inconsistent.

Truth Social’s struggles highlights a number of key themes:

1. Competitive markets: The financial losses show the challenges of entering saturated markets and providing real product differentiation. Truth Social always felt like Twitter lite — in all the worst ways.

2. Positioning: Truth Social was seen as the counterweight to a left-leaning Twitter. Under Musk, however, Twitter has improved in the eyes of conservatives and likely gained many Trump acolytes.

3. Scale: Comparison can be cruel. These numbers by Truth Social are sad, but even if they had strong top and bottom line numbers, they are still negligible in contrast. Meta made $116b in revenue in 2022; TikTok is on pace to do $100b this year.

More Tech News

• Well, that was short: Klarna’s ex-COO is fired after 1 week in his new job as CEO of savings platform Avanza (link)

• Chip Surplus: OpenAI’s Sam Altman predicts chip production will improve in 2024 (link)

• Gmail Purge: Google’s set to delete inactive Gmail accounts (dormant for 2 years) on December 1 for security purposes (link)

• Streamers Unite: Max and Netflix rumoured to be working on a streaming bundle that would cost $10/month (link)

• Twitter Boost: Twitter set to change algorithm to promote smaller accounts, according to Musk (link)

Startup Fundraising

• Enable is a B2B rebate management platform, specifically for retailers, and manufacturers. Raised $120m (link)

• Monument is a British challenger bank focused on affluent clients. Raised $50m (link)

• Solvimon helps companies deploy and test different pricing methods, e.g. usage-based pricing. Raised $10m (link)

• Lounge is a social media startup without a newsfeed; hopes to end the time-suck that is mindless scrolling. Raised $4m (link)

• Summer helps members buy and rent vacation properties. Raised $18m (link)

Daily Data

ChatGPT vs CharacterAI — depth vs breadth

Distractions

Want to stay on Branson’s Necker Island?

• Useful lessons from 1-person startups

• There are now camps to teach kids how to become YouTubers

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