📱  The anti-social network

👋  Good morning. Let us start this day with some valuable lessons from the Chinese farmer who shared his misfortune with journalists this week: He trusted AI’s weed-killing instructions a little too much and instantly killied nearly 25 acres of sesame seeds. Our takeaways: verify all AI advice, don’t mess with chemicals without knowing what you’re doing, and a sesame seed bagel sounds really good, doesn’t it?

NEWS FLASH 

🍵  Spill the tea: Chinese tea chains are rapidly expanding across the US with fruit teas, cheese foam, and other Instagram-friendly drinks priced between $2 and $8. One new Heytea location drew two-hour lines, while Mixue (which already has 50k stores globally) and rivals are betting consumers will keep treating themselves to affordable beverages even as they cut back elsewhere.

🚿  A great selling point: Boston startup Reservoir is hoping you’d like to take more hot showers, and pay less for them. They designed a smart water heater that heats up the water when electricity is cheapest. With installation, it’ll run around $4k, which a crying homeowner would tell you isn’t atypical for a water heater. Reservoir says off-hours heating, which it likens to a thermal battery, could save customers $800/year in energy bills.

🐶  This feels like a spicy documentary in the making: The man whose viral post about using AI to make his dog a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine is naturally turning his miracle into a startup called Gamgee. The founder and supposed savior of mutt Rosie, Paul Conyngham, who clarifies he’s “not a biologist” and whose science has been called into question, is promising big things nonetheless, outlining his four-week “vaccine in hand” timeline and his goal of expanding these bespoke vaccines to humans.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• How is everyone affording everything? Easy. They’re in debt. Americans are collectively $1.26T in credit card debt, per Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. It was very slightly worse at the end of last year, though, so good on you, America.
  

• Picking up good vibrations: Their optimism had tanked over the last four months, but US small business owners’ confidence is back, baby. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index is trending up again.

   

• A win for gig workers: Delivery drivers in Australia are getting a minimum wage hike, equivalent to $22/hour, a victory labor leaders hope will spread globally. Hourly rates will guarantee workers are paid while stuck in traffic or waiting for a restaurant to complete an order.
  

• Whoa: Last spring, the Boston Celtics sold for $6.1B, the highest price ever paid for a sports franchise. Yesterday, former Disney boss Bob Iger and VC Josh Kushner smashed that record, buying the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5B.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM 

Your future is calling

What if you could ask your future self for advice?

MIT researchers are testing AI-generated older versions of people to help them navigate major life decisions, finding that participants who feel connected to their future selves are more likely to make decisions that help them later.

👉 Read more on Mindstream

THE BIG IDEA

Gen Z's not-so-social media 

Social media has long been a digital megaphone for users to yell, "Everybody look at everything I do!" at their peers — but many Gen Zers are seeking something quieter.

Seventy percent of Gen Z Instagram users' engagement happens entirely in DMs, and "spam accounts" — secondary profiles used to discreetly share posts with close friends — are on the rise.

The most online generation in history may quietly be going dark, and a growing class of startups is betting that's not just a phase.

London-based Yope just closed a $12.3m Series A to finance its private "micro-community" app.

The platform is essentially a hybrid group chat/scrapbook with invite-only photo walls and AI-generated memory recaps. It has no algorithm, no ads, and no public content.

Since its official launch in 2024, it's amassed nearly 15m users and half a billion shared photos — all on zero marketing spend.

Is small the new social?

Other apps are looking to capitalize on this "not-so-social media" movement, including:

• The direct-to-home screen photo-sharing app Locket Widget limits free users to 20 connections and has racked up 80m+ downloads.
  
• noplace, a MySpace-meets-Twitter throwback with customizable profiles and zero photo sharing, raised $19m and topped the App Store the day it launched.

The social media market appears to be fracturing. Public platforms are chasing attention, while emerging private ones are chasing intimacy.

Is this low-key social media approach viable?

The social media landscape is littered with dead apps built on good vibes and bad unit economics.

BeReal proved the demand for anti-algorithm social, but it sold to a mobile gaming company for ~$537m and added in-feed ads within a year.

Yope is betting subscriptions can pull its financial weight. Time will tell if that holds up, but the pattern is hard to dismiss.

The generation that grew up performing for the algorithm might be looking for a way out of the spotlight.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

To build a durable business, make sure your content strategy is focused on the right thing. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Cases of wine purchased each quarter by airlines, which, amid slumping sales at sea level, have become wineries’ new favorite customers, per The Wall Street Journal. Winemakers, who until recently were reluctant to accept airlines’ business — not only because of the stigma around “airplane wines,” but because they often couldn’t supply the volumes that airlines required — are now vying for a spot in their first-class cabins, where wealthy jetsetters, often in vacay mode, are proving to be ideal captive audiences to market their premium products.

One issue: high altitudes can dull our sense of taste and smell. To elevate the onboard experience, some wineries are now working on engineering their grape juice specifically for the skies.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1961, East German soldiers started installing bricks and barbed wire — which would become the Berlin Wall — between the eastern and western sections of the city.

⏲️  That’s fun: Hit the timer on the dot.

✏️  Game: Draw a country from memory in 30 seconds.

📚  That’s interesting: An atlas mapping 300+ real locations mentioned in novels.

🦭  Aww: A smol seal.

SHOWER THOUGHT

I've never felt more like a criminal than walking into a movie theater trying to sneak food in. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo, Ben Berkley, and Jay Fuchs.

Editing by: Sara "OG Facebook user" Friedman.

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