They Got Acquired
We help entrepreneurs sell online businesses
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.
As we head toward the launch of our M&A intelligence platform, my confidence has been up and down. I want to mark this here so I remember how hard it is when I look back at it later.
Two negative comments stick out over the last year from folks in this space telling me I'll fail:
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One who I pitched on joining First Look wrote back saying they're "the worst leads on the planet." Of course, he hasn't seen the leads, and he probably only looked at the sales page for 30 seconds, and I'd had negative (man-splain-y) interactions with him before so I expected his response might be along those lines. But it was still a stinger of a comment!
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Another founder I respect told me "media people can't build database companies." I look forward to proving him wrong on that =)
At the same time, I had a call with a female founder this week who sold a business with a model that was very similar to ours. She gave me a huge vote of confidence, plus lots of ideas for how to practically move forward.
She was in a similar spot to where I am now when she was also two years in, and that's when she brought in a salesperson-turned-co-founder who helped her get the product across the finish line and scale for the next bunch of years. I've been thinking about whether this is a step I might take in the next 6-12 months.
Overall, I'm still flying high on the M&A platform concept, and as we get closer to being ready to add paying users to the platform, I'm having little bouts of clarity that all add up.
We now have two opportunities that seem viable for growing the business: the M&A data platform, and First Look, our newsletter for buyers featuring founders who want to sell.
I realized, while comparing those two opportunities last week, that First Look is SO much simpler to execute than the data platform. It's appealing to me for that reason.
So I'm spending a couple of weeks experimenting with the part of First Look that's still up in the air for me: Can we generate enough sales? I believe the answer is yes, so I'm putting time into that now to see if we can significantly increase our user base.
If that proves true, I'll need to decide whether to put the data platform aside for a while. I'm still really excited about that project, but I know it will be too much to do both at once.
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!
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.
The good, the bad and the ugly. And this year's post includes an option to listen via audio!
Biggest takeaway for me: This is a make-or-break year. Gotta get the data platform to sell.
More details: https://alexisgrant.com/2024/02/05/year-2-in-review-they-got-acquired-for-2023/
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.
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.
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.
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
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.