MicroAcquire

“And I think what was really important that I would recommend to anyone who goes through a process like this is we did a Google video call Where we record, we both mutually recorded the call, and then transferred everything on the call”

“Building an FAQ document, kind of like a pseudo-help center for these buyers, Will allow you to focus more on the buyers that really are serious. And then the ones who you say like, hey, I have some questions. You send them the document. They never get back to…”

“Typically even DAW best in my, from what I've seen when, you know, business isn't growing too much, it's flat or it's just extremely profitable. And then ARR if it's growing.”

“The lucky position I was in is that the product is very passive income for me, and so I was pretty rigid in the valuation that I put out, and if A buyer said, I don't think it's worth that much. I was like, great. Good luck on all your other Micro Acquire acqu…”

“You know, I think we don't all need to be IPOs. We don't all need to be acquired by like Salesforce or whatever. So having an outlet and an exit strategy that is quite lucrative for those of us that are micro SaaS builders or, you know, solo founders has been …”

“There's a lack of transparency on that side, and I think what has been wonderful is Microfire has so much transparency on, on the actual relationship building experience”

“That's one thing we've been building in is just better mechanics. And that's actually how we came up with the micro car premium program is before that you would have received like a hundred messages. And so we're constantly thinking of ways to really separate,…”

“And we just closed the deal in like three weeks or four or something. It was really quick. Three or four, yeah. Actually, it was supposed to close it three weeks, but he had some problems with paperwork, so it was like three and a half or something.”

“Yeah, no, that's not our plan, so don't worry about that.”

“I actually just did my second. I haven't told you about this yet. I just closed my second Microacquire acquisition last week, the end of last week. So I'm now two on Microacquire.”

“So there's been two the first one is called copycat and it's a copywriting AI software. And the other one the most recent one is called way. And so it's a software that helps you build a website. So a website building tool. The first company was the founders b…”

“They were reporting, you know, like, 73 K in our ARR and asking for 350 K which was, I found outrageous for, like, that kind of product but I didn't mind, like, I still got in touch, you know, I still basically did my thing, and Basically made an offer, which …”

“Probably 40, just like within the first like week or so, we had like 40 people reaching out, you know, requesting more information. I basically would, I spent a good amount of time kind of like weeding through those just to make sure that they were legit and, …”

“If you have one buyer, you have no buyer, so you want to draw in a bunch, and then If you're successful, you can, you know, negotiate and raise up the price or you have leverage on the terms and stuff like that.”

“In, in late April, I think it was I saw the Trinsley product, which we ended up acquiring come onto the market on the platform. And I immediately reached out to the founder, David.”

“You recently acquired a startup at Microquire for around a quarter million, and you were telling me you bought something else as well”

“So I ran a pretty tight process there, and within a week and a half, we had an LOI in hand”

“Yeah, a little more than that. Just under a 300 day.”

“We have data around startups that connect Stripe, or Barometrics, or any sort of analytics within MicroQuare. They get, like, 500% more buyer requests, because it really cuts down on the due diligence of the buyer.”

“I usually do recommend if it's your first acquisition and it's in like the six figures, it's a very small price to pay to have an expert come in and give you a second opinion and help walk you through the process.”

“This is what I see the most on Microquire, is existing companies acquiring great products to sell to their existing customer base”

“Cause there's, you know, 500 plus SaaS businesses on my career. I'm probably like a thousand”

“So the fact that the seller had, you know, all the information up front was responsive. Like all those things right there can dramatically increase your odds of being Acquired.”

“I'd say that's probably the number one reason a lot of companies don't sell microquare is they overpriced and it just stops the conversation from, because the gap is too big to close.”

“Just show your business work like warts and all, like all, like it's okay if there are gaps, it's okay if things are not on, you know, under optimized because that's the opportunity that a buyer is looking for. You know, they're looking, if you're a buyer, you…”

“I think Brian holds the record for most companies sold on MicroQuire.”

“Without, again, like without a broker, you're sort of on your own and, but that's by design, right? Like that's like, I chose to go without a broker intentionally because basically because micro acquire exists that, that made this path a lot more viable. But i…”

“You can't expect just the listing page or just the asking price or just the name or something to be enough for a buyer to submit an offer. They're going to need to First of all, they're probably looking at many other businesses. Second of all but like you don'…”

“So yes, two companies February first, closed on February first, then what was yesterday and then closed on February 24th. So within, within three, three weeks of each other, something like that.”

“There's a ton of tech guys on there, and I say tech guys, software guys, that are building amazing tools, that build amazing sort of applications, that I look at and go from a, I mean, I'm in, I'm selling to businesses every day, and I look at them and go, I s…”

“I think we're going to see a lot more just general private equity activity specifically from first time buyers, like people, you know, just hearing about the success of like, You know, basically you know, entrepreneurship through acquisition is, is really beco…”

“Cause the number one reason that a lot of startups don't sell on microquire is they just priced. 10 X annual recurring revenue. And those multiples are really reserved for when you're at scale. So when you're like at ten million revenue and above, that's when …”

“Roughly speaking, about 30 or something, like in, in the course of two months, I would say we were in touch with maybe 1516, 17 with them.”

“One piece of advice I always give to sellers is make a buyer work for you, and what I mean by that is you ask them a series of questions like, have you acquired a company before, or in your situation maybe do you have any experience in this space, and they slo…”

“This is a definite pattern when we see across successful acquisitions is just preparation, like actually putting some thought and some time into preparing, you know, proper financials, you know, how does marketing work, like all the questions that a buyer is g…”

“So I would say for micro acquire, I had like two serious inquiries, and then outside of micro acquire, I had like three serious inquiries,”

“And what you want to do in those situations is I always recommend, you know, make the buyer perform. What I mean is, You know, you have someone inquire about the business. Instead of just granting them access, ask them a question like, hey, do you have experie…”

“Although I sent, like, 250 DMs, ultimately, the buyer came from MicroAcquire”

“And then, you know, I'd say off of that, like, 50% of the people didn't even sign it.”

“It's almost like a, in my opinion, a benefit to bring your business forward with, you know, scars and, you Especially, like, growth opportunities, like, hey, I haven't done this, haven't tried this, I tried this, and I failed at this, or this has a, you know w…”

“We have a 150,000 registered buyers.”

“From my experience of doing this, of just successful founders like yourself, they all figured out the sales process on their own, and they did not outsource it. They did not hire for it. They grew into it. You know, if you figure it out, you nail it, and then …”

“I don't have a lawyer that does any of this. I do all the legal myself. It's not terribly complicated when I could use your forms off your site, and we all agreed to not touch them and mark them up.”

“And then the other thing I'm looking for is I'm waiting for that like company that raised 30, forty million dollars and now burned through it all, but built an amazing piece of tech to go and micro acquire and sell for a million or two. Like, It's inevitable. …”

“For MicroRequire, it was actually Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Hootsuite, or now chairman, and I'm kind of a startup nerd, so when that came in, I was like, whoa, like, that's so cool, like, hey Ryan, I hope I don't let you down with MicroRequire. He's now an inves…”

“That was a good seven figure deal.”

“So last year in July, I built a startup and sold it on microquire within 30 days.”

“24 hours later, 24 hours after listing on Microquire, not only did I have a few people who were interested in buying, but I actually had my first real offer within 24 hours, which was absolutely insane.”

“I'm trying to kind of build a micro startup studio almost. So it's more like a build to sell model. And using kind of sites like might require to achieve that.”

“Every time I've listed a startup without fail. There's always that one person who lowballs you with like a 1.5 X multiple or two X multiple. It just says your startup isn't worth what you're asking for. I'll pay you this much. So, so don't fault them. Even if …”

“He has sold, or he has micro acquired five different startups, or have had five different startups micro required.”

“And I even recommend sometimes to price lower than you might expect, because then you'll draw on more buyers. There's no, if you have one buyer, you have no buyers. And so if you can get, you know, a bidding war going with a timeline saying, Hey, I'm looking t…”

“Always asked for the buyer to jump on the call if they're interested because anyone who's kicking the tire, anyone who's not interested is not going to go forward because there's a ton of people who might reach out, but at the end of the day, they're not reall…”

“It's almost like I can see a future where, you know, people are able to build products specifically to sell them to someone else. And then you get to go back to doing what you love, which is building.”

“Just having like those growth opportunities on how you would continue growing this startup with a buyer, I think is a huge selling point because you kind of just give them a roadmap.”

“I just have mostly given up on trying to convince people like you could throw them the micro require reports and be like, well, this is what things are transacting at. But if people think their business is worth 10, 20 times ARR, it's just, you know, maybe the…”

“What's exciting to us is, like, more of these companies that are, like, struggling to raise their next round, like these venture orphans. I've seen a few come up on Microquire. I think we're going to see more of those pop up.”

“If you want to create wealth, bootstrap. If you want to change market raise venture because your odds are, I mean Mike requires venture backed. I know my odds. I got a one percent lottery ticket.”

“We had been contacted by well over a hundred. We didn't get to meet with everyone by any means. We kind of sifted through... We ended up meeting with probably well over 30 or 40 people.”

“It would have benefited us when we were selling, so we could have sold for a higher price, probably if we had paid attention to that earlier”

“Sometimes it's not just the price that, you know, you, I could tell you got some passion for travel and, you know, you don't want to just sell to someone who's gonna, you know, just destroy or ruin the reputation of the business. So that's something buyers, I …”

“So it was a company called Sunrise KPI, and it, like I said, small acquisition. I think it was like, 10 grand US.”

“Some due diligence questions can be you know, tricky, like, hey, send me your entire customer list. The answer to that is no. Scrub it. Send anonymized data.”

“I think when we first found it on Micro Acquire, it was around just over a thousand dollars MRR and just flat line, no marketing, no presence online.”

“I got in a couple of situations on On micro-acquired, I think, one-off, where I didn't end up buying, and this is, again, pre-Stridist, where I submitted a letter of intent, we moved into due diligence, and the seller just was still really unwilling to share m…”

“Having a transition plan laid out in advance is a huge advantage comparative to other founders that may not have that. Because if you're interested in that application, you're wondering what's, what do we do next sometimes? And instead of figuring it out on th…”

“Believe it or not, at this point, we're seeing typically on average, usually two or three acquisitions per day.”

“And so I came across UTM link manager and which is a short link short link builder and UTM link builder and really well built product, but I really just wanted to find a company that had terrible marketing or really no marketing at all and take my marketing ex…”

“Definitely, like, ask everyone the same, like, full set of questions, even if the tools are a little bit different. Cause that way, like you're just establishing that baseline. You're able to compare offers or compare companies you know, a more fair way.”

“One of my always, the recommendation I always make if they're looking to do technical due diligence is to have agency or, you know, some Individual that is technical that can help with that side.”

“If you're in line with those valuations, your buyer interest is based on our data. It's like two to three, four times higher.”

“You'd be surprised at how many startups we see at Microquire where we look at them and they're really good, but we're like, what do you do? What? So when you see the newsletter, actually, that's usually us. Kind of doing them some help in terms of clearly expl…”

“At the end I sold for three something.”

“When I decided to build something for micro acquired, I had no idea what was going to be. So it was like, I'm going to spend some time finding a nice problem, solve it build something, and then in the end sold it.”

“Yeah, I would say that's probably the number one reason we see startups not sell on Microquire is when they just price way too high.”

“We've actually had to turn away some that raised millions of dollars, and the revenue is less than a couple 100,000, and we're just like, I don't know who's gonna buy this. Like, you need to essentially, you know, this is an aqua hire situation.”

“Yeah, and if I remember correctly, I think the number of buyers was about 20 that, you know, had reached out and shown interest, and there was, in the end, there was probably three serious buyers that not only wanted to use the application, but wanted to build…”

“If you're a SaaS company and you have to keep on your contractors or your development team a little longer, like really expect to keep them on through the acquisition and not like cut them before thinking everything's going to go smoothly.”

“I think we spend almost a hundred hours of our own time just getting the application ready for the transfer.”

“There was one night where like one person sent an LOI out of the blue. And then I got like four more right away.”

“One tip for those listening that I've seen work really effectively is kind of recording like a loom as you go live on MicroQuire, just kind of going over the tech stack, common questions, because most buyers have the same questions, like, how are you finding y…”

“I built an app. That was an NFT tracker that would let you publish sales to, like, a Discord channel... Within seconds, maybe just a couple minutes of listing, I got a few messages, and within a couple hours, the money was in the bank, and it was done at, like…”

“I put it up and I think within sort of maybe three to four months, I got the first LOIs.”

“Within seconds, maybe just a couple minutes of listing, I got a few messages, and within a couple hours, the money was in the bank, and it was done at, like, three a.m. It was a very small deal, right? I think it was, like, 1750 dollars, maybe. That was my ask…”

“The smaller transaction of 40,000 US or something like that on microacquire was like, for us, more like a bonus. We didn't expect that. We were about to, I mean, sorry for the person who purchased that, that listens to the podcast, but we were about to shut it…”

“We had actually received an offer from someone outside of micro acquire. And I think that's what first got me thinking, oh, actually, potentially I could sell this”

“There were no M&A advisors, I believe, and the last time the acquisition fell through, so it didn't happen.”

“Originally what I'm getting at is the original idea was a deal flow platform for myself. So I could potentially acquire small SaaS companies. And then if you couldn't find, if I didn't buy it, you could still find a buyer.”