Osterman: Career readiness organizations are an underserved and viable SaaS niche
Harris Osterman · How to Build SaaS for an Industry No One Knows About (Except Your Customers) · Oct 16, 2024 · at 7:11
Harris Osterman, founder of Talk Hiring, explains his company's strategy targeting career readiness organizations and workforce development programs.
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“We really focused on the niche of career readiness organizations because they were very underserved as a market and a good, you know, business to build off of.”
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More from Harris Osterman
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“There's also a point when you're in an acquisition process where you have a bunch of people interested, but no one's going to jump until someone else jumps and like gives you an offer or like there's some deadline.”
Osterman: Working capital requirements can secretly gut your acquisition proceeds
“Working capital requirements can really screw you over, you know, cut your deal.”
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“Once you sign the LOI now the buyer has all the power, and, like, if they back out, now you have to go back to the other buyers.”
Osterman rejected higher acquisition offers to avoid post-sale earnout requirements
“There were offers that would have earned me a lot more money, but I'm not going to be running the business anymore. So I don't really want to do that.”
Osterman: Three consecutive profitable years guarantees buyer confidence in SaaS
“If you run a business, and it has at least three consecutive prior years of profit, and like, let's say six figures of profit, like a very small amount that's what buyers want. So, like, there are a lot of companies that have had a lot of profit, but they're p…”
Osterman: Talk Hiring evaluated seven acquisition offers from varied buyers
“We had seven different offers that we were considering but it was tough to vet all of them, and, like, some of them were public companies, some of them were private startups, some of them were, like, individuals, some of them were search funds”