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 0 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
Pekibar: Before and After generated over $100,000 ARR before sale
“At the end it was more than a 100,000 a year.”
Pekibar: Before and After reached 50,000 websites and 3,500 paying customers
“I think we had around 30, no, Around 50,000 websites had this widget on, and I think around 3500 customers, so paying customers.”
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.”
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 …”
A near-fatal pulmonary embolism in 2023 prompted Fourie to sell Pluto LMS
“The reason for the sale was to give myself a bit more time to focus on my health essentially. So at the end of 20, 23, I unfortunately had a pulmonary embolism. It's basically like a clot to the lung. So, I was in hospital under critical condition for seven da…”
Pluto LMS secured an LOI just two weeks after listing on Acquire.com
“So we, I listed had a letter of intent in two weeks. So I only had about 10, no, It was probably around eight, eight to 10 calls from listings, so got the LOI around two weeks after listing, so it happened, that was what was actually more of a surprise to me. …”
The Pluto LMS acquisition closed without a valuation reduction from the LOI
“When we actually did the final agreement, it wasn't far off the letter of intent there wasn't a reduction in value that, that was positive, you know, we stuck to the value the terms were mutually beneficial to myself and to the acquirers”
Rosen: Nomad Cloud was acquired for half its listing price
“We got it for like half the listing price and ended up acquiring it.”
Rosen: Nomad Cloud received two offers above asking within three days
“And then within three days, we had two offers that were both above asking. So one that was one and a half times, and then the other that was double the asking price.”
Saini: Listed Reetail at a 3x multiple, well below typical SaaS valuations
“I had listed it for three X. So way below the five or six X.”
Domofsky Expanded by Saying Yes and Learning on the Fly
“I had very much a yes mentality for anything that came up. So some doctors would ask, you know, do you do websites? Do you do SEO? And the short answer was always yes. And then I'd go home and Google for a couple hours and learn and research and try and figure…”
ForMJ Social Lost 25% of Revenue in a Single Phone Call
“Private equity had their own internal teams. So they reluctantly had to had to essentially fire us as the digital agency through Through too much success, we got fired, basically. And it was a real harsh reality of the landscape of the world, the landscape of …”
Mark Givko built, grew, and sold GoIndex.me within seven months
“I built it in 30 days, launched it grew it with ads for another four or six months. And then sold it through acquire.com.”
Ginan: TalkNotes lost a $220,000 offer when the buyer acquired another startup
“I had like two, like real offer. So I had one for 220. But the this buyer can sell at the last minute. So I think he bought another startup in the meantime or something like that.”
Fider reached $1,000 MRR on autopilot after transitioning from free to paid
“So, I think I got to, like, around thousand MRR. From that going from free to paid, which is not a lot, but at the same time, from someone who is not getting anything on this site, brother, to getting a thousand dollars from, was paying my mortgage, basically,…”
Metelsky: Sitekick received three legitimate LOI offers during acquisition process
“The things really started speeding up when we've got our second offer and then the third offer. So technically I had three legit offers. With LOI.”
Metelsky: Sitekick.ai Acquirer Won Deal With 10% Refundable Retainer
“And the next day he reached out to me and he told me, Hey, let me just say just transfer a 10% retainer to your account. Just you know, we will sign a small LOI where we will say that it has to be refundable if the deal doesn't fall through, but otherwise, let…”
Levy-Garboua: Noosa Labs targets bootstrapped SaaS with $200k-$800k ARR
“So we look at businesses that are between 208 hundred K of ARR. We look at businesses that are typically bootstrapped No team beyond the founders or maybe a few contractors here and there.”
Pacifici: SMB Law Group closed $950M in enterprise value last year
“Well, last year we closed about nine hundred and fifty million enterprise value. The amount that we, those are closings. The amount that we worked on is in the several billion and then in terms of sheer number, maybe a couple hundred transactions that we've wo…”
DiGiorgio Used a Stock Purchase to Avoid Creating a Spanish Entity
“We decided to actually do an equity deal. With them and actually purchase stock. So it wasn't an asset. So, because I didn't want to go through trying to figure out how to set up a company in Spain.”
DiGiorgio: 1840 Leaves Rollover Equity in Acquisitions to Retain Founder Support
“What we've done with some of our deal, with our two deals is actually we've left them with a piece of the equity. So, we require most. But, you know, we hopefully are giving them a taste at the end. So we, so they would help us more. With the transition and be…”
InvoiceOwl started its SEO strategy six months before building an MVP
“We didn't have the product. He started the SEO six months before we had even the MVP, like before even we started working on the MVP, we had started the SEO six months before that.”
Shaaban received 60 to 70 signed NDAs during SaaS acquisition process
“I think we got close to, like, 60 or 70 NDAs, if I'm not mistaken. It was definitely in that range.”
Shepard: Revive Ratings sold for $500K with a 90-day SBA loan process
“So I think in total it ended up taking, like, Almost 90 days to get it all the way processed. And, like, we weren't, like, a huge acquisition, you know? Like, 500 grand is, it's good, but, like, Acquire.com is selling much bigger deals, but the SBA loan just t…”
Shepard would pay 2% higher interest to avoid SBA loans
“Okay, but I did, I told myself, ah, if I got to pay an extra two percent interest rate, I'll do that to avoid an SBA next time when I made an acquisition.”
Idol: Keyboard and Mouse for xCloud hit 250K users and $4K/month
“So within like a few months, I had like, 250,000 active users. And was making about 4000 dollars a month or so in new activations.”
Schroter: Startups.com evaluated over 100 venture-backed startups and acquired six
“We end up talking to, and doing diligence on over a hundred different venture-funded startups, And we ended up pulling the trigger on six of which all six completed.”
Martin Galovic Founded FansMetrics at 20 and Sold It at 22
“So when I was probably 20, I started fencematrix.com, which is to this day, it's biggest only fun search engine, and then when I was 22, I sold it To a German company which noticed it through acquire.com.”
Ken Savage: Product Launch Pro sale yielded over $200,000 payout
“I do the online banking thing, looked up, and there's 200 and something thousand dollars there”
Gazdecki: Traded Valuation for All-Cash Deal and 90-Day Exit
“When I did my acquisition that's what I negotiated the most over actual valuation was all cash at clothes. I was out of the business in 90 days because those are the things that were important to me.”
Vanderheide Recreated Sunsetted Zendesk Apps for One Dollar Per Agent Monthly
“So I recreated a bunch of the apps that had been available for free nominal price of, you know, one dollar per support agent per month and managed to get those out really quick.”
Aiello: DimeADozen was built and launched in three to four days
“So then we took three days, four days, wrapped up all the prompts we put together and all the research and launched the site.”
Aiello: DimeADozen generated up to $40K in three months with broken MVP
“We launched it in four days. I hated that website and Lord knows she did too, as a designer and product designer. It was a disaster, and it was, we have no user authentication. Add 50 different fonts, 30 different margins. Our landing page looked terrible. Obv…”
Aiello: DimeADozen listed on Acquire.com at 3x revenue after six months
“So all that being said, so we figured out a price point that we were happy with. It was about three times revenue at that time, which is silly, or which is rough because we were only six months old, but you know, we decided what we decided, put it up at three …”
Gazdecki: Crypto exchange compliance would have cost $10 million and two years
“We're in the regulatory compliance business and the capital to take the business to market would be we estimated around like ten million and then two years because we'd have to get a broker-dealer license, money transmitter license.”
Gazdecki: Sold crypto startup to a strategic buyer to bypass licensing costs
“So what we did was we positioned the company to sell and
we took the technology and then ended up selling it to a strategic buyer, someone who had the regulatory compliance.”
Bickhart: Minnow rolled 25 investors into a single SPV for its acquisition
“And so we rolled everybody up into like an SPV LLC. And they acquired that one LLC.”
Gazdecki: Acquire.com bans buyers who strategically reprice deals near closing
“Anyone who does that on acquire.com, we unfortunately ban buyers that do that. So it depends. It, if it's on a what we would deem as, you know, egregious, where there's no, if it's repriced based on information you had at day one, and we feel that that was you…”
Sorbara: Multiple acquisition offers for Barkley HQ were identical
“Cause a lot of the offers were the exact same.”
Alan Li: Moxa struggled to achieve positive LTV-to-CAC with paid ads
“What we realized was it was really tough to have a positive LTV to CAC on peer paid advertising.”
Li: Moxa chose an all-cash Acquire.com offer over stock and earnouts
“We decided to go with the buyer on acquired because they were able to make an all cash offer. The other buyer wanted to do sort of a mix of stock and earn outs which just made it a little bit more messy.”
Spera: GrowthBar rejected a seven-figure acquisition offer due to significant earnouts
“We got one that was a seven figure offer, but it came with a pretty significant earn out. So we ultimately passed on that.”
Molina: Tweet Hunter sold to Lempire for $1.4M at 1x ARR
“We built and sold TweetHunter, which is kind of a tweet scheduler just recently on Twitter, and we sold it to Limpire for 1.4 mil, which was, like, around one XAR maybe, like, six months ago, that was 20, 21, and yeah, that's how I connected with Andrew.”
Gazdecki started a crypto startup during Bizness Apps due diligence
“So I ended up starting a crypto company called all coin. That one wasn't nearly as successful, but I was, Literally building a company, like, during due diligence”
Gazdecki: Acquire.com evaluates over 3,000 startup listings per month
“But we see like, 3000 plus startups a month, so I kind of lose track at times.”
Molina tied his Tweet Hunter equity vesting to specific MRR milestones
“The way we structured that was, I was going to get 10% at launch. I was going to get 15% at 25 K AMR. I believe, and I was going to get 25% at forty-pay MRR”
Gazdecki waited eight months before working full-time on Acquire.com
“Even I didn't jump right into like you know, choir, I kind of took, put my toe in there, thought, figured out if there was anything real and then I jumped in full-time yeah, maybe like Eight months after launch or something like that. Six months.”
Scott: A Podcast Company offered performance guarantees to B2B clients
“We only do that for businesses and we handpick all our clients or they will soon handpick all their clients. So that's also part of the sort of magic sauce is the fact that we don't take everyone. Everyone has to go through an application process and an interv…”