Due Diligence as a Service

This year kicked off with two projects. We provide help to companies and investors to do due diligence before investing in companies. One that crossed our desk at the end of the year was to take an existing company’s SDK and build a simple ‘Hello World’ app to test the difficulty and assess the capabilities compared to what they pitched. The other project is to spend a month and build a web/app prototype. We’ll be focused on the backend APIs, CRM, front-end and possibly some of the app. After that, they'll evaluate the next possible steps for the product. Having something in hand you can use on a daily basis is worth 1,000 Figma mockups.

⏳🌿 Long-Term Plants

Ginkgo trees are called living fossils. Over 290 million years ago, they thrived even before dinosaurs. Today, there is only one species left and it is endangered in the wild.

The magnolia is another ancient plant. They evolved to be pollinated by beetles, because they had to wait 10 million years for modern pollinators like bees and 100 million years for butterflies to evolve.

Both of these plants co-evolved in an ecosystem that doesn't exist today. Magnolias and ginkgo lost their original pollinators a long time ago, but they continue to survive all the way to the present.

Q4 Writing

In Q4, we published 1 article and 5 weeknotes, and stayed on track with the newsletter cadence of one full ◍ Quarternotes newsletter per quarter and one ⪮ Good Morning episode each month

NFC Business Cards
https://optional.is/required/2023/09/20/nfc-business-cards/

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⪮ Good Morning Newsletter Season 2

⪮ Good Morning Season 3

Season 2 went off without any major incidents. People continue to enjoy the format, so we're going to continue to iterate, such as adding additional links per topic and an optional image for each section.

If you're not signed up, be sure to subscribe to ⪮ Good Morning for a monthly dose of 4 interesting topics.

📰 Monthly Inbox Delivery: https://optional.is/newsletter

◍ Newsletters 2.0 iOS app

It has been in the works for a while now. We've re-worked the old Newsletters iPhone/iPad app to make updates easier. We removed some features, like spotlight indexing and global search, but managed to add new features like merging lists (for newsletters that switch sender emails) and list-wide image blocking/allowing.

Newsletters is a free download for a limited time only. The price is expected to go up to $1.99 this spring.

Merch