The Ledger
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Cooke avoided aggressive negotiations to protect the Pulse acquisition deal
“Where I had, like we had valued the business right in the middle of the valuation range. And I think that's fair. And I think they were getting a fair deal and they offered a fair price. So I wasn't really like with the size of the money we were talking about …”
Cooke leveraged an Irish tax relief scheme when selling Pulse
“So when I sold the company, I was able to take advantage of a far lower tax tax break compared to just paying myself through the company.”
Pulse had 360,000 users and over 100 B2B clients at acquisition
“So on the B to B side, I think there was over a hundred anything. And then on the B to C side the actual platform had grown to around about 360,000 users in like the database with around a thousand to 2000 daily active users within the desktop app.”
Cooke required an all-cash upfront deal for Pulse due to taxes
“I was also clear that I wanted cash up front because specifically for the tax break, it needed to be cash up front.”
Cooke: Pulse acquisition due diligence lasted two to three weeks
“That lasted for maybe, I'd say, two to three weeks, which I think was quite a short period, because I know it can go on quite longer”
Pulse received 50 to 100 inquiries overnight via Acquire newsletter
“And then I think it went out in a newsletter one of the days and I woke up the next morning and it was something like 50 or a hundred different requests to view the listing.”
Cooke: Pulse was built entirely by contractors hired on Upwork
“That was how it was built basically all through Upwork through contractors. And then as all the features were built out, we scaled the size of the team down and just focus more on the marketing and sales side of things.”
Cooke: Pulse never ran B2B marketing campaigns
“I never actually had to market the B to B side of it. The B to C side we did, but the actual B to B side where we were offering the platform for companies to use. I never actually did any marketing for that. It was always just through word of mouth or through …”
Cooke: Repurposing open-source itch.io caused technical debt and burned capital
“We tried using the open source platform, but it was a nightmare because what we found was as we tried to take that apart and make it work for our solution, every time we'd go one step back, we'd have to go two steps forward, and we'd Add one feature and would …”