Hard

Check out my most recent guest appearance:

By the way, Shiv has this podcast thing down. His background was so good looking, the whole thing was super buttoned up, and he even sent an amazon gift card after. #podcastgoals

I also did an interview on Indie Hackers you can check out! I'd like to see more indie hacker types get into buying business.

Stop building. Start buying.

Andrew Pierno has built over 40 products. Two were successful and one of them got acquired. He also built a productized service company and an operating…

Indie HackersJames Fleischmann

There's really nothing groundbreaking to report. The past couple of weeks have been difficult. Journey has been a great buy for us. I love the product, the customers love it, and time will tell if we made a good bet, but I'm still feeling confident that we did. The handoff was exactly how you'd want it to go, where we send out an email, and Danny is booked solid for two weeks talking to customers because they are so worried about the product going away. Of course, the product isn't going away; we hope to make it better, but that level of engagement from an email list of a company we just acquired is a huge vote of confidence that we made the right choice.

Growth Bar has been difficult in this new environment. It seems we bought the business exactly at its peak. We over paid. This is the second time we've done that, and it doesn't feel good. There were quite a few lessons learned here in terms of diligence and some increased scrutiny we will be applying to future acquisitions. One idea we're kicking around is not paying fully for annual subscriptions that don't have any history of renewal. In Growth Bar's case, there is a significant amount of annual subscriptions, and it was something we didn't consider too much during diligence. As next year approaches, in a completely different environment under which these people initially subscribed, we are now at risk of having bought a business that presumably had a higher MRR number than it actually did because these annual subscriptions may or may not renew. In an ideal world, we would value them fully if they renewed for us. However, if they failed to renew, we should not be paying a multiple on those customers. In terms of product, we continue to make improvements, but the landscape is getting more and more competitive. We're going to have to figure out a new way to differentiate in a very crowded space. One thing we have going for us is that I bet a lot of these big GPT wrappers are going to go bankrupt and open up some space in the market. That being said, I think we're going to have to invest a significant amount of resources to get this company back on track. We've also listed Growth Bar for sale.

We also put up several other companies for sale, including some small ones that are now 5x-9x bigger than they were when we bought them. Partly, it was just an exercise to see what we could get for them. It's always good to benchmark products. We have two in particular that are very passive, with good growth rates, high retention, very low customer support requirements, and almost no engineering requirements. And still, people don't seem to want to pay more than 2.5x ARR. At two and a half times ARR or lower, it doesn't make much sense for us to sell them now, so we're going to be taking them off the market. We can continue to stack cash from those over the next year and maybe try again later.