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I acquired a competitor and turned it into a lead magnet 🧲 - Here's how

A couple weeks ago, I was doing some SEO research for Tweet Hunter.

My ultimate goal is for my website to appear whenever someone is looking for "tweet inspirations"-related keywords ("what should I tweet", "tweet ideas", "tweet templates", etc.).

At some point I just typed "what to tweet" in Google, and among the 5 first results was WhatToTweet.com, a project that @jakobgreenfeld built a few months ago.

You probably heard of Jakob, he's pretty well known for making micro-SaaS and databases and has gotten some well-deserved attention on Product Hunt multiple times.

What To Tweet is a website where people can just press a button and get an idea for a tweet along with an example. It's fun, and it had made it to #2 spot of the day on Product Hunt.

I thought there was an opportunity there, so I decided to reach out to Jakob.

Here's what I sent him.

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And I quickly heard back!

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A couple of hours later I was on a call with Jakob (someone I've been following since before I was a maker), thinking I could probably negotiate some sort of affiliation deal if I got lucky.

Jakob told me he probably wouldn't pursue What To Tweet much further, so I became more confident.

But he had no interest in an affiliation deal. What Jakob offered was actually for us to acquire What to Tweet.

Oh damn! I wasn't ready for that 🤨

So I asked how much traffic he was getting, and went back to my co-founder Tibo with this unexpected opportunity.

He was pretty excited, as I was. But as bootstrapped founders we can't really afford to go wrong with those kinds of deals 😱

So we crunched the numbers, meaning we made some wild assumptions about traffic and conversion rate. And came up with an offer we thought was fair.

I sent that offer to Jakob, and he accepted it! 24 hours later, the first 50% of the payment had been wired, and the assets were being transferred to us.

This all went very quickly. Too quickly to be honest, we should normally have been more cautious, drafted up a contract, done some due diligence, etc.

But luckily this was a solid investment for us.

In the next few days we made very small changes on WhatToTweet.com, just adding a CTA to Tweet Hunter.

Here are the stats for the 7 days after we made the changes:
😀 113 new visitors
✅ 47 new free trials started
💸 Already a couple sales and probably more to come (7 day free trial)

This makes WhatToTweet.com our 4th source both in terms of traffic and free trials, which is huge considering we had a very good week because of a successful Product Hunt we did. It will probably end up 2nd or 3rd source.

As next steps, we're going to try to improve SEO so that WhatToTweet ranks #1 for "what to tweet" (come on Google, we have the .com). We're also going to work on the CTAs, and we definitely want to add 1 or 2 features to What To Tweet so that we can re-launch on PH.

Here are my key learnings about this acquisition:

  1. SEO is a long term play, but you jump ahead by finding opportunities for acquisitions.

  2. There are a LOT of websites that have great content and traffic, but whose owner can't spend a lot of time and energy on. These make for good opportunities.

  3. Trust is a key factor when acquiring a business. Would it have been anyone else that Jakob, perhaps this deal would not have gone through.

  4. Most of the time, you're buying a qualified audience, not tech. Both What To Tweet and Tweet Hunter speak to the same audience: people who need good tweet ideas. People interested in What To Tweet and who seriously want to grow on Twitter will definitely check out Tweet Hunter because it's a lot more robust. That's why we made the offer.

That's the story! If you want to follow the rest of the journey, find me on Twitter!

I'll also be here to answer questions obviously!

  1. 10

    Really enjoyed reading your side of the story!

    Imho the deal really is a win-win-win.

    💸 I made some cash from an abandoned project that I'll invest into my other projects.
    📈 You got a new acquisition channel and will easily make back your money in no time.
    💡 Users get a much better solution.

    I probably could've squeezed out more money if I'd listed the project on different marketplaces and looked at multiple offers.

    But it's also really fun to do this kind of win-win, no-headache deal. If you sell to someone you trust, everything is much easier.

    1. 4

      Thanks Jakob for dropping in!

      I agree, more money was probably possible, but probably a bit more headache as well 😂

      I have to say this deal went through quicker than when me and my girlfriend have to pick a restaurant to go to.

  2. 5

    Very happy we made this choice together

  3. 3

    Awesome story! Looks like a great opportunity for both sides. Glad to see some synergy within the IH ecosystem 🤗

    1. 1

      Always important to be part of this amazing ecosystem!

  4. 2

    Brilliant :) Love this - sounds like you both got what you wanted. A true maker success story.

  5. 1

    Interested in the technology here with the refreshing of the page.

    What type of database or API process is baked in here?

    Looks really cool and happy to read stories like this.

    Nice work getting after it!

    1. 1

      You mean on What To Tweet? There's an Airtable behind it.

  6. 1

    Congrats. Would you mind pointing into the right direction on how much you've spent to acquire it? I assume it was a small transaction since you didn't do any due diligence.

    1. 1

      Hey Alex, I would rather not disclose that. But yes it wasn't a $100K transaction, far from that.

      1. 1

        Not a helpful answer as this forum is for people who share honest information.
        Is it under 10K then?

        1. 3

          I don't appreciate your remark supposing I might be dishonest for not revealing the contents of a private deal. It certainly doesn't make me want to share more details.

          1. 1

            Same here. I don't want to continue conversation with you any further. Pointless fluffer.

  7. 1

    That was a very clever and fortuitous move. It just shows what growing a pair and reaching out can get you !!

    1. 1

      Haha I'm not sure about growing a pair, but definitely reaching out to people pays off!

      1. 3

        ...a pair of tomatoes, thats what I meant...yeah that's it.

  8. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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