Read a lot and practice - knowledge is your best investment
Hey guys.
This week was great. We helped a few buyers accomplish their acquisitions, fixed some bugs, and started working on a new marketing strategy.
One of the subscribers asked me how I knew many things about startups. I said by reading a lot of stuff on the internet and experimenting with it.
So I suggested him to read different newsletters (Slice, MS), listen to podcasts (MFM, Solopreneur Grind), or watch YouTube (Nathan Latka). Just learn and practice.
Besides this, my wife and I got a dog, small bread, a hybrid of a chihuahua, and a jack Russell terrier. We plan to travel around Ukraine at the end of this week and visit a few beautiful places.
Friendly reminder: don't forget to take some time to relax.
👋 Welcome
Welcome to the 18 new people joining this week.
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Now let’s crack on with the newsletter ☕️
🤝 Recently acquired startup
This week, we helped sell one small project. The story of this one is pretty interesting. At the same time, the market is crowded with many overpriced startups. But this one was a little undervalued.
The asking price the founder set was underpriced at only $200, so after careful review, we bumped it up to $600 to reflect a fair price.
In the end, the closed price was $350, slightly higher than the founder set. The most beautiful thing is speed. The startup was sold in 3 days which is excellent.
This way, we try to keep a balance when evaluating startups. We strive for a fair price for both sides. Sometimes we suggest lowering the price, sometimes increasing. Evaluation is based on our experience, data reports, and the experience of other premium members.
🍿 Revenue filter
After a while, I realized that we have two types of buyers. Those looking for profitable startups and those looking for a great concept with some traction (can be without revenue).
Especially projects with users but without monetization cost a few times less, so it's a great purchase when you know what to do and how to monetize the user base.
So we've added a revenue filter to help our buyers quickly find what they're looking for. Either profitable projects or pre-revenue concepts.
🏆 Key factors to micro-SaaS success
Recently I discovered research about aspects that make startups either successful or failed.
I was such inspired by this research that we decided to write a post summary based on our experience.
What Are the Critical Factors that Make A Micro-SaaS Startup Successful? — www.microns.io Having a great idea is not as important as execution. In this post, you'll learn things you need to care about to run a successful micro-SaaS startup.
📰 Looking for new owners
SMS Automation Tool
$100 in ARR
Business model: SaaS
1 customer
Target audience: auto shop owners
Built with Twilio, n8n and React
Founded in 2022
What I like: great concept that needs marketing, simple tech stack, one customer that paid $50/mo for solution.
Concerns: customer churned after two months of using, so you need to understand reasons and improve the product accordingly.
🔥 Asking Price: $1,200
Web3 Developer Job Board
Pre-revenue
Business model: free to use
80 users
Target audience: blockchain startups and developers
Built with Webflow, Memberstack, and Zapier
Founded in 2022
What I like: 2 startups that post jobs and 80 developers signed up, need to bump up on marketing and introduce monetisation.
Concerns: jobs is a very competitive niche, so you need to make this board unique.
🔥 Asking Price: $3,000
Google Sheets API Add-On
$675 in ARR
Business model: freemium
50 customers
Target audience: business owners, marketers and sales people
Built with JavaScript, HTML and CSS
Founded in 2022
What I like: steady revenue and established customer base, low expenses, simple tech stack and one month of support.
Concerns: need to redesign the landing page and find a dev to support this add-on.
🔥 Asking Price: $5,000
💡 Wisdom from subscriber
💌 Share with a friend
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Stay awesome,
Ilya Novohatskyi