BitsForDigits

9 months after our official launch and today marks the birth of BitsForDigits Pro 🤑

😯 What is BitsForDigits Pro?

An exclusive paid membership for acquirers serious about buying up and into $100,000/year revenue businesses.

🤨 Who is this for?

Not tire-kickers! BitsForDigits Pro is meant for professionals with high acquisition intent seeking to have meaningful conversations with business owners about full and partial sales.

🤔 How does it work?

In addition to Marketplace access for viewing listings, it allows for direct negotiations by granting buyers instant lines of communication with sellers.

The membership also comes with an invitation to join our private buy-side Discord server for acquirers to connect with peers.

🧐 Why now?

We have onboarded thousands of business owners and acquirers, and recently we surpassed the 1,000th negotiation between owners and acquirers on the Marketplace.

To guard our business owners (and acquirers) against unserious buyers, we will institute a subscription fee which in turn will help fuel our platform growth, functionality and deal flow.

🤓 Read the full announcement, including pricing, here:

https://www.bitsfordigits.com/resources/bitsfordigits-is-going-pro

We reached a milestone this month when we punched through the 1K user ceiling!

As of posting this, BitsForDigits is on track to grow by 300+ users in May alone, which is in part thanks to our SEO and content marketing. Earlier this month our domain rating entered the 40s and our brand following on Twitter is now 500+ followers strong. 💪

For several months our marketing of the platform was on standby while we were in talks with lawyers about international regulation. Now that we have received professional advice on matters of compliance, we can again feel confident about promoting and seeding the marketplace across the globe. 🌐

Network effects, here we come! 🚀

✨ BitsForDigits has evolved and now also serves acquisition entrepreneurs ✨

Increasingly over the last few months, we kept hearing the same request over and over again: Owners want to sell their entire businesses; and investors want to acquire them.

So, we’ve added an option for full acquisitions 🎯 With that, we made two more changes:

1. We are moving from a success fee to a subscription fee.

2. The new minimum annual revenue for businesses to list is $100K.

We hope you are as excited about these changes as we are! For more info, read about why we made these decisions in our full announcement below👇

https://www.bitsfordigits.com/resources/bitsfordigits-is-evolving

January was a big month for BitsForDigits! Two highlights were:

First, a milestone was reached when we last month surpassed 500 accounts on the marketplace. Being at the halfway mark to our first 1K users is a real achievement and we cannot wait to onboard the next 500 founders looking for liquidity events!

Second, our launch on Product Hunt in mid December has yielded sustained growth on new signups. We saw this in December all the way through January. This was amplified when we got nominated as Fintech of the year 2021 and later shortlisted as a top 4 finalist in the Golden Kitty Awards along with Carta, AngelList and Monarch. Receiving that many votes was unexpected but a real testament to our community of bootstrapped IndieHackers looking to connect with investors around striking equity deals.

With the highest number of 5 star reviews, comments and upvotes per hour, plus hundreds of new signups on BitsForDigits.com, our launch on Product Hunt made it to the top of the day!

Out of the 54 businesses that launched their product, securing a second place for our secondary marketplace somehow couldn’t be more fitting! First place went to a company powered by $11M in VC funding so we are beyond proud of how much organic traffic our bootstrapped platform was able to attract with a marketing budget of zero dollars.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bitsfordigits

Over the weekend, we surpassed an important milestone: our first 100 users!
In order to onboard our first 100 users, we went in with a mindset of quantity over quality. We did not run Facebook Ads to onboard random folks who are browsing their feeds or targeted big communities just to get to this number. Most users came from 1:1 interactions. Our primary acquisition channels were Twitter and direct outreach via email & LinkedIn.
Building a presence on Twitter, we messaged with many founders of small profitable online businesses, asking for feedback and inviting them for chats to discuss our platform, resulting in most of our users today. Investors came mostly through us reaching out to them directly to discuss if our platform would be relevant to their operations. Turns out, it very often is.
We went about acquiring our first 100 users in the Paul Graham manner of "doing things that don't scale". We will probably keep doing it for the next 100 users as well.

Over the past 4 weeks we have gotten feedback from dozens of users and made several small iterations to design and copywriting. More significantly we have created a wishlist of functionality to be prioritized starting with filters for sifting through the business listings and professional profiles on the marketplace. These were implemented over the weekend using Jetboost allowing buyers and sellers to filter platform entries according to their interest.

To try filtering listings and profiles, sign up to access the marketplace today at www.bitsfordigits.com/signup where creating an account is totally free!

September was spent rebuilding the marketplace to support our new exclusive focus on partial buyouts in moving away from full acquisitions completely. We also integrated new functionality based on user requests and accumulated feedback. These features include authentication, memberships, in-app chat functionality between users on the platform, website forms for founders to list their business and professionals to make their profile, and automating data entries into our CMS. On top of that, we rejigged our visual identity to (try) make the website look more inviting and trustworthy. Our traffic in the past 28 days is at 1K visitors.

The concept of our idea is best conveyed and understood via our 10-tweet twitter storm (https://twitter.com/bitsfordigits/status/1445161321880768512?s=20).

But to show rather than tell, our current product is also demonstrated in a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlmTUzV2pAk).

Our next step is finding superusers and applying a hyperfocus on their wants and needs. After taking down business listings with 100% equity for sale by founders who were not interested in staying invested in their company, we are now down to 36 members signed up to find new business partners. Our goal now is to nail down our product offering and value proposition in collaboration with the community by building in public.

After weeks of building, testing and iterating on user feedback, the platform is now live! We built this marketplace to enable founders to take partial buyouts from professionals looking to apply their expertise in a startup as a partner rather than an employee.