Bought A Business On Acquire, Here’s How It’s Going

For about two years now, I’ve been a member of Acquire.com.

Just watching and waiting for a business to buy that jumped out at me, but that was also in a price range I could risk.

My goal was to be under $10k for a purchase price, but could even entertain a bit higher.

There have been a few businesses for sale where I liked the concept, but usually noticed one or a few things:

• Asking price was way overvalued. I get it, we are protective of the things we create and always think it’s worth more than it is. Plus, I of course could negotiate too. But I’d probably be insulting if I offered what I thought on a few.

• The idea behind the business was really good, but the product, website, and/or brand needed a lot of work. I have no problem putting in the work, I love to build and create. But for this project, I wanted to see a bit of traction and quality, where I could make some minor tweaks immediately to see some positive impact.

• Way too many AI focused features. I have nothing against AI, but it seems there are quite a few people just trying to build something fast and cash out on generic integrations of ChatGPT. I mean, get your money. But sometimes it was frustrating to see how many of those there were.

Anyway, I’ve had the entrepreneur bug for years, but never could really figure out what to pursue (SaaS, agency, community, etc)

So in the meantime, I’ve built multiple side projects mostly in media and marketing services.

For example:

• Started a personal finance and investing media site in 2018. It was acquired in 2021.

• Started a remote work media site and job board in 2022. Currently active, but might be acquired soon. Vetting some offers.

• Started a productized SaaS marketing service agency for founders and small marketing teams at seed to Series A companies.

So back to Acquire.

Recently, I took a nice vacation down to Florida to soak in some sun, disconnect from work and side hustles (as much as I could without letting them decline), and spent more time with my family.

But something funny happened too...

Unexpectedly, I ended up sending a Letter of Intent on acquire.com for a new side project with a silent partner.

Right before I left, something stood out and sounded familiar. And when I requested access, I got excited because it was something I was already using.

I reached out to someone I’ve been working with on different projects (we originally met via LinkedIn). And he happened to also be going on vacation in the same town in Florida during the time I’d be down there.

Okay universe, if that wasn’t a sign.

But wait, it gets better. His significant other and my wife had the same name. Also spelled the same way but pronounced differently.

Okay universe. This is getting REALLY interesting.

So we decided to be 50/50 partners on this acquisition.

Here’s how Acquire.com went:

• The process was super smooth. Having the LOI and APA all easily done for you to get signatures makes this part easy. I’m sure for very large deals, there may be more customizations a buyer + seller will need.

• The UX/UI of Acquire and emails are solid. Everything is very easy to navigate and understand. While I’ve had something acquired before, it wasn’t quite like this setting and I had to handle more of the paperwork/process.

• They are partnered with Escrow.com, which is nice and fees are waved. However, I ran into a snag here (not Acquire’s fault at all). Essentially, the seller is from another country, lives in a different country, but has bank accounts in the United States. So Escrow blocked him as I guess they thought he was sketchy. Sounds sketchy when I type it out, but he is legit, has worked for well-known companies, and is involved with the government from where he is from.

So with Escrow out and no real great alternatives, we had to build a foundation of trust and find a transaction/transfer process that would work for us. Which we have and it’s been going well as we are in the final stages.

The lack of Escrow.com had slowed the transfer down, but got it done in 3 weeks from initial convo to acquisition.

So say hello to Tech Workers Club: https://techworkersclub.com/

The Premier Slack Community for Professionals Looking to Build a Successful Tech Career.

Here’s what we got done so far this past first week:

• Full operations and marketing plan. Right now the focus is re-engaging the community, getting more content added, getting feedback from the members (20k+ people in there), adding new premium channels, and cleaning things up. From there, our marketing and sales efforts begin.

• Updated the brand and positioning of the community.Finding jobs and connecting with hiring managers directly was a huge part of this community (and still will be!). But we wanted to expand to networking, chats about salary and equity, AMAs with tech recruiters and leaders, and more. A place for tech workers to connect, learn, and grow.

• Finished the wireframes of the new website. We still need to get the design and development process in place.

• Set up our membership pricing model and launched a new checkout page using LaunchPass.

I’m excited to share more about this project soon on Indie Hackers and about how we will build it up further, some wins/fails, and more.

Hope to see some of you become a member of the community in the near future (:

Stay tuned 👀