Bootstrappers.com

I'd seriously consider taking $2M for my startup with a 30-day transition over $3M if I had to work for the buyer for another three years. That extra $1M sounds pretty nice. Until you realize what you're signing up for. Three more years of meetings. Three more years of someone else deciding what you work on. Three more years of potentially needing approval to take the company in a different direction. And depending on the deal, some of that money might be tied to you sticking around. Imagine spending five years building your startup, finally selling it, and then becoming an employee of the company you used to own lol. Some founders would love that arrangement. Personally, I think the ability to walk away and start something new is worth a whole lot. Especially when you've already got $2M coming your way. I've always thought founders should spend more time negotiating what happens AFTER the acquisition. Because getting a great price is awesome. But getting a great price and being able to move on with your life? That's a pretty incredible outcome. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

A founder who makes $300K a year for 10 years and then sells their startup for $3M has made $6M from one business and I think that's a pretty underrated way to get wealthy. Imagine bootstrapping a small SaaS company. You've got 5 employees, a few hundred customers, and a product that solves a pretty boring problem. Nobody is writing TechCrunch articles about you. You're probably not getting invited to speak at startup conferences lol. But every year you're making $300K. Over 10 years, that's $3M. Then one day you decide you're ready to move on. You find a buyer who loves the business and sell it for another $3M. That's $6M in total earnings and sale proceeds before taxes. All from a company you built from scratch. I think founders sometimes forget that you can make a ton of money along the way and still have a valuable business to sell at the end. You don't need to build the next unicorn. A profitable little startup that quietly makes money for a decade can turn into a pretty incredible financial outcome. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

Selling a startup for $2M after 3 years of building it is a pretty incredible accomplishment. That's roughly $667K for every year you spent working on the business. Obviously that's before taxes, expenses, and whatever money you invested along the way. But still. Imagine starting a SaaS company with $20K of your own money. You spend the first year figuring out what people will actually pay for. The second year getting customers and building a small team. And the third year making the business profitable. Then someone offers you $2M to buy it. I'd call that a pretty damn successful three years. But I think startup culture has convinced a lot of founders that a $2M exit is somehow small. Which is hilarious when you consider how difficult it is to build something that another person is willing to pay $2M for. You created a product, convinced strangers to pay for it, built a business around it, and found someone willing to acquire the whole thing. That's an incredible achievement. And now you've got the experience to go do it again. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

Imagine building a SaaS that makes over $1M a year in profit helping colleges keep students from dropping out. This founder started in 2012 and spent the next 14 years building software that helps universities manage student advising, appointments and retention. The numbers are incredible. > $1.4M TTM revenue > $1.1M TTM profit > $1.4M ARR > 97% recurring revenue > 75% profit margins All bootstrapped with very little spent on marketing. 14 years of building a profitable SaaS in a market most founders probably never think about. Now the founder is looking to retire. Love businesses like this. Now live on @acquiredotcom. Full listing: app.acquire.com/startup/Wi38…

If your startup makes $1M a year in profit, hiring a CEO for $200K might be one of the smartest things you ever do. Hear me out. You've spent five years building a SaaS company. You've got a great product, happy customers, and a small team. But you're still the person making every important decision. At some point, you might want to do something else. So you hire someone for $200K a year to run the business. Assuming they can maintain performance, you're still making roughly $800K a year before taxes. And suddenly you've got a whole lot more time to work on whatever you want. Maybe you start another company. Maybe you finally take that month-long vacation you've been talking about for years lol. Or maybe you just enjoy being an owner instead of running the business every day. And here's something interesting. If you eventually decide to sell, you've already solved one of the biggest concerns buyers have. Who's going to run the company when the founder leaves? Obviously finding a great CEO is easier said than done. But building a startup that can operate without you is a pretty incredible achievement. Especially when you still own the whole thing. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

I think founders who sell their 1st startup have a pretty unfair advantage when building their 2nd. Imagine you spend 5 years building a SaaS company and eventually sell it for $5M. You probably made a thousand mistakes along the way. Hired the wrong people. Wasted money on marketing that didn't work. Built features nobody wanted. Spent six months figuring out something that should've taken two weeks. But now you've got five years of experience and potentially millions in the bank. When you start your next company, you're playing a completely different game. You know how to find customers. You know which hires actually make an impact. You know how to manage cash. And you've already been through the process of selling a business. I experienced this firsthand after selling Bizness Apps. Building my next companies felt completely different because I'd already made so many expensive mistakes. I think founders sometimes underestimate how valuable that first exit can be. You might sell your first startup for $3M and eventually build your next one into a $50M company. Pretty wild what a little experience and financial security can do. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

After 16 years building his company, Vincent Serpico decided it was time to sell and the business was doing better than ever. Pretty interesting timing right? Vincent built Founders Workshop, a software development company that helped founders launch over 300 applications. But after 16 years, he wanted to spend more time working on AI. So he did something I wish more founders would think about. He spent 6–12 months getting the business ready to operate without him. Documented processes and improved operations. Automated what he could. Got everything organized for a buyer. Then he listed the company on @acquiredotcom and worked with our M&A team. The acquisition took about a year to close but here's the cool part. After selling, Vincent stayed available for 90 days. The buyer barely needed him. That's how you know you've built something someone else can actually take over. And what did Vincent do after selling? Bought himself a custom AI workstation and got back to building cool stuff. Congrats Vincent and the Founders Workshop team. Love seeing founders build something great, sell it, and get excited about what's next. Check out the full podcast interview here: blog.acquire.com/the-operati…

I'd take a $4M cash offer for my startup over a complicated $5M offer any day of the week. Here's why. Buyer #1 offers you $4M in cash at closing. Buyer #2 offers you $5M. Sounds like an easy decision, right? Except buyer #2 wants to pay you $3M upfront, $1M over the next two years, and another $1M if the business hits certain revenue targets. Oh and they want you to stick around for three years. Suddenly that extra $1M doesn't sound quite as exciting. Haha. I've seen founders get so focused on the headline acquisition price that they overlook how much money they're actually guaranteed to receive. And who wants to spend 3 years working for someone else just to hopefully collect the rest of their exit? Obviously every deal is different. Sometimes earnouts and seller financing make a ton of sense. But if you've spent the last five years building a startup and someone offers you $4M in cash to buy it, that's a pretty incredible outcome. The amount you actually get paid matters a whole lot more than the number in the press release. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

Turning down a $6M offer for your startup is basically making a $6M bet on yourself... and that's a pretty big bet. Imagine you've spent 5 years building a SaaS company. It's doing $1M a year in profit. Business is growing 20% a year. Then someone offers you $6M to buy the whole thing. You think you can double the business over the next three years and sell it for $12M. Maybe you can. But here's something I'd ask myself. If someone wired you $6M today, would you turn around and spend all of it buying your own startup? Because that's essentially the decision you're making. I love founders who believe in what they're building. I've turned down acquisition offers myself. But there's a difference between believing your company can be worth $12M someday and having someone willing to pay you $6M for it today. Both are pretty incredible outcomes. And sometimes taking the money, celebrating the win, and going after your next idea is a perfectly good decision. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

One of the best times to sell your startup is when you have absolutely no reason to sell. Business is growing and customers are happy. You're making $500K a year in profit. And you've got enough cash in the bank that you're not worried about next month's payroll. That's a pretty great position to be in. Now imagine a buyer comes along and offers you $4M. You can take the offer seriously without feeling like you need the money. You can negotiate harder. You can walk away if the terms suck. If the deal falls apart, you still own a profitable business that's doing just fine. I've seen founders wait until they're burned out, growth has slowed, or they're desperate to move on before they start thinking about selling. That's usually when negotiating gets a whole lot harder. There's nothing wrong with testing the market while things are going great. You might be surprised what someone is willing to pay for the business you've built. And if the offers aren't good enough? Keep making money lol. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…

A founder sold his SaaS on @acquiredotcom at $12K MRR and a few years later, he's building another one approaching $1M ARR with over 5 million users. Pretty awesome story. Paresh Deshmukh (@pareshmukh) and his cofounder Chirag built their first SaaS while working full-time. It took them over two months just to get their first 10 customers. Eventually they figured out distribution, grew to 100K+ installs and $12K in monthly recurring revenue. Then they listed the business on @acquiredotcom. They weren't even sure they wanted to sell. But a few months later, the right offer came along and they took it. They eventually went on to build BoloForms, which is now approaching $1M ARR. And here's my favorite part. Paresh is now back on @acquiredotcom looking to BUY SaaS companies to grow even faster. Went from seller to founder again to buyer. I love seeing founders use an acquisition to fund their next chapter. Sometimes selling your startup is just the beginning of a much bigger entrepreneurial career. Congrats Paresh and Chirag. Pretty damn cool. Check out the full interview here: blog.acquire.com/how-a-succe…

I'd rather make $250K a year from a startup I own than $400K working for someone else and I don't think it's particularly close. That $400K salary is awesome. But the second you stop working the money stops coming in. Meanwhile the founder making $250K is also building an asset. Every new customer you close. Every improvement you make to the product. Every dollar of recurring revenue. All of that can make the business more valuable. One day someone could come along and offer $2M or $3M and buy the thing. Now you've collected a great income for years and have a pretty nice pay day at the end. Obviously running a startup comes with a lot more risk than having a job. I've done both the building and selling part a few times now and it's still pretty wild to me that you can create something on your laptop that eventually becomes worth millions. Software is a hell of a business. P.S. thinking about selling your startup? Our team will help you understand what your business is worth, prepare it for buyers, and guide you through the entire acquisition process. Meet the team here: acquire.com/guided-by-acquir…