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 64 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
Leteyski: Shopify banned app Checkout X for taking platform revenue
“Then we got banned by Shopify for stealing their revenue.”
Startups that raised $40M will sell for $1M-$2M within 12 months
“And then the other thing I'm looking for is I'm waiting for that like company that raised 30, forty million dollars and now burned through it all, but built an amazing piece of tech to go and micro acquire and sell for a million or two. Like, It's inevitable. …”
Gazdecki: SaaS startups average 2.8 years to hit $1M ARR; 4% succeed
“On average, it takes a SaaS company, 2.5 years, two years and eight months to get to a million in recurring revenue, and only four percent of startups get there.”
LittleThings generated $70M revenue before Facebook algorithm changes destroyed it
“We were doing, you know, 60, seventy million a year in revenue. And then Facebook just dropped the hammer on us one day and kind of destroyed our business, which was my point with like Shopify.”
MainStreet issued an LOI and restored Bench in under 48 hours.
“It was basically, you know, we had a term sheet out by the end of the, like, in the letter of intent by the end of the day, and,
Went and had the service up and running by, like, Monday morning at, like, four or five a.m. Eastern”
Naveen Arun: Global wellness economy will exceed $5T in five years
“It's going to be more than five trillion, ah, dollars wellness economy. Which has all these healthy eating, skincare beauty. It's all a lifestyle, I would call it, right? Almost more than five trillion in the next five years.”
Quayam: Legacy ESG rating agencies rely on heavily lagged data
“And the issue is solving is that today when people are looking to invest in these kind of invest in companies and want to, you know, see how they rate and that kind of stuff, there's all these rating companies, but they use like the reports from the companies,…”
Shopify's Verifiable Dashboard Prevents Founders From Falsifying App Metrics
“In Shopify, it's even easier because you can't lie. You know, there are the numbers. There are the numbers. You cannot modify those numbers. It's by Shopify. So when the buyers see it, okay, everything is okay here.”
Aiello: DimeADozen sold for $150,000
“The amount we sold for, right, it's, I think it's public at this .6 figures, 150,000.”
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: 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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
Simmons: Apreva Evaluates Condition of Nearly 100M US Properties via AI
“And what they have built is they have built an ability to go through and use AI vision models. To go through and evaluate the property condition of close to a hundred million properties in the United States.”
Sandeep Jangala: Sold fitness and nutrition platform to Apollo
“Luckily we got an opportunity to work with Upasna Garo there at Apollo. We went on to sell the company to them.”
Yardini: Y Combinator Funded Two EssayGrader Competitors in Past Eight Months
“Actually funny enough, now two companies, Y Combinator are just back that are doing very similar to what we are doing in the last six to eight months. So that shows that we have like almost a year and a half head start Compared to these companies.”
Cooke: Music software industry has at most 10,000 companies
“There's about 10,000 companies in the entire industry at most, and I would say if the top 50% in sales is probably attributed to maybe like a hundred companies.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Kim: The Cubby eventually gave 100% of marketplace sales fees to students
“We gave a hundred percent of the fee to the college student and allowed them to showcase and sell their work to the public.”
Gazdecki: 98% of startup acquisitions are valued below $80 million
“Like, 98% of acquisitions are below eighty million dollars.”
Molina: Tweet Hunter took 1.5 years from idea to acquisition
“It took around one. Actually, like, ever since, like, idea to selling it, like, one or one and a half, maybe.”
Gazdecki bootstrapped Bizness Apps to $10M ARR before selling to PE
“It was called a business app, spelled B-I-Z-N-E-S-S apps. And it was like a no code mobile app builder grew it to about ten million in your career revenue and then sold to a private equity firm and then bootstrapped that business like you.”
Gazdecki: Potion was recently acquired for about $300,000
“The reason I say former is he recently got acquired for about 300,000.”
Bragg: Transferring Stripe accounts requires custom scripts for active subscriptions
“Stripe does have a you know, an easy interface to basically move products over or no, to move customers over. But then we had to like write the code and the script to move all the subscriptions and the payments and that over. And then start those again on the …”
Jeanne: MakeLogo.ai won Product of the Day on Product Hunt
“So I just launched on product and then it totally blew up. I ended up product of the day. I think.”
Gostecki: Average SMB marketing budget is $500 per month
“I think the average SMB budget is 500 a month on marketing spend”
Ryan Kulp sold an NFT tracker on MicroAcquire within hours
“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, three a.m. It was a very small deal, right? I think it was, like, 1750 dollars, maybe. That was my ask…”
Gazdecki: Hootsuite's Ryan Holmes was MicroAcquire's first customer and investor
“For MicroRequire, it was actually Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Hootsuite, or now chairman, and I'm kind of a startup nerd, so when that came in, I was like, whoa, like, that's so cool, like, hey Ryan, I hope I don't let you down with MicroRequire. He's now an inves…”
Gazdecki sold Bizness Apps to a $10B PE firm at age 29
“Yeah, well, I sold to a ten billion dollar private equity firm, and at the time I was 29, you know, so it just kind of felt like a David versus Goliath situation, and the firm I sold to is very professional no hard-nosed negotiations. It was a fantastic outcom…”
LittleThings built 50 million Facebook followers before the platform revoked distribution
“I had like, fifty million followers on Facebook at one point, right? But they were rented, and Facebook decided to take them back, right?”
Enduring Ventures acquired Hawaii's only motorcycle rental business
“He bought like a Harley Davidson rental company in Hawaii, like the only motorcycle rental company in Hawaii, right? So he has monopoly on all motorcycles, if you want to rent one in the entire, on the entire island, and it just prints money.”
Abousleiman: Shopify partner ecosystem generates 3-4x Shopify's platform revenue
“I think the partner ecosystem makes like three or four times more revenue than Shopify itself.”
Kozinsky: UpCounsel raised around $20M to $25M from VCs
“They had raised, you know, somewhere around 20, twenty-five million dollars from some really great VCs, but I think they didn't achieve the kind of escape velocity That maybe it would require to go on and continue raising capital after that.”
Dumont: Bitly Burned Through Venture Capital Before Pivoting to Profitability
“Bitly was interesting because it was a venture-funded company that kind of blew through a lot of the venture capital needed to become a sustainable, scalable business, and I hopped over from Betaworks to Bitly, and I saw a lot of that, not necessarily post-acq…”
Dumont: Tiny Capital acquired Meteor.com without its original team
“With that one specifically, a team did not come with that product, so it was, you know, just the company.”
Balkhi: Awesome Motive's portfolio powers over 20 million websites
“Over the last decade have filled a portfolio of companies and WordPress space specifically, some in the SaaS space and collectively are now powering over twenty million websites.”
Gazdecki: Public SaaS valuation multiples dropped from 20x to 8x ARR
“Public market SAS companies were traditionally trading at 20 X in recurring revenue. Now they're, On average trading at eight X. So they've gone from 20 to eight X”
Lazarus: Shopify application Returnly was successfully acquired for $300 million
“Returnly was a self-service really Shopify app when I joined. And it sold for three hundred million dollars”