Flip Fund® 1 Launch
Watch:
Listen:
It is with a tremendous amount of unfounded excitement I present to you this beautiful button that will now let us publicly solicit investment for XO's first ever Flip Fund®
Kidding. The excitement is reasonably well founded ... based on initial conversations we have around $650k soft circled. We will now see who shows up to the party.
If you haven't seen our deck yet for the Flip Fund, you can check it out here.
If you would like to do an "idiot check" meeting, just reply to this message and we can chat. Our goal is to close at the end of August.
Business As Usual
Everything is an experiment. Here are 2 I've worked on this week.
- Community
- Consulting - Andrew As A Service (aaas)
Community
I get 5-10 "questions" a week over email, Twitter (X?), Linkedin, and even a few unwanted texts from people who got my phone number from that one time 10 years ago I accidentally registered a business with my personal phone number ... lesson learned. I still get all kinds of calls in all kinds of languages.
I've never really run a community. Or started one (successfully). But, I think there are enough people on this email list now that may find a community helpful.
Here's what I envision the community being able to help with:
- sourcing
- diligence
- deal structure
- valuations
- integration
- other random questions that come up
Eventually I'd like to make the community paid. Something small but I want to have a gate so the quality of people in there remains high. I'm going with Discord for now. Some of you older folks won't like it, but I've tried 10s of other platforms like circle, etc and really I just want slack, but not slack ... hence discord.
There's no paywall now. If I can get to 25 people and start having real, interesting, helpful conversations in there, then I'll flip the switch.
I'm not sure what else I will do in addition to the discord channel but I may take inspo from Codie Sanchez. I am really doubling down on XO as a brand and acquisition entrepreneurship as a niche. I love it, it's the best, and the folks I get to chat with about it are energizing. I want more!
Consulting / Advising
I've never done much consulting except for a few engineering related things here and there. I was a bit inspired by a course I took last month on productizing yourself and am going to give it a try. I might hate it, you might hate me, or it might be awesome, won't know until I try!
I'm calling it Andrew As A Service (AAAS) for short. yes, joke intended. If you don't think this is funny, my particular "spice" may not be for you.
I'm going to charge $5k a month for all you can eat and see if there is interest. I'll take at most 2 on at a time for now and see what that's like.
This ask falls under my monthly "do one thing that scares you". It's not really a fear thing, mostly it's a discomfort but enough people have asked me directly for specific stuff to warrant this as an experiment for a few months.
My goal is to have this consulting $ pay for my MBA which I start next month.
An interesting part of getting older is acquiring very specific knowledge that gives you a unique value prop as a "product"... and we're all a product of some kind. For example, the # of people that have exited an AI company, also acquired 10 companies, and sold 4 is smaller than "people who can help with M&A" or "software developers" or even "software developers who can help with M&A". As an initial test, I cold emailed 2 CEOs of small funds asking where I could be helpful. They both said "tech diligence on acquisitions" + "your thoughts on AI" + "product stuff". These guys are up stack though ($100M+ funds). Moving down the stack, I think I could help people new to the space get comfortable and execute a transaction smoother and with more confidence than without me.
The ask is still a little cringe for me though.
Portfolio Updates
Danny put together a great update on our July performance.
Growthbar continues to dominate my headspace. It's our largest acquisition to date. There is a lot of competition for these tools and the industry is changing rapidly. However, we're pushing the product forward, adding features I think will help many people figure out the SEO game. I've been relying on session recording a lot more for this product than usual to see exactly how people behave. Our removal of the paywall to check out the app has 3x-ed our signup rate. Because of the 2-week free trial though we're still waiting on conversion data. Pretty scary.
Fun
I built a personal AI coach to keep me on track. I've let a few people try it out and so far the feedback has been positive. Basically you set up what questions you want the AI to chat with you about (and at what time) and it will start a text chat with you (on your phone).
It remembers who you are and what you've chatted about. It also gives a nice progress update at the end of the week. Not really a product, more just a fun personal project but I love the accountability.
Markets
IDK man, I'm confused. S&P is ripping, down a bit this week. Fed might pause, but these hikes can take years to play out in the market. Residential real estate might remain strong so long as jobs are strong, but commercial loans aren't 30 year loans, they're 3, 5, etc. Shorter term. So when those "expire" and have to re-up at current market rates, that might cause some stress on the system. Big cities need housing but turning commercial properties into residential is apparently really really tough. Maybe they will all turn into vertical farms. Also crypto is back? Let's see what earnings season brings, my guess is it's going to look "fine". Not helpful!
Books
- This week I'm revisiting Ray Dalio's Principles - 10/10
- I read "The EOS Life" - thought it sucked
- Gave up on "Crossing the Chasm" - some nice history here, but pretty dated. couldn't finish it. it's a skip / just read the summary
- 10x is easier than 2x - really loved this one if you let yourself drink the kool-aid.
