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
Ian Blair's next venture Laundry Sauce hit eight figures in 18 months
“There's kind of this, like, wide open market, and you know, it's scaled at, you know, eight figures in the first, like, year and a half, so it's,”
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”
Mark Givko closed the GoIndex.me acquisition five days after the initial conversation
“Monday we had our first conversation and by Friday it was completely sold. The cash hit my bank account, the username and password, everything was transferred.”
Ginan: Every project built without a personal problem failed
“I think all the project I made using this concept. Failed in a way or another. Like for this one, I had the problem myself. I was like, okay, I tried to transcribe this and it didn't work well. So there is like, I had the need already. But for others, it's jus…”
Ginan: Untested production bug dropped TalkNotes sales by 70% overnight
“I shipped a bug to production. So I went to bed and I did it before going to bed. So I went to bed and the next morning I wake up, I have like 50 emails in my inbox. I see the sales down 70%.”
Fider reached an agreed sale on Acquire.com in just two weeks
“And I think I have noticed here that it took like two weeks to go from publishing on Acquire to Sale Agreed.”
Free self-hosted Fider instances generated SEO backlinks to the main site
“The open source side of the product is every time someone hosts it for free, even though I not can pay for that, they are giving me back a backlink.”
Metelsky: Sidekick AI Product Hunt Launch Generated Only One $19 Sale
“I launched it on Product Hunt, and it became a product number one of the week on Product Hunt, and there was a lot of hype around it, and I got some media attention, but long story told short, only, I made only one sale worth 19 bucks,”
Metelsky: Sitekick Received 50 To 60 Buyer Inquiries After Acquire Newsletter Feature
“What really helped is we got featured. I think you've got something like a daily featured startup section in your mailing list. And then one day also, I don't know, I got 50, 60 potential buyers reaching out”
Metelsky: Sitekick Received Over 100 Buyer Inquiries on Acquire.com
“I think we get like more than a hundred potential buyers reaching out on acquire.com”
Levy-Garboua: Noosa Labs doubled Sendtric's MRR in under two years
“It was one of the larger acquisitions we made both in terms of, it's actually our largest acquisition in terms of enterprise value. It was a good size. We've been able to grow it, grow MRR to X at least already in less than two years.”
Gazdecki: SaaS deals rarely use earnest money deposits and ease financial diligence
“Surprisingly on let's say the SAS side, we rarely see earnings, earnest money deposits. And then also quality of earnings are typically easier because everything's online, everything's digital.”
DiGiorgio: Swearit Sells Across the EU Driven by Wine Labeling Rules
“Most, most of what's where it's doing right now is actually in the EU because of some legislation around wine labeling in the EU. So, we're effectively selling into all the countries into the EU with it.”
InvoiceOwl reached 1,000 paying customers before its acquisition
“So if you count the number of users, it was like, 13,000 plus users. But like, customers, customers would be in like, thousand or something range.”
Jeel Patel's Upper Route Planner has reached $500,000 in ARR
“Already doing great on it. We are at like half a million dollars in ERR.”
Gazdecki: Luke Shepard sold his startup for $500,000 at age 23
“He recently got acquired for half a million bucks at age 23.”
Shepard: Revive Ratings acquired its first 200 customers via cold calling
“Yeah, that was all, that was our first 200 customers. Yeah, so all cold called.”
Shepard: 95% of competitor CEOs agreed to meet with college founder
“The other cool thing about college is, like, kind of like the secret is you just no one sees you as a threat, right? So I would actually, like, spend, like, probably, like, 30 minutes a week just messaging competitors on LinkedIn, their CEOs and stuff, and lik…”
Shepard: First acquisition deal collapsed due to buyer lacking funds
“He didn't have the money that he said that he did. And so it kind of the later acquisition about two months, which, you know, looking back, it's like, you know, kind of a drop in the bucket, right?”
Gazdecki: Bizness Apps hit tens of millions via 5,000 agency partners
“What you can do is you can take products and then offer a white label solution, and that's what we did, and we sold to over 5000 agencies all across the world in, like, 75 different countries, and so, essentially, what it allowed us to do is kind of have, like…”
Gazdecki: David Idol's extension reached 279k weekly active users with zero marketing
“So, you know, two million
Organic impressions.
Two, 279,000 weekly active users with no advertising or marketing.”
Sinise: Linq Commerce hit 1,000 users in its first month
“And then soon after in the first month, we had at least a thousand users free and paid.”
Quayam: SEO drove over 95% of ESG Analytics inbound leads
“And actually to this date, SEO Is the source and has been the source and was the source of 95 plus percent of our leads coming in.”
Schroter: Winding down a company costs tens of thousands at minimum
“It costs tens of thousands of dollars at the very least in legal fees and in, in consulting financial fees in order to officially wind down a company.”
TrustApps Sold to Their First Potential Buyer After Two Weeks
“And the first potential buyer that we talked to, like the first time in, in, in, in video call in zoom to talk about that. This was a buyer. He bought the store app like two weeks later.”
Martin Galovic: FansMetrics Peaked at Six Million Monthly Visitors
“Within a year, around one million people came to the site every month, and at the peak of it, there was probably like six million people visiting the site every month.”
Martin Galovic Built All FansMetrics Code and Technical Infrastructure Solo
“I coded like everything to go to infrastructure, basically all technical stuff.”
Martin Galovic: FansMetrics Achieved 50% Month-Over-Month Early Stage Growth
“It was just, like, growing steadily, and by steadily, I mean, it was, like, 50% month-over-month growth, which is, like, pretty big.”
Gazdecki: Stock Alarm was recently acquired for $500,000
“Alright, I'm here with Yahia, who recently got acquired for Half million dollars for a startup called Stock Alarm.”
Bakour: Stock Alarm's Recurring Revenue Tripled During GameStop Trading Surge
“Our RR, like, tripled in one month. That was, like, one of our best months ever.”
Bakour: Hundreds of Wealth Management Firms Used Stock Alarm's Individual Plans
“Because we had a couple of hundred wealth management firms using it on individual plans, right? Like one person from this firm or one person from that firm.”
Vanderheide: US-Canada Acquisitions Cannot Directly Transfer Stripe Accounts
“Because I was Canadian, getting acquired by American companies, we couldn't just transfer the Stripe account because it's, like, set as a Canadian entity type thing, so we had to actually, like, switch over Stripe keys and stuff, which wasn't as seamless, but …”
Aiello: DimeADozen generated roughly 80,000 business reports
“I mean, we've generated, I don't know, I think they're up to 80,080 thousand business reports for these people, you know, a good percent of those paid, meaning they got the full forty-page report and not just the initial report.”
Aiello: Unprompted viral influencer video drove $15K revenue in three days
“A influencer out of nowhere who had a lot of followers posted a video that went way beyond his user base. He ended up getting 1.2 million views, and we made, like, call it 15,000 dollars in, in three days.”
Gazdecki: Podseeker was acquired for a six-figure valuation
“All right, I'm here with Simon, the founder of Podseeker, who recently got acquired for six figures.”
Amazon launched a free competitor one month after Gazdecki sold his startup
“When I sold my previous business, it was a drag and drop mobile app builder. Within a month, Amazon released a free version of what I had built.”
Thompson: Podseeker suffered high churn due to non-recurring user needs
“One thing about Podseeker is it was a great business and it always brought on new customers, but it was a really high-churn business. Like the problem, it solves a real problem, but it's not necessarily a recurring problem for a lot of people.”
Lynch: A single TikTok generated two million views and $10k for Solodrop
“So I made a TikTok account and within like a month, I think I got like 1.5 to two million views on a couple videos and it did really well. Yeah. And it generated like, I don't know what it was. I think it was like getting close to like 10 K in revenue for the …”
Gazdecki: Minnow was acquired for a seven-figure sum
“Former founder of Manao, who recently got acquired for seven figures.”
Bickhart: Minnow broke into Apple's top 200 apps on launch day
“On lunch day, we broke into Apple's top 200 apps on the lunch day, and we never know a lot of that until we sold.”
Bickhart: Instagram meme account drove 400 daily app downloads for Minnow
“We built one of the fastest growing Film and TV meme accounts on Instagram, and at its peak, we had over 600,000 followers including big celebrities, and we're promoting new movies on platforms, old movies on platforms, things that are coming, things that are …”
Bickhart: Minnow's 13-month sale required six buyer meetings for one term sheet
“We had six in-person meetings with large companies. Everyone from like four to 500 to So the largest nonprofits in the world that could benefit from the technology that we built. So six in-person meetings translated into three real diligence meetings where the…”
Bickhart: Letting the buyer draft transaction documents saved 90% in legal fees
“They drafted all of the language, and so we just did contract, which probably saved me 90% of our legal bill for the trade.”
Gazdecki: Selling his first startup cost $170,000 in legal fees at $1,000/hour
“Mine was a hundred and, like, 70,000, but we hired, like, Pillsbury, and they did they, yeah, it was over a thousand an hour”
Gazdecki: SimpleInk was recently acquired for a six-figure sum
“I'm here with Daniel, the founder of Simple Inc, who recently got acquired for six figures.”
Daniel Ch: Simple.ink acquired its first users via discounted annual pre-orders
“We were selling a pre-order, so I think we had a pre-order for something like Six dollars a month, and when we launched, it was 12 dollars a month, so we had, like you would pay for a year upfront and get 50% off, and that's how we got our first users”
Daniel Ch: Simple.ink validated market demand using a mockup video before launch
“For us, I just made a simple preview of the app, it wasn't even actually the app, it was a bit of a, kind of like the iPhone demos back in the day, it was a bit like a movie of the no-code app, I made it To look like simple.ink, but in turn, I knew that when w…”