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
Martin Galovic: FantasyGF Simulates Realistic Relationship Dynamics By Creating Friction
“And the second one is FantasyGF.ai, which is like an AI girlfriend site, which is more moderate compared to other competitors like DreamGF or Candy, because the girlfriends on their site, they are not like super eager to do everything you want. They're actuall…”
Savage: Product Launch Pro relies on thousands of gig workers for engagement boosting
“The whole secret with the whole thing is I built a team of hundreds of gig economy workers that can help me promote their stuff. And that team of hundreds is now thousands. And I utilize that Team, you know, more tweets, more likes, more shares, more upvotes, …”
Speiser handles his own acquisition legal work without using lawyers
“I don't have a lawyer that does any of this. I do all the legal myself. It's not terribly complicated when I could use your forms off your site, and we all agreed to not touch them and mark them up.”
Patel: Ramp Ventures will always choose buying over building for speed
“We'll always buy versus build because it gives us speed”
Imran: Never build a product before successfully cracking distribution.
“So I don't build the product until we can crack distribution.”
Manthani: Streamoid aims to let one person run a billion-dollar brand
“Our vision with Streamoid is that a single person can run a billion dollar brand.”
MainStreet reached high eight-figure ARR with Tinsley retaining over 50% equity.
“We're in the high A figures in ARR, And growing pretty quickly, like, but I own, I have complete order control and own, you know, over 50% of the business”
Gazdecki: Acquire.com Uses ChatGPT to Review LOIs and Rate Offers
“We do it all the time at Acquire. When we have a letter of intent or we have an opinion of our own, but we want another one, you can just upload that in the chat to GBT and say, is there anything concerning here? How would you rate this out of a hundred? What'…”
Lear: LeadGen App Founders Exited Without Formal Post-Sale Transition Contract
“And so we didn't write down, okay, it's going to be two months or three months when we will be working together. We just said, we'll be here. We're not running. We're not going to run away. We'll be here. Any questions you have after the sale, just email, emai…”
Osterman rejected higher acquisition offers to avoid post-sale earnout requirements
“There were offers that would have earned me a lot more money, but I'm not going to be running the business anymore. So I don't really want to do that.”
Nico Ginan: Prefers $200,000 cash exit immediately over waiting for $300,000
“I don't like, I don't want to risk losing a decent offer because of the, like, potentially I could get a better one, potentially. So I would rather get 200,000 today than three and like 300,000 in six months or something.”
Gazdecki: Law firm Pillsbury billed 15 minutes per email during first sale
“I definitely wish I knew the last point when I sold my first business. I remember I hired Pillsbury, if you're familiar with them. And I remember they sent me an email and they said, Andrew, like you've been emailing us a lot. And just so you know, we've charg…”
Traditional M&A brokers charge 10-20% fees compared to Acquire.com's 4%
“And so I realized that with Acquire, I was only paying four percent, and also you had a big reach, and you were helping me, coaching me, like, step by step and, you know, helping me make sense of all the different elements that are needed, all the different do…”
Quayam bought ESG Analytics back for $1 and resold it
“The people that brought us on sort of left the company, and they gave us the company back for like a dollar. And then we sort of scaled up the business again, and then we resold it on acquire.com to another company who, you know, we're sort of still working.”
Schroter: Startups.com only does asset purchases, never acquiring operating entities
“We always do asset purchases. We never buy the actual operating company. There's never any upside in it.”
Bakour: Rejected Higher Offers to Avoid Seller Financing and Lengthy Onboarding
“So there was a lot of things that we were also interested in other than just cash. So like some buyers were like, Hey, we want you to spend three months onboarding our team afterwards. Right. And even if they're offering more, we wouldn't necessarily be intere…”
Daniel Ch: I would accept a lower valuation from a trustworthy buyer
“I would even go as far as saying that I would at any moment choose somebody with, you know, a lower multiple, but, or, you know, maybe a lower valuation, but somebody that I know is a good person, as opposed to the other way around”
Sanchez plans to bootstrap future startups to avoid venture capital pressure
“Maybe in the future, if I create more startups, which I will, I would rather go to the bootstrapping and doing it myself rather than raising money and having that, you know, Strong metrics to be met constantly, and that big backpack, backpacking your shoulder …”
Gazdecki: Acquire.com is rejecting derivative AI startups due to market oversupply
“I mean, we've been seeing a huge, huge, huge influx of AI companies on acquired to the point where we've had to Like, not list a few, just because there's so many, like, image creators, house image creators chat, GVT bots that all kind of do the same thing.”
Skaalerud: Skaling Ventures uses debt and fractional teams for transformations
“We used that in our acquisitions and to finance some of the transformation pulling in my team, which is all kind of fractional folks.”
Skaalerud: Skaling Ventures targets an average 3x ARR multiple for acquisitions
“For instance, an AR multiple, we want to see like on average a three X. So if we see a two X that's rewarded, if we see a five X that's punitive, but it's not a deal breaker.”
Stefurak discounts startup asking prices for buyers who move quickly
“I always prefer those who move quickly. And I'm always happy to drop the price a bit for them. You know, I don't want to deal with negotiation and documents for weeks.”
Kundra Bypasses Escrow for Direct Wire on App Sale Due to Trust
“And I think one thing that helped here was like because of our relationship with the buyer, we, you know, we liked it not to go do escrow at all.
Like we just wired the, he just wired the funds.
so that saves a lot of time.”
Tran: Platform friction with Notion prompted decision to sell Queue.so
“So I used to think that, like, I will spend most of my time working on Notion-specific products because, like, I did that for almost a year, and then a lot of people know about that, but then I did launch another product, and I had a little of an issue with No…”
Fork Equity avoids high-touch sales to strictly target self-serve SaaS
“So for that reason, for my temperament, we avoid businesses that require high touch sales processes. We only are interested in businesses where people sign up and pretty much figure out how to use the product. On their own.”
Ryan Kulp never wrote code or answered support for Cross-Sell
“And with Crosssell, what I really liked about it is that I, and I'll admit this publicly for the first time right now, I never wrote a single line of code, and I think I never replied to a single customer support ticket.”
Culp's Ideal Target: Part-Time Solo-Founder Apps Built in Ruby on Rails
“My wishlist is something that is run currently by one person part-time built in Ruby on Rails.”
Fork Equity Avoids High-Touch Sales in Favor of Self-Serve Products
“So for that reason, for my temperament, we avoid businesses that require high touch sales processes. We only are interested in businesses where people sign up and pretty much figure out how to use the product. On their own.”
Culp: Never wrote code or answered support tickets while running CrossSell
“With Crossell, what I really liked about it is that I, and I'll admit this publicly for the first time right now, I never wrote a single line of code. And I think I never replied to a single customer support ticket.”
Acquire.com rejects heavily funded VC startups generating negligible revenue
“We've actually had to turn away some that raised millions of dollars, and the revenue is less than a couple 100,000, and we're just like, I don't know who's gonna buy this. Like, you need to essentially, you know, this is an aqua hire situation.”
Gazdecki: MicroAcquire rewrites startup descriptions to clarify confusing value propositions
“You'd be surprised at how many startups we see at Microquire where we look at them and they're really good, but we're like, what do you do? What? So when you see the newsletter, actually, that's usually us. Kind of doing them some help in terms of clearly expl…”
Miklas Refuses to Build Software Without Existing Market Competitors
“I would never go into building something without a competitor trying to educate the market.”
Sidhu killed two acquisitions because sellers refused to share codebase access
“I got in a couple of situations on On micro-acquired, I think, one-off, where I didn't end up buying, and this is, again, pre-Stridist, where I submitted a letter of intent, we moved into due diligence, and the seller just was still really unwilling to share m…”
Keeley: Verne gave up convincing founders expecting 10x to 20x ARR multiples
“I just have mostly given up on trying to convince people like you could throw them the micro require reports and be like, well, this is what things are transacting at. But if people think their business is worth 10, 20 times ARR, it's just, you know, maybe the…”
Rathee: Operating a build-to-sell micro startup studio model via MicroAcquire
“I'm trying to kind of build a micro startup studio almost. So it's more like a build to sell model. And using kind of sites like might require to achieve that.”
Kozinsky: Enduring Ventures targets 3x-5x cash flow multiples for acquisitions
“We really like to buy at valuations that are three to five times cashflow. So if a business does a million dollars of cashflow per year, We really want, don't want to pay more than three to five million dollars to acquire it, and you really can't get that in m…”
Enduring Ventures Targets Unprofitable Venture-Backed Tech Startups With Strong Revenue
“We've actually redirected our focus in tech to just focus on businesses like UpCouncil that have good revenue that don't quite have the profits to support it and that we can turn around and create a cashflow engine from them because in those situations we can …”
Drury: StayTuned rejects high-MRR Shopify apps if merchant utility is weak
“Basically if we don't think the product is good, it's a total no-go. Like even if the revenue is off the charts, you know, one example would be if your app makes a red button on a site, That just says click me, and people click it, and you get a dollar every t…”
Drury: StayTuned prefers acquisitions structured with seller earnouts
“What we like to do most, like we really like when sellers want to do an earn out, and why? Because they have so much of the knowledge in their head about what works and what doesn't, and we love partnering and working with great people.”
Dumont: Tiny Capital targets profitable companies with consistent, not exponential, growth
“I think something that Tiny does that's really smart is they acquire companies that are Already profitable. Are growing consistently, not exponentially. But you know, they have a good growth rate”
Calm Capital targets essential operating software rather than optional add-on tools
“I think our ideal business we're learning is, is it needs to be like a, an essential business, like a, like the operating system, not an add-on, if you will. So not a business that people can choose to use or not as a, like as a SaaS tool, but a business that …”
Jabbar says Horizen Capital avoids high-growth startups and VC competition
“So we don't like these, you know, super high growth companies and we're not competing with VC money or capital investments.”
Chamness: Dura Software Operates as Permanent Capital and Never Sells Acquisitions
“It means we're permanent capital. We're not going to sell your business. And so we're taking a long view on it.”
Chamness: Dura Prefers Direct and Channel Sales Over Marketing-Heavy SaaS
“So generally speaking, we like businesses that where we can, you know, build a list of customers and go, go find them. So we like a direct sales model or a channel sales model to a really marketing heavy or marketing intensive business. We'll, we'll certainly …”
Kosarek: OpenStore plans to keep acquired brands intact rather than breaking them up
“Our long-term strategy is to acquire as many of these businesses as we possibly can and take into account that we want to leave The brands completely intact. We don't want to sell them for parts. We don't want to shut them down. We want to leave, you know, the…”
Kosarek: OpenStore can generate acquisition offers in 24 hours
“Assuming you come to the front of our website, you submit the data we need to generate our offer. If you're a fit for the criteria I just mentioned we can turn around a price in 24 hours, and you can accept that price in 24 hours, too.”