🐝 Hot startup teasing a community round??

Last week’s article broke my site.

I exposed blatant corruption in a popular crowdfunded startup, and the response from my readers was incredible.

So incredible that my site metrics wouldn’t load for a few hours.

If you missed that article, you can check it out here.

In today’s issue we’re continuing to bring the heat:

• 3 hot startups you can invest in right now

• This huge startup is considering a community round

• Exposing another startup for misleading investors

3 HOT RAISES

Startups that you can invest in with as little as $100 right now:

 🕸️ MeWe - The largest social network you’ve never heard of (LINK)

💻 Coco Coders - Small group coding classes for children, $500k in ARR (LINK)

 🥤 Smart Cups - Printing flavor into drinking cups (LINK)

Rise and grind, dollar bills!

Put your money to work in a high-yield cash account with up to $2M in FDIC† insurance through program banks.

Get started today, with as little as $10.

Buzzing with Excitement

Did Wefunder snag another prized startup?

Wefunder has had more success than any of its competitors in bringing highly respected startups to crowdfunding. Most notably, Substack, Mercury, Levels, and Replit all hosted community rounds on Wefunder.

To have 4 'blue chip' startups select Wefunder when no other crowdfunding platform has been able to nab any is impressive.

Wefunder may soon be adding to their tally…

The rumor mill is bustling with activity that a popular creator tool will soon launch on Wefunder.

beehiiv is a Substack competitor that has built out an extensive suite of newsletter tools. Milk Road - the prominent crypto newsletter, was built on beehiiv's platform.

beehiiv was founded by Tyler Denk, an early employee at Morning Brew who saw an opportunity to roll out Morning Brew's email tools for anyone that wanted to create a newsletter.

So far, it's working.

The buzzy NYC startup now hosts 8,000+ newsletters with a collective audience of 35M+ readers. Most recently, beehiiv raised $12.5M from venture capital.

The team at Wefunder recently made an impassioned pitch to the beehiiv team to let their community own a part of the company. They rented out a billboard in Times Square with a message directed at Founder Tyler Denk.

The post gained traction on social media, with Denk and the official beehiiv account interacting with it. This teaser signaled more to come, and an investor recently unearthed a staging page for beehiiv on the Wefunder website.

Denk now even has a profile on the site - this all points to an upcoming funding round.

If you want to invest in beehiiv and see it on Wefunder - holler at Denk on Twitter/X!

INVESTING ON HARD MODE

Ah yes, Mode Mobile.

The last time I wrote about Mode Mobile, I took issue with their manufactured share price.

There's no one better at stretching the truth and exaggerating figures than this company.

The below chart might be the best example of this. 

There are THREE issues I have with Mode Mobile’s chart:

1. They compared one year of revenue (2019) to THREE years of revenue combined. That's not how graphs work.

2. Touting '590% CAGR' - this is manipulating the law of small numbers. I mean they don't even put a dollar amount on 2019 revenue, they just say it's less than $100k. Starting from such a small amount can make anything look great; for example going from $1 -> $6 is a 500% increase.

3. What does the $125M represent in this chart? I honestly have no idea.

In honor of #1, let’s apply this misleading tactic to a household name brand, Kohl’s. Kohl’s is in a clear business decline, with revenue shrinking in the past two years:

2020 - $18.1B

2021 - $19.4B

2022 - $18.1B

2023 - $16.6B

Here is how one would normally position the revenue date to get a clear sense of the business trajectory:

However, if you manipulate a chart like Mode Mobile has done, you can make any business look like it's thriving. Look, Kohl’s now appears to be on a rocket ship of growth!

The crazy thing is, Mode Mobile appears to be a growing business. But I don’t trust a business that cuts corners and misleads investors.