What's New: What Trump's victory means for crypto and AI regulation

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Crypto lobbyists spent $100M+ to help elect pro-crypto candidates, including Trump. What happens now?
• After profiling 80 companies for Indie Hackers, here are the top lessons I've learned.
• Self-funding a 15 person team. Damjan Dano went from running a successful service business to building his own operating system for small businesses.

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What Trump's victory means for crypto and AI regulation 🏛️

Donald Trump was officially elected the 47th President of the United States. And, as anyone who has been on X the past few weeks can attest, the tech industry played no small part in his victory.

Trump has not always been a fan of crypto, but for one reason or another, he has dramatically changed his tune.

Here's what he pledges to do.

In the news 📰

🎁 The Verge's 2024 holiday gift guide.

🛠️ PlanItOut: Let AI build your business for you. #ad

📱 Here's what makes content go viral.

💻 Get more out of your webinars and virtual events.

🔎 The best B2B acquisition strategies.

🏢 What's really behind Big Tech's return-to-office mandates?

I've profiled 80 companies for Indie Hackers 📝

Like many, I was sad to see that the Indie Hackers Podcast was ending. However, it turns out that Courtland and Channing are just shifting the focus to written content.

As part of that, they hired a team of writers, including me (Otto Nagengast). I worked on the Ideas Reports, which is a large database of company profiles, almost all of them bootstrapped. The Ideas Reports are intended to help you find inspiration for your own projects. After profiling 80 companies, here's what I've learned.

Hint: The "Big Launch" is a myth.

SaaS Watch 👀

SaaS Watch is a roundup of all the latest micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. Here are the top three for this week!

1. Trello-integrated AI chat agent for project management: $0 per month, 10-100 users, $17.5K asking price.

2. Tool for startups to find and submit their products to directories: $879 per month, 100-1K users, $24.1K asking price.

3. AI tool for automating customer acquisition on Reddit: $856 per month, 10-100 users, $24.9K asking price.

Self-funding a team of 15 people 💰

Damjan Dano spent 17 years building a wildly successful service company before deciding it was time to build something more scalable.

In 2018, he started building Aqtos, an operating system for small businesses. It has been a slow grind, but he's finally in the process of rolling it out to the public...and, just in time. He's been draining his bank account by self-funding a team of 15 people.

It's expensive, but he says it's necessary in order to disrupt the industry.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Stephen Flanders, Darko Gjorgjievski, Otto Nagengast, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing