Opinion
Hyrkin: Non-AI SaaS companies cannot get revenue multiples above 5x
“Not six. I mean unless you're AI right now, you're not getting north of five.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Debt lender demanded 1% equity monthly and $1M penalty
“And this firm continued to negotiate with us after we had verbally agreed and kept squeezing and adding in more and more and more and more terms to the point where they started to demand they wanted at one point, an additional point in the company for each mon…”
Assertion Partly supported
Issuu raised a $30 million Series C entirely as non-dilutive debt
“All of it was debt. Yep. And the way it works is, you know, there's essentially no dilution. So it's really good for the team and really good for the company.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Bending Spoons buys $25M-$200M ARR companies to hold long-term
“What they're doing is they're buying companies that have, ah, some pretty good scale kind of revenue in the 25 to two hundred million dollar range, profitable or close to it, and then they go run them They buy to own. It's not a P firm.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Issuu sold for nine figures at $30M+ revenue
“As a company, we're doing just north of thirty million in revenue. Profitable. Not, not very profitable, but sort of barely profitable. And we sold the company for nine figures.”
What-if
Hyrkin: Issuu would have fetched 2x-3x higher price in 2022 market
“Given the stage of where issue was when we sold it in July, if we had sold it two years prior in 22, we would have gotten two to three X what we got.”
Disclosure
Hyrkin: Issuu acquisition by Bending Spoons was all cash without earnouts
“Well, it was all cash, no earnouts.”
What-if
Hyrkin: Raising equity in 2021 would have required a $1B exit
“So instead of raising, we would have had to raise thirty million on a two hundred and fifty million dollar valuation, which meant that For everyone to feel successful, we would have had to have a billion dollar exit, which may have happened, but I wanted to ma…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Issuu missed a quarterly debt covenant by $150K on $7M
“However, about a year into it, we missed our revenue covenant by a footfall. So on a seven million dollar quarter, we missed by about a 150 K.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Bending Spoons did not retrade price terms during Issuu acquisition
“One of the great things about working with Bending Spoons, they didn't retrade with us. I don't think they've retraded with others, meaning changed the price. Terms were the terms.”
Disclosure
Hyrkin: Issuu had deep acquisition discussions with Canva and Adobe
“We were, we had really deep conversations with Canva and Adobe.”
Insight
Hyrkin: Most acquisitions ultimately come down to only one to three buyers
“Most companies, when they get acquired, there's one to three that really come to the table. So, don't be disappointed if the 20 folks that you thought were gonna buy you, that you thought were gonna keep Raising the price and quadrupling it if that doesn't hap…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Issuu has been profitable for most of the past six years
“And also for most of our tenure, for most of the last Six years, we've been a profitable business.”
Opinion
Hyrkin: Standard venture debt loans carry 9 to 11 percent interest
“You know, I don't know what they're targeting, but I think loans in this nature are sort of in the nine to 11% range. Probably some are paying higher.”
Opinion
Hyrkin claims Issuu is valued in the high hundreds of millions
“You know, we're certainly in the high hundreds of millions of dollars, probably more, depending on on, on, on who's doing the valuation and where things are going.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Issuu's monthly gross customer churn is under 2%
“It's kind of in the, it's under two percent a month.”
Insight
Hyrkin: Tech platforms moved publishing's center of gravity to the West Coast
“Really the publishing and content business, the center of gravity is shifted dramatically to the west coast because that's where access to content is being made available on platforms like Facebook and Snapchat and others.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Issuu had 1M annual free users and 65k paying customers
“We had a million free customers a year, marketers, content creators 65,000 of them paying issue.”
Disclosure
Hyrkin: Issuu paid over $2M in investment banker fees on exit
“A little over two million.”
Disclosure
Hyrkin: Received significantly higher equity than typical hired CEOs at Issuu
“I got I got a nice compact, I'm not gonna give you the specifics, but I got a high, a much higher percent of the company than normally when you bring in a CEO.”
Disclosure
Hyrkin: Issuu took $20M of debt in 2021 despite $31M announcement
“We, ah, took on twenty million dollars of debt, actually, and had access to another 10. So it was announced as 31, but it was really 20.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hyrkin: Shell, Patagonia, and Miami Dolphins use Issuu for marketing
“Everybody from folks at shell to Patagonia the Miami dolphins use us in, in all those instances, it's groups within the marketing group or the HR group that's using us.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Issuu serves over one million freemium users
“We've got over a million customers. We're a freemium product. Over a million folks are using us.”
Disclosure
Issuu's most popular paid plan costs $500 per year
“The base product that most people are paying us for is, is 500 dollars a year.”
