Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Can you give me a sort of a rundown of like, what was your journey into entrepreneurship? Sounds like you got started two years ago.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I've dabbled in entrepreneurship before. Like maybe five or six years ago, I built a cryptocurrency trading app which actually was. Was quite profitable for a time, but there's some dollar disagreements. And about two years ago I kind of got more inspired into it again. Basically I just kind of got tired of work really, like working for unemployment at 9 to 5 and I wanted to kind of do my own thing. And what really appealed to me was kind of the indie hacker space. Like rather than going out, finding a co founder and raising decent money, I like the idea of what Peter Lovels is doing, which is just build something cool, try to sell it to people, stay small, stay lean and like have a lifestyle. And so that was about two years ago. And then I started listening to all these podcasts, read some books, ideated on like what type of entrepreneurship I wanted to do and things like that. And then in 2024, early 2024, I finally quit my job and jumped into the whole entrepreneurship thing wholesale. And I started launching some, launching some apps, you know, I was really excited about. Let me go, like build these profitable bootstrap apps and I'll just make a lot of money. It's going to be great. And they all failed miserably. I had launched like two or three of them and I learned so much about how hard it actually is to build something from zero. And I had heard about the buy then build thing basically acquisition entrepreneurship, buy a SaaS rather than building from scratch. And it appealed to me. And then now is appealing even more to me because clearly what I've been doing wasn't working the time. I probably could have figured something else out later, but I just wanted to try this out. It seemed really cool to buy something. And in fact the idea came to me from watching my first chameleon, the podcast. So if I hadn't watched that, I wouldn't have known that it was even a thing. So that was great. And then just, I was just going to fast forward and then like, you know, six months later we could talk more about it, but I ended up buying improv MX, which is an amazing custom domain email forwarding SaaS. And I've been running that since.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Very nice. Yeah, so let's go ahead and start there. And then I have some questions about Improv MX itself. So we were talking before the podcast. Acquisition entrepreneurship, something I'm very interested in because it Seems like getting product market fit is, like, so challenging.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: It's really hard. It's. It's. Yeah.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: But also acquisition entrepreneurship scares me because I have somewhat of a technical background. So I taught myself programming for four years, and at the end of that, I was good enough to get a job in marketing. So that's a bit about my programming skills.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: But somewhat technical. And it just really scares me, the idea of, like, buying a business and it's someone else's code and I just don't know what hairballs are in there. So what's been your experience?
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah, so just taking a step back, like, every entrepreneur needs to figure out what you're good at and also what you're explicitly bad at. You know, like, it's easy to think, oh, I'm a good coder, I'm a good salesman. But then you also have to realize, like, what you're really bad at and find a business that matches that. Right. Because, you know, everybody in the world has some strengths and some weaknesses, and people make the problem of choosing, like, the sexy business right now and get into that. But really, you should pick something that is weirdly sexy to you but extremely unsexy of most other people because that's how you find a match that actually works for you and then kind of like answering your question, then. I'm really good at coding. So actually that's not my fear. Basically, I would figure out that if I bought something, if the code was crap, I would just rewrite it and it would be fine. That's my confidence, because I've been a site reliability engineer for the last 10 years. But then my fear was the sales and the organic growth and marketing and distribution. Because when I launched my two Bootstrap apps earlier in 2024, I built amazing code in less than a week and just had a thing launched. And nowadays you can do that with AI in a day. Then I couldn't even get a single customer. I just didn't know how to market it. I tried paid ads, I tried hacker news, all the different things, and it was just impossible for me to get anyone to use it. So I was bad at marketing, but I was also bad at how to craft a landing page that converts and how to also think about a product that people really want to use. But the technical part is nothing to worry about for me. So when buying something, my nightmares while I was thinking about buying these companies wasn't like, oh, the code might crash. It was really more, I'm going to buy this thing. And suddenly users are going to start churning and then I'm not going to know what to do and it's just going to keep going downhill from there. And similarly, if I buy a company that has enterprise sales, I'll like, I'll get an emails with these founders and then we'll have like a video chat and they're going to be like, oh, this guy doesn't know this shit. And you know, immediately leave. Right. Those were my big fears.
So it's funny, we have different fears.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: I'm really curious as to whether any of those fears any played out or if they did, how you handled it.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: So I think that's. Yeah, that was where I was trying to go. I bought a business that had the highest probability of me being okay with those fears of me being okay in those negative outcomes. So basically I bought a business that was very technically complex. So improvmx is like complex email forwarding. There's all this encryption and domain authority and reputation and just like all this stuff that is actually really complicated. And in fact, I didn't even. I've never really managed an email server in my life before, but because my experience is sre, it's stuff that I can just pick up really, really quickly. I just read some documentation. It's like, all right, good, done. So the difficulty of business is that it's very technically complex. That's my strength. So good, good, match there. And then on the other hand, my weaknesses that I just described. This business is almost ideal for a technical founder who doesn't know how to sell because it's one of those ideal sasses where it's like, you build a good product. If you build it, they will come. We all know that that's a fake saying because it doesn't really happen, that you build something and people magically find it and start coming. But it is almost the case for Improv MX because they built it 10 years ago. And if someone's going to handle your mail, you want it to have a lot of reputation. You can't just launch it on a weekend and expect anybody to really trust it because it's your email, right? So it's just a technically great product that was built a long time ago and has a lot of trust in the community and inbound organic growth and also inbound enterprise queries. Like about once a week I get somebody emailing in saying, hey, I want an enterprise plan, or hey, I want this special feature. And I just reply to them and saying, hey, want to have a video chat? Or here's a Price or whatever and then people just kind of say yes or no. And that's okay for now. You know, I'm not doing outbound enterprise phone calls and I'm not doing any marketing right now. But basically the company just has organic growth which is like the best, like shallow end of the pool for me to learn how to do SaaS, distribution of marketing and sales.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, totally. And you mentioned that you're not really doing much marketing right now. Did you end up hiring out some of those tasks that you were afraid of, like other stuff like sales or.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Did you take all of that off? There's. We're not doing any outbound anything. It's all inbound right now. That's basically I bought the company and my priority right now, or my priority was just take the grasp of the captain wheel and make sure the ship is going straight. So I wanted to make sure that the employees were kept, were kept, the customers are still happy, the service is still running, it's not going down. There are random attacks on our service and deal with compliance and tax of moving the company from Europe to America. So a lot of that stuff, I'm just like getting the ship going straight and that's largely done by now. It's been like two months or so. And so I've been working hard on that and now I'm kind of pivoting a little bit more towards some new feature development. We're lucky that it's really obvious what new features we want to build because customers are literally telling us all the time and we have all these pre existing customers. So it's not like the zero to one case where you sit down in a room and you think, oh, what do people want? What do people want? It's right now it's so obvious to me what people want because they're literally telling me so. The answer is I hired a new junior dev and we're doing dev work and we have support people and otherwise I've not hired anybody in marketing or sales because we're not doing any of that. It's basically, I'm already inundated enough with running a company and then dealing with occasional inbound enterprise sales requests. So that's already enough. I think maybe when I get the feature set to somewhere where that I'm really proud of, maybe like in a half a year, year or so, then maybe I'll look into hiring someone's sales. But even then though, I feel like at this point in scale, the other people like talking to a Technical founder on the other end. Like it's really nice that someone's gonna be able to call for me and we're speaking like APIs and email domain authority and stuff like that rather than them talking to some non technical sales guy who will then relay things to me. This change. So it's not going to scale forever, but for right now it's actually working quite well.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: That's amazing. And with the acquisition. So let's kind of go back to when you were looking to acquire.
You already talked about a little bit of sort of what stuck out to you about this business that you thought it was maybe strong technically, had some inbound that would kind of give you the shallow end of sales and marketing, which is great. Yeah, yeah, like that's, that's per. I think you should write the textbook on SaaS acquisition.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I'm planning to write, write more about that, honestly.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Please do.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: There's a lot of stuff out there about like buying laundromats and you know, lawn service and things like that, but there's very, very little information out there about being an engineer and buying a company and going into the CEO marketing sales role, which is exactly what I did. In fact, I made like a little Google sheet of like pre existing podcasts that cover this and they're like three episodes that I've pulled over the thousands in the acquisition entrepreneurship space that are like specifically about buying a technical SaaS. And so I do want to write more about that in the future.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be amazing. Whatever you write, I will read and buy.
Just let me know.
I'm really curious. So let's kind of get into that acquisition side of things because I think. Yeah, it's just not talked about just like you said. So let's talk about it.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: When you're looking to buy a SaaS business, what sort of things were you looking for? What opportunities stuck out to you? What things maybe you could go deeper into? Like what were you afraid of? But just like what stuck out to you about say improv MX in particular and SaaS in general. And then just sort of walk me through your thought process when you were looking to acquire.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, that itself was a large journey. So you know, the Dunning Kruger effect or like the.
Basically at the start of this there's a website called acquire.com, which is really popular marketplace to buy sasses. People just put their listings up and then you. There's a price and there's like some metrics about it and you Decide if you want to buy it or not. And you can just kind of literally click a button and start talking to the founder.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: I was literally on acquire.com two days ago.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I saw that, and I was like, wow, this is great. There are, like, thousands of listings. Let me just spend an afternoon, look at all of them. Pick six, send them, hey, I want to buy this, and then I'll have a SaaS in three weeks. That was literally my thought process. And very quickly, I was very disillusioned by the whole thing. I realized that at the low end of SaaS, like, let's say less than $200,000 for the whole thing, everything's monetized, launched on a weekend, very little history.
Some of them are sketchy, too.
They'll list the P and L of, oh, look at our growth. It looks like this. But then they don't include the massive amount of advertising they pumped into it. So it's actually a net negative. And even the nicer ones, it's just all these products were just very commoditized and tons of competition and no real path to growth. And so you buy the thing, and then now you're just kind of like, all right, Now I'm just zero to one. Except it's not zero. It's like 0.01 to one. Right. And for a lot of businesses, I thought about, okay, I could buy this. But then I'm really not anywhere further than just starting an app from scratch, because you have an app that you paid money for and that has no growth or declining growth. And actually writing a ship that's already going the wrong way is actually harder than just building a new ship, to be honest, in a lot of cases. So that was the initial kind of trial of disillusionment. And I got pretty demoralized, or it took quite a few months, really, where I was just looking at a lot of these sasses. And then the process started to kind of turn around a little bit when I looked at many several hundreds of sasses across query.com, across quiet light, which I highly recommend, and others as well. And I started expanding my scope to, what if I buy an E Commerce? What does that look like? And what started turning around, which I didn't even really notice because to me, it seemed like I was just making no progress and maybe I should quit this. But what was actually happening was that I was looking at all these sasses, and when I considered them and something I got excited about, and eventually I realized that they had serious problems. I started to internalize what are those things and start seeing those problems earlier. But I also, because I was seeing nothing I wanted to buy, I had to ask myself these deep questions of like, what am I actually good at and what's my edge? Because if I'm just going to buy a thing, it's probably not going to work. I really need to buy a thing that I said earlier where I realize what I'm good at is what the business is unattractive about and what I'm bad at the business is good with. Right. And so I started to crystallize what I basically said earlier. I need a SaaS that is very technically complex and also a SaaS that has organic growth. That's going to be like the perfect thing. But I didn't realize it at the time and I didn't, I wouldn't be able to tell you those two words, but that was what I was kind of coming to eventually. And another thing is I actually started to send offers to different founders, something that wasn't quite perfect, but maybe let's just set an offer and actually go through the process of not just thinking about the listing, but then talking to the founder and really thinking about what would it actually be like to own this and going through a deal negotiation and all that stuff. That was also useful as well because there's a difference between just looking at it and considering shelling out the money for it. And then after it was probably about half a year, the listing, I was subscribed to Quiet Light and the listing came up on my inbox and I just saw like, you know, revenue numbers and it's email SaaS click for information. And then I clicked it and I saw Improv MX and my jaw dropped because I was literally using Improv mx. And I think like half a year ago I thought like, wow, if I were to build a perfect company, like a perfect bootstrap SaaS company, I'd want it to be something like this. And it was for sale.
And because of all the homework I've done in the last six months, or not homework, but failures and self questioning and things like that, it just made it so clear that this was the perfect business for me. And so I went like a thousand percent in, basically. I sent an email immediately, got on a call to founders the next day, which was as soon as possible, and then I submitted my first letter of intent with a cash offer within half an hour of that and got the signed LOI with an agreement to proceed by that weekend, basically. So I moved Ultra fast and was also super earnest about I really want this business. And I think you guys are going to be great partners here and I'm going to make it as easy as possible to get this done.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: And with the things that stuck out to you about Improv mx, like, did you just have a feel that it was growing organically and that it was technically complex, or what about it in particular made you feel like, oh, this is the dream deal?
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, well, technically complex, just custom email domain forwarding, you know, for a fact that that's going to be technically complex. And in terms of the organic growth, like when you go to these listings, you do see the growth. So basically I saw that there was consistent organic growth and I saw that they didn't spend any money on marketing, so that's where gonna grow. And also, like the other really giant thing is that the video call is important. You get a feel for how much you trust these guys on the other end. And their names are Cyril and Antoine. And basically from that call, I just got the highest amount of trust and integrity possible from the other end. And so that is a big deal. Actually, when you go through the acquisition process, either party has so many different ways you can screw the other party over. And if there's any amount of this guy's, even the smallest amount of shade, I would not go forward with the deal because there's just so much that you're kind of going through a mini marriage at the time and then.
And even afterwards there's like lingering effects to it. So integrity of the other party is really important too. So that, that basically when I had the check mark on that, that basically meant all the metrics that I saw. I'm just going to assume the benefit of the doubt for everything. Like that they're not trying to trick me. And that happened to be case. That happened to be the case that everything was good.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Amazing. So let me kind of recap that just so that I can have sort of summary for myself. So it sounds like sort of in order of, not importance, but order of maybe discovery would be the things you're looking for. So first is like consistent organic growth.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Second is maybe aligning skill sets with what you have.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: And then third, at this point you'd be like, okay, now I'm interested in buying it now. Let's talk with the founders. And then you're probably looking at like founder integrity.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, those are like. Yeah, those are like the top three things for which everything else kind of flows from there. Right. So.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: So I think probably another important thing would be, like, price. You mentioned the 200, like, below the 2K or 200K mark is, like, maybe a little sketchy.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Is there, like, a floor, like. Excuse me.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Yes. I know where you're going with this. Go ahead.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Well, if you know where I'm going, just go. You go ahead.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: So I wrote a blog post, actually, about the Improv Banks acquisition. There is, like, a blog post on improvmex.com, but I also have another one on matthewc.com, which is a little bit more personal. And I in there, I wrote basically that, like, the concept that people are kind of worried about these first acquisitions. I mean, obviously a lot of money is a lot of money. So don't, you know, take a giant loan if you can't take the risk, don't borrow from friends and family, etc. But if you. If you do have money or if you can, like, save up for it, people get afraid that their first business is too big, you know, too. Too much money in. And it's actually a little bit. It's actually counterintuitively the opposite. The bigger the business is, the easier it will be to run. The more profitable it'll be, the more stable it'll be, and the less work it'll be.
That's counterintuitive. People think I'm going to buy, like, a 50k little web app and it's going to be super easy, but actually it's going to be super hard because there's going to be no employees. There's no moat, there's no standard operating procedures. The code's terrible. Literally everything about it's going to be bad. And if you think about, you know, on the other end, let's say you take an SBA loan and buy something that's $5 million. They allow you to loan up to 5 million. It's going to have a lot of employees. It's going to be at least probably four or five years old to get to $5 million in value. It's going to have a lot of standard operating procedures. The code's going to be pretty good because it's been ironed out by, you know, just churning through a million dollars in revenue. They've got to figure some stuff out, and they probably have diversified clients. Like, literally everything about it's going to be better. So the higher in price you go, the better the business will be, and the easier it'll be for you. For SaaS, I would say a floor of, like, it should be at least a few six figures is what I'd say. I think below that, you might as well just build your own business. That's just my opinion. I mean, maybe there are definitely some people who buy things that are 20,000 and grow it to a $2 million company. I think that those people would have succeeded if they built from scratch as well. But I think that if you're buying something, I would recommend saving up a little bit more if you can't afford it, because the higher value businesses are just strictly better.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: And when you were looking to buy a business, were you looking at a certain level of cash flow from the business to replace your day job, or were you just like, I'm just going to buy it and then replace my day job as I can?
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Yeah, a little bit of both. So I've accrued a decent amount of savings, so I could definitely run off that for a while.
And so the price of it I was looking for, not necessarily amount to replace my living expenses, but more an amount that'll make it worth it for me to work on this. So let's say I bought something that generates $30,000 a year in revenue and I build a new feature, and even the feature generates 50% more revenue, which is amazing and unheard of. That'll now be $45,000 a year. And so how motivated am I to make this worth it? So in that sense, it's kind of similar, but basically I need the revenue of the business to be at least some meaningful fraction of what my market salary would be so that my efforts will kind of return in that way. So it's similar to replace my day job, but I look at it a little bit differently than that.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, that makes total sense because I think you are right about that, where some things are just not worth our time, especially as people get higher up in the income brackets.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: And it's a trap. It's a trap, really, because entrepreneurship is amazing for some people. The way my mind works. I don't think I can work for people anymore. And so this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. But I was kind of in a trap for many years where my salary just kept rising and rising and rising and my spending would relate. And then it's easy to get in a trap where you're just never at a point where you feel like, okay, I can go take somewhat of a risk because you're just like, spending more living in a more expensive city, get a wife and children and like, more and more and Just never take the leap to entrepreneurship. I mean, some people don't actually want to be entrepreneurs, but if you do, try not to fall in that trap. But it's kind of. It's kind of dangerous.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Wise words. And I think that's probably all the questions I had as far as acquisition. However, I'm really curious. So I think even in this space, I don't even know the right questions to ask. So, yeah, is there anything that I should ask you about acquisition?
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Oh, don't even know the right questions to ask.
You know, I felt the same way in the beginning. I was like, okay, I'm going to be an acquisition entrepreneur. And I've never bought anything, and I've barely even launched anything.
I don't know the right questions to ask the other seller. Right. And I don't even know where to even base my multiple. Like, the company makes 50k a year. What multiple will I pay for the whole thing? I don't even know where to go with that. Is it 2x or is it 6x? Is it 10x?
Why are sasses a higher multiple than E Commerce's? And why is this particular E commerce selling at 5x? It's completely a black box to me. And the way I solve that. I'm not really answering your question because you're asking me what questions to ask and I'm answering you, basically. I also didn't know the right questions to ask. And the way that I kind of got through that was just. Just going through the process, actually. Like, I can read as many books and watch as many podcasts, but the real experience and also specifically the experience specific to you. Right. Like, I could watch a podcast about someone buying a Laundromat, which might give me some information, but I really need to try to buy it SaaS and like, just start. Submit an offer. You can do that. You don't actually have to go through with it. Submit an offer and see what the seller says and realize, oh, you were totally off base on your price. They were asking for way more. Or maybe they say yes immediately and you're like, okay, I offered too much.
It's like, just. That's an example of you kind of just got to do it. It's a lot of entrepreneurship. You just need to do it. And then the questions are going to be so obvious to you because you'll literally be like, okay, I don't know what to do right now. Let me go ask this question to a relevant person.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Well, this feels like a stupid question on my end, but what about funding for SaaS acquisitions.
We're both fans of Walker Deibel Buy then Build. For anyone who's not familiar, great book. And he talks about getting an SBA loan, which is basically 10% down, and then you long, like, like you said, I think it's up to 5 million or whatever.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: For brick and mortar, that sounds not as scary as it does for SaaS.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: For SaaS, it makes me want to wet my pants a little bit.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: You know, it's not really about scary or not. Okay, so you're saying scary because for brick and mortar, you're assuming that it's going to be like, stable. You buy a laundromat and like, the income's going to be stable there. So you can imagine paying the revenue, paying. Paying the loan costs back. Right. And you're scared. As a SaaS, you take a loan for it and then suddenly people start churning and you literally can't pay the loan. Is that what you're expressing?
[00:27:02] Speaker A: So at its core, yes. I think SaaS is more ethereal. So I think with a phys, with a physical asset, you would. Even if the business went to zero, you'd have, like, some sort of physical assets. So like with a laundromat, you'd still have, like, laundry machines that, worst case scenario, you could sell your laundry machines, you know, like the land that. The business on, the building, whatever.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Whereas SaaS is like, if it goes to zero, like, it just went to zero. Like, you're just. You're just out of luck.
[00:27:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, this is hard. I'm lucky. I'm really lucky as an entrepreneur in that. Or maybe this isn't luck. I've saved a lot of. I've saved up a lot of money. Just I've worked as a site reliability engineer and climbed the corporate ladder for like the last 10 years, which. And I've lived well below my means. So part of it was I was prescient to just work hard for money, which I might use for something in the future. And I figured out what I wanted to use it for, which was equity and entrepreneurship. So I didn't actually take an SBA loan for Improv Mix. I paid cash and borrowed some money from friends and family, and I would not have been able to do sba. So basically, even if I wasn't afraid of those things, SBA typically takes a while, like two or three months or something. And also they don't like SaaS that much.
When you're doing SBA, you're dealing with a lot of literally Brick and mortar banks, and they understand brick and mortar companies. And actually the vast majority of them will just not even talk to you. They'll be like, you want to buy a website? What do you mean?
There are ways to do it. There are a few different kind of SBA brokers out there that know the specific bank managers that know SaaS. And so you work with these brokers and they'll put you in touch with those people and you'll make it happen. But I still couldn't do it because it's going to take a while. So I'll make my deal less competitive. And also, SBA intrinsically is less competitive than offering an all cash offer. And they're going to need like more down. Right? You can't do 10% down and get 90% of the leverage for SBA. You probably need to do like 40% down or 50% down or something just for them to trust it. Because they're going to look at, they're going to look at like the loan to coverage ratio, like loan to coverage ratio, basically how much money you're making and how much revenue there is. And because sasses tend to trade at a higher multiple, therefore they're going to be like, hey, whoa, you're paying a lot for this revenue. Right. So you're going to need to put more down in order for us to consider this safe, because they're going to compare it to like a brick and mortar. Brick and mortar numbers, right? Yeah. So basically, SBA is hard, and for SaaS, it's hard to do as well. I feel like I actually submitted an offer for one guy and I offered asking price and sba because he was already SBA pre approved. And I said, if the SBA doesn't fall through, I will pay all cash for this. And so that's effectively the same as all cash. And the guy took someone else's offer. Even that wasn't enough. The smell of SBA was already making my deal much less competitive than all cash.
So for competitive SaaS deals, SBA is just not going to work. People are going to come in and buy the thing away from you. But I think for where SBA might work and where I might actually do it for my next deal is if I find a large off market deal. Basically, I intend for my next SaaS purchase to be a large company that I reach out to myself. And it's going to be way different than just, hey, I'm a new budding acquisition entrepreneur. Do you want to sell? It's going to be like, hey, I bought this thing.
Look at all the information I released about buying companies and I did it successfully before. I'm offering you this much and we're going to do an sba. It'll be closed by this date. And just the confidence that I exude from having done through this process means I should be able to just present a much more compelling offer. And I think in that situation where I'm not in a competitive bid war with other people, I think I could swing an SBA where I'll find the right bank and I'll find the right business and I'll link them together and say we're going to do it in this timeframe and then make it happen. But it would be difficult otherwise. So that was a long tangent to say that SBA is hard to do for SaaS and it might be impossible for first purchases. And I ended up saving money and putting that in. That's basically my answer.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: And then you mentioned buying another SaaS. When's that on your docket for? Are you looking to do that this year, next year? Never.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: Definitely not this year. Maybe next year or maybe the year after. But basically I would need to hire a either hire or promote one of my pre existing guys to be a general technology manager for the company so that I could be basically fully out of it, only making high level business decisions because there's no way that I can run a second business and this one at the same time. So once I get to that point then I'll be lucky. Yeah, I'll be lucky. I definitely want to do the Holdco route. Entrepreneur idol is not Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. It's actually Andrew Wilkinson. I don't know if you know him, but he's basically like Berkshire Hathaway of online businesses. So he buys sasses, buys e commerce companies and just grows them, installs an operator, goes by the next one and is never really no longer in the day to day workings of things.
[00:32:48] Speaker A: Very interesting. Now I'll have to look into Andrew. You said Andrew Wilkinson?
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yeah, Andrew Wilkinson. He's pretty famous so you should be able to find him.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Okay. I feel like I've heard the name at some point, but I'm definitely not familiar with who he is. And yeah, so all of that's amazing. You answered a lot of my questions as far as acquisition entrepreneurship.
I know we're pretty much running out of time here, so I'll ask one more time. Are there any other questions I should ask or anything that you wish you had known about acquisition before we hang up here.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah. I'll just summarize again. The biggest thing about entrepreneurship is just figure out what you're good at and what you're not good at and find a business that matches. I think everybody in the world can find that.
And it's actually not as easy as, oh, what's my current job? And what does my current job do? That must be what I'm good at.
It actually takes a lot more soul searching and in fact, trying to launch a business where you do the thing you think you're good at and then you really realize what you're not good at.
That's the key to entrepreneurship, I think.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Amazing. I know we're running out of time. I have so many questions about your current business, but I guess we'll have to save this for another episode.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I'd be happy to come back on and we can talk about current business. Yeah, right. We didn't get into that. You know how I'm growing it right now and what running it, like, running it is like. And also like how to take the reins of a new technical product that is in a foreign code base, right?
[00:34:09] Speaker A: Yes, 100%. Let's schedule that. I know next week I've got microconf. But then after that, you know, I'm going there too. Oh, you're kidding.
Amazing.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Tomorrow, like, I'm flying out tomorrow for microconf.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: Okay. I fly out Sunday, so I will see you there.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: I'll see you there. I'll see you there, bro.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, cool, man. That's super cool. Well, Matthew, thanks so much for being on. If people want to follow you more, get in contact, see what you're doing. Where should they go?
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I have a Twitter. It's Matthew TSC underscore. That's my Twitter. And I'm also@Matthew C.com M A T T H E W T S E COM. That's my personal website, blog and you can find me there.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: And improv mx. Really cool business. I actually use it myself, so.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: Perfect. Awesome, awesome, cool.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: Thanks so much, Matthew. Appreciate it.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Sa.
