Flywheel

This month I'm working from Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. It's a beautiful one-street town in the middle of the jungle with excellent surf. I feel like I'm about 2 years late to getting on the digital nomad bus. I've always been a late bloomer... Of course last week I posted

The Uncanny Valley Of Micro PE 🐌

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley (Japanese: 不気味の谷bukimi no tani) is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness

How Not To Buy A Bad Deal & Our 2nd Sale!

At the tail end of last week, we finalized our sale of Sentiment Investor (SI). It's in much better hands now with a team that can execute on the vision. SI was a tough one for us. We had a bad transition when we bought it, lost 100% of the

July 2022 Updates

Highlights: * 💰 Total MRR: ~$26,819 (+/- a few hundred) (20% MoM growth) * 👯 Over 66,000 total users under the XO umbrella! * 👏 Danny closed a HUGE deal for WorkClout and doubled MRR! * 🚣 1 new team member! Now at 4 FT employees (excluding founders) Biggest Win: * Danny closed a massive deal for

June 2022

Highlights: * 💰 Total MRR: ~$22,107 (+/- a few hundred). * 👯 Over 64,000 total users under the XO umbrella! * No new acquisitions or employees Biggest Win: * Adding a new $9.99 plan on Sheet.Best helped drive 19 new subscriptions in one week! Biggest Fail: * Not catching that LinkedIn changed something

Doldrums

💡The Doldrums - a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or depression. We bought 3 companies in 3 months once. We haven't bought anything in the past 3 months. The last acquisition we did was inlytics.io which is doing well but we just haven't found anything since. Not that

Measuring Stuff

A Preamble On Markets I can't title something like this without mentioning how tough the markets have been the past few weeks. I, much like you, have definitely been measuring my stock + crypto portfolio. It's much lighter than it used to be! Luckily I am mostly in cash, but still

Building A Content Factory

💡Keep in mind, these thoughts apply to our small portfolio. My thoughts would shift if we had larger companies that could individually support full time staff.  We should build a content factor. There are effectively two activities in company building (at the beginning). There's building and there's selling. If you're

Micro PE Mindset

We've been running a micro PE fund for 18 months now. It's a fundamentally different business This week at XO, we had a little bit of a customer support wake up call. Inadvertently, we were prioritizing new code and new features over existing customers. For the typical start-up, this is

Co-Founders

Starting companies with people you've only interacted with online sounds like it shouldn't work. Or at best (worst?) you crypto heads will think "Oh yeah there should be a DAO for that to coordinate between parties who don't trust each other fully". This is all super interesting, but it's also

timing

Timing the market is impossible. Actually I don't believe that at all. Do you remember '08? I was in college, but I remember it well. Kids were dropping out of school bc their parents couldn't pay for it. Friends' parents were losing houses, jobs, etc. It was pretty damn clear

April 2022

Some days you wake up and nothing material happens. Other days you wake up and Andrew Gazdecki from Micro Acquire puts you on a billboard on a boat in Miami. Life is so rich. XO Total MRR: $19,739 This month, the focus was mostly on raising capital. We went

Failure To Raise

At the beginning of the month we decided to go out and try to raise $1M in equity into XO Capital. We failed. I'm being a little flippant. I pulled our fundraise. The truth is I just didn't get the terms I expected, and we made a conscious decision to

Creating A DAO - Part 2

💡All in, this DAO cost me over $600 to set up. It's not California bad but it's still a pretty confusing process (and yes CA will want their $800 pound of flesh). Despite being around for several years now, these DAO products are still pretty rudimentary. I wish the crypto

How To (Legally) Form A DAO In The US - part 1

First off. This is not legal advice, or advice at all. These are the uninformed opinions of a  dude in his early (mid?) 30s okay, so like please disregard. > P.S. Don't worry, XO is not going off and doing random crypto stuff now, we're still buying sober SaaS's at

Portfolio

March 2022

I don't know where March went. Partially bc I went on a vacation (WUT!?!). Danny held the fort down and I figured out how to do async tech diligence. Also discovered I'm useless without my 3 monitor (+iPad for meetings) set up. Yes I know how that sounds. No I'm

Software Is Not A Moat (Usually)

I remember pitching a machine learning company 6 ish years ago and all the VC folks wanted to talk about were moats. What's your moat? Do you have a data moat? How easy would it be for competitors to get access to the data you have? It turns out most

Portfolio

Acquisition #6 - Inlytics.io

This week, we acquired inlytics.io [https://inlytics.io], a LinkedIn analytics tool focused on helping companies view and optimize their content performance. Pretty neat. This is the first acquisition with serious platform risk. It took me (personally) a good month to get comfortable with this. As an indie hacker,

Shared Service Platform (SSP)

AKA perhaps why ByteDance is worth $400B. > The SSP has also brought together other important teams: user-growth teams, which help identify and acquire desired users; content teams, which establish partnerships to acquire new content; analytics teams, which help to develop deeper user insights; and sales teams, which drive monetization. -

Async Tech Diligence

> Here is our live tech diligence doc for you to use as you see fit! Tech DiligencePlease cover as many of the following items as possible in video format, showing as much code as possible and where relevant, showing the code, and then the corresponding UI. Don’t worry about

A Simplified Structure

> Thanks so much for those of you who helped me workshop this new model over the past few weeks, I really appreciated the honest feedback and the tough questions. Once again, this post is not a solicitation of investment, but a dialog about our fundraising process and experience. For those

Fundraising Like A Roman God

> We're raising capital for the first time to fund a new acquisition. This post is not a solicitation of investment, but a dialog about our fundraising process and experience. Sorry for the clickbait. The title is aspirational. If you are able to fundraise like a Roman God, please write a

WorkClout: Are the free trials working?

👋XO Capital is now ready to take on external investors! We have 2 deals nearly ready to send out. If you're interested in learning more about participating, please send a note to andrew at xoxo.capital. One will be for accredited investors only, and the other will be a crowdfunding

WorkClout: First 30 days after acquisition

WorkClout was XO's first non-self service, non product-led growth purchase. As a result, the first 30 days since purchase have looked quite different in comparison to Sheet.best or Screenshot API (a more in-depth post on this topic coming soon). On Day 0, I jotted down some high level goals

Micro PE Vs Venture Capital

> This post lays out our vision in the hopes that one day you'll invest with us. Whenever I'm about to have this conversation I always say up front that I'm not against venture capital. Like all financial instruments, venture has a time and a place. What I do like to