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🥒 Chaos in Congress

🥒 Chaos in Congress

Trump and Musk push for Shutdown over Funding Bill

Robert Benson-May
December 23, 2024

Hey Pickle Gang, it’s Rob.

Here's what's in today's issue:

Chaos in Congress: Trump and Musk Push for Shutdown Over Funding Bill
The Blueprint Behind Lemlist’s $150M - Guillaume Moubeche
Perplexity Raises $500M Amid AI Search Showdown
And more…

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This Week’s Favourites

Article: Ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is founding an AI startup backed by a16z (link)
Article: Home Assistant’s new voice assistant answers to ‘Hey Jarvis’ (link)
Article: New Jersey Is Looking To This Tiny Startup To Help Detect Mystery Drones (link)
Video: New Superman Movie Official Trailer (link)
Fun Stuff: Beast Games - Amazon has given Mr Beast $100m to do a TV series. It’s out now. It’s pretty good! (link)
Book of the Day: Noah Kagan - Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours (link)

Today’s Goodies

My Reddit Playbook Revealed: 474,000 Views in 60 Days

I previously sold over £50,000 worth of birdhouses on the internet. It was great, whilst it worked...

Rising ad costs killed the business overnight. No backup plan. No organic traffic. Just gone. Determined not to let it happen again, I spent years mastering marketing and found the answer: Reddit. In 60 days, I hit 474,000 views and drove thousands of clicks to my site - without spending a penny on ads. Now, I’ve turned my proven, step-by-step strategy into a guide anyone can follow. Ready to take control of your traffic? Get my playbook and start seeing results today.

News

Chaos in Congress: Trump and Musk push for Shutdown Over Funding Bill

Credit

The US government teeters on the brink of shutdown as President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance rally Republicans to reject a stopgap funding bill. Their reasoning? Claims of "Democrat giveaways," a failure to cut congressional pay, and an unraised debt ceiling. The bill, drafted by GOP leaders, aimed to keep the lights on through March 2025, but Trump and Vance are calling for a showdown, accusing Democrats of holding the country hostage.

Adding fuel to the fire, Elon Musk stormed X (formerly Twitter) with a tirade, threatening to bankroll primary challengers against Republicans who support the bill. Musk, slated to head the Department of Government Efficiency under Trump, even suggested keeping the government shuttered until the new administration takes charge. While Trump and Vance stoke the flames, chaos grips Congress as the shutdown looms. Will this power play pay off, or will Americans pay the price?

Story

The Blueprint Behind Lemlist’s $150M - Guillaume Moubeche

Credit

After failing to launch a t-shirt business with his father and losing his savings on a tech idea derailed by a single line of LinkedIn code, Guillaume Moubeche found himself with just $1,000 left and strained relationships with family and friends. Facing mounting pressure to take a traditional job, Guillaume refused to give up on his dream.

Then, he started Lemlist. Lemlist is a sales automation platform with a unique focus on personalizing outreach and solving customer pain points. And, after seeing some good initial traction by being the number 1 product of the day on Product Hunt, he viciously pushed the product.

What made Guillaume successful was his ability to learn from failure and iterate quickly. Instead of competing head-on with established platforms, he focused on a key differentiator - personalization at scale.

When sending cold emails to thousands of people, often you use just an email which is the same for everyone. Lemlist helped you personalize this email so it’s unique for each person you’re emailing, dramatically increasing the response rate from the emails.

For his early customers, he did the cold outreach for them himself using the tool, as a way to get it into the hands of users and those precious early customers.

He was then able to iterate his product based on their feedback, and crafting a powerful growth loop, he turned Lemlist into a thriving business.

Despite setbacks like stalled growth and co-founder exits, Guillaume grew Lemlist to $30 million in ARR.

Here’s a video of him sharing his journey

Funding

Perplexity Raises $500M Amid AI Search Showdown

Aravind Srinivas - co-founder of Perplexity

Credit

AI search startup Perplexity has reportedly closed a massive $500 million funding round, valuing the company at a jaw-dropping $9 billion. The round, led by Institutional Venture Partners, marks a significant milestone in the escalating race to dominate AI-powered search. While Perplexity declined to comment, sources suggest the deal was finalized earlier this month.

Perplexity isn’t coasting on its success. Amid fierce competition from OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search and Google’s rumored “AI mode,” the company is expanding its capabilities. Its latest move? Acquiring Carbon, a startup that connects AI systems to external data sources. Even as Perplexity faces legal challenges over copyright infringement, it’s clear they’re not backing down from the AI search arms race.

Growth

The Hidden Power of Micro-Niches for Explosive Growth

Here's why micro-niches are secretly brilliant: When you're the only one solving a very specific problem, you don't just stand out – you become irreplaceable.

Think about it. Would you rather be the 10,000th "social media marketing expert" fighting for attention, or the go-to authority on "TikTok optimization for independent bookstore owners"? In the first scenario, you're drowning in a sea of competition. In the second, you're the only fish in a small but hungry pond, and those bookstore owners are practically throwing their credit cards at you.

The best part? Once you dominate a micro-niche, scaling up is actually easier, not harder. Start with left-handed watercolor artists, then expand to all watercolor artists, then all artists. But try it the other way around? Good luck cutting through the noise. Sometimes, the smallest door leads to the biggest room!