TLDR 2018-10-15

Samsung's foldable phone 📱, Magic Leap's avatar 👩, getting your first customers 💰

📱
Big Tech & Startups

Tesla reaches milestone of 100,000 Model 3 vehicles (1 minute read)

Tesla is now consistently making 5,000 Model 3s per week, and just made its 100,000th unit. Tesla is expected to release the $35,000 base version of the Model 3 by the end of this year. This is expected to move Tesla from being a niche automaker into a mainstream one. Tesla is already producing electric vehicles faster than any legacy automaker.

Samsung says its foldable phone is also a tablet that fits in your pocket (1 minute read)

Samsung's mobile chief DJ Koh says that Samsung is working on a foldable phone (i.e. a tablet that can be folded into and used as a phone). He also hinted that the phone could be unveiled at Samsung's developer conference on November 7th. Lenovo, Xiaomi, and Huawei are all rumored to be working on foldable phones as well.
🚀
Science & Futuristic Technology

Magic Leap introduces MICA : AI Avatar (1 minute video)

Magic Leap has created an AI virtual assistant that exists in augmented reality. Mica is a female with short hair, and she is ridiculously human looking. She doesn't talk yet, but she uses AI to look people in the eye and her facial ticks, body language, and posture make her look and feel really realistic.

My Next Act: Building The First Startup Accelerator Designed for Bootstrappers (Announcement)

For those of you who don't know him Rob Walling is an OG internet small business entrepreneur, cohost of the Startups for the Rest of Us, and cofounder of Microconf. He's now starting his own accelerator Tinyseed, which will give you a year's worth of runway so you can work on your startup full-time. Definitely worth checking out if you're currently running a side project, I've been listening to his podcast for a long time and he's a really smart guy with tons of good advice.

Splash CLI (Github Repo)

This is a cool little command line utility that will allow you to change your desktop background to a randomly selected high-resolution photo from Unsplash, just by typing "splash -c" into your terminal.

HeyDesigner (Newsletter)

This is a daily curated newsletter for product people, UXers, PMs and frontend developers. Curated by typography, alien, and robot enthusiast Tamas Sari.

How I've Attracted The First 500 Paid Users For My SaaS That Costs $5/mo (7 minute read)

This is the story of how former freelance developer Takuya Matsuyama created a SAAS that makes $3200 a month and allowed him to quit freelancing! Since he includes a TLDR in this excellent article that you should definitely read, it would seem a bit rude of me to write a separate one. So from the article, his TLDR/bullet points: you don't have to get covered in large blogs, why churn rate is surprisingly low, spend a lot of time in user forums, publish roadmaps, treat paid users as special, tell your strategy, ignore all competitors, and accept your incompleteness.
Get the most important tech, science, & coding news in a free daily email. Read by +1,250,000 software engineers and tech workers.
Join 1,250,000 readers for