The Exchanges

Q Nice. Would you do any sales calls, or was it a complete product-led growth, or would you do, like, one-on-one onboarding calls or anything like that?

A We tried, we tried to do a mix. So it was product-led growth where people could start using it, sign up, pay for a subscription without ever talking to anybody. To the extent that people wanted to have calls or wanted a demo to see what it was, the platform was about, you know, I was always flexible, able to have a call with them. I also always tried to be very involved on the support side. So after users would sign up, I'd offer to get on a call with them to show them product and make sure they got stood up. That wound up being really beneficial from a retention standpoint of the users that signed up, paid, And then booked an onboarding call after we're far more likely to be with us six months later.

AI assessment note: “We tried to do a mix. So it was product-led growth”

Q Nice. I love that. Let's talk about the first acquisition that you went through on Acquire. I'm sure as each acquisition went, you learned something. The process was easier the second time and the third time. That's usually how even just building startups go. Um, what was the first, uh, startup that got acquired?

A Yeah. So it's, it's quite a random idea. I mean, I actually developed it during my paternity leave. We were talking about our kids. At the beginning of this, uh, my, my little girl was born about a year ago. That was in summer, just as the pandemic was starting to fade away and travel restrictions were opening up. So everyone in the UK at least was trying to get their passports renewed because it all elapsed over the kind of two years in COVID because no one needed them. So there was this crazy rush for passports and no one could get appointments. And I realized that from done some basic web scraping stuff before that I could ping these appointment sites with a government passport service and find out When appointments are available, where they are and these kinds of things. So I quickly spun up a kind of quite simple consumer kind of SAS product. They would allow people basically to get alerts for when appointments came out for passport renewals. And this was in super high demand and it just took off. And at its peak, we were doing about a thousand plus dollars a day, just piling money into Google ads as well. Cause it's just a brilliant strategy, at least for that business hasn't always worked out by the ones, but It just really took off, but obviously it was quite seasonal. We managed to kind of capitalize on that and package it up in a nice enough way that it could be rolle…

AI assessment note: “simple consumer kind of SAS product. They would allow people basically to get alerts”

Q I'm doing good. Um, so for those that may not know you or your background or, um, about Fork, do you want to just give a quick introduction of yourself?

A Sure. I've, uh, been in tech ever since I got out of school around 1011 years. And halfway through my journey, or the first half of my journey, I was a marketer at different venture-backed startups. And then somewhere in the middle, I had like a mid-tech career crisis and decided that I can't just sell code. I need to know how to write it and, um, explain it to other people. So I got into Product development, programming, and then I sort of transitioned from being an employee to being a founder. So I started a few companies. One of them was called FOMO, and we sold that, and in the midst of all of that started, as you mentioned, Fork Equity, which is a micro PE fund, and we've been buying, growing, and selling small-ish SaaS apps for about four or five years now.

AI assessment note: “started, as you mentioned, Fork Equity, which is a micro PE fund”

Q within your criteria, and you were saying you're pretty agnostic. Is there, let's, let me, let me reframe it. Um, is there, like, a certain, uh, size in terms of, like, revenue, um, or, uh, use case? I noticed, um, a pattern, like, a lot of your acquisitions are developer-focused, um, tools. Like, what, What's like a perfect acquisition, um, for Xenon? And that's, that's a really hard question, so.

A No, no, no. We, we actually have it written down. We have, um, certain deal criteria. So for us, we focus on B to B, first of all, uh, B to C. It's different skill sets than what we have. We have a circle of competence and B to C is outside of our circle of competence. The second thing we'll look for is we look for around a million In recurring revenue at a, at a minimum level at a low bar. And that's because we feel like at that level of revenue, the business has enough to support itself as its own cost center without, without needing an injection of capital to sustain marketing and sales operations, which we think are actually critical to a business. Um, and the other thing is a recurring revenue stream. So the, the, the revenue model, Needs to be recurring. There are instances where we've actually done transactions a little bit outside these criteria. So one example would be scripted where, um, it didn't actually have a recurring revenue subscription business, but we immediately saw that the one could be implemented. So, um, we, we went ahead and, um, applied that to scripted.

AI assessment note: “we focus on B to B, first of all... around a million In recurring revenue”

Q a business, and the teacher, the teacher loved it. He was like, that's what, so, um, Chico State does have a pretty good, um, entrepreneurial, um, department, and I, I'm forever grateful for them, but, um, anyway, story for, uh, for another time, but, um, my, uh, my next question would just be, um, you know, you look at, I, how many deals do you look at, like, a month?

A Yeah, we actually, uh, you must not be, well, let me back up, hundreds, and we actually document it for our investors, like just, I think they like the notion of like, okay, and it's like by month, so in, uh, you know, we're recording in February, we just put out a letter for everyone that says, in January, we looked at X number of deals, and let's, it was probably a 153 or something like that. The, you know, the only ones that made it through the first filter were these 30, And we're down to, like, actual investigation on these five, and two may have a chance of going to a letter of intent. So we actually publish all that for our investors.

AI assessment note: “hundreds, and we actually document it for our investors... was probably a 153”

Q Makes sense. Different skill sets, totally different sales gets and, you know, almost like personality types to execute a zero to one phase and a one to 10 and 10 to a hundred, et cetera, et cetera. Um, tell me about the acquisition process. What was your expectations and how did it go?

A Yeah, absolutely. So I, uh, was in Sao Paulo, Brazil when I had decided, you know, this is what I want to do. I want to go and sell that business. And so, um, you know, as I'd shared with you before, this is my third exit. I had self-brokered the other two, um, uh, acquisitions and run that process, that, that sales process from A to Z. Um, Not because I, I didn't want to work with a broker. If I'm being financially, I didn't know that I could bring in a broker. And so it was a little bit of, uh, you know, rough learning by doing, but, um, you know, I, I had had that prior experience, um, March of 20, 25 decided that I wanted to go sell the business and started prepping at that point in time. So let's get all of our books in line. Let's, you know, make sure that the team is solidified. Let's, you know, extend those customer contracts. Make sure it looks really sexy, attractive, and appealing to, uh, you know, a prospective buyer. And so, uh, we got that ready over probably, you know, two, two and a half months. I think we, uh, launched, uh, on a plethora of different sites, including Acquire.com, uh, shout out Acquire.com, uh, I think in June of twenty-twenty-five, and I personally had the high hopes of, uh, getting to a point of, uh, Acquisition around, like, September, October time. Uh, you know, I think as, uh, a lot of, uh, you know, really fast-growing and ultimately just …

AI assessment note: “I personally had the high hopes of, uh, getting to a point of, uh, Acquisition”

Q Love it. How do you think about distribution? Are you sales focused, like code email, mainly marketing focus, both? So why do you, how do you think you're getting the initial customers?

A So marketing is, is mainly what I do. In the past, before AI, I'd always have a co-founder to build tech. Now, um, it's all distribution and marketing focused. So I don't build the product until we can crack distribution. Uh, so some of the experiments I'm running now, you know, I'm messing with some consumer stuff. Um, it's distribution first. And if it works, if it goes viral, if people are clicking pages, if people, the big thing, if people are spending money, even if they spend a dollar, that's better than 10,000 people signing up on a wait list and saying they're gonna spend a dollar, right? So we start there. And then from there, um, because when you start there, all you need is a website or a landing page or something to capture. And, uh, you can iterate that very quickly and drive traffic. So we do things on Instagram, TikTok, when it comes to consumer for LinkedIn, uh, for B to B, we go at LinkedIn, LinkedIn, like building in public, not even, you know, running ads. Um, and for B to B, uh, when it comes to paid advertising, we actually had a lot of success with meta, which a lot of people will get on LinkedIn to try to run ads for B to B. But they don't realize the entire, all the same people are on Facebook, and it's less competitive to get those people, um, on Meta than it is on LinkedIn. And, um, yeah, we, we, we use Cappy conversion API to target those, you know, B…

AI assessment note: “marketing is, is mainly what I do. In the past, before AI”

Q more obvious with AI tools like Lovable and Rissell and Cursor, uh, is distribution and marketing was, Always the hard part. Actually getting the customers. Building was the easy part. Um, but let's talk about how you got customers. How'd you get the first, uh, handful? Did you, uh, have friends with businesses? Same problem? Did you, uh, share it somewhere? Like what did the, the initial spark look like?

A Yeah. So it was all very boots on the ground, um, at least in the digital marketing world. So no Facebook ads. We didn't spend a single dollar on marketing. Um, we, uh, Facebook groups, So, uh, we were in several Facebook groups, just like for our industry. So, um, you know, water damage, mold remediation, business owners, um, and basically just shared our story on there. Somewhat of a testimonial, but very natural, very like, you know, someone from this industry sharing their experience that's dealt with, um, you know, marketers that don't have your best, your best interests in mind that overcharge, you know, we had a very digestible Monthly subscription cost. Um, but yeah, Facebook groups. I think we made four posts across, um, across, across different groups and had roughly 22 customers that we acquired, um, from those four posts. So, um, yeah. And then it got to the point where it was like, after those customers came on board, we were tweaking things, editing things. And, uh, yeah. So all Facebook groups, Um, yeah, never spent a single dollar on, uh, on Facebook ads or anything like that.

AI assessment note: “we made four posts across... different groups and had roughly 22 customers”

Q Nice. That is slick. What were some of the most common use cases? Was it TRMs? Was it something else?

A Uh, mostly it was client portals and like internal systems. Um, so let's say, um, you are a marketing agency and you have multiple clients and many projects running on those clients. Um, you wouldn't want to give them access to an ocean database. Uh, what you'd want to give us create an app where each client can see only their ongoing projects and tasks, et cetera. So we built like a very, very solid, a very advanced set of personalization and data restriction features, um, uh, that actually help, um, like a person can see only their, uh, relevant roles, et cetera. So client portals, member portals, uh, internal order management systems. There are a lot of garages that use our product. Uh, a lot of educational institution that use our products. Um, so, uh, to manage like, um, just record keeping, uh, placements, so on and so forth.

AI assessment note: “mostly it was client portals and like internal systems.”

Q Nice. So it sounds like you, you clearly had product market fit. You had tons of happy customers. Customers. Loving the product. What made you ultimately decide to sell the business?

A So it was, um, a few personal factors, uh, primarily that dictated that we sell the business. Um, mostly for Samir and I, we have been on this journey for six years. So Notion Apps wasn't our first product. It was utilized at App, then it's Notion Apps. And then, um, we, we thought the business, one, we were both exhausted, we were continuously building and we were in on mode for like, Quite a long time. Just wanted a break. We just wanted some capital to see us through that break period. And then the second reason we thought it, the business is better suited in the hands of someone who could grow it faster. Um, because it requires some level of, um, energy and vitality that you can breathe into the product, especially with such a fast changing market, because going from no code to prompt based applications, it's, It requires a lot of vitality that you have, that you breathe into the product, and we, um, we just felt it was the right time to hand up the business to someone else.

AI assessment note: “one, we were both exhausted... second reason we thought it, the business is better suited”

Q I completely agree. Walk me through the, your acquisition process. Like, what were you looking for from the start? Did you decide in October, like, I'm going to acquire an agency. I don't know the specific shape and size of it, but I'm going to start looking around. Um, how did you get started and what does your process look like?

A Yeah, it's funny. Initially, like back in, uh, this is not long ago, but let's say August, September, I was like, you know what, what if I, I went in a totally different direction and bought some like I don't know, service based business or like a blue collar business that I know nothing about. Um, there's plenty of people on the internet that will brainwash you into doing that. Uh, I think there's more value in like staying in your lane. If you have an expertise, it's much easier to grow from there. So, uh, just a lot of self learning, a lot of research. I have a decent vibe, decently, uh, crystallized buy box and like what I wanted, what I wanted to buy. So, um, I knew I wanted it to be a marketing agency that specialized in something That had some form of a subscription recurring base of clients that's been around for at least a couple of years that has a really talented team, good processes. I didn't need it to be this giant agency that's doing four or five million, uh, in EBITDA. Like I actually was looking for something a little bit smaller, um, something that's at least 300 K plus EBITDA that was important to me, but like there was a, um, a cap on that. Uh, I didn't want to do too much leverage on the first deal. Um, But yeah, a specialist agency with a recurring base, and I wasn't really looking for design, honestly. I look at, it's funny, I had a lot of different, like…

AI assessment note: “downloaded Acquire, bought the annual package, started talking to founders literally within, like, 24 hours.”

Q Tell me about the, the due diligence process. Tell me about, um, okay, you, you see this as a good deal. You're interested. You have a good conversation with, um, the founder. Uh, what happened after that? How long did the process take? What did it look like?

A Yeah. Met with him two or three times, had a bunch of questions. I sent him a, an LOI draft within maybe like seven to 10 days. Um, he reviewed it and then we got to work. So I got a, I had no idea what I was doing. This was my first acquisition. So I was just asking dumb questions to the M&A, Slack community, like, what do I do here? Um, I got a quality of earnings specialist, uh, to just make sure everything was clean and kosher. I, I got a lawyer, and maybe that's another conversation, but I think if you're doing a deal under a certain size, it doesn't always make sense to bring in an attorney for something like that. It ended up being a very costly venture to do that. It's kind of like a sidetrack, but in any event, it was my first deal. I wanted to do it the right way. Um, so quality of earnings, attorney, Due diligence took a few weeks. I secured some financing, uh, through the SBA. Um, so yeah, I was like really hitting like every single box that you could check off when you do an acquisition. Um, and just getting to know the founder more, had weekly conversations with him about the clients. I would say in tandem, like while you're doing the due diligence was critical that I met with him regularly and just got to know him a little bit better, how he runs his business. There are certain, he was, he's a very self-aware person, uh, who understands, uh, He's built something …

AI assessment note: “Due diligence took a few weeks. I secured some financing, uh, through the SBA.”

Q at some point go build another business, which is, you know, back to that zero to one phase that they really sell at. Um, so tons of those opportunities I see, um, you know, tell me a little bit more about, you know, plans to, to grow the business from here. Is it, uh, to add on, you know, new go to market engine, uh, what does that look like?

A Yeah, so we're putting in a go-to-market engine. I would recommend to anyone who's doing an acquisition, get started on that sooner rather than later. Whether you have a contact or an agency or a friend that can help you, or you can do it yourself, it'll, it'll help, you know, due diligence, you know, once you do the acquisition and you're integrating, um, there's a lot of unknowns that come up. There's a lot of chaos and stress or systems you want to put in place. Like, I can't imagine how stressful this would have been If I knew nothing about growth or outbound and I'm like, oh shit, like that's another thing that I have to worry about. And I'm just going to like pray that like we get phone calls to do business with us. Like, I don't, it doesn't matter if you have a background in growth or not, like you should get started on that, like as soon as possible. So that's what we did. Even before the acquisition closed, I started like buying domains, like building email infrastructure for the new, for the company, like warming up mailboxes, um, making sure that we knew whose LinkedIn profiles we're going to do outreach on. Putting a content plan on LinkedIn in place. How are we going to run ads so that there's no guesswork? Day one, I put my outbound team on the case, like they were just another client and we got the engine moving pretty fast. So the goal is to continue scaling tha…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so we're putting in a go-to-market engine.”

Q Nice. Tell me more about the niches. I know a few of them, but what's like maybe five or six of them?

A Yeah. So like, for example, I mean, dentistry is one that I'm super familiar with. Um, that's probably been my main one, but even within dentistry, um, you know, you have like oral surgeons, you have orthodontists, the dental specialists. Um, and then, you know, home, home care services is a big one. Um, but then specifically, like if you go after just HVAC guys and you build your product specific to them and their workflows, um, another one would be Uh, med spas. I've had, you know, a lot of success working with different med spas, and I like that space because it's, you know, it's growing and expanding, but, um, yeah, really all kinds of verticals, and it's, I just love positioning my, my products to talk to them, and it's just easier to get early stage traction.

AI assessment note: “dentistry is one... home care services is a big one... med spas”

Q a, a clear read in a cell you like to, to build rather than, uh, scaling the businesses. But walking through that thought process, do you have like a goal that you want to hit? Like, I'm going to sell this at Exactly. When I hit a 100,000 or do you sell when you're kind of tired of the clientele or just a good time to cash on the chips?

A Yeah. Yeah. I like, um, I like building to about 50 K in ARR. Um, so about 50 K in ARR. So, um, and I, I like to specifically focus on a buyer. So I think that when you're selling a company, you should just like, if you were selling a product, focus on, you know, a certain type of buyer. So for me, um, that's usually a first time, first time founder. The reason why is like, I've learned all these little things just through the years of trial and error and investing in programs and all that good stuff. And I always think to myself, man, if I knew someone like me, 10, 1213 years ago, it would have been so much easier. And so I think the value that I can deliver for a buyer is, is the best for a first time founder. And so, um, with a lot of my deals, you know, one thing that I include is just like hands on training and support. Um, through an extended period of time. Um, but yeah, I usually like to around 50 K ARR and, um, you know, I shoot for a decent multiple, one that's fair, one that will sell quickly, um, but make it worth it on my end.

AI assessment note: “I like building to about 50 K in ARR.”

Q Man, what an awesome ab! Having, you know, probably a really positive impact on a ton of people, you know, you work, work out, you feel good, you look good, and then For you, you know, you were able to turn that into a business. That's incredible. How'd you get the idea for this?

A Yeah, um, so it actually started in, in 2017. Uh, initially we were actually a hardware, not a, uh, um, a software based platform. So in the area where I live in, we call it, uh, uh, we call it in, in the UK, we call it borough. So I lived in London, Borough, Barking and Dagenham. So, um, there was high obesity and then they were going through a procurement process to Source for ideas for people to tackle that. So I pitched an idea of having these boxes built, and then we attach them to lampposts, and then we give people in the local, local area basically cards, and they tap on those, ah, boxes all around them. Um, so that, we, we successfully got the funding to start that, but when we launched, unfortunately, they were all vandalized. Um, so that was a disaster. I mean, we could have put it right there and just call it a day, um, but then I managed to convince them to say, you know what, like, you know, we can try it one more time, because we've truly printed the boxes and put, you know, Arduino, put a bunch of electronics inside. Oh, actually, you know what, give us, you know, six more weeks, let's relaunch this, we'll make a metal boxes, and then put a alarm padlock to make it more secure. Then we launched again, it will vandalize us.

AI assessment note: “there was high obesity and then they were going through a procurement process to Source for ideas”

Q and you look at everything someone doesn't like in a market and you offer the exact opposite. That is awesome. I love that. If you had to go back and change one thing as you were building the business or do one thing differently, what would that be? Like a learning through working with clients or maybe the pricing or the service? What's like one thing you would do different?

A There's a million things I would do different. I, cause the business at the time I sold it was like the most evolved phase of the company, right? All the tweaks were made. There was no, there was no like one tweak that changed everything per se. I think it was just a bunch of the little ones, but I, I, I did really see that things started taking off once I got the right people in place. I hired a A really good account manager that changed the company for the better. And there was another time I hired a really bad account manager that lost us like a 100,000 dollars worth of revenue in a year. So by me taking the slightly cheaper option of the bad account manager that saved me like 500, like 5000 bucks over the year, it cost me a 100,000 dollars in mistakes that made. So if I had to choose just one thing, it'd be hire the The better person from the start instead of hiring it, losing all that revenue, and then hiring the right person.

AI assessment note: “if I had to choose just one thing, it'd be hire the The better person”

Q be about the decline. Why is this declining? What's happening? Can we negotiate a better price? I don't want to pay this valuation because things have changed. So you're absolutely correct. Keeping growth on track is, is massive. Um, what did, what did you do to celebrate? You had a, you know, fairly life-changing acquisition. What did you do when it all closed? And Money was in your bank account.

A I thought that, I thought that, all right, we're going to throw a party or something like that. Literally the day we closed, I was Wednesday, right? Like the escrow was released and actually the money hit, the money hit my bank account. Uh, we started, we do, we have calls all day transferring the assets and things like that. But at, from six AM was the first call cause they're Eastern time, right? So it was, it was a long day, right? From six AM to six PM, I was at the office. And then from there, I had to go home, pack, and head straight to Upside's annual festival, which was happening in two days, so I had to drive to, uh, to, uh, Sequoia National Forest to start organizing that. So, to answer your question, nothing. Like, I didn't celebrate at all. It was just straight back to work mode, and then when I came back, obviously, the transition, and then was even busier with Upside, and so yeah, I, Just continued, continued on like it was, nothing happened in a way.

AI assessment note: “So, to answer your question, nothing. Like, I didn't celebrate at all.”

Q I use the product. It's amazing what you built. How'd you get the first users and the first customers?

A Um, funny enough, I didn't do that, like, big of a noise. I went to Reddit, um, and I started from Reddit. I posted three posts. On three different, uh, subreddits, and all of the three got viral, um, like, 150 to 301 of them got 500 upvotes, and from, only from Reddit, I got, like, 30 to 35 customers, um, and then I used that money to pay to, uh, a YouTuber and a TikToker to, um, to do some videos, and, and then I just got, you know, the money got rolling, and I managed to Pay more to more, to more influencers to just promote the product. The response rate was pretty good with the influencers because the product was good. So they, and also I think the, It is a hyped product in a hyped market right now, so the niche is very hyped, and everyone wanna build with AI. Uh, so that was also one of the things that I experienced with, with Superdive, that it was just too hyped for people to say no for influencers.

AI assessment note: “I went to Reddit... I posted three posts... got, like, 30 to 35 customers”

Q That's awesome. Um, so the business is doing well. You clearly have a ton of happy customers. It's growing extremely fast. What made you ultimately decide to sell the business?

A Yeah. There was a couple different factors that came into it. Um, you know, I would say the primary one was that I had a child in twenty-twenty-two. Um, that was a little bit eye-opening for me. I was, it was the first time I had a child, so I, I, taking on that task was, was a lot. Um, and I also really wanted to be involved in my son's life. Uh, as I mentioned before, I also work full-time in a, as a national account director in my full-time job, and so I'm traveling a lot. Um, you know, I have a lot of responsibility there. Mixed in with this e-commerce business that I was trying to scale and grow. Um, I would say that that was the primary reason was, was limitation in time. Um, I had done a great job of automating the business, but the limitation in time to be able to scale the business to the next chapter and, and continue making it worth my time. Let's say there was a lot of opportunity with that business. Um, we'd slowed down the marketing side of it and really relied on word of mouth. And I felt that I was doing a disservice to the Baby that I created, uh, it being the business, not my actual child.

AI assessment note: “I would say the primary one was that I had a child in twenty-twenty-two.”

Q And then what about the transferring of assets when you moved over the billing account and the buyer was reviewing the financials and the product? Um, how did that process go and how long did that take?

A That was also super smooth. I like the entire transfer of assets and everything. I think took less than Three, three days or two days, something like that. It was super, super quick. We moved, uh, from acquired to their partner. Uh, uh, it's escrow.com, I think. And it made it so easy. I mean, we were obviously, we also had this support agent that was emailing us super quick responses and everything. So it was so easy to get everything done. Um, super friendly people as well. And, um, Everything was automated. Uh, I really liked this. So you had the LOI that both were able to sign and then it tells you everything step by step. So like don't transfer assets yet. Wait for him to make the escrow payment. And then you see all the status, the status, and you see all the updates about it. I really loved that. And it was super quick.

AI assessment note: “I think took less than Three, three days or two days, something like that.”

Q Nice. What was the business model? Was it like a placement service? Was it a monthly subscription fee? What did that look like?

A Yeah. We thought about doing a finder's fee early on, but because I've, I come from the cleaning world where everything is recurring revenue, you want someone who's going to come to your house and clean every week or every month on a regular schedule. It had been ingrained in me to, to when I do a business to make it a recurring monthly revenue type of business. And so You can charge a lot for a finder's fee. You can charge five, seven, 15,000 dollars for placing a great office manager, but it's a one-time thing. So, um, I'd started out with a small group of people on a beta, and I just said, hey, look, I'm happy to train them for you, happy to manage them for you, um, but in return, I would like to charge you, um, this much per month in a set, uh, set hourly package. So the way that we bill is a little different than you would pay an employee. So an employee, you'd pay them for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, And you'd run payroll. Um, we do it differently and I'll tell you why. So in the home services industry, there's something that we kind of joke about called the valley of despair. And what the valley of despair is, is when you're running a home service business, sort of between 205 100,000 dollars per year in revenue, there's a valley where you're profitable and you're very busy, but you as the owner are not profitable enough to actually hire a full-time office manage…

AI assessment note: “charge you, um, this much per month in a set, uh, set hourly package.”

Q But yeah, tell me about due diligence. How did that go?

A Uh, painful, I would say, but good. I mean, closed, right? So, um, I had done basic due diligence before, so I kind of knew what to expect, but I'd never done it at this level before. So, just, just to give a little background, the person who bought it owns a fund of other companies. So, His experience is extremely professional. He's not just a guy with some money buying the business. He was coming at it from a private fund perspective. So there was an intense amount of due diligence. So at least from my perspective, so he had, um, he had a list of, of a very long list of specific requests, um, that were very granular, you know, contracts for clients who'd left years ago. So he could review those to make sure there was no pending obligations, right? So So it wasn't just financial due diligence of your profit and loss statements and preparing those. It was, um, legal due diligence. It was making sure that I'm a US citizen, which I have been my whole life, but because I live abroad, you have to do a certificate of non-alien. I think it's called a FINRA, which is a certificate of not being a non-resident, right? So, so there was all these, um, small due diligence parts that you had to do, which I was not prepared for. Um, because they seemed fairly non-standard. So I will be honest with you, that was, that was a tough month. April first is when we started due diligence, and April …

AI assessment note: “painful, I would say, but good. I mean, closed, right?”

Q Nice. And then if you were giving advice for a founder that was launching a new product, um, where would you direct them? Would you tell them try cold outreach? Would you tell them social media posting, um, something different based on the business? Like, what advice, um, would you give to attract your first customers?

A Social media, I think, has become a little bit more crowded if you don't already have an audience for kind of your individual profile or business profile. Network, like personal networks are always going to be the best if you have them, or the second best then becomes alumni basis. So, um, Reached out to a lot of alumni, both from my undergrad and then my MBA program as well. And then after that, it kind of comes to like, you know, less easy ways of either cold outreach, putting together marketing, doing a product hunt launch, just figuring out ways to find where your buyers are going to be. So we did some things in the early days of like, you know, sponsoring newsletters, getting in front of influencers within our segment that wound up being really good and pretty scalable early on, which was helpful as well.

AI assessment note: “personal networks are always going to be the best if you have them”

Q Nice. That's awesome. Um, so tell me, why'd you want to sell the business? It was, you know, things were going well, product market fit, um, what, what did that decision look like?

A Yeah, uh, things were going great. I had a team of employees eventually, so it was just myself in 2020 through by, on average, one per year. Um, and when we were acquired, we had five employees, And I really just wanted to prioritize self in the process. So it's obviously a lot of work as a solar founder, bootstrap founder, um, reason, the reason for the sale was, um, to give myself a bit more time to focus on my health essentially. So at the end of 20, 23, I unfortunately had a pulmonary embolism. It's basically like a clot to the lung. Um, So, I was in hospital under critical condition for seven days, and it was just a bit of a wake-up call in terms of priorities, um, so I really wanted to focus on my, my mental health, my physical health, and a part of doing that would be to, you know, start to let go of a few responsibilities.

AI assessment note: “the reason for the sale was, um, to give myself a bit more time”

Q How did you grow it? I have so many questions now. Um, so it's a newsletter. I have to imagine the original owner, Did they have like a, a specific style of writing or content? Did you just kind of pick that off where they left off? Did you have a writer that came with the acquisition? How did you like keep the wheels going and how'd you grow it?

A Yeah. So I think it's important. Like every single person has an unfair advantage because of what they do for acquiring a certain company. So for us running an email outreach company, it's like, we know how to work lists. We know how to email people. And we're good at systemizing things, and we have employees who are already trained in ways where if you can feed ChatGPT a prompt, um, and you know what to tell it, then you can pretty, pretty easily replicate content to send out to people, so it's not going to take a ton of your time. Um, so we just saw that when we were doing, like, when we were talking to Olu, the original founder, we found out he had a list of A million names that were scraped of people who had searched digital nomad and Instagram, and it's a valuable list. If you have the infrastructure to email people, if you don't have the infrastructure, then it's kind of a wasted asset because it's so expensive to email, but we're like, oh, we already have the infrastructure. We can email people and ask if they want to join our newsletter. Um, so once we saw that piece of the puzzle, we were like, okay, like, Why not? Why not give it a try and see what we can do with this? We're pretty confident we can grow it. So yeah, that's why we acquired it. And then that's how essentially we grew it. Um, and then, uh, uh, We eventually got to a point where we're making good money on…

AI assessment note: “he had a list of A million names... We can email people”

Q Nice. Um, why do you want to sell the business?

A Yeah. So I was running it for about two years. I'm fully bootstrapped. I was the only dev working on the, on the business. And it was, I started off by being like, okay, let me see if I can build a mini Shopify. Shopify is this big, even if they got, you know, 10% of that, that'd be great. Um, but when I started selling, I realized that the market, uh, or the folks that I was sort of selling to, or the, where I found the most product market fit were, uh, you know, again, somebody, a teacher who's doing a bake sale, um, or a dentist on the street. Uh, those folks don't actually have a lot of volume of sales, and so if they don't have a lot of volume of sales, they're not going to spend a lot of money on a tool that helps them sell. And so because of that, I found LTV, the lifetime value of a customer was very low, um, uh, to the point where it's not going to be that massive success. So when I, when I sort of started to realize that, um, it was going to be a lifestyle business, um, and I ran that for a little bit, and then at some point, I had tried all of different ways to grow that lifetime value, and I couldn't do it, and I was like, hey, um, I think this is a natural end to, like, my capabilities of where I can take this business. So it's time to sort of exit out of that. Um, and in parallel, I was building another business, which is Engine. Um, that was a VC backable sort of…

AI assessment note: “I think this is a natural end to, like, my capabilities of where I can take this business.”

Q That's great. I like that. Let's talk about, um, GoIndexMe. What, uh, tell me about the product, what it do, what problem, what problem did it solve? Who's it for?

A Uh, so Goindex.me is a micro SAS that I built in 30 days. It solves the issue of indexing pages. Um, it's related to Google mostly, uh, because Google is the dominant search engine, uh, but it also, uh, would have eventually, um, interacted with other search engines like Bing. I didn't get to that point because I sold it, but that was the initial plan. So the issue is that you work on your content, you create this beautiful website with thousands of pages, and Google just doesn't show that content. You keep refreshing Google, and there's nothing there. There's like, 25 pages getting indexed, and all of the other content that you have built remains untouched. The official, so to speak, solution is to go into the Google Search Console and manually request indexing for the new pages that you have created. For one, that is limited to 10 requests per day. So if you have thousands of pages, that's simply unfeasible. You can never actually go through all of them. Your life will expire before you end up indexing all your webs, all of your pages. And secondly, it's, it's, it's not a guarantee that something will happen. So sometimes you need to re-request indexing. So keep on talking to Google. Goindex.me fixes that by using official Google APIs. That do the same thing, but on a larger scale, you're no longer limited to 10 requests per day. Actually, by integrating, um, you know, variou…

AI assessment note: “Goindex.me is a micro SAS that I built in 30 days. It solves the issue”

Q Gotcha. How many customers did you get for GoIndexMe before you ended up selling it?

A Uh, about 150. So it was a relatively small, um, website. It was growing steadily. Yeah, so that's the number. Approximately 150. In fact, the total number of users lifetime was around 500. Uh, but they churned a lot. So that was one of the issues I had with the website, the large-ish churn rate. Because as it turns out, Most people don't have huge websites, so it's quite rare to see a website that has more than, let's say, 5000 pages. That, that's a large number. And the tool itself, even on the lowest tier, so the cheapest option, indexed 6000 pages per month. So that's such a large number that most users would just come in, use it, the tool would do its job, and they would churn, because they would no longer need it. After a month. So that was one of the, the main headaches I had.

AI assessment note: “Uh, about 150. So it was a relatively small, um, website.”

Q Wow. That was, um, that was really straightforward. Did you have any like hiccups or speed bumps or delays or things that you thought were confusing? Maybe during due diligence or finding the buyer or anything at all?

A Uh, no, on your part, everything worked great. So the website is excellent. I really didn't have any questions or absurd, uh, problems with the website itself. Uh, there was something on my backend. Um, I didn't really set everything up correctly from the beginning, so some lessons learned there. Um, if you have side projects, keep them separate. So because I elicited it for sale, I also had to move some virtual machines around and Uh, virtual private servers. Um, but, but that, but again, that's, that's like general advice. If you're preparing to sell your company, make sure everything is completely isolated. So ideally you just hand out the username and the password and it's all transferred. It's done. Uh, that took a little tiny little bit of effort, like one day, something like that to set everything up correctly and make sure it works. Uh, but other than that, no hiccups. The person who acquired Goindex.me. Uh, they had previous experience acquiring various other startups on your platform. So this is, I think, their eighth acquisition, uh, numero ocho, now eight. So they told me that, you know, you have to, uh, have a USD account, blah, blah, blah. This is going to be, uh, you know, the due diligence is going to take, like, this amount of steps. So they walked me through it. As well. So I was, I felt like they were the one acquiring, but they, they guided me. So everything…

AI assessment note: “there was something on my backend... other than that, no hiccups.”