The Exchanges

Q What's your, uh, what's your favorite part through all this? Is it the buying? Is it the selling? Is it the growing?

A Um, I love the hunt, right? I love hunting for, for something. I think that's just, it's so exciting to kind of send out your LOIs and see what comes back and negotiate them and come up with these fun structures. I think that's really cool. Um, and then it's the, the first, you know, six to 12 months of kind of getting your hands dirty on, I'm the customer service rep and I'm the project manager. Um, I don't, I don't code. I never have, but I'm on all the standup calls and talking through, uh, you know, all the issues with the devs. I'm in JIRA every day. Um, so yeah, I love those beginning stages. You know, I think for me, like companies under 30 people are a ton of fun. Once you kind of break that 30 plus mark, and you know, I'm sure you're experiencing this too. It's like, you no longer have everyone directly reporting to. You have middle management. Um, politics start coming into the equation, although less so now with everyone being remote, that was really a, uh, you know, in office kind of thing. Um, yeah, so I, I like companies under 30 people, just a lot of fun for me.

AI assessment note: “I love the hunt, right? I love hunting for, for something.”

Q me more about the hunt. So you, so you, so you like hunting. I like that. Um, what do you, what, what do you look for, um, like to start, what are like the main qualities or attributes like that gets you excited aside from obviously price is probably in there. Um, but like, what kind of like gets you super excited when you come across a good acquisition opportunity?

A Um, you know, it's the same for me. Like when I look for real estate properties to buy, I like to start also with the oldest. So I sort from oldest first to kind of see who's kind of been sitting out there for the longest is going to be the most desperate. You know, who's the, the last girl at the dance who, uh, is all alone in the corner. Um, typically they're, you know, willing to negotiate significantly more on price than someone else. Um, so I do that. I also tend to look at the overall reviews for each company and the more negative the reviews are from customers, the more likely I'm going to be interested. I know that sounds really perverse. It doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but it has to be for certain reasons, right? Typically what I find is when founders kind of give up on a project, it may have been an amazing product, but they no longer service the customer. So customer service kind of gets overwhelmed and maybe there's no one doing customer service and no one's answering these emails. So you get all these one star reviews on whatever platform they're on. And it just destroys the reputation of the software. And then I come in and say, wow, you know, What they have is actually really cool. Maybe they answered their emails and got back to customers and fixed the bugs. They'd actually have something worthwhile again. So I do love to look at, you know, on…

AI assessment note: “I like to start also with the oldest. So I sort from oldest first”

Q kind of how, um, entrepreneurship works is you gotta find that initial mentor, and I've always found the best way is to just start doing cool shit, and then get someone who's like, oh, Joe, that's rad what you're doing, like, I'm also doing this, but with maybe two more zeros on it, um, so that's what I always tell people when they're like, where do I find a mentor?

A I mean, but that's reactive though, like, you can't, I wouldn't want to wait for someone to come to me, like, you need someone right away, you gotta be proactive, you gotta hit your DMs, You know, hit them on DM on Twitter, and find the people that you, like, look up to that, I mean, obviously don't shoot for the stars, like, you know, you're not gonna get a celebrity to mentor you out of the gate. Like, I don't know, if you can, great, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest that. You need someone who's, you know, successful, but not, like, celebrity successful. Otherwise, their, their DMs are probably flooded. Like, Sam, Sam Parr, who I was just talking to a couple minutes ago before we got on this, he said he gets 500 DMs a day.

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't want to wait for someone to come to me... you gotta be proactive”

Q Were you, and you were a CEO, I assume?

A Yeah. Yeah. We had, I don't remember how many square feet in Midtown, but it was enough to cost a million dollars a year in lease. All these video studios go on. It was, and it was my baby. I love that company. It was so much fun. Uh, and I was hoping to go on and do huge things with it. We were doing, you know, 60, seventy million a year in revenue. And then Facebook just dropped the hammer on us one day and, uh, kind of destroyed our business, which was my point with like Shopify. I'm just, I'm very nervous because of that. I'm very nervous to kind of put all my eggs in that one basket. So like right now, you know, I'm, I'm building a Twitter influence, you know, I'm building Twitter followers, and I love playing on Twitter, but I'm thinking to myself, like, when does Twitter just decide to change their algorithm, right? And maybe I don't see tweets from Andrew anymore from Joe. Maybe I see something else that Twitter wants to push out, um, which kind of leads you to, to like, you got to build your own newsletter, right? You got to kind of take your followers off of the platforms and own them yourself. Um, just something I've picked up over the years.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah. We had, I don't remember how many square feet”

Q So I keep hearing, um, in my head, you're doing big things. Um, I mean, you're buying applications for six figures, selling them for seven figures. Um, but what's, what's on like the, what's on the big map for Joe? Like what's big for, what's, what's big in your head? Like what's next for you, man? Like, yeah.

A Yeah. So, so as I said, you know, as I buy all these small staffs, I'm assuming at some .1 of them will kind of tickle my, my fancy and be like, all right, this is the one I want to Put in many years. And that's the other thing is I get very bored of these smaller companies after two years. I'm like, all right, I don't want to do the same thing anymore. Um, so I have a partner, uh, who also helps out a bunch and, you know, he, he helps manage it, but in terms of like bigger pictures. So either one of these SAS, you know, go gangbusters and takes off and I don't sell it for seven figures. I sell it for eight or nine figures. Um, but in what I think will really happen is the, the other stuff I'm working on, I have a whole other Um, so I just bought a SaaS. I bought two actually, uh, small ones two months ago. Um, and I merged them together, and now I'm like redoing the, the GUI, and hopefully it will be done, I don't even know what, what are we in August now? By the end of August, I can go out on Twitter and show everyone, uh, what, what I've been working on.

AI assessment note: “either one of these SAS, you know, go gangbusters and takes off”

Q Nice. And then in terms of, uh, okay, you find you hunt, Joe, you just went hunting. You found something, you know, you, you'd like to maybe bring home. Um, how do you, how do you structure your deals? Are they all cash? Are they a mixture? Um, like how do you, like what does an offer from Joe typically look like?

A Yeah. So usually I get, I get, I get emotional when I shouldn't. So I like to move very quickly because once I start like getting the gears going, I'm going to send an LOI for this. I start building a whole plan on how I'm going to take it over and how I'm going to build this thing out. Um, So I don't like to put a lot of hair in the deal. I like to tell the founder the truth, which is, like, I've done a bunch of these before. I move really fast. Like, I can have this closed within 48 hours, a week at most. 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. You just kind of fill in the variables, and you go from there. Um, so it really just comes down to diligence, and that's not terribly difficult to do. I don't understand why it takes companies a month to do diligence. Um, again, I'm not buying the company. I'm buying the asset. So there's also a very, very big distinction there. I get none of the liabilities, none of the debt, none of the issues that typically.

AI assessment note: “I'm not buying the company. I'm buying the asset.”