They Got Acquired

We help entrepreneurs sell online businesses

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I noticed a gap when selling my own online businesses. While lots of publications cover sales of VC-backed companies, we rarely hear about sales of online businesses in the 6-, 7-, and 8-figure range.

March 10, 2024 Early subs for First Look

My goal was to hit 20 paying subscribers for First Look, our newsletter for buyers, before sending out Issue #2. (The first issue gave us an example to share.)

We hit 19 paying subs! Close enough to call it a win.

Most of those subs did NOT come from our email list. Our list is mostly founders. The subs came from sharing the opportunity in groups I'm in and tell people directly about the newsletter when they asked me to look out for certain types of businesses for sale.

Next we'll share the opportunity with a few partner groups that have bigger buyer audiences than us.

My goal is to have this grow over time. Initially it's generating about $2,000/month. If we can grow that by 25% MoM, that will feel worth doing to me.

We also had some other wins last week that are worth reporting here so I'll see this when I look back months or years from now. The biggest one: we have interest in the M&A data platform and will soon onboard our first subscribers!

February 22, 2024 New offer for buyers: First Look

I talk to a lot of founders looking to sell.

Buyers in our community know that, and they've been asking for access to those opportunities.

Now we have a way to connect both parties, via our new product, First Look.

All the details are here: https://theygotacquired.com/firstlook/

We see this as a win for buyers AND a win for founders who choose to participate.

It's $99/month or $1,000/year for buyers, and free for founders.

It's easy for us to create -- we're already doing 98% of this work, and this is essentially our "sawdust" -- so we're aiming for 20 signups at launch to justify the project.

February 1, 2024 Update on referral pipeline

Bummed at how many referrals to our M&A partners have converted over the last year. But 2023 was a slow year for M&A, and lots of founders we've referred haven't sold yet.

Just went through our CRM, and here are the stats:

Total leads: 270

Still active: 67

This still has potential, but it's gotta be gravy on top of other revenue streams.

January 23, 2024 A moment of doubt led to my WHY

During a moment of doubting myself, I thought:

What if our data platform doesn't work?

What if I have to shut down They Got Acquired?

And it hit me...

No one is covering lower-to-middle market M&A like we are.

The stories we share would not exist if we didn't write them.

January 22, 2024 Database build continues

Our goal now is to launch in April, and sell at least 10 subscriptions at the $2,500 early access price point that month.

We've been doing light demos and have nearly that many folks highly interested!

Deals cleaned and fleshed out and added to the database: 500
Buyers: 196

We'll need more deals and buyers in the platform than I originally thought to make it useful for early users. Now aiming to have SaaS, content/media AND agency buyers at launch. Likely at least 2K deals and 1K buyers.

I've hired a team of researchers, and at this point I'm the bottleneck, so I'm now hiring a database editor to help with the project.

December 5, 2023 Update on the database pre-launch

We are slowly adding buyers & deals from our internal database into our soon-to-be public portal.

We're aiming for beta launch in January with a focus on SaaS & content/media.

Need to launch:
200+ buyers
1K deals

Where we are:
141 buyers
233 deals

November 17, 2023 Countdown is on until we launch our data product into beta

I blocked off this entire week to focus on our data product, and develop a plan to get us to a beta launch.

We're targeting a beta launch in late January 2023. That's when we'll invite select users in our community who have expressed interest in getting into the tool to become our first paid users.

The goal is to slowly sell people into the product to 1) prove we can sell it 2) get their feedback as we continue to build and 3) use that revenue to pay for the continued build.

Our database has about 6,000 records. We are slowly cleaning them up and getting them into shape so we can make them available to users.

To make this manageable, we're focusing first on buyers who've bought multiple SaaS companies in the last year years, plus buyers who've bought multiple media and content companies in the last few years.

We're aiming to have around 220+ buyers in the system when we go live, plus about 1,000 deals.

Then we'll continue working our way through agency deals, e-commerce, marketplace deals and more.

While we have a solid plan, this feels like a big, daunting task right now. I'm documenting it here so we can look back later and say, LOOK, we did it! We figured out how to get to beta.

First though, I'm taking a week (more like 9 days) off for Thanksgiving with family while my kids are off school. I just made a list of what I'm working on, so when I come back to my desk in 9 days, I can remember where I left off.

October 19, 2023 First demo of database portal

Still building the database portal, but had the opportunity to do a demo with a potential customer who knows SaaS, and he gave me some great ideas for improvements.

Getting closer to sharing this with the world!

Here's the landing page for now: data.TheyGotAcquired.com

About

I noticed a gap when selling my own online businesses. While lots of publications cover sales of VC-backed companies, we rarely hear about sales of online businesses in the 6-, 7-, and 8-figure range.