We 10x-ed screenshotapi.net and sold it

Before we jump in, I was on a pod talking through content, acquisitions, etc:

This exit is bitter sweet. Screenshot was our first ever acquisition. We 10x-ed it, and it is really the reason XO exists today. If this first acquisition hadn't gone well, I think I would have given up.

We bought it for a really low amount. You can google around and probably find the number but it was doing about $550 MRR (yes five hundred and fifty). Back then, XO was myself and two other gentlemen no longer with us but we split the deal 3 ways so it only cost us a few thousand each. It was very low risk to give this a shot. If you have been pinging me on linkedin asking for a meet to tell you how to get started, that's what I'd tell you. Buy something small, potentially with a business partner to lower the risk even further.

Immediately after acquiring the biz, we rewrote it to scale better and to remove some php code I didn't want to deal with. Beyond that initial 3-4 week period after the rewrite, this product required little to no engineering effort other than the odd feature request. It had minimal support tickets and really just ran on its own. In some ways, this acquisition was extremely misleading causing us to think:

1. Wow we're good at this
2. This is pretty easy

Both were wrong, but when a market is growing and takes you with it, you can easily get fooled.

The business had decent SEO when we bought it and was running a few dollars worth of Google Ads a month. We really didn't do much on the SEO front nor did we change the Google Ads much. I think I logged in and saw that Google Ads was profitable and then spent more money there and then we grew. 🤷‍♂️ . Again, see above, this never happens and didn't ever work this way for any other acquisition (except for maybe sheet.best which was acquisition #2 and was also a treat to own).

Of course we had some scaling issues and some customer support issues but by and large this thing was an absolute dream to own.

We made $192.5K while holding it (gross). Then sold it at $7k MRR (12.7X from where we bought it). So all in this thing brought us mid six figures in overall CASH on a sub $25k investment. Awesome!

Winners like this are few and far between. We have investors now who need us to show off that we more than 10x-ed something but for those of you hoping to emulate this thing (us included), I'd caution you to remember a few things we've learned:

• Don't buy something you have to rewrite. It's awful and risky.
• Buy a tested growth channel. I don't care if it's paid or not, just make sure you're acquiring something that is growing, and you know how they're growing.
• Buy something that's already growing.
• Passive income is a myth.
• Buy stuff you know at first (I'm a dev, we bought a few dev tools).

While I'm giving out unsolicited advice, here are a few other reasons why this product was successful:

• The domain name was the thing it did. Nobody asked what screenshotapi.net does (other than non developers). It takes freaking screenshots of other websites. That's it!
• Because it was so clear what the tool did, people either needed a screenshot api or didn't. That meant our traffic was really high quality.
• We had a subscription fee and an overage fee.

Those are two hacks I don't see enough. People want to name their products all kinds of crazy sh** but I have to learn wtf your thing does. If you name your product the actual thing it does that can sometimes be a hack for great SEO and high intent traffic.