Acquisition #7 - Cold DM
This week we closed on a Twitter DM tool.
It's the smallest deal we've ever done. Are we going backwards? What's up?
We're working on our largest deal ever. Hopefully it will close early next year, we're on a path for that one and it's looking great, but in the mean time I wanted to run an experiment.
If I look out in 5 years, what does XO look like? It think the naive answer is that we'll continue buying bigger / better businesses. We probably will do that too, but I do think there's a massive overlooked opportunity in micro saas.
Instead of (or in addition to) buying bigger and bigger businesses, I would love to see XO be the default buyer for SaaS companies doing sub $10k MRR. Super quick closes, no haggling. We'll be upfront with our valuation, have a quick diligence process and have most everything done in a week.
Why did we pick this?
I love the product. I can use the product to grow the product. I'm long on Twitter in a time when others are leaving the platform. We found this one before it hit significant revenue and bought it at a good price. I think we can 10x this one in the next 3 months. Once we put it on a path of content, automated outbound, etc, I think we could dial this in to 10% MoM growth for the next 18 months.
Affectionately I called this a snackquisition. I wanted us to take something with basically zero revenue but an awesome product and put some solid marketing behind it and see what happens. We've never done it, and I wanted to try it. I want us to have that muscle. This is of course more than just an exercise, I do think we can make some decent $$ out of this one.
For the past 12 months we've realized that long term, if we can collect a bunch of Sheet.Best or Screenshot API type companies that are largely automated, PLG, growing organically, etc, the better off we will be. And if we have the muscle to take something from a tiny amount of MRR and quickly double it with a few tweets from yours truly, then that's pretty cool too. We don't have investors. we don't have to run anything by anyone other than the 3 of us. We're still lean and mean and can try stuff. I don't know if that will always be true.
Anyways we're thrilled to welcome Cold DM to our lil portfolio!
✌️ ,
Andrew
