August 2022

Andrew Pierno

Sep 2, 2022 — 1 min read

Highlights:

💰 Total MRR: ~$26,737 (+/- a few hundred)
👏 Sold Sentiment Investor!
🚣 Now at 5 FT employees.

Biggest Win:

Sold sentimentinvestor.com - it went to a much better forever home :)

Biggest Fail:

churn on inlytics. Inlytics uses a chrome extension to check linkedin for post performance. When anything in LinkedIn changes, our app breaks. PITA.

Lessons Learned:

We said no to a deal this month that we could have acquired at a great price. We passed because the product was not where we would have liked it. In the past, I would have said yes to this, spent a hundred hours rewriting it from scratch and then figured out if this was a good market to be in. I can't tell if we're getting smarter or more cautious but buying $5k MRR just doesn't feel worth it anymore in some cases depending on the price we can acquire it for and or the amount of engineering required to maintain + grow it.
We're still looking for a slightly larger business, ideally something we can finance via the SBA.

Screenshot API

$ 3,088 MRR
6x growth since acquisition

Sheet Best

$4,493 MRR
5.5x growth since acquisition

Inlytics

$7,212
shrunk this month due to chrome extension disconnections. God is it annoying to be totally dependent on someone else's platform.

Work Clout

$11,944 MRR - no change

Cold Email Studio

$24.3k
August wasn't great.
We're still struggling getting back into sales mode. Oddly we didn't have sales issues for about a year. We repeatedly had to stop sales efforts to let the service catch up. Now it's the opposite, we are slightly over staffed in anticipation of growth, but have struggled to get meetings at the same pace as last year.
I'm starting to think it's just August though, summer is notoriously slow. The true test will be September where we should be back to $30k.

Distribution

As part of UCLA's MBA program, I've had the opportunity to sit in on some VC pitches. It's been a while since I've stepped back and looked at the broader startup ecosystem. My head has been in the micro saas space for a bit too long. I don't believe engineering

v2

XO V1 concluded with 10 acquisitions and 1 "fund". The V1 "conclusion" is really a line in the sand but it feels right as we continue to offload assets to focus on larger deals using outside capital. This will transition us into v2 which we're still modeling out. Last week

What business are you really in?

I spoke with an entrepreneur recently who, after 5 years of running a successful and growing business, said "After 5 years I finally know the real business we're in.". It means they outwardly do X but on the inside the hard part is Y. As an example: Let's say you

Consolidating Our Portfolio

💡We've finally rolled out a small community of folks interested in acquiring saas businesses. The first few weeks of it have been a delight. It's the highlight of my week chatting with other people interested in this space. Join us! https://notes.xo.capital/community/ We've decided to consolidate our