The Exchanges

Q which features to build that'll have the most impact on the most users. So that's, that's definitely a moment when, you know, you have, um, product market fit. I, I forgot one question though. Um, I know it's stock alarm does, you know, it's soccer alarm does. Do you want to just give like a brief sort of pitch on, Uh, what's like the problem that stock alarm was solving?

A Sure. So I'll go over the problem and also the value of products. There's always a question afterwards apply, but I was talking, the idea is super simple. It's, Hey, I want to get alerted when something happens in the stock market, right? So it's like an alarm for stocks pretty much. Um, so the idea, the original idea was, okay, if the price of something goes above a certain limit, give me a phone call and specifically a phone call, cause it goes through, you know, like if you don't have data for some reason, or you don't have internet, it'll still go through, right? That you can set. Even if you have D and D on, you could set like emergency bypass for certain phone numbers. So that was like a value prop, right? It's like, Hey, they'll still call you. Um, but then as time went on, it became, Hey, you can customize kind of strategies, uh, that'll alert you when something happens. Like for example, a certain technical was hit or there's earnings coming up or some mixture of those. Right. Um, so it became like a compound alerting like kind of platform.

AI assessment note: “I want to get alerted when something happens in the stock market”

Q That's awesome. Yeah, I can tell by the numbers. You guys did, did pretty, pretty damn good. Um, tell me about, um, how did you guys get your first, uh, customers?

A So I guess the first few were all just friends and family, right? Like people using it or friends of friends, you know, like, hey, someone launched this thing, like, try it out. But really, like, getting the first, you know, Getting past just like the first dollar pretty much was all like posting, uh, where our customers would have hung out. So at the time it was like Reddit or Quora if people are starting for certain or searching for certain types of questions or whatnot, like if you look up, you know, what's the best stock learning app on Quora, you'll see like hundreds, like tens of answers by me specifically, like just everywhere. Um, so posting, I like that ASO worked super well, right? So optimizing for certain keywords on the app store worked really nicely. Uh, a bunch of SEO stuff that I can get into if you're curious, but yeah, all of that helped us kind of go from like friends and family to random people finding, right? So like the first customers that we aren't forcing ourselves.

AI assessment note: “first few were all just friends and family... posting where our customers would have hung out”

Q Just, yeah, using data, basically, market data, and then getting it to the traders as soon as possible. I love apps like this. Um, tell me about, um, so things are going good. You're, you build a really profitable SaaS. Um, you know, it's, it's got, you know, tens of thousands of users, or actually hundreds of thousands of users. What made you decide to, uh, sell the business?

A So, this has always been, like, kind of a fun thing for us to work on. Also, in a sense, it was the first story. Real production app that like, that has tons of users that we built all on our own, right? We're all working in big tech companies. So chip code, it hits people, but this was different because we made all the decisions. So it was a real learning experience for us in the sense that, you know, we learned how to optimize for SEO. We learned how to build like an in-house referral or like affiliate program. For example, we learned how to, uh, you know, do certain like growth packs to get more people on certain days or certain times of the year or whatnot. So it was, it was great in that sense, but I don't think any of us were really Passionate about it necessarily. And it was taking up a lot of headspace because with something like this, um, you're always on call and it's a very like real time product in a sense. So like Friday night, if there's an outage, for example, and suddenly you're calling like tens of thousands of people, you kind of have, you have to deal with it immediately. Right. Um, and there weren't many outages actually, there was a countable number and the three years that we're working on it was more that it was constantly taking up headspace. None of us really wanted to, we're passionate about it anymore. So we're like, okay, It's time to do something ab…

AI assessment note: “I don't think any of us were really Passionate about it necessarily”

Q Nice. And then in terms of, um, you know, uh, due diligence, um, transferring, you know, the assets and all that fun stuff. How did that go? Any, any bombs? Was, was it smooth? Any advice for maybe other founders?

A Um, overall, it was, it was all right. I think one thing is, like, we're a cross-platform app, right? So Android, iOS, uh, and, and Stripe. So even though revenue might, like, revenue for Android and iOS would be higher than what they're actually getting, because, um, of the 15% hitting that Apple and Android take for business making under a middle year, um, if it's over, then they take 30%, right? So, like, We were advertising a certain MRR, and then afterwards they were like, oh, actually, but Apple's taking like, 15% off that, like, we, we didn't know about that. For example, right, there's like small things like that, um, as well as the makeup of the, the user base, right, like how many people are paying on the lowest tier versus on the highest tier, because that kind of gives them signal on, hey, maybe they can raise the price if, if the majority are in the highest tier, right, so they can raise the price even more and, and kind of do something with it. Um, maybe they had different expectations with that. There was one more thing along those lines. Oh, yeah. Also, our growth rate had kind of stagnated over, like, we had a weird, you remember the whole GameStop saga?

AI assessment note: “overall, it was, it was all right. I think one thing is”

Q Nice. So I, I usually like to start, um, moving over to the, the acquisition story. I usually like to start at the beginning, but I want to hear the, the end first. What did it feel like to get five, a half a million dollars wired over to you for someone that you built what sounds like on the side?

A Yeah, I mean, it, it, it's different. I guess it's, it's, it's kind of insane because you're like, okay, it's, you know, we're going to sell this thing as time goes on. And then, You know, one day it actually goes through, right? And you're like, oh, cool. I mean, we still, you know, we're helping out the buyers, um, great people by the way, but, uh, we're helping out the buyers every once in a while. They need to, if they have any questions, you know, it's a code base that was built over three years and we were three, three people doing it. So they have some questions sometimes, but otherwise, like, I don't know, it's, it's, it's a weird feeling. It's still feels a little bit surreal of like, oh, I built it. People are using it. People are still using it and it's out there in the world. Like without, right.

AI assessment note: “it's a weird feeling. It's still feels a little bit surreal”

Q I mean, you, you, you built something great. So again, congrats on that position, man. I'm, I'm, I'm impressed and happy with you. Um, but now I want to know, um, so you, you list on acquire.com. Can you tell me what happens within like the first two weeks? What did that look like?

A Yeah. So actually even before, for some reason I was hesitant to list on acquire. I had never used it before, to be honest, but I was like, I'm not even sure what's going on there. Um, no offense, but, uh, so I, I was asking around, I was like curious. I was, you know, seeing, okay, maybe we, we have some previous buyers. Maybe we can go back to them and talk to them and see how they were doing. But after a while we're like, Hey, like this is kind of a huge pain and none of us really want to work on it actively. So this is even more work to try to sell it. So we went to head, like I went to head, I went on acquire listed. It was pretty simple, uh, overall, right. Submitted it and submitted the price range. Etc. And then got some feedback back, like, Hey, from, from your team, like someone on the team, on a car team.

AI assessment note: “went on acquire listed. It was pretty simple, uh, overall, right. Submitted it”

Q great job putting together a P&L because that also leads to more buyer calls, people that are interested in learning more about the business because they can see, okay, this is a very profitable, fast growing SaaS business. Um, so I, I guess my next question would be, um, in terms of, um, The number of buyers that you spoke to, how many buyers did you speak to on acquire.com?

A We got a ton of people interested in it, right? And it does sound kind of like the way I think the way I phrase it, it sounds like a sexy thing. It's like, oh, zero marketing dollars spent. It gets like hundreds of downloads a day organically, et cetera. Um, runs on its own, basically like we, we made it sound pretty good. And then people like, we got tons of people reaching out to us pretty quick. Um, but finding the right buyer actually took like A few more weeks. Like people would reach out, they'd ask certain questions about, Hey, what is your, what's the split of like paying users between tiers or whatnot? They dive deep into like the metrics, like, Hey, how are you getting people? Where are most people coming from? How long before they leave, et cetera. And then I think also like certain people were interested in like different plays on the, on the start, the startup. Right. So like some people wanted to take it from a VTC product. They were in the wealth management space. Right. So they wanted to like, uh, for example, like, Take it, then offer it to their customers, and then at a much higher price point, because they have customers already using their products for certain things, so they were interested in a different way, like they're more interested in tech, for example. So, yeah.

AI assessment note: “We got a ton of people interested in it, right?”