A hard pivot... then relief and excitement
A few months ago, we made the hard decision to stop building our M&A platform.
It was a tough decision that came with a lot of feelings. I was so bummed to give up on a project that 1) I enjoyed building 2) I thought still had potential (even though I'm not the right person to build it and 3) my team and I had put many months into.
And I still haven't really announced this publicly. I'm not sure whether I will or not.
But as soon as I made the decision, I felt immense relief. This was SO the right choice.
Here are three reasons why we made this pivot, nearly three years into building this business:
We heard from M&A advisors they all wanted one thing (instead of what we were trying to sell to them): leads. I had this feedback on my brain for months, and finally decided to listen to it.
When I put together a plan for 2025 for growing the platform, I knew success required going bigger. I needed more resources to grow a team to make the product robust enough to be truly useful for our users. That mean either investing more of my own money into the business, or raising money. I had this ah-ha moment that this was the kind of project that couldn't be done well with a bootstrapped, lean mindset... it needed more to work well. And I realized I didn't WANT to do what it would take to succeed. At this point, I want to work less, not more. I want ease and joy in my work, not anxiety. Kind of crazy after coming this far, but that was the truth.
Alongside these two realizations, we'd been piloting a program where we sent leads in a new way to our M&A advisor partners -- and it was going really well. So well that I knew it made sense to move in that direction rather than the direction we were going.
So we scratched the M&A platform, and moved to a model based around referral partnerships and sponsorships. We've done both of these since our inception three years go, but finding a new way to do this make it sustainable, and created a path to leaning solely on these two revenue sources.
What I love about this new model is that it's entirely in my wheelhouse. I'm good at most of the things we have to do to succeed this way, including audience growth. And we're not starting at zero, since we've built these partnerships over the last three years.
It feels really good to move in this direction. More on that in the next post.
