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
Scott: Listed A Podcast Company at a 0.8x revenue multiple
“Now, part of that may be because I only did a 0.8 X valuation on revenue.”
Bragg: Lowering Potion's price to $350k generated 25 NDAs and 3 offers
“So after two weeks, I lowered it to 350 K had more people come through. I think I had like 25 ish people sign the NDA to kind of see more data, see more info. And out of that talk to around six people on like a call. And then out of that, three people like act…”
Noah Bragg: Automated Potion.so operations to reduce workload to two hours weekly
“Even with running the business potion, like, at the later ends of it, I was kind of just trying to automate more things and just, like, basically make it so it takes less of my time even with, like, customer support and things like that, and just being able to…”
Skaling Ventures targets SaaS acquisitions with $10K to $40K MRR
“And then right now we're playing in like the, you know, call it 10 to 40 K MRR. And we have a pretty structured quantitative scorecard that, that addresses some other things. So we fixate a lot of course on net revenue retention logo retention, some stuff like…”
Kirkovska: Studio built 10 no-code products in one year to find success
“Until now, I think we have around 10 products that we built since last year, No code. It's easy to build and test them. And we have one profitable business, which is voicepan.”
Gazdecki: Acquire.com rejects most of its hundreds of monthly pre-revenue startup submissions
“We get literally hundreds per month, and some of them are, you know, there's just not, if we don't have If we don't think we can help it sell, we won't list it.”
Benjamin: Renewal Tracking Received an LOI Within Seven Days on Acquire.com
“And then I think like within seven days we had an LOI.”
Daugherty Mandated That Camskins Buyers Retain His US Manufacturing Partner
“One of the requirements that I talked to all these guys with was if you buy cam skins, the manufacturer stays the same. I use a us manufacturer. These guys took a bet on me when I had basically no money in. And I basically gave them my life savings and was lik…”
Stefurak: Type/AI went from launch to acquisition exit in three weeks
“Yeah, I think the last one is my favorite one because it was the fastest exit I have ever done. Only like three weeks from launch to exit.”
Bardet retained a 10% equity stake in Clearly after its sale
“I retain like a 10% ownership in the product, too, so it's a little bit like I'm still there to help them with what I've seen, you know, the things that I've seen work, and the things I've seen not working, and stuff like that, but I'm not there on the day-to-…”
Testimonial shifts product focus from indie makers to e-commerce and large agencies
“That's a little bit outside of the indie maker stuff, like the wall of love from Twitter and G two and product. And now we're kind of going way beyond that and focusing on e-commerce and big agency stuff.”
MakeLogo.ai's MVP had no backend and was fulfilled manually
“So I just made like a HTML landing page with a type form and that's it. No backend. Basically people were paying and I was manually using the AI model to generate the logo and sending it by email. So that was my MVP.”
Ezeike: TripVisa acquirer offered to angel invest in new venture
“The person that acquired TripVisa, and the reason I was actually also selling that as well as there's a new startup I'm working on at the moment, they actually want to Do an angel investment into the new startup that I'm doing as well.”
Tran: Listed Queue.so at 7x to 8x ARR multiple on Acquire.com
“Like I needed to come up with the asking price, so like how much multiples of the ARR that I should ask for, and then I did a bunch of research, and then I asked a bunch of people, and then I come up with like seven or eight multiplies of the annual revenue, a…”
Tran finished Queue.so due diligence in two days with one call
“For me, when like, I think it was, it's done within two days. Like, yeah, like we had only one. Yeah, we had only one con. And then I did one video recording and then that's it. So like the day after we just finished everything.”
Tran: Queue.so acquisition payments were split into staged asset installments
“We decided to break it into two payments, two installments. So the first half, he will pay, and then after I get that first half, I will transfer the assets of the company to him, and then The last half of the installment, we will point that into three differe…”
E-commerce aggregator Staytuned acquired Tabarnapp in early 2023
“And well, long story short, we sold like two weeks ago to a company called Stay Tunic.”
Tabarnapp sold a doomed side application for $40,000 on MicroAcquire
“The smaller transaction of 40,000 US or something like that on microacquire was like, for us, more like a bonus. We didn't expect that. We were about to, I mean, sorry for the person who purchased that, that listens to the podcast, but we were about to shut it…”
Ryan Kulp has completed between 10 and 20 software acquisitions
“Maybe 10 or 12. I think total deals like 20. We've started things that we've then sold. So that was like a deal, but not an acquisition because we were the creator and the seller. And then we've done things where we bought it and resold it. We've bought things…”
Ryan Kulp's MicroAcquisitions course acts as a proprietary deal flow engine
“We've actually got at any given moment, a few deals in our inbox that are just there. You know, they're direct to us. They're not on marketplaces. They're unlisted. They're private deals just because microacquisitions exists.”
Culp Built and Sold NFT Tracker App for $1,750 Within Hours
“I built an app. That was an NFT tracker that would let you publish sales to, like, a Discord channel... Within seconds, maybe just a couple minutes of listing, I got a few messages, and within a couple hours, the money was in the bank, and it was done at, like…”
Culp: Educational Content Yields Unlisted Micro-PE Deal Flow
“We've actually got at any given moment, a few deals in our inbox that are just there. You know, they're direct to us. They're not on marketplaces. They're unlisted. They're private deals just because microacquisitions exists.”
A last-minute buyer offered $4,000 over asking price for Jump Studios
“And then the last moment, a new buyer emerged and offered 4000 dollars more than asking price.”
Englert used public demos and P&L records to filter out casual buyers
“The biggest thing that I did was I recorded a demo, I recorded customer interviews, and I made my P&L public, and I was like, here's everything, right? Don't really come at me unless you're ready, you've watched all that, and you're ready to actually have more…”
M&A brokers often reject clients under $120,000 in annual net profit
“The magical number seems to be about a 120 K net profit a year because somebody can quit their job, maybe not in California, but quit their job and like live on that. Right. And so, so that's this magical number. So yeah, we're typically not taking any clients…”
McDannell raised on $10M valuation and sold pre-revenue at a discount
“I started a tech company in 2018. We sold it last year, but not for, you know, it was very expensive to build out. Of course we didn't hit revenue. And so we had to sell it at a discount last year, but I was, it was like a fun time, you know, as I was in Los A…”
Gazdecki used fifth-year financial aid to skip classes and launch a startup
“I took a fifth year in college. So I can get financial aid to pay for my rent and food. And then I minored in entrepreneurship. Didn't go to any classes and started a business.”
McBride enrolled in an MBA program to incubate her new startup
“I literally went back to get my MBA because I thought I'm starting a new company. I loved starting a company in college. It provides so much, so many resources and so much protection from like the real world. No one really expects anything of you yet. But you …”
Keeley: Verne acquired BlinkSale for a six-figure price
“Yeah, it was six figures. I don't know if I could, I don't think I could say exact numbers, but in the six figures is owned by this guy, Brandon who was a serial founder and had done acquisitions before. So like we couldn't have possibly bet bought from like a…”
Keeley: Verne typically values acquisitions using SDE and pays 1-4x ARR
“Seller discretionary earnings is typically how we value it. And then we say we often pay, like, one to four times ARR”
Gazdecki chose all-cash over a higher seller-financed offer on Shopify app
“We bought a Shopify app as a group, me and some buddies, and we resold it on Microquire. We had a offer at a much higher price, but seller financing and all that stuff over 12 months. And I ended up taking the all cash offer just cause it's, you know, I don't …”
Gazdecki bought a Shopify SaaS for $60k and exited for all-cash
“I actually, I haven't announced this yet, but we bought Shopify SaaS for like, 60 K, like a year ago, and we had two offers. One was all cash, and one had seller financing. The all cash offer was a little lower, and I, without a doubt, I was like, let's go wit…”
Barlow & Williams charges a 0.5% flat fee with $10,000 minimum
“So our thing is, as you mentioned, it's flat fee. So it's one half a percent of the transaction size with a minimum of 10,000 dollars.”
Speiser sold Brax for over a 10x return in 18 months
“We ended up selling it for over 10 times what we paid.”
Speiser doubled his investment flipping a Shopify app in six months
“We ended up holding that one for six months and doubling our money, which I didn't like the space. I don't like being reliant on one platform.”
Speiser bought his first software business for six figures, exiting for seven
“The first business we bought for low six figures and sold for seven figures.”
Appregator: Shopify checkout functionality updates are our main acquisition focus
“There's a lot of like new and exciting things, especially with the updates that Shopify pushed to its checkout functionalities that, you know, are Right in the middle of our focus right now”
Abousleiman: Appregator targets an acquisition every one to two months
“I think our target is probably to be doing like an acquisition every month or every other month.”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures Buys Cash-Flowing Businesses to Hold Forever
“So enduring is a long-term holding company. What we do is we buy cash flowing businesses at reasonable prices and we pair them with great operators and we run them and we hold them as a portfolio forever. That's our plan.”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures owns 12 businesses, mostly from retiring owners
“We are now owners of 12 businesses two of them or three of them actually are tech companies. We also have a venture studio, so we've started a couple of businesses, but 90% of what we do is we buy businesses that are generating cash flow from retiring owners.”
Enduring Ventures is Structured as a C-Corp for QSBS Tax Benefits
“We do have QSPS designation for enduring ventures, which is a C corp and a holding company, and we are pretty strategic about making sure we set it up in the right way. Such that we could get that designation”
Gazdecki: Bizness Apps refused to build enterprise functionality to stay strictly SMB-focused
“At business apps, we in our, you know, values, like you were saying, we said we serve small businesses, so we never built like enterprise functionality.”
Nassar: Retained equity and manages marketing for Soil and Clay post-sale
“So we're actually still involved in the company. You know, we're vested into the company. And we still run the marketing behind the company.”
Nassar: 50% of interested startup buyers refused to sign an NDA
“And then, you know, I'd say off of that, like, 50% of the people didn't even sign it.”
XO Capital Acquired Inlytics
“I can name it, because it's public, so it's XO Capital from the United States.”
Jabbar says Horizen requires sub-3% churn and $1,500 minimum LTV
“And then the other criteria is, you know, looking at monthly churn of less than three percent and LTV of at least 1500.”
Polychrome Capital acquires SaaS companies with $50K to $3M in annual revenue
“In terms of revenue, I think we would honestly go anywhere from 50,000 dollars, even a year in revenue. That's pretty small, obviously, but definitely open to those conversations and probably all the way up to two, three million dollars in revenue.”