The Wisdom Wall

“I always say, um, you know, also think about your employees before your investors. This might be a little bit more controversial, but these are people that chose to work with you And spend more time with you than their families believed in your mission. And I think you have a duty as a founder to take care of them. So…”

“with AI, B to B now, they can see a problem and they can build a solution sometimes faster than you can, you know, deliver it or for cheaper than you can deliver it.”

“If you're trying to make a million bucks a year, do not start a startup. It's a very bad idea. It's going to take a lot longer and be very harder. You just start a service business, do something that other businesses need.”

“do not hire advertising agencies. That's the one rule that I'm applying, that I applied to this business, and that I'm, that I'm applying to all my businesses. The one that I'm moving on to right now, as well, is that if somebody comes to you and says, oh, Pay me a retainer of whatever, 3002 1001 thousand, even if it's…”

“That's a big thing is like on the listing, the numbers we put on in terms of engagement or revenue, they were all slightly lower than what the truth was because someone looks at it. They're like, this is a really good deal. And then you speak to them. And then when most people speak to a seller, they find out the…”

“one of the things that I coach founders on when they go through this, um, is I say, hey, you know that you can go back and create a new deal for yourself within the company, right?”

“By the time you're going to have that conversation, it needs to be definitive. Dude, I'm out. I'm out of money. I'm out of, like, hell, like my, my spouse is trying to, you know, is, is tired of dealing with my shit. Um, I need to get out. Okay, now hear me out. Now, need to get out could mean two things. It could mean…”

“You have to start with right now, your option is zero. You can't be like, oh, I know we raised that fifty million, but like, you know, this one will only get you five. You'd be like, dude, you invested however much you invested. Sadly, it's gone. We're starting from zero. This is how you recapture from zero, not here's…”

“no one will remember whether or not you made money on the sale, but everyone will remember that you sold.”

“Growth is another one where too much growth is kind of punitive for us because it's like, you know, what are we supposed to do? If the business is already ripping, like that's what we do. So, and then it's also that raises some flags from a seller motive too. It's like, why do you sell the thing that's just shredding”

“I also tend to look at the overall reviews for each company and the more negative the reviews are from customers, the more likely I'm going to be interested. I know that sounds really perverse. It doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people, but it has to be for certain reasons, right? Typically what I find is when…”

“If you want to bootstrap a company and you have no, no, no money whatsoever. Right, and to build a product. Go and get 10 customers to pay you for a service that you deliver behind the scenes Wizard of Oz manually. Customers want an outcome anyway. They don't want a piece of software. Get them that outcome, then use…”

“Cause the number one reason that a lot of startups don't sell on microquire is they just priced. 10 X annual recurring revenue. And those multiples are really, um, reserved for when you're at scale. So when you're like at ten million revenue and above, that's when you can really start to command as multiples”

“which a lot of people will get on LinkedIn to try to run ads for B to B. But they don't realize the entire, all the same people are on Facebook, and it's less competitive to get those people, um, on Meta than it is on LinkedIn.”

“adding links to your calendar does not work. Um, saying we do SEO does not work. Like, I think people care less about what you do, but more about the outcome and what you can do for them.”

“in our experience, distribution has always been like a much, much harder problem. Like, building a product Is actually fairly easy. Ah, building a product people will use is slightly harder. Building a product people actually use is much, much harder. So, whether you're talking about consumer, or whether you're talking…”

“you just want to be patient and see what, see what all the offers look like, um, what the different arrangements look like, um, and try to remove money from the equation, um, until the very last, the very last stretch, I'd say.”

“Not to knock some great agencies, obviously, but many of them kind of do them mediocrely. Uh, if you don't specialize in one thing, it's like really hard to be good at like 10 things.”

“I think there's more value in like staying in your lane. If you have an expertise, it's much easier to grow from there.”

“If you want to buy a marketing agency, and that's what we're talking about right now, I think you should know what it is to build one zero to one, even on a certain scale. Like, I don't think it's a great idea to go buy a A highly volatile asset, which I think marketing agencies could be considered more volatile than…”

“very quickly understood that key, you really don't make any money in the cloud kitchen space, right? Because your margins are wafer thin, so many other things that you need to do and all.”

“My job is to push you guys. My job is to not pamper you guys. And my job is to see till what extent I can push you also. Right. So I always talk about this rubber band theory where I say that my job is to expand that rubber band as much as possible till it doesn't break, but whether it breaks or not is again your thing…”

“But nowadays that eight hours can be much faster. You can get your work done through AI, different technologies, you know, it can be, you can be more productive. So let's say four hours.”

“it's always good to start from a tier two cities. Startups, you know, always best to explore in the tier two cities. So we, you, You get to validate your own business model and see all that.”

“Don't run, don't run photo ads. They will tell you this in dropshipping words. I, of course, uh, you can run retargeting image ads, but only video ads”

“Wholesale is majority of the business always. If you, if you can make it, make it work.”

“having started a bunch of businesses and then sold a couple before this, buying a business is now like, man, it's so much better. Um, you can use a lot more of your, um, experience to improve it, we found, uh, than the other way around. Uh, just, it's all, it just de-risks it up front.”

“At the time we had a money back guarantee for the first one. So they would, Use us for like three weeks, almost like a month and like a few days before they'd like cancel. So that really sucked. And, um, I don't think I'd recommend other founders.”

“I, I think I would definitely Recommend people to acquire an existing business, then start something from scratch, because it takes forever to build something from scratch.”

“I don't think you should be looking at profitability of the business you are purchasing. I think you should really look at the, uh, product market fit. You should really say, okay, can I grow this business to at least three X, four X, five X, uh, and, and just look at the competitive landscape. You know, if you at…”

“none of the marketing expertise that I had working at large scale enterprise B to B companies was useful to what I was doing with my company.”

“In a software as a service model, I think a good idea might be just to try ad campaigns straight to the audience that is your dream audience that needs your product. So it doesn't hurt to put some budget into, um, a nice landing page that address, exactly addresses the need of what, what it is you're solving. And then…”

“what if you just took that 10 grand and bought a business instead, a business you're interested in learning about, and you build that skill set in real time, like that's so much more valuable. Because even if that business doesn't work out, at least I've acquired all this knowledge that I can use for the next business.”

“one tip actually is to do a lifetime deal, have some, some customers come in, and those customers can then hopefully invite more customers that are paying Higher amounts, and that will get you that initial burst of users that are paying and can bump up your revenue multiple.”

“Lifetime deals can actually work heavily against you in acquisition, because as a buyer, you're essentially taking on these users that are free users. They're not paying any revenue. And so sometimes that can actually dent your valuation, depending on how many, um, free buyers you have or lifetime deals that you've…”

“bootstrapping, uh, is more like building a business around your life. Whereas raising VC or P capital is more like stretching your life Around the business. At least that's how it feels to me.”

“earnest money deposits, for example, is not an M&A concept. Very Common in real estate. Obviously, if you ever bought a house, put down some earnest money, and it makes a lot of sense there. It doesn't make sense in, um, in small business M&A, but you've got a lot of brokers who either know that and are seeking to take…”

“people usually, when it comes to acquisitions, mergers, anything, they try to focus on substance, which is, like, amount, or, like, dollars, or, like, how, how can I get the highest bid from buyer? But I think, The process is more important. So the author is things like negotiate on the process rather than negotiate on…”

“I feel like we're always told when you start a SaaS business, like, oh, you're going to be valued off of profit, off of revenue, right? You're going to get three to five times whatever your revenue is, um, and, like, just, I mean, yeah, that's true in some cases, and maybe in a different economy, but, like, He was, he…”

“when you go to sell your business, you actually do want to, or I always recommend pricing it lower than your final number that you want to hit and write your final number down, but Go a little bit lower than that. And the reason you do that is because just like in sales, you want to get as many people interested as…”

“Usually the founders are like, well, I just raised that a twenty million dollar valuation. And I'm like, yeah, and if you stop working there, the value is now zero. Like, it works there, there's no value. And most founders don't get that.”

“They think that their cost structure, their OPEX, everything else is baked into what it's always been. They forget that that asset in the hands of people that don't have that expense base could be a money machine.”

“If you don't keep that variable component, what I call kind of the lottery ticket in the deal, it is very hard to negotiate a cash purchase.”

“even if a category is saturated with a lot of other competitors, like, you can still build a nice business from it. Like, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that's like, oh, someone's already doing this, and every time I'm like, just make it a little bit better, and you know, It does. This isn't like a winner's take all…”

“when you start a SaaS business, like Shopify app, for example, you need to not grow fast in the beginning. Because in the beginning, you will have issues with the app, user issues, and once a user has an issue, and the app's not performing well, you will just lose the customer.”

“the adoption curve of any technology goes like first is adult industry and then it's like anything else.”

“people often will say, you know, cold email outreach is kind of Like pointless unless your average contract value is like, you know, under over 5000 dollars and things like that. But I found like even for this 50 dollar a month product, like the conversion rate on people responding to that email was so high that that…”

“if you, you know, you had two buyers and everything else is equal, uh, apart from, you know, one's offering you less money, but you know, it's going to be a smoother acquisition and one's offering you more money, but it might be, you know, a bit more hellish than, you know, I would go with the, The former in that…”

“if the person that you're talking to is looking for a reason to say yes, then we're probably out. Like, if they're looking for a reason, they're like, tell me why I should buy this again, like, what, What is it, if they're looking for a reason to say yes, they're done. They're out. Just kind of close, end the meeting,…”

“any offer that you get, you should also view it as, um, the only offer you'll ever get, because it may be”

“So like narrow and deep is great for customer retention and like giving somebody something they can't live without, but For customer acquisition. I actually like the broad”

“no starter should ever go to zero, because you build a product, you build, you know, happy customers are using it. It may not be that, yeah, it may not be that multi hundred million dollar business, but to someone it's a good, you know, starting point That they see a lot of benefit from, and they can breathe some, you…”

“a lot of entrepreneurs think taking their business to market, they want to show it as perfect, but it's actually the opposite. You want to show with bumps, bruises, the good parts, bad parts, because the bad parts can also be good parts.”

“the best kind of business to build for like an indie hacker is to build on top of another platform.”

“There's, um, a saying where businesses are bought, not sold, and that couldn't be further from the truth. You have to sell your business. You have to talk to buyers. You have to message them. You have to answer their questions because what you're really doing is number one, you are selling your business. So you're…”

“you realize actually the cap table doesn't matter if the company is like, whoever holds the password is the, the owner of the company.”

“I think, I think founder market fit, this is probably an argument, um, for Twitter one day, but I think, uh, founder market fit is more important than product market fit.”

“I actually, you know, typically will advise founders. To work with experienced buyers, even if the price is lower, because the chance of the LOI closing is higher and it'll just make your life a lot easier”

“you can probably even like under price a little bit, To get more buyers and then negotiate to like push it up sort of.”

“it's advantageous to build on no code in many ways, especially in these early days, because the cost to maintain it is lower. The ability to ship is faster, and that gives you the ability to move quicker and to adjust to your customer's needs faster, which helps you find that product market fit faster, and it also…”

“The hybrid apps we have tried to build have never gone well. On either the updates, the libraries always change, or it actually costs more in the long run to build a hybrid app. So we highly recommend doing native Android, native iPhone.”

“if you've never managed developers before, you're going to blow a lot of money. I'm trying to wrangle them in and build stuff. So like, you know, content sites or something like that, I think is a little easier, like a small content site to start.”

“if you want to create wealth, bootstrap. If you want to change market, uh, raise venture because your odds are, I mean, uh, Mike requires venture backed. I know my odds. I got a one percent lottery ticket.”

“And I even recommend sometimes to price lower than you might expect, because then you'll draw on more buyers. There's no, if you have one buyer, you have no buyers. And so if you can get, you know, a bidding war going with a timeline saying, Hey, I'm looking to sell this asset or the startup by this certain date, um,…”

“The idea that VCs know their industries better than the entrepreneurs is almost always ludicrous.”

“almost always the competitors have a little impact on your progress as an entrepreneur, right? It's usually distraction, paying attention to them.”

“I've always found that a players want to know, they want to know what they're doing wrong more than anything. They want constructive feedback. They want to know how to get better. They want to know where they stand with you. They do not want to be left alone.”

“there are a lot of really smart, competent execute operators executing against really stupid ideas. And they're running into a brick wall and the team thing holds presuming that the team will figure out a bad idea. An idea is bad and innovate and get to a good one. But I do believe ideas have a lot of value.”

“How you finance your company is a big determinant of how much money the entrepreneur actually makes. Now that may not be the definition of success. It might be how big the company is, but a lot of entrepreneurs are out there trying to raise venture capital when they have businesses that should not raise venture…”

“The most important skill for a founder to have is learning to sell, because you're selling, first you're selling to your family that this thing is worth it. You're selling to co-founders, you're selling to customers, You're selling employees to join you for almost no money. You really need to get, get good at selling.”

“from my experience of doing this, of just successful founders like yourself, they all figured out the sales process on their own, and they did not outsource it. They did not hire for it. Um, they, they grew into it. You know, if you figure it out, you nail it, and then you scale it.”

“your goal as a CEO, in my opinion, at least is to, you know, eventually get to a point where you fire yourself from every role and you're basically putting leaders in place that are better than you, but that's, you know, that's when you're well into, you know, let's call it like ten million post, um, Uh, 10, ten…”

“I think the biggest mistake is people take over a business and they feel like they have to scrap everything, you know, just get, um, rebuild everything. And in some cases that's not needed. Like you need to continue the momentum that exists and start building the missing pieces”

“good businesses rarely go out of business. Great companies sometimes go out of business, but good businesses rarely go out of business, so, you know, profitable, cash flowing, pretty easy to manage, has, you know, some kind of growth trajectory versus going backwards”

“There's a saying, it's not true. It basically means Google shows up to your door and they're like, Hey, here's your check. You got acquired, but you know, a lot of founders don't understand, like you actually have to like sell your business. You have to point out the opportunities. You have to point out the market.”

“Like, that's why I always say distribution over product, because when you are able to sell the product, you can improve the product, and that's how you get the best product, and it's just this big, circular life cycle, man, but it starts with driving revenue.”

“we talk to these founders who have built this, this business that is in all senses, a great business. But when you overlay the venture capital trajectory that needs to happen for businesses to be doing actually great by the label of great in the, in the modern world, then these companies aren't typically hitting the…”

“It's literally, you have, you know, a 10% chance of success starting a business. I would argue your success, your chances of success when acquiring a business is probably higher because you're skipping over, you know, some of the hardest parts like finding customers and product market fit,”

“Your company's not a scale unless you're at ten million dollars in revenue. I hate to break it to everybody here. That's the case. It's a fact.”

“I think the VC game is great. If you think you can win an industry, it's great if you're top three, it's bad for everyone else who doesn't become top three contender in that space, right? So, uh, just because the valuations and the, and the, uh, and, and the, uh, Illiquidity about the deal and then the dilution that…”

“I do think it, in some ways, it, it helped us to, um, you know, not be quite as burnt out on, like, one thing, right? It kind of, it reinvigorated us to work on the, the older thing.”

“market product fit is super important, but it's a singular event, like in the life of a product. Like after you're done with that, then everything starts, you know, like that's so much more important, you know, in my, in my view now is how you execute.”

“I'm not really that interested in the like low price point, but we've got lots of customers model. I actually prefer premium price points as a business model and sort of learned that in my first two businesses. Um, one where I did a low price .1 where I did a premium price point, and there was a radically different…”

“I actually worked with a due diligence company, actually, who, like, went to the code base and did all of that work, and I felt like they It just wasn't all that helpful at the deal sites that I was doing, um, to get that level of, like, there were things that were like, yeah, this could be more secure, we could do…”

“It is the beginning of that end, and it requires you to actually be burning a lot hotter than probably the rest of your, your, your experiences. Maybe there's a little, you know, spikes throughout that entrepreneurial journey to building that business, but I promise that, you know, that last acquisition, you're gonna…”

“the difference of just knowing what to do or having the right cancel or not is, Literally, uh, in, in some cases, uh, you know, seven plus figures of a difference of, you know, what the outcome is for you as a founder.”

“when you have these bootstrapped exits, You've done well for yourself, but you haven't shown investors you can return their money. So it was really, it took us a while to raise some money.”

“even if they spend a dollar, that's better than 10,000 people signing up on a wait list and saying they're gonna spend a dollar, right?”

“what I tell my friends and some portfolio companies I've invested in is you're about to sell, push harder than ever. Put the gas on the pedal and go, right? Give them a reason to actually have some real urgency. Show them you're growing, and that gives you leverage. It gives you negotiation power. Otherwise, what a lot…”

“you don't have to have all your ducks in a row. So even if it's like, you know, maybe even if like some numbers are like a bit down or like maybe you don't have like a, Yeah. Um, like you can still sell the business. Like it just, it's just a business that needs a bit of renovation, but actually the right buyer sees…”

“If you can think of anything that you would tell a person to do at a company, and then they would go and do it for you, like we're reaching a stage today where these models are now able to do this, understand the request, and actually use the same tools that a person would be using, whether it's a web browser, or…”

“a lot of companies today, when they say they're using AI, they're trying to just add AI to existing processes and workflows. And, yes, it is helpful. It gives you, let's say, 10, 20% improvement in your process. But, you know, the real things that need to be done is a complete rewrite of your workflow.”

“Of course, it's in the beginning. It, Sounds and feels very, very promising and easy, but in fact, it's, it is like adopting a tiger. When it's a little one, uh, you see a nice video on YouTube or Amazon or, uh, Instagram, like how cute is to have a tiger, and you think like, wow, I can do the same, and, uh, while the…”

“Product Hunt helped a little bit. Um, at least it helps less with sales nowadays and just with a little bit of visibility.”

“and I think a lot of buying and selling from what I understood happens based on perception. So if I think I can build this whole product, which might not be true in reality at all, just by white coding, I might not be willing to put money behind it. Um, so it is the perception that kind of Uh, drives the sale, at least…”

“Speed from a buyer is huge. If they're willing to move quickly and close fast, uh, that's usually almost always, uh, worth a reduced price.”

“Uh, living Q and A at Acquire, or if you're selling your startup, you put every buyer's questions on one Google document and you just answer the question, keep it there. And then when a new buyer reaches out, you share the document and they go in there and they see, you know, 10, 20 different questions from other…”

“when you list, list with as much information as you can, um, have a price that is good to attract buyers. So it might be lower than the price that you were imagining, but just, just a tiny, uh, fraction below it so that you can attract more bids.”

“we know specifically what the buyers on acquire are looking to pay and around one multiples. And if you go outside of that interest is very low compared to if you're within the range or even a little bit below that, because you're right. That's how you create kind of that competitive process and buyers really start…”

“organic growth is linear. You know, you're, you're pitching one client at a time, which, Is what I've always done and will continue doing, um, for love of the game, I suppose, but you can actually have the geometric growth, uh, that you want where you adopt systems, clients, staff in one go.”

“I think if you get a company at the level of branding, um, it cascades down to services that we offer. On the go to market side.”

“And if it's the ladder where you really want to build something that has real scale, that services lots of clients across lots of service lines, then M&A is just a muscle that you've got to work out and exercise.”

“Having an app that solves just one small issue in the Shopify app store is amazing, because you might not be able to charge, like, a big amount, like a monthly subscription, but You can get a lot of customers, um, charging, I don't know, like, a 19 dollar subscription each month, or nine dollar, or five dollar, and…”

“allows individuals like myself or targets like Apreeva to be able to go through, meet each other, find a way to go through and, and blaze a path that does not have to necessarily be financed by large venture capital checks with completely, um, uh, uh, out, like different size, uh, ambitions around outcomes and what…”

“It is, it is going through and finding a business that has, has reduced it down to just execution risk. And if it's only execution risk, then you're ultimately betting on yourself as an operator. And that is what's so great about, about entrepreneurialism through acquisition, because that is what it really comes down…”

“So if you as a buyer have that skill and you can keep the existing tech talent on so they can keep the lights on at the very least, um, then that's a, that's an excellent spot to be in because that's normally at that stage in which, you know, the business is, you know, they might've built an interesting product, but…”

“based on all the acquisitions I've seen, the bad ones are usually when the buyer and seller, they don't get along. Almost all of them. Actually, all of them. And then the best ones are, you know, buyer and seller get along, meaning They're on the same page. There's a shared interest of where to take the business. Uh,…”

“it's completely appropriate to ask buyers if they have the cash or to show you a bank statement and stuff like that. Um, or just asking for what we call a due diligence schedule.”

“We always recommend going with the seller or excuse me, the buyer that you're most comfortable with and that you're on good terms with, because it just makes everything so much easier.”

“And so you'd see someone spend, you know, a 120, a 160 K right on brand and web and product, all this stuff. And then you see, you kind of watch from afar and you see the quality, like after we stopped working with them, right. Cause it was expensive, right. To like maintain supporting those products, those brands. So…”

“So, it has become very easy to start it, and that's the reason why you can see so many people building cafe, right, and so many people shutting it down also, because once you start, right, you really understand the numbers, and you see that, oh, yes, you think that you are going to make a lot of money when you start…”

“If suppose one day of sale is lost in the F&B business, Your entire sale for the month is gone. You cannot expect that key. You will regain that sale some other day, right?”

“So I've just learned from experience that if I'm selling a software product and I position it for everyone, It's harder to get traction. If I position it for a certain vertical, a lot easier to get traction, um, more specifically from partners within the space.”

“I always say the, the reputation tool is a great, you know, foot in the door, so the idea is, okay, you're a reputation company for gems. But then once you get your foot in the door, you start working with gyms, then hopefully you can find out different tools and features that haven't been created yet, um, that you can…”

“So I think, um, I think a lot of buyers really underestimate, like, you really should be cool to these sellers, um, because there's lots of people looking at these deals, and, and, you know, at the end of the day, it usually comes down to whoever is the coolest and easiest to work with.”

“Everyone will exit their business at one point or another. It's just gonna be up to them, or it's gonna be something that happens, and the business goes a different way, or it's just, it's very rare to pass a business along to your kids, or something like that, especially a software company.”

“And I think that with that, the biggest thing when you have thousands of new startups every like week or month is distribution. How do you get customers? How do you keep customers? I think that is where we've been focusing a lot of time and effort, uh, to get scale. So I think that's a moat.”

“I think, uh, right now we look at, like, the pace paradox, like, how long does it take us to, like, build, and then, like, go to market with some products, um, to get the same revenue, versus just buying today and arbitraging that delta, uh, in time, take that time.”

“You call a bunch of lawyers and ask, I'm doing an acquisition. They're immediately gonna say, you know, a hundred to a 150 K, right? That's like a price point, right? Um, but if you say I'm doing a business transaction, which is True, technically, the small scale, right? A lot of these, like, deals are basically, like,…”

“I think you can do a bunch of micro roll-offs where you can pay out small amounts of cash and gold equity. And I think that's there all day, every day. I could roll up, you know, a couple 100,000, you know, in a month, basically, I think at least two or three deals of like that, that scale. So I think that is there.…”

“I'd say last thing in boring software is the best software. So anything like you have to have, like, so first thing you do when you start a business, like accounting, payroll, tax, like banking, anything like that, that every business has to have, or, or incorporation services, like those things are very, very…”

“That's one of the strongest things you can do prior to selling a company, because what you just brought up really is every buyer's biggest fear is they take over the business, there's something that they don't get to learn, the business declines in revenue.”

“One way to mitigate risk is to make sure that, you know, maybe it's a, maybe you create a specific tier for that lifetime plan, and maybe it covers it, you know, upgrades for a year, and then it's, you know, ongoing features, it separates it, so I think as long as you're upfront about it, and don't try and hide it,…”

“I think if, if it's kind of a make or break, or you want that really fast user base or revenue growth, then it's, it's a really good, uh, lever to engage, but, uh, obviously it's not for everyone, and it doesn't always play out the way you want, and it can lead to, you know, massive influx of having to, you know,…”

“India is, India is a price conscious market, you know, anything to do with price, lowering the price and getting, there's a lot of scale. Um, so whoever has got those mass market apps or, you know, products or services, definitely scaled.”

“the 1:03 seconds, you must show a human, right? And then you must answer what you are within the first, like, six seconds, right? The 1:03 seconds, you're not showing a human, the click-through rate is a lot worse, so you're going to be spending a lot more.”

“when you listed Your business, and so on, and you made the decision to sell it, right? You can't relax in the sense that, okay, I'm selling. Think like you're not, you're not selling it, and you're, it's still your business, and you're still responsible to yourself, and to your team, if you have a team, uh, to continue…”

“what is your plan that you could share with the buyer? I'm passing this on to you. Do this edited how you need, but if you do this, you will 10 X it. So have that plan. Um, or yeah, the work of action that you can share with the buyer, because that will make them feel way more confident with the acquisition…”

“like if, if a non-technical people would see that SQL, They will probably abandon the project. They will get panicked.”

“unless you have capital, um, it's gonna be hard to take it to the next level. Like I wanted to take it to like one to five million error. It's definitely doable, but you need, you need money in order to, you know, in order to pay for ads and, uh, influencers and the cost of the LLM is very expensive.”

“The, the best thing I think What you should do is get the deal close as soon as possible. Um, because since it's a space, it's very unpredictable and, um, and it can happen with any industry as well. So as soon as you list the product, try to get a couple of interested buyers. If you get them within, let's say a few…”

“our approach is first try to build a project that is side project. And that is kind of complement to the main part. And let's see how it comes out, um, slowly. Not, so you, you, as a founder, you have a limited time, right? So you cannot put everything into the new thing that you are building. So you have to maintain…”

“The person before that spent the two to three years to build it to where it was, they went through all the pain of, like, who is the customer, what do they want, you know, and trying to build the product. Based on that, we got to, like, interview the customer, say, hey, this was the product we, that you did have, you…”

“you need to know every dollar in and out every day of your business and how it translates to the P&L and the balance sheet in QuickBooks Online or whatever accounting software you use. If you don't understand it, you will never create shareholder value. You will never return money to investors unless you just get…”

“So I think that the startups that really stayed with us the longest, um, and they're still clients, um, you know, for the, uh, over, over a year now, they really need help on like iterative stuff. So if they're building like a SaaS, um, you know, It's not just like a one-off thing, like a landing page or a website. You…”

“first I would say if you're not thrilled with your job, um, that's already a sign that you wouldn't like, like, telling people telling you how to do your job and you should definitely not look at franchises because that's their whole model. They tell you how to do your job and they give you like very set of defined…”

“if you find engineers, like technical people selling the project, uh, because they can't, marketing or sales is not their expertise. And if you are, if you have that expertise, absolutely. That's a fantastic fit.”

“I work with so many founders where they think, you know, you list on acquire, you kind of step back. And if a buyer wants to acquire you bad enough, they'll figure out a way to get ahold of you. But it's, it's, it's going to be further from the case. You have to Reach out. You have to schedule meetings. You have to,…”

“So in the home services industry, there's something that we kind of joke about called the valley of despair. And what the valley of despair is, is when you're running a home service business, sort of between 205 100,000 dollars per year in revenue, there's a valley where you're profitable and you're very busy, but you…”

“When you're, when you're an office manager for a company, you get to know the owners and the teams and the clients, right? So if you're doing that for more than two accounts, it's just too much for one person to manage typically.”

“Most people think it's a time where Something, a surprise pops up, but it's generally just timelines. Uh, there's a mismatch in expectations”

“the other thing was really helpful that impressed the buyer, and this might be a small tip for others, is to also start preparing post-acquisition stuff before you close, and then share it with the buyer.”

“it can be very easy to be too detailed, and you overwhelm the buyer, and then they just go, no thanks, I don't want to deal with this mess.”

“when you take away your own role in your company, you don't know what to do anymore, unless you tell yourself very clearly what your role is going to be moving forward. So I'd had a period of about a year and a half or two years where all my companies were stable, but they were not growing and they were not progressing…”

“I think one of the biggest challenges was just like selling into finance and accounting teams is pretty rough. And so there became a pretty large glut, especially in the CFO market in You know, 15 different SaaS tools, all targeting CFOs for Series A through C startups, with all of those same companies having very…”

“The benefit is when you figure out the distribution mechanism, it works significantly better than like, Like, doing outbound sales.”

“pretty quickly we realized that there was a large enough concentrations finance buyers as people with a real subject matter expertise that that was probably gonna be a much better fit. To both take over the business and not have the hassle of us wondering, A, is it going to continue operating? But B, during that…”

“Try and find a friend who works there high up. Like that's literally the only thing that worked for us is like we had to get senior management involved. Out of like the IT loophole we were stuck in.”

“selling a business you can't necessarily like. You know, hard close the person. Like you gotta have this. There has to be, you know, reasons of their own to want to acquire the business, but you can just make, uh, the decision really obvious.”

“Sometimes we have to go through two or three failures within the sales process to find the right buyer.”

“Very rarely do we see that, but a lot of times before we go to market with different businesses, we'll say, can you document certain things or can you outline key procedures to at least allow people to wrap their heads around how does marketing work, product work? Um, you know, whatever's really important to the…”

“when you have a website, sometimes, you know, website is not as an important asset as in a web store, because online store is your main revenue generator. Website is in many cases for like local businesses is, you know, not the main thing.”

“cause we, we, we figured that a lot of businesses, you know, start with cold outreach and do it for maybe one month to month. And as they're learning, you know, uh, these businesses, these tools for outreach tend to have high churn rates.”

“if I was a non-technical founder now, first of all, I would try to build like a very basic MVP. With AI, it's not always possible because it can't do everything, but definitely I would build a very basic version of the MVP, get it working, like at least clickable. It doesn't have to function properly, but at least…”

“Then I think over that 12 months, really try and maximize and push your business to scale the revenue as much as you can, because How much it scales in that 12 months, even if it grows, like, you know, 2030, 40%, like, that can massively increase your valuation, especially because people will see it's on an upward…”

“So you don't want to hand over a full-time job to them. You want to make sure that the, the systems are in place so that it doesn't feel like a burden once acquired.”

“When you price it as a low opportunity or a low price opportunity, it attracts a lot more buyers and that leads to usually more offers. Then we get more offers. You can usually negotiate them upwards.”

“what you want to do is you want to tell buyers that you're accepting offers, but don't accept one. You say, Hey, I'm hoping to get all formal offers in by this date. And then the first buyer submits it and he knows the timeline. Like Camille is going to review these in the next week and accept one. And then the second…”

“those folks don't actually have a lot of volume of sales, and so if they don't have a lot of volume of sales, they're not going to spend a lot of money on a tool that helps them sell. And so because of that, I found LTV, the lifetime value of a customer was very low, um, uh, to the point where it's not going to be that…”

“if it's an AI product, and you know every call somebody makes, it's gonna cost you, and you're selling a lifetime deal at 50 bucks, uh, just all is, all, all the software. Then you're putting yourself at risk, because that person can come in and, like, do a thousand dollars worth of AI calls, and now you're, You're,…”

“for healthcare, they're typically five to 10 years behind on business tactics versus other businesses.”

“one thing that I've learned, um, is like simple system scale. And, you know, when you have to add tons and tons of new features, it just becomes like this endless treadmill that you're on.”

“when you raise capital, I mean, at a certain point, you have to return capital to shareholders. Um, so You know, kind of around the 10 year mark, you know, they're looking for liquidity.”

“when things are like really hot and frothy and, you know, the future's looking bright, I mean, that's really the time that you want to sell. Um, so I, I wish, you know, we had, we had made those moves at the time.”

“there's also a point when you're in an acquisition process where you have a bunch of people interested, but no one's going to jump until someone else jumps and like gives you an offer or like there's some deadline.”

“working capital requirements can really screw you over, you know, cut your deal.”

“once you sign the LOI, um, now the buyer has all the power, and, like, if they back out, now you have to go back to the other buyers.”

“If you run a business, and it has at least three consecutive prior years of profit, and like, let's say six figures of profit, like a very small amount, um, that's what buyers want. So, like, there are a lot of companies that have had a lot of profit, but they're pretty new, or they've been around for a while, and they…”

“multiples are very subjective, so A person who's only interested in your business as a cash cow is going to, um, buy for potentially less or three or two point something to three X your ARR and recurring revenue. Uh, but someone who's interested more in your tech stack or some, some other mode you have built around…”

“if people ask too many questions, especially before the letter of intent, They're usually not particularly serious about it. Uh, there is this trend, not only on acquire.com, on Flippa and other websites, where people pay the monthly queue, whatever, and go on there just to do market research, to see what works, what…”

“do people actually use the app? Because if they don't use the app, then it's pointless to try to optimize for Like sales and stuff like that to make a nice funnel if, if they just don't even use the free app.”

“since it's AI, AI moves super fast. So within a few months you get new competitors and stuff like that. So it's not possible to just Do nothing when you have something in AI, in my opinion, just too much stress. Uh, so that's one of the major reasons that I wanted to, to exit because I couldn't afford to like, if I…”

“there is emotional attachment to the product, but it's, it's not worth anything for the buyer. So even if you think your product is like your baby, it's, it's not the case for the buyer. And I think most of them will buy based on the number alone, not the, oh yeah, it's a nice tech, et cetera.”

“Like, don't overvalue your products, and it's, as we mentioned earlier, I think it's really worth maybe pricing slightly under what you had in mind to get more offer, and then raise the bids, because, like, it's like, it's like a restaurant. If you go to a restaurant and there is, like, no one, then you're like, oh,…”

“when I decided to sell the visa, I had four products running, and I think that's one of the main mistakes. I learned a lot, but, uh, running four products a lot, even though this was on autopilot, one of the other ones was also kind of autopilot-ish, but two of them are spending more time and kind of focused on growing…”

“we really tailored our services, our approach and everything for a client, which is Not the most scalable way to, to, to grow your agency, because the more time you invest, you have a less time to allocate for other clients, et cetera, et cetera. So either you should increase the price of your service, you know, and…”

“What is hard is when the business is not growing anymore or declining, despite having a lot of inbound or being very profitable, because you don't know why, what is broken and how, and you don't know how much time you'll have until the thing is immediately broken.”

“the more meticulous a founder, like a seller is, the better the business. And so today I spend way more time understanding the psyche of a founder, of a seller, because I, in a way, for bootstrap founders, the business reflects the founder very, very closely. Um, and so if they're messy, the business will be messy. If…”

“debt for these businesses is very expensive and you, you need growth to pay for the, the price of the debt in a way. And so, um, you want to make sure that what you're buying is not going to Have one last path, and then go downhill from there, despite everything that you can try. So it means that when we're thinking…”

“what we're seeing is there's, there's a relatively fast life cycle. You know, guys and gals will go out and buy businesses when they're 35 and fresh out of business school or whatever, and then 18 to 24 to 36 to 48 months later, they're oftentimes looking to sell.”

“I see a lot of really sophisticated people financially struggle with the financial diligence piece of it, because they come in, you know, they've got 10 years of experience at Goldman Sachs, right? And they're like, I don't need a higher quality of earnings provider to, to look at these books, like I can do it, right?…”

“You always need to get a person that's there that you trust. Locally, and, you know, that's just from experience from talking with. I'll say other foreigners that have companies that are in other countries, because as as you being a foreigner. Um, you know, people will try to take advantage of you in those local…”

“I think for any SaaS business, like this is the lesson I learned is like, um, comparison pages, alternative pages, review pages. Like if you have these three pages nailed out, And, uh, then I think you are getting your major like inbound channel is like right there.”

“having these materials available in advance is huge, and You know, I think a lot of startup founders, um, really don't understand how much it impacts your valuation, the amount of buyers interested.”

“Insurance agencies, We're the easiest clientele to start with because I started without, like, knowledge of, like, Apollo or Seamless or ZoomInfo, so I don't know how to find people's names online. So if you look it up, just look up insurance agencies near me, you're gonna see it's, like, Allstate Insurance Todd Smith,…”

“I would say, you know, maybe you have like a five percent chance with a strategic buyer and they'll value your business entirely different from the majority of buyers. Which are definitely going to be looking at your profitability.”

“The process is the same for 500 K or up to, you know, five million.”

“there's a lot of good product, especially on acquired. I see them all the time where it's like, if you can just pick up the phone and you know how to cold call and close the customer, you can make the business a hundred times more successful”

“even if you come in 1000th place in a market, you can still build like a multimillion dollar business.”

“the strategy that I always recommend, and my whole team recommends, and what we've seen work the best is, is counterintuitive, but price it below what you think it's going to sell for. Because what that does is it draws in a lot of buyers, so you have a lot of attention from buyers and interest, and then you have a lot…”

“if you have one buyer, you have no buyers and it gets very fascinating. And this is how you increase valuation or get better terms is you have multiple buyers cause you have leverage.”

“if, um, you're unsure of, you know, where you want to invest it, Or whatever, maybe just let it sit in your bank account for six, six months and just change nothing about your lifestyle. Don't, don't start, you know, angel investing and stuff like that. Just let it all kind of sink in. And then after six months, you…”

“This is probably the number one reason why I see a lot of startups not selling is they read about some company that sold for 10 times revenue and that biggest thing that happens, but that's an outlier. That's not the averages and that's normal.”

“I would say you have a 45% chance of getting acquired by private equity, five percent strategic And then, 50%, it's probably going to be an individual buyer.”

“when a startup runs out of cash, everybody kind of runs for the hills. The founders are like in a broken cap table where they have no upside, so like, hey, I'm out of here. The investor is like, well, hey, there's no one to run it, and there's no money, so we're out of here, and all of a sudden, this great asset often…”

“I said, here's three buckets that you're going to wind up in either private equity, which is only an option if you have revenue, right? The second is a strategic buyer, which is always your best case, but there aren't that many in the likelihood that they're willing to buy in the contact you have has the authority or…”

“Bessemer or folks like them would prefer to be able to have their stock just moved over to another entity that would likely do something with it and hopefully have an outcome down the road so they don't have to write it all down”

“You can't just sell the venture story to the world. Like nobody gives a shit. Do you have some revenue? People understand that.”

“in a lot of cases, by the time you get to this point, even if you've only raised a few million dollars, the likelihood that you're going to sell something and, um, get over your, your preference hurdle is usually pretty low”

“by the time you get there, investors knew this a long time ago. I mentioned that company that I did back in the mid-two thousands called Affordit. By the time I was like, guys, you're not going to believe this. We're going to have to shut this down. They were like, dude, we wrote this off like a year ago.”

“And frankly, having met with thousands upon thousands of founders, I have hardly ever met a founder at the end of this that's just like, ah, I just, my feelings were hurt, so I had to leave. By the time I'm talking to folks, or even, you know, before then, they have ruined their lives at so many levels, both…”

“before making any changes, just shoot out a few emails, head of a corp dev, head of product, uh, CEO, depending on company size, and see if they'll at least take a meeting, and you'll get to, you'll figure out if there's strategic interest pretty quickly.”

“When you go to PE, it has to be a lot because it has to be worth their while. When you go to strategics, it has to be a lot. But if you've got 50 K and MRR, there are a lot of people that could just take over that business.”

“most of these companies don't get bought with just a big check cash on the barrel head.”

“And one more I can give as a developer is to avoid adopting the last fancy tech stack, you know, just stick with the technology you are comfortable with and go with it cheap fast so you can continuously improve the application.”

“Don't have a webinar. Don't do a white paper. That stuff is just played out even way back then. Nevermind now.”

“over explain everything in your listing. There's not going to be too much data available to people. So, you know, if you've got the exact, you know, monthly data points of visits, revenue, everything like they can, they can break it out and look at it however they want. But yeah, over explain and give as much data as…”

“I'd say pretty well every request for a face-to-face call, and I wouldn't be too choosy unless you're, you're overwhelmingly busy. Um, you never know what's going to come out of that discussion face-to-face. I maybe only had one that was like really not productive and shouldn't have bothered meeting, but if you've got…”

“assume everyone is the buyer until they're not, until they say they're not interested, continue to follow up, continue to push for calls. And that's really like the, the biggest part with acquisitions that a lot of people I think miss is number one, you gotta be obviously prepared in terms of before you go live, but…”

“don't, don't try to, like, hide things, it'll, it'll come out in due diligence, so I'm just in that initial data dump, like I said, over-explain, just post all the raw data, even if you've got it, and they can look at it as is.”

“I always feel like when you get to 90%, it's gonna, that's where you need to just stop and ship it, because 90% to a hundred percent takes just as much time typically within the team from what I've experienced.”

“I like to say that in the eighty-twenty rule, whatever side of the eighty-twenty rule in terms of timeline you think you're on, you're on the other side. So when you're building your product and you think you're 80% done, you're only 20% done. Whatever side of eighty-twenty you're on, you're on the other side. Almost…”

“Run, run a hundred dollars in ads or 20 dollars a day on ads to a landing page with a buy button four or fours and track how many people click on it. Because if you don't get any clicks, the rest of your problems don't matter.”

“I love how you took an existing business model for a more traditional market, press, PR, newspapers, blogs, whatever, and then applied it towards a newer medium being podcasts, which I think really de-risked kind of the idea or the concept of the business, because You can look over on the right hand side and say, Hey,…”

“So, the more buyers you can bring to the table, the more conversations you have, the more interested buyers you get to You know, solicit an offer to you a letter of intent. That gives you the opportunity to negotiate upwards on valuation, terms, all that fun stuff.”

“with software companies, you're not going to hand them down to your children just because it's going to be disrupted like 20 times by then. So if you're not able to continue, like continue with product development, keeping up with customers, you know, you're, you know, over time, competition is just going to creep in…”

“I think that's like one of the best ways to build a business because you're seeing the problem”

“when you have like the one-time payments every month, you gotta have that amount of money coming in. But if it's recurring, You know, you can predict the revenue out. So, you know, next month, even if no customer comes in, assuming your churn is low. You know, you, you really have something on your hands and then it…”

“I think that's a crucial mistake that a lot of sellers make is they think that you just listed and then you just kind of wait around and then someone's like, I want it. But I'm sure as you went on buyer calls, you realize like there's a level of trust that needs to be built and obviously, you know, additional…”

“don't intentionally or unintentionally ignore a prospective buyer. I think that's, you know, just be on it because the one, the, the person that I sold my business to, like I said, was not really like first in mind.”

“Film and TV, the sampling time with music is like three to four seconds. You're like, I kind of like this or not. Tilbury TV, like, you have to watch it in 20 minutes to something to figure out if you like it. You do that two times and you're done for the night. Like, you're not going to keep watching something. Um,…”

“as far as like Facebook's algorithm goes, like if you get, the more shares you get, the more likely you're going to be featured on that, um, discover page. So, um, create a content that it's inherently shareable, not necessarily the most outliers or comments, but like creating content that people share with their…”

“The more people that pay to subscribe to this alpha, the less alpha it's actually providing in the marketplace. Your data becomes priced into the model.”

“if all of your assets individually are worth something, it's probably a premium to buying everything together, unless you can find that perfect buyer.”

“the, the best way to sell your company is to not have to sell your company, So if, if you keep on going without selling it, you're perfectly fine.”

“I would recommend going with someone even at a discount because you know that the probability of that acquisition closing is higher instead of kind of signing and going into like a mystery tunnel with this person where once you sign there, cause the worst thing that can happen is not necessarily the worst, but, um, you…”

“whenever someone Emails me and says like, how do I get an acquisitions? Or, um, I'd love to learn more about acquisitions. I'm looking to sell my company in like a year or something like that. I always kind of just say, go buy something for a five K and go through, like treat it like it's a multimillion dollar deal.…”

“Um, but for, for business at the scale that I was at, uh, good luck. Kind of trying to go run a traditional sell process for that. I think typically in the business that we're in, if we were to go out to market, uh, to, to, to sell this business, this is like a business I would be doing like five million in EBITDA, um,…”

“because if you're a dog groomer, and it's specifically made for them, ah, you know, the chances of you building the best software for that specific customer is just so much higher.”

“I'd say the pinnacle of marketing is when you can either have a company name that's a verb or you make up some acronym that is adopted within the industry.”

“when you get an LOI, you know, factor in, you know, the probability of close as well, because you might go after that big extra 20%. Um, or maybe it was like a 10% difference in this case, but it might not close.”

“Like, you know, the weekend kills deals.”

“the quicker they get to an LOI, or the quicker they get to, you know, responding to questions they ask, or sending you additional questions they may have, that's kind of what Due diligence is going to be like. If it's really slow getting the LOI, if it's really slow getting questions responses, due diligence is going…”

“organic growth still, particularly for, you know, bootstrap startups, like, you've got to find a way to reduce your customer acquisition costs, because every venture-backed company who you're competing against has enough money to outspend you on, on all the paid channels, and they're doing all the stuff that, like, you…”

“The, the number one question that my mentor shared with me, and that I came to, came back to over and over again, it was, what is a problem I can solve? And what is the biggest problem in my life? It wasn't, what is your idea? What is the business you want to grow? How do you want to make money? It's, what is a problem…”

“seasonality when it comes to acquisitions is terrible. It literally is. If a buyer looks at that, unless the product, you know, is, is typically at scale, but I mean, if you're selling like an e-commerce store with fireworks or something like that, they do that. They say, you know, fireworks, 90% of the sales on like…”

“When you sign an LOI, don't stop selling. Do not stop selling the business. Like you're going to have all this stuff that the buyer wants. Right. What you should also always do is, um, record like a loom on how marketing works, how sales works, how showcase me, you know, those cool, um, paintings, you know, get me…”

“be friends with your, with the person who's going to acquire you, with the group that's going to acquire you, whoever your main correspondence is.”

“when you come up with a sizable win, that's meaningful to you. I think you do as an entrepreneur have like an elevated level of confidence. And so you might venture out into, A type of business that maybe isn't your strong suit, or it's beyond what your skill sets really are”

“Some businesses will get to a million revenue in a year, but I think on average, it takes a business, you know, three, four years.”

“if the, if the future can be an update, we put it on the, on the next release. And if it's need more work or need more time, we put it on our new product.”

“Yeah, that's what put the difference between the acquisition that is done in one hour because an acquisition can, can, can take one hour on acquisition and, and at the same time for the same assets, the same things, uh, it, it, it might take, uh, one month or three months or five months just for, for, for those…”

“just don't, don't shut down a product if it's not working for you. Maybe it's, it's, uh, it suits some, someone else. It's, uh, it might fit some, some other buyers who may be interested in that product. So just don't put all your efforts or, uh, time Into, into a trash or into an archive folder. Just put a, put it on…”

“the majority of acquisitions that I see close and I see a lot always have some form of just goodwill where you and the buyer are getting along. There's no tension. That's kind of where deals fall apart. Like you get a really high price, you sign the LOI, you both just Can't get along, whatever it may be.”

“when you share that with the buyer doing during due diligence that can exponentially increase the chances of close case, something pops up.”

“I know that time kills more deals than anything else. So I was quick to always respond within five to 10 minutes, no matter what I was doing.”

“realize that if you can de-risk your sale, you will have a better chance of selling. That's massive. If you can say things like I'll stay on for a period, I'm happy to do certain KPIs.”

“fine tuning an AI model is quite a difficult, complex process. It's a little bit tricky, uh, but it can kind of 10 X, five X your results in terms of the quality outputs.”

“If they previously acquired a business, you can ask for references. Like, do you have anyone I could speak to? What is it like working with you? That's entirely appropriate.”

“we were starting to look more closely at horizontal SAS plays and then thinking more about the vertical component from a go to market perspective. To avoid kind of the pitfall of your market to everybody, your market to nobody, but also to avoid kind of the trade off of vertical SaaS, which is smaller kind of niche…”

“Like I think our assumption is that, you know, call it on average, 20 to 40% of the product needs to be enhanced or rewritten in some way. But beyond that, you start to play a game around technical debt and it kind of changes your ability to move fast.”

“the more you can kind of hint Or foreshadow what a transformation play would look like, and then rationalize why you're not the one to execute it. It'll speed up your ability to transact.”

“So if you think about traditional OG private equity and it's like, hey, we have a data room and this data room is stuffed full of like spreadsheets that have P and L's and, you know, customer concentration and personnel and salespeople and quotas and headcount and HR and benefits and overhead and all this stuff. It's…”

“And if we're talking kind of, you know, the 500 to a million ARR, which is like, you know, 15 to 25 or whatever, 25 The 45 MRR where there's that level of complexity. You're probably talking about 90 day ideal or three months seller transition, which is 60 hours, 30 hours, 10 hours.”

“optimally my view is like, you're selling the business. Let's keep you on the capital stack, like on the cap table. Um, for two, three, four, five, you know, whatever, for like five hours a month, and you're there to advise us on the thing, but ultimately, it's, it's kind of like a, hey, we're in the interest of doing…”

“all of these other linking bio tools and the competition is really strong and like building a product like this, you need to rely on building a user base that is huge and then getting money and stuff like that. It's really hard to monetize.”

“as an entrepreneur, sometimes thinking in that framework of, you know, rapidly build products, then one will take off, and that's one that you shift your, your full focus to, or you just focus on all of them, if they're all, if they're all working.”

“If you're buying a complex SAS product and you don't have any, any engineers that are going to be staying, um, my advice is to get an agency involved and see if they can understand it. Um, do the technical due diligence with you, and then, uh, from there, if there's a fifth, and then you have, uh, agency on hand, but…”

“And I reckon I actually recommend that often for, especially for larger size businesses to Work with an experienced buyer, even if it's at a lower price, because your chances of it closing is so much higher because you can have an inexperienced buyer give you maybe a better offer with better terms. But if you have a…”

“especially for Shopify apps, where it's like my bread and butter, it's so liquid right now. It's, it's a really good business model to just make Shopify apps and sell them after one year. I think you could make a lot of money bigger.”

“sometimes the person who puts out like the first LOI typically is, um, the buyer of the startup, even if there's many different LOIs.”

“People who just sell, uh, who send out premature LOIs. So like, they kind of don't, they haven't asked the right questions yet. They really haven't, you know, dove into the business with you. You haven't spoken with them. Um, I do not recommend signing those LOIs because you want to do as much due diligence as you can…”

“I always tell people when they're first starting out, uh, building a startup, uh, business, whatever, maybe focus on one marketing channel at a time, you know, cause you can do ads, SEO, uh, you know, Social media, but just going all in on one channel, you'll be, you know, good at it, you'll be consistent.”

“before starting a business, write down all the stuff that you don't like to do. And that'll really be your guiding path.”

“you're still selling the business after you sell an LOI. And if you do that, sometimes if they find something maybe kind of small, you just shared with them a bunch of other stuff to get excited about, growth opportunities, et cetera, and that can keep the deal going.”

“having all that upfront gives a good first impression, shows you're serious about selling the business. And again, just increases your chances of getting acquired by a magnitude of an amount. I, I'd put it at like 500% in terms of, uh, Cause it shows buyers that you're serious and buyers are looking at a lot of…”

“potential buyers prioritize the easy and speed with which they can restart and grow the project. So often preferring projects with a viable business model over those that generate significant revenue.”

“when you're selling a business, you got to really sell it. You know, you gotta follow up with every single lead you have. I always recommend, you know, treating each buyer like they are the buyer and bill they're not. So following up with, you know, weekly updates or product demos or any additional information you can…”

“getting along with whoever's buying your business is just absolutely critical in terms of, cause when you sell your business, it's, I always say, it's not like handing over keys to a car. You're gonna have, you know, probably a three month transition period or a six month transition period where you're gonna have to…”

“if you haven't acquired anything, just buy something for a five K, go through an LOI, go through the asset purchase. Go through due diligence and that alone will help you when you get to, you know, larger acquisition.”

“working with buyers that already bought a business, it's, it's, Preferable also because there's a expectation on alignments, right? So a new buyer might, might think that, you know, he buys a business and then, you know, this business is running by its own.”

“first of all, be profitable, especially if you are in the e-commerce space, because, um, it's going to be really hard to convince someone to buy an e-commerce business that is not profitable just because it's a really a margin optimization game at the end of the day.”

“If you only have one buyer, they have all their leverage, but if you have a three or four, then you can say, Hey, this person offered me this, but these terms, what do you think? Can you, can you do better than that?”

“you'll definitely get better options if you list earlier when you are having like really good growth versus like, okay, my product has now like maybe flatlined or plateaued, then I should list them.”

“you got on calls with buyers, because when you sell a business, you have to sell the business, and what I mean by that is, you need to talk to buyers, you need to answer their questions, and I like how you did it all in one day, Because that helps you control the timeline that buyers have where you're not taking call…”

“if you have one buyer, you, you tend to have no buyers.”

“I realized that, you know, it's not about, um, how much money you can make from it, but it's about what you can do for that user base.”

“So sometimes, um, it's important, like, as a, as a buyer, I'd say, to have a vision of what the product could be. Um, and it's, it's good if that vision is different from the person who's selling it. Um, That's just the way I see it because, you know, if, if, if there's an, if you see an opportunity to make it way, way…”

“I realized, you know, distribution is the most important thing. So I actually started working on distribution before I ever started working on the product itself to see, you know, what's the best place for the customers.”

“transferring assets can, can sometimes be harder than due diligence, just because, like, I've heard stories of people having, you know, some, some really good products or businesses inside of a single AWS account, they got to pull it out, um, Or a Stripe account with multiple products in it, and they got to pull that…”

“when you are speaking to the buyer, you know, if, if I say this as growth, it's kind of like, you don't want to sell them here. You want to sell them that it's about here to kind of show that there's still room for that big growth, um, through there to let them know, okay, cool. This is the, Distribution channels that…”

“I always say small, small exits, they lead to bigger things because you learn so much and then allows you to swing bigger the next time.”

“And the inbox, the text message inbox is usually reserved for friends and family. So if you let a brand into your text message inbox, you know, you're, you're probably going to read it. Uh, so it's, it's just incredibly more effective than other mediums out there, whether it's email or social media.”

“when you, you know, kind of don't have a timeline, buyers can really extrapolate that in a week and turn into a month. But when you have multiple parties interested and you put it into one day, say, Hey, we want LOIs on this day. Um, that could be a very, very, um, powerful way to get buyers to quickly say yes, or No.”

“Only the one, the one that, like, didn't really ask a lot are the ones that actually gonna be serious about the product. So usually they know, and they did their research”

“If we would have, if we would redo that, I think Bogdan and I would just try to replace ourselves at least a year before we actually sell the business just to make it more easy to transfer and to also shorten the period that because we will stay with them until the end of 2023 with Stadium, but it could have been…”

“Customer support can be the ultimate killer if you're trying to build or buy lifestyle Applications.”

“You always have to keep your deal flow sources. I would say agnostic. You have to be willing to look under every nook and cranny to find something. And sometimes the best deal is never going to be listed anywhere. It's going to be the right time, the right place, a little bit of luck, a little bit of serendipity, a…”

“honestly, the, the hardest problem is, is getting people to understand like what cryptography is and why you have these kind of like, you know, these seed words, which are effectively you, you, let's say your password for your, for your keys. Um, Getting them to really understand why they need to do this stuff, uh, is…”

“just because you write code doesn't mean it has to be a startup. It doesn't mean it has to be stressful. It can just be a technology company.”

“Customer support can be the ultimate killer if you're trying to build or buy lifestyle applications.”

“you always have to keep your deal flow sources. I would say agnostic. You have to be willing to look under every nook and cranny to find something. And sometimes the best deal is never going to be listed anywhere. It's going to be the right time, the right place, a little bit of luck, a little bit of serendipity, a…”

“And as you know, with any startup, that's 90% of where the money goes. That's 90% of like where the focus is, is getting over that hurdle of product adoption and product market fit.”

“That's a huge, um, uh, just an advantage compared to a lot of other sellers. Cause as a buyer, you don't want to buy an application and then you, the source code is messy and then you have to go find another engineer. So just having someone available for any sort of fixes and upgrades.”

“if you're a SaaS company and you have to keep on your contractors or your development team a little longer, like really expect to keep them on through the acquisition and not like cut them before thinking everything's going to go smoothly.”

“Every single week, we're sending that buyer, like, an exciting email, like, hey, this is a new initiative we launched this week. Hey, these are our sales numbers. Hey, et cetera, et cetera, and keeping them completely excited, engaged the whole way until the close”

“definitely, like, ask everyone the same, like, full set of questions, even if the tools are a little bit different. Um, uh, cause that way, like you're just establishing that baseline. You're able to compare offers, um, or compare companies, uh, you know, a more fair way.”

“just getting to that point alone can take a year. So you kind of skipped over that, that year where you're just eating glass, begging customers to just look at the product.”

“some due diligence questions can be Um, you know, tricky, like, hey, send me your entire customer list. The answer to that is no. Scrub it. Send anonymized data.”

“sometimes it's not just the price that, you know, you, I could tell you got some passion for travel and, you know, you don't want to just sell to someone who's gonna, you know, just destroy or ruin the reputation of the business. So that's, that's something buyers, I think, um, can really leverage if they have…”

“I, I guess we probably quickly realized, like, if you're doing something that's 200,000, or like two million, or four hundred thousand and four million, like, it's roughly the same amount of work, so leaning more towards these, like, single digit ARR companies.”

“there's a pretty significant delay between the public markets and the private markets. It's like, um, before things really start to turn, just because there's a lot of dry powder out there.”

“I would say pricing power. Like, not that we do it, but I think if you could double prices and see very low churn, I think that's, like, a meaningful, uh, measure of, like, how much value you're actually creating for your customer.”

“I always recommend, um, cash upfront because if you do, and seller financing can work out really well in a lot of scenarios, but if you have an all cash offer, um, it just reduces so much risk on your end because you're not chasing the other person down for either monthly payments or whatever you agree to.”

“Like part of it, it's, you know, it's not like a million dollar sale or anything like that, and so we didn't feel like we needed, uh, like a real escrow, I guess, which, you know, probably goes right a lot of the time, and I don't recommend it, because if it goes wrong, then it really goes wrong, but it went right for…”

“So if you kind of outline the things that you know are wrong with the app, then they can, like, figure out some quick wins, um, as soon as they buy it, and so I think that helped in that case.”

“just having like those growth opportunities on how you would continue growing this startup with a buyer, I think is a, is a huge selling point because you, you kind of just give them a roadmap.”

“always asked for the buyer to jump on the call if they're interested because anyone who's kicking the tire, anyone who's not interested is not going to go forward because there's a ton of people who might reach out, but at the end of the day, they're not really interested.”

“every time I've listed a startup without fail. There's always that one person who lowballs you with like a 1.5 X multiple or two X multiple. It just says your startup isn't worth what you're asking for. I'll pay you this much. So, so don't, don't fault them. Even if they come in early, even if they come in within a few…”

“If all you're doing is billing hourly, every, every efficiency gain you make as a lawyer is basically just lost revenue.”

“when deals fall apart, they typically happen because something has come up in financial diligence. You know, income wasn't what you expected. Expenses were greater than what you expected, and so you typically don't want to be incurring a lot of legal fees until you at least do a couple You know, get through a bit of…”

“And as buyer counsel, the truth is that, like, we only care about the intellectual property that really is, you know, really kind of necessary and compelling for the business, right? Like, we want to know your patents. We want to know your trademarks. We want to know that the code is, like, actually, like, properly…”

“I don't need an SBA loan, which slows things down pretty dramatically. So I can offer them a low ball offer, but all cash all up front within like 48 hours. Right? So for people who've been sitting there for a while trying to sell their, their SAS, that's really attractive to them, even if it's at a lower price. So…”

“everyone always says the same thing about why they're selling. Which is kind of like, you can see through it, like, oh, you know, I want to do something else. I'm bored of this, which, which I get, and it could be honest, but more times than not, it's for a specific reason you're selling. Like, your skill set doesn't…”

“No, what I, what I would do is like to elephant hunt again, I would contact like ramp and Brex, Because they see everyone's bank account, they see the debt, right? They know who's about to go under and who's not, and it's in their best interest to not lose money. I do some deal with them, like, hey, any startups are…”

“the reaction that they end up having is saying, Hey, uh, we're overweighted venture. We're not going to give any money to new V to VCs for a while. And VCs know this. And so the net result is VCs say, okay, well, it's going to be really hard to raise capital. Let's hold our breath. Let's, you know, instead of doing 10…”

“You can never scale into profitability or a healthy company with a negative gross margin. Unless it eventually writes itself.”

“the thing is delegation only works if the team's competent, right? And you have to have, you have to have both. You have to have a team that's competent and a leader who's willing to let go to scale. You can't have one or the other. You have to have both.”

“I talk about speed of execution, um, a lot cause I believe that to be, um, the biggest, if not, um, you know, the main driver of, um, or the, the biggest advantage, uh, startups have.”

“Within a team, the characteristics that I think make people really successful as entrepreneurs, all three things that you have in spades, and why you were probably successful despite having no experience in college, it's humility, organizational skills, and work ethic, grit. And if you have those three things, you'll…”

“As an entrepreneur, you should make a non-obvious bet to everybody else. That's obvious to you. That will become obvious over time.”

“in the new reality of, uh, DTC today, it's really difficult to get the same return on ad spend that you used to get. And it's really imperative to have a channel to communicate with your customers one-on-one, uh, to be able to like personalize commerce.”

“whenever someone says like, I want to offload this really quickly, like this needs to be done ASAP, kind of like Raises its suspicions for me, just because it's like how, you know, how quickly is quickly? Like, why do you want to get it done so quickly? You've spent months, if not years building this, like what's going…”

“Fulfillment solutions or anything that'll like increase conversion rates. Maybe it's like a bundling app or something like that. Um, Those tend to have pretty clear measurable ROIs. And so I would, I'd be hard pressed to find a merchant who's like, oh, you know, times are tough. Let me delete all my bundling…”

“I actually recommend, at the very least, thinking about your sale process three years before you plan to do it, and ideally even four or five years if you're not in a rush, right, because you can really optimize your business for the sale”

“if you're a year out or you're two years out and you've had zero profit this whole time, which many businesses do or negative profit, consider showing profit or considering structuring your business so that you can make it very clear to the buyer that these two levers, if you move them, your business will be really…”

“audience is different than a community. Insta influencers, they're all audiences. People have newsletters, they're audiences. That's great. The community is where members or people, uh, the audience interacts with one another without the, the sort of influence, key influencer involved, right? So like, I think audience…”

“Anytime we incorporate more than two senses into an equation, you start to build even stronger connections. Like when you're doing meetups, you're, you're drinking together, you're smelling each other's sweat, you're shaking hands, uh, and you start building more and more genuine connections.”

“Now, if you don't have product market fit or not very many users, you're just early on, you can't start a community of product, right? People will think that you're going to sell to them, right? I mean, it's obvious. Why would I go to a community of product when I don't know if I want that product and users. So you…”

“Yesterday's innovation always becomes today's option and tomorrow's commodity. You look at the GPS, right? Perfect example. You couldn't get it. Then it was an option in the car. Now everyone has Apple CarPlay. If you build a community, you won't become a commodity because it creates that flywheel of connection between…”

“as soon as you start making money, if founders or execs are not aligned on the same values, like maybe one person is not transparent, but the other person believes in supreme transparency, it never works out.”

“They immediately go and put all the same amount of resources that they have in scale in one market in another market versus going through that same model again. Let's go and validate the ICP in that market. See if the same message resonates when you need to tweak. They, they, they, you know, you started small to get to…”

“if you keep hiring and promoting people based on tenure versus trajectory, you will become the very thing you set out to disrupt. And that means like, uh, people with high trajectory question a lot Uh, they tend to use their hands a lot, and I think you can stretch that in many cases post ten million even, you know,…”

“And the reason I'm calling out tenure and churn differently Is because some apps are so cyclical, um, and seasonal.”

“Be really upfront about what you're looking for, um, because there are no issues with that. If you want to sell and have nothing to do with it, that's totally your prerogative. If you want to sell to someone who's going to partner with you in some way to carry it to the holy land of where you think it can get, because…”

“it's almost like a, in my opinion, a benefit to bring your business forward with, you know, scars and, you Especially, like, growth opportunities, like, hey, I haven't done this, haven't tried this, I tried this, and I failed at this, or this has a, you know what I mean? Like, because it shows, number one, honesty,…”

“We were, we were on a call recently Um, with a company that, like, tell us about your competitors. What are they doing well? Like, we don't, we don't look at competitors. And to me, like, that's a huge red flag of even talking about disclosures. Like, think about what your competitors are doing.”

“If you're looking at acquiring an app and you don't know the space, download it, use it, talk to people that use it. Um, try not to just have the myopic lens of like MRR and ARR and IRR and anything that ends in RR and actually get your hands in there.”

“The thing that's been broadly true is that there's always stuff that you find out after the fact, uh, with an acquisition. And if you don't have access to that team or kind of the institutional knowledge for that product, it can become really difficult, uh, to find a solution there.”

“I find that generally folks kind of rush through the product that they're acquiring and not fully understanding the technical debt, uh, that exists within the business. If there is, uh, any, and in most cases with software there, there typically is.”

“typically when somebody is selling a business, It is not fully optimized. So I think the thing that has been obvious from each one of these companies is there is always opportunity”

“that's always the balance as an operator is how much do I want to invest in the business versus taking earnings, uh, out of the business. And it's important to note what stage the business is in, in terms of earnings versus growth and what you're trying to lean into. That's kind of the tug and pull always with…”

“it's different than starting a business. It feels different than starting a business. Um, so do you want to be in kind of the, what I call like the tweaking phase, you know, where you're just kind of like taking something that has product market fit Uh, and you're trying to scale it. You're trying to tweak it and get…”

“And what you want to do in those situations is I always recommend, you know, make the buyer perform. What I mean is, You know, you have someone inquire about the business. Instead of just granting them access, ask them a question like, hey, do you have experience in this space? If they don't respond back, then just…”

“this is a, a definite pattern when we see across, um, successful acquisitions is just preparation, like actually putting some thought and some time into preparing, you know, proper financials, you know, how does marketing work, like all the questions that a buyer is going to ask, if you have it up front, like maybe you…”

“know exactly what you're looking for, right? Oftentimes when founders enter this selling cycle, they're still unsure about, do they want a clean exit? Do they want, uh, and are now terms where they want to stay around for three years and so on. Like, you know, don't, like, don't have a dis-debate. I know what you're…”

“one, one piece of advice I always give to, to sellers is, um, make a buyer work for you, and what I mean by that is you ask them a series of questions like, have you acquired a company before, or in your, uh, situation maybe, uh, do you have any experience in this space, and they slowly respond back, and you get to…”

“I think if somebody in due diligence is really clueless what to do, what to ask for, it also kind of shows, um, they don't have any plan on what to do with the business after that”

“the same amount of work that it takes to find and acquire and, and finance, uh, you know, uh, like wave, the last business, you know, we probably could have done that same amount of work and bought something that was, you know, two or three times As big.”

“Uh, the one that scares me and also excites me is churn. ... I don't say growth, it's churn, for sure.”

“all salespeople interview well. You're going to have to go through maybe a few in order to get the right person.”

“what we see a lot are companies with single founders, and that's fine, but if you want a high valuation, Have a team hire, see if you can hire one or two more people to join your team. The value of your company is going to increase if you can put some people around you in place, because when you get acquired, they want…”

“allow the buyers to dig in deep enough that they can get answers to the questions they need to know and sooner rather than later. Um, cause that's the big thing that I run into a lot is, uh, especially in a competitive market, um, there are going to be buyers that don't want to do the work and then, you know, they'll…”

“when you're negotiating with the buyer, especially a financial buyer, um, make the negotiation about your specific business, not your market. Um, right. There are a lot of things you can point to External to your company that are going crazy in technology. Um, but you know, at the end of the day, your growth is your…”

“Just show your business work like warts and all, like all, like it's okay if there are gaps, it's okay if things are not on, you know, under optimized because that's the opportunity that a buyer is looking for. You know, they're, they're looking, if you're a buyer, you're looking to buy a business that you can come in…”

“On the one hand, somebody who's more experienced, who's done more, more acquisitions in the past, they know the mechanics, they know the process. There's, you know, um, they're, they're going to ask for certain things and then they're going to do due diligence. Then we get into contract negotiations and like a wire…”

“you can't expect just, just the listing page or just the asking price or just the, the name or something to be enough for a buyer to submit an offer. They're, they're going to need to First of all, they're probably looking at many other businesses. Second of all, um, but, but like you, you don't want to give all the…”

“If it's a solo founder with no team and no plan, and if they're gone, you know, the business is hosed. Well, that that's a problem. But if it's somebody, a founder who's built up a team and they're ready to step out, then that, Adds value to the business.”

“we've seen a lot of situations where people are sort of forced to sell a business for one reason or another. And if you haven't at least thought about these things, haven't had a couple of conversations, haven't like documented the things you're going to document, um, you, you're going to sell at a, you know, a…”

“I'd say that's probably the number one reason, um, a lot of companies don't sell microquare is they overpriced and it just stops the conversation from, because the gap is too big to close.”

“VC funding, multiples are very different than exit multiples. They've always been different.”

“I usually do recommend if it's your first acquisition and it's in like the six figures, it's a very small price to pay to have an expert come in and give you a second opinion and help walk you through the process.”

“There's no matter how technical you are and how much into the weed that the product you can get, there's always like little corner cases that you'll want to ping him about. And because he has skin in the game today, he's always willing to pick up the phone and chat with us.”

“for me, uh, the biggest heuristic that I go off of is organization and consistency of structure. Um, so it's really hard if you're just, like, eyeballing, like, Thousands of lines of code over a zoom or whatever it is to figure out if it's quality code. But what you can do really quickly is to see if that the folder…”

“if you have one buyer, you have no buyer, so you want to draw in a bunch, and then If you're successful, you can, you know, negotiate and raise up the price or you have leverage on the terms and stuff like that.”

“If you have a life changing acquisition, especially in the millions, It, it really does go a long way hiring like a M&A advisor, investment bank, um, just to, it brings insurance, not just to you, but also to the buyer. It's the biggest signal to a buyer that you're serious and you're actually going to sell this…”

“The advantage with something when you buy it is that it's more focused chaos, you know, like you're buying something where you know where the fire is, and you know exactly, like you have a playbook for how to fix it”

“The other part that's really important about how we structure the deals just for like tax planning purposes. Is we'll do a lot of the asset purchase. We'll be like, we'll take the amount that we agree upon, and a particular percentage of that will be actually for the asset purchase itself, and the other percentage of…”

“But if you gave people, like, a service, the service did the exact same thing as the software, but just a service version and told them that humans are gonna do it, they would pay, like, way more for that same exact thing.”

“I always recommend something small just to go through the motions of, like, letter of intent. You have a purchase agreement, in between that you have due diligence, then you have transferring of the assets, and then just do it all formally, even if it seems a little overkill, just to kind of like, give yourself a…”

“it has been helpful to, to interact with people who intimately know the product and therefore can help with that kind of post-sale support versus being like, oh, let me go talk to my dev team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It takes forever. And then you don't get an answer right away.”

“typically even DAW best in my, from what I've seen when, you know, business isn't growing too much, it's flat, um, or it's just extremely profitable. And then ARR if it's growing.”

“a lot of times you want to assume good faith, but you have to protect yourself. Um, especially when you're running a business and you're trying to sell it a couple months extra when you're already tired or when you're trying to get out, just running in circles while people try to like hammer your price down.”

“a large portion of my work ended up being in regular industries like CBD and cannabis retailers, because they couldn't run paid ads. Like they were literally banned from running ads. And as you couldn't advertise on Google Meta, like SEO became one of the only viable marketing channels for them to acquire customers.”

“buyers really like recurring revenue and stability. So I think one thing I wish I knew in hindsight, if I were to kind of do this again, um, is like, I wish I would have signed My clients onto like longer agreements instead of just like month to month, because like we did have recurring revenue, um, but we didn't have…”

“first of all, change your head from I'm the head of my business into I am selling the, selling the business. So what is the benefit your buyer will get? So you really need to change the shoes, uh, of, uh, operational leader into the seller of the asset. Once you do this, it helps you to do different positioning,…”

“a lot of times what we see is founders keeping Multiple products within one Stripe account, and that's a whole new mess on its own.”

“it's important to remember what you're selling and what the buyer is acquiring, and it's really the brand and the customers and the profitability and the distribution. You can't copy those things overnight.”

“I came to learn that I, I didn't actually own a business. I owned a job that I worked, uh, that had a business front on it.”

“setting up the data room, too, in advance is massive, because you want to be ahead of that stuff, so you keep momentum going, so it doesn't drag on during due diligence, and it delays closing, and people lose excitement, and then that's how deals fall apart, and then a surprise pops up, and everything just goes haywire…”

“The last point's really good, because a lot of founders don't realize when you're Selling your business. You're in sales. You need to follow up. You need to share information. I cannot tell you how many acquisitions I've seen close from like the fourth follow-up one. You know, buyers looking at everything. They're…”

“the best thing you can do is start to build those relationships and partnerships with, like, potential acquirers years in advance. Like, a lot of the acquisitions we've done have been with companies we've known for some period of time, other than, like, Bench.”

“because I think because they're small projects, there wasn't a huge amount of due diligence, but so it made it really smooth and quick processes in both cases.”

“What people narrow down into a small market size, and they get saturated, They can never come out of it.”

“In US and other countries, they really don't care what you do once you're off. The, when you're doing all this, you really need a huge support from backing from all your, you need to convince them first, your internal network. And if they're giving you that, you know, thumbs up, go do it. There's nothing like that.…”

“When you're in even, let's say, due diligence, Like if you're able to show the business is trending upwards, that makes everything so much easier. And then when it starts trending down, that's where every discussion with the buyer is going to be about the decline. Why is this declining? What's happening? Can we…”

“Cause you know, in sales, if you let a lead sit for a few hours, it goes colder. The same exact thing applies to acquisitions.”

“I've seen many acquisitions that are like tangled messes where They gotta reach out, see if they can transfer projects. It's much easier if you have separate containers for each business that you're building.”

“try to build a product that is very easy to transfer and get ready things done before even the due diligence process started, because you, at the end of the day, you have to transfer the assets, right? So be prepared yourself so that, um, there is very less time between, uh, the agreement and the closing of the deal.”

“It's a great way to get more offers too, because you're de-risking the acquisition opportunity for buyers. The last thing, you know, the biggest fear for every buyer is, you know, I'm going to acquire this business. Now I know how to run it. The founder is going to leave. So clearly stating up front, like, Hey, I'll be…”

“There was like a quote, something like, you know, any deal is better than a strikeout or something like that. And that, that was like, Hey, like, I think that was, that's true. And a lot of, I think I see listings on there where vendors want to get, obviously the max they can, uh, but also being realistic and saying…”

“I think that's some of the best win-wins that I see at Acquire is you build a business to a certain point, you hand it off to someone to take it farther.”

“when you start meeting with buyers, it becomes very obvious which buyers are prepared and they've done their homework. And that should really separate, you know, serious buyers from non-serious buyers.”

“time kills all deals. Like if you see somebody who's in, who's interested in your business, keep them engaged, keep working them, keep massaging it. You gotta, you gotta keep with it. You know, they're going to be looking at other deals. They might be busy. They might be doing all these kinds of things. You don't want…”

“Post-COVID, once the Zoom era started, and once everyone started understanding remote, it's the easiest thing in the world to sell now. People just get it, and they know it's possible, and they, they expect it to work.”

“Anything that you can do to essentially de-risk the acquisition for a buyer, I highly recommend doing this. So putting together You know, standard SOPs or looms, like you had mentioned, or just outlining things to a bit more than what's asked, just gets a buyer more comfortable, gets them excited about acquiring the…”

“Social media, I think, has become a little bit more crowded if you don't already have an audience for kind of your individual profile or business profile.”

“Network, like personal networks are always going to be the best if you have them, or the second best then becomes alumni basis.”

“surprises kill deals. Uh, so if there's, like, a bruise on your business, or a bump, or something, you're not necessarily excited to share, just share it anyways, because it's going to get uncovered, and every business has issues.”

“Number two is always create separate accounts, uh, for all your products. It's hard to do, um, but Stripe lets you have a separate account, like, you can have multiple accounts in your organization, so you can have a single product and then, sorry, a single account for this product, and then all of the things, the…”