The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 388 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gazdecki: It takes nine follow-ups for a prospect to respond in sales
“And it actually takes nine, nine follow-ups for someone to get, for someone to finally get back to you in sales.”
Spera: GrowthBar was generating $318,000 in annual recurring revenue upon acquisition
“Yeah 318,000 dollars. You asked for a range. I actually, I know what the number was, three 18.”
Kim tested 50% transaction fees on his manual campus marketplace MVP
“Like, I was making money, and I was actually implementing manual transaction fees just to see. I, we actually played, I played around transaction fees to a point where I would get 50% transaction fee, and it was crazy because, like, these students wouldn't car…”
Gazdecki: 80% of founders sell their startup to build something new
“Generally, 80% of the time someone's selling a business, they want to start something new. That's like the main reason for sale.”
Gazdecki: Over 90% of startup buyers request post-sale transition support
“I would say almost 90% plus buyers will ask for some sort of transition period.”
Gazdecki: Many pre-revenue marketplace submissions are scam clone scripts
“Users, people using the product, so anything that's just not, hey, I built this, no one's using it because when we list those, we don't know if it has bugs, if it's a clone script, which is a very common item that we actually see is people will just buy a pre-…”
Gazdecki: Slow Founder Communication Causes 90% of Stalled Acquisitions
“When I've seen acquisitions not fall through, we'll go and, you know, give advice to the founder, kind of look, and nine times out of 10, we'll see chat logs not responded to, we'll see you know, questions answered three days later. What that does is it signal…”
Gazdecki: Overpricing is the primary reason startups fail to sell
“The number one reason that startups don't sell on acquire.com is overpricing”
Mellstrom: Generational turnover in blue-collar SMBs will drive modern software adoption
“Look at like your local HVAC company. It's probably a 50 or 60 year old guy that owns the company. And he's thinking about, you know, either selling it or passing it down to his son. Either way, the new owner is going to be slightly more sophisticated than the…”
JJ Englert built Bubble no-code systems processing 20 million monthly workflows
“Over the last year and a half, I've built no code systems that natively on bubble process over twenty million workflows a month without a problem, right?”
Amann: Spotify was the first to implement the bottom navigation bar on iOS
“The features that they put out are revolutionary, and they end up being industry leaders in a lot of areas, and it's very minor things. They were the first ones to put the bottom bar on iOS, and everybody followed suit”
Gazdecki: Overpricing is top reason startups fail to sell on MicroAcquire
“Yeah, I would say that's probably the number one reason we see startups not sell on Microquire is when they just price way too high.”
Gazdecki: MicroAcquire averages two to three acquisitions per day
“Believe it or not, at this point, we're seeing typically on average, usually two or three acquisitions per day.”
Keeley: More venture orphans unable to raise will seek acquisitions
“What's exciting to us is, like, more of these companies that are, like, struggling to raise their next round, like these venture orphans. I've seen a few come up on Microquire. I think we're going to see more of those pop up.”
Gazdecki: BareMetrics doubled its total revenue in one day after doubling prices
“Yeah, that was fascinating because for those listening BareMetrics is a SaaS analytics tool, and they have something called, I believe OpenMetrics or something like that, so you can see how much money in real time BareMetrics is making, and when they doubled p…”
Achard: WeWork-owned Meetup tested charging free users $2 to RSVP
“This was when meetup was owned by WeWork, and they were going to do something very strange. They were going to try to charge free users two dollars to RSVP, to free events, They were calling it a pricing test.”
Gazdecki: Founders Will Increasingly Build Startups Specifically to Sell
“It's almost like I can see a future where, you know, people are able to build products specifically to sell them to someone else. And then you get to go back to doing what you love, which is building.”
Almost every startup pitching Speiser is seeking emergency bridge funding
“I do a bunch of angel investing and every, almost every single contact that has reached out has asked for like a bridge round or some sort of emergency, you know, cash infusion. They're all looking at somewhere between six and eight months of runway before the…”
Davis: Downturn-driven founders will build IPO companies within a decade
“A lot of great people who maybe didn't have the risk appetite for entrepreneurship, maybe aren't as insane as you and I are when we do it kind of addictively, are going to come out and build wonderful organizations that we'll be talking about in five or 10 yea…”
Drury: Macro environment and inflation may slightly lower acquisition multiples
“I think this less so Shopify's earnings, but more so like the macro economic environment, inflationary environment will change the acquisition space a little bit. It might take multiples down a hair. They've been crazy high. Maybe that'll happen for those sell…”
Drury: Economic Downturn Will Expose Vaporware Apps and Ineffective Rollups
“And I think we're going to see a lot of like, what are the apps that are just like vaporware and not really doing anything to contribute to a merchant's bottom line? What are the companies that haven't been able to add value when they buy up these apps?”
First-time buyers will drive a surge in micro-PE acquisition activity
“I think we're going to see a lot more just general private equity activity specifically from first time buyers, like people, you know, just hearing about the success of like, You know, basically you know, entrepreneurship through acquisition is, is really beco…”
Successive stewardship will eventually create 100-year-old SaaS businesses
“There will be a time where you can look at a SaaS company and be like, that's a hundred year old SaaS business, and it's going to take, you know, a bunch of different people to kind of keep that going, and hopefully continue to add value to the community it se…”
Jabbar: Cash-Burning Startups Will Struggle to Raise and Face Bankruptcy or Sale
“I think like midterm, you also see even not just like buyers, but you know, VCs, investors will also be like more risk averse. So I wouldn't be surprised if like some of those high growth cash burning startups, like rely on constantly, you know, new rounds to …”
Kosarek: E-commerce merchants with under $10M revenue lack fast exit options
“A merchant maybe, you know, making in the one to ten million revenue range doesn't have as many options to pursue a fast and easy exit as you know, merchants that have achieved, you know, escape velocity above that ten million dollar mark.”
Garcia predicts acquired startup Monster VoIP can scale to $10 million ARR
“I think Monster, we could, I could scale that to, you know, 10, ten million dollars in AR are pretty, Not, not easily. It's been a long haul G-Twelve as an example to get past that, but ultimately I think it'd be a ten million dollar organization.”
Garcia predicts Engage.co can scale past $10 million ARR over ten years
“I think the shelf life is at least another 10 years for something like that. And I think that could scale to, you know, well over ten million dollars in ARR on its own.”
Garcia claims no telecom provider offers active listening AI softphone receptionists
“Nobody in the phone business has that today. Like they just don't have that. They have an IVR or they have an, you know, an auto attendant and stuff like that, but they don't have like someone that's actively listening and doing something while they're talking…”
Crennan predicted in April 2022 that tech valuations would contract
“And so I think over the next 12 months or 20, 22, I think we're going to see some really bubbly valuations that we've had start to contract down again.”
Patel: Mailshake integration tripled Warm Up Your Email revenue with no marketing
“We literally gave it away for free to Mailshake customers, and, like, did, we updated the product. We did no marketing on the property. We just kept it as is, and we tripled revenue for it, right?”
Patel: Voila Norbert roughly tripled in year one from basic CRO
“I think, and we almost like three X in the first like year. I think it was a little over three X, but like it was basic conversion rate optimization, like simple, like button size, color, like headline copy, redo, you know, simplifying the signup and onboardin…”
Patel: Startup valuation expectations will normalize and decline in 2022
“I do think the market will normalize this year. It's already had a bit of a correction. And I think when I say normalize, I think it's been pretty stable. Like buyers like myself have kind of had a formula for how much we evaluate a company for a while. But th…”
Gazdecki: Startups connecting live analytics on MicroAcquire get 500% more requests
“We have data around startups that connect Stripe, or Barometrics, or any sort of analytics within MicroQuare. They get, like, 500% more buyer requests, because it really cuts down on the due diligence of the buyer.”
Jakaitis: Chatkick Faced Escrow.com Payment Delays Up to Three Weeks
“Like, we used escrow.com for our payments, and we had all sorts of issues getting payments into the platform, and then also out like, delays up to two to three weeks, which was, Challenging because you want to impart trust on each other, but at the same time, …”
Toledano predicts his $500K MicroAngel portfolio will return 2x in two years
“And because they are growing really slowly over a period of two years, they'll reach a certain point where the value of my portfolio will allow me to sell it. So I can perceive a two X return on that half a million dollars two years later.”
Calderon: StratDev Grew ~118% Year-Over-Year Over Five Years
“In the five years of us or me running the business I was able to grow the business about a 118% year over year.”
Calderon engaged 215 potential buyers to secure 11 LOIs for StratDev
“As a result, I think we spoke to 215 total buyers on an offer. We got 11 LOIs”
Imran's marketing agency FISMA was acquired before he turned 18.
“We grew to be one of the largest marketing agencies in Atlanta. We ended up working with a lot of fortune, 500 Some names like Avid, McDonald's, and many others that other people probably recognize, and we did web development and influencer work for them. We g…”
Imran's Business Blurb generated one billion Gen Z views in three months.
“We got a billion views in three months, and all we did was take news from other platforms and put them on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram in a manner that Jen's guest didn't understand it.”
Imran claims his startup Backspace accumulated a two-million-person waitlist.
“We spent hundreds of thousand dollars in building a product and engineers, and we had two million people on our wait list.”
Faze Imran: Peerbase raised $300K in days and sold on Acquire
“This time we raised our entire round was only 300 grand. For, in a couple days, and the company was actually a mental health company for entrepreneurs. It was called Peerbase. We sold this one on Acquire”
Imran: Scaled Fraction from $2M to $12M ARR in one year.
“And I took that company from two to twelve million in annual recurring revenue in a single year, very fast paced.”
Imran: Apple's 50-day payout delay creates severe cash flow obstacles for developers.
“Like, it takes about, like, 45, 50 days to get your money from Apple. And it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's a very big deal, especially if you're trying to scale paid.”
Zhang: Acquire.com Newsletters Drove 15 to 20 NDAs Each
“The newsletters was actually very, very helpful because I think we did like two newsletter blasts, which actually led to most of the, like, you know, NDAs like that came in. And then, so, you know, after each newsletter blast, we would have like a, like an inf…”
Gazdecki: Agencies Are Acquire.com's Second-Largest Transaction Category
“A lot of people don't know, but we do help a lot of agencies sell and acquire. That's our number two category before SAS.”
Manthani: Streamoid cut e-commerce client return rates by five percent
“And so, before using us, I think, you know, this customer had, like, a pretty high rate of returns, like, let's say, 35, 38%, and, you know, after we worked with them on improving their catalog quality, You know, it came down by five percent.”
Miller built Seen entirely with Claude and Lovable without writing code
“I've never written a line of code in my life. If you offered me ten million dollars and said, I need you to write one line of code, well, I wouldn't make ten million dollars. Like, there's no way. So yeah, relied almost entirely on, on Claude code, Claude just…”