How to Streamline the Sales Process of a SaaS company | With Expert Andrew Gazdecki

What's like the minimum amount of information that you need to provide to the buyers you're seeing right now that they're able to make a decision and buy other than you just connecting to their account, verifying their payment, and that's enough? Or what else are you giving them?

I have a questionnaire that I usually have sellers answer, just like, what is trailing 12 months revenue? What was profit? What's involved in operations? How much time are you spending on support? Who's updating the code base? Just general high-level questions that I think every buyer will want to ask.

Mm-hmm.

Like, have you raised any venture capital? Is there any debt on the companies? What are the liabilities? Do you have a P&L available? If they have all that information, great. But that's kind of the bar that I try to implement on MicroAcquire.

Mm-hmm.

But it is on the buyer to do all the due diligence, verify all this information. Because again, I'm not brokering these deals. So I'm not like, hey, this is like All the information I've done. I just kind of help sellers understand these are the typical questions that buyers are going to ask. So let's get these formatted. Let's put it in a presentation. And again, it's also anonymous too. So when you go into MicroAcquire, sellers can approve or deny access to their private details, and that would include the revenue metrics or any sort of P&L or company presentation that they upload. But those are, those are generally the, the high-level requirements. It's like you've got to give a buyer enough information to understand the business, what it takes to operate. Um, do you have like your numbers even close together? Like how organized is the business? Um, but I'm also still working on, you know, streamlining that part as well. So I've gotten a ton of feedback on how to make that better, which I'm going to be implementing soon. I'm excited about that.

Why did you decide to focus only on that less than $500K ARR? I know you are getting some different deals now, bigger deals, but what was the reasoning? Because it's a smaller market. I mean, bigger buyer pool probably, but yeah, maybe less efficient, maybe.

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I just kind of threw it up there. I was like, hey, Maybe you're too small for a broker or investment bank. You're definitely not growing fast enough for venture capital. You're definitely too small for private equity. So I just really wanted to niche it. I wanted to really niche it to— the perfect example would be a company recently that I know was acquired. They were doing $75K in revenue. They had some some good enterprise deals. So it was B2B. They ended up selling for, I think, 4x of top line ARR, which was really all profit because there was just 2 people running it. And I think that's just kind of the sweet spot. There's really no good place to buy those types of businesses.

Yeah.

So rather than just starting a marketplace where it's like, hey, I do the same thing as like these brokers except, you know, provide less information, that sort of stuff. I wanted to just create an area for startups that it may not make sense to use a broker. And if they do use a broker, they're going to be paying 10%. And again, the audience on MicroAcquirer is definitely within that range. But I'm probably going to expand it just because I've been seeing a lot more deal flow that's doing $1 million a year, As high as $2 million a year. Um, one came to me and they were doing $10 million a year, and I was like, wow, you're like, did you see micro in front of the name? Like, go find an investment bank. Like, you'll, you'll be much better off. Um, sure. So just to start, it was just like, I see this as, you know, a need in the market, and, you know, just started it there. But I think, you know, I'm gonna expand that in the next couple months.

Makes sense. Yeah, I think there's a— so Empire Flippers, I think that's how they started. Actually, my first acquisition was actually through them back in like 2014, about like a $50K site. So I know that thinking of how to buy a site, but they started off smaller as well. And I think eventually now, I think their average size is like in that 7-figure range. So I think even though they're charging fees, I think you'll eventually move up is my guess.

But yeah. I think it's like anything, you start small, you learn, And then, you know, you let the market kind of pull you in the direction that makes the most sense. And, you know, I'm still figuring that out to some extent.

Yeah. So I want to hear about your content marketing strategy. So you did that really well. You talked about that with, you know, business apps, with Spiff. And now you're publishing a lot of content on Twitter, LinkedIn, on other guest posts. I want to learn a little bit more from you, I guess. What's more important, the content you publish and just being kind of, you yourself or where you publish it, or, you know, tell me a little bit what— how you set that up for yourself.

Yeah, um, so thanks for reading my tweets and LinkedIn posts, man. Um, I mean, when I post stuff, I, you know, what I've found is like, obviously I think there's, you know, a huge opportunity for people to build personal brands, tell their stories, and help other entrepreneurs or whoever you're selling to. Um, By just reading, you know, the content that you're putting out. And I guess the way I think about it, it's pretty simple. It's just whenever I'm just kind of feeling something, like, you know, maybe I just talked to someone or maybe, you know, I don't have like a list of like buffer posts ready to go. Like literally in the morning I'll just be like, you know, I'm just kind of feeling this right now. I'll just write it. And then if it gets a bunch of likes, cool. If it doesn't, I don't care. Um, so I don't have Like a strategy, but I do like posting on Twitter. I do like posting on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

It's a great way to connect with people. I've made a lot of interesting relationships and met some cool people. Just letting people get to know you, because I think that's a big shift that we're seeing with just companies in general is people want to know the person running the company, their personality. Who are they? Are they an ethical person? You know, they're, they're talking about building companies. Have they ever built a company? Like, maybe this is someone you can learn from. So, um, again, big fan of storytelling, and I, I just do it for fun when I think of just something that, like, you know, this, this seems like I just want to get it out. It's when, you know, I'll post something. But, um, I've definitely noticed this though. Um, I've recently became more active on Twitter Way more entrepreneurs on Twitter than LinkedIn.

Yeah.

It's so weird. I don't know if it— like, sometimes I want to write something and say like, hey, you probably won't like this because it's about how to like start a company.

Mm-hmm.

Because maybe your boss will see it or something like that and like it'll tip you off or whatever.

Yeah.

So LinkedIn, I have more of a tone that applies to like, you know, company culture, scaling a team, you know. You know, for, you know, businesses further along. And then Twitter, you know, I like to post stuff for bootstrappers, people just getting started, that sort of stuff. I found that interesting.

That's a good point, actually. I can see why I don't want to— I don't publish personally on my LinkedIn because I think, you know, there's like people who follow me from years ago. I don't want them knowing what's going on. But Twitter, yeah, it's just, you know, it'll disappear in a couple of days, right? So who cares on their feed? Yeah. Interestingly, that, yeah, I didn't have a Twitter. We only— the only reason I started Twitter was because of our podcast. It's like, hey, let's start this. I had it years ago and then I stopped using it. But then because of that, I just commented on one of Nathan's posts and then that led to, you know, being on that— the show that we were on and then, you know, kind of led to other things. So it's kind of cool how, you know, Twitter can be a little powerful there, but I had no idea, right?

People are raising like funds off Twitter. It's ridiculous. It's insane. It's amazing. You know, so you never know like who you'll meet. Um, I always get excited. Like I had the CEO of Zoom follow me and I was like, no way.

Like, cool.

Uh, just like other people. Um, so yeah, I, I love Twitter. I'm a big fan.

Cool. Is there anywhere else you kind of looking to decide where you should publish your content or where you, you pick to publish, whether for MicroAcquire or for yourself, or is it just those 2 right now?

Um, I write for Forbes. Probably about once a month. I'm writing a book too. I don't know how that's gonna go.

Cool.

So I do write a lot. I've always just enjoyed writing. That was also a big strategy at Business Apps. I guest posted on every customer's blog. I reached out, was a publisher for, you know, Entrepreneur Magazine, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Inc. Magazine. And all that's like hustle too. I was like Here's like a bunch of good like content. Like, can I, how do I be a guest publisher? Um, so I enjoy writing, but yeah, I'm writing a book right now that I've got like 50 pages through. I don't really know where it's going to fit in the book sphere, but, um, you know, my ride at Business Apps was just so interesting. I want to just document it. So before I forget it, I have it out on paper.

Sure. Yeah. Send it my way when it's done. I'll definitely promote it.

Um, Interesting.

So like Forbes, Entrepreneur, TechCrunch, is that just, you know, reaching out, building relationship, and just creating the content and keep sending new content ideas to them? Or are you like actually writing it and then sending to all of them and seeing, uh, who wants to, who wants to take it?

Yeah. Um, so Forbes has a, um, like tech council, business council. Um, it's invite only. I don't know how they let me in or why, but I was super excited when Forbes reached out and said, hey, do you want to write for us? I was like, sure. Entrepreneur Magazine, we had a partnership with them at Business Apps, and so they would syndicate a lot of the blog posts we post on Business Apps. And so that gave me a guest contributor account for them as well. TechCrunch is a little bit harder.

Mm-hmm.

You need to have a really good story. I wrote about how I moved my company from San Francisco to San Diego. This is probably a story for a whole other time, but that was probably my 15 minutes of fame. Um, you know, I moved the company down to San Diego to focus more on, you know, operational efficiency, profitability, um, because San Francisco is super expensive and blah, blah, blah. Um, Mm-hmm. But when I went to San Diego, I was on like 5 news channels and like, it was just like a bomb went off. And then I wrote a follow-up piece of how do you actually move a company It was in the same state, but San Francisco to San Diego is a long way.

Sure.

Just having a really good story. I know that sounds very simple, but it's actually really hard at the same time, like really understanding. And with TechCrunch too, there's a lot of talk around people leaving San Francisco or San Francisco, and this was in 2016, and obviously this talk has accelerated today. there was some talk around San Francisco losing its luster. I felt that as a bootstrap company surrounded by companies that have raised $10 million, $15 million, $20 million with less revenue than my company. People would kind of— it just isn't the place for a bootstrap company, and I realized that. So I wrote about it. Again, I think it just comes down to having a good story to tell, And telling it from like a very unique perspective. And then just keep trying. I mean, there's countless pitches that I made to TechCrunch. Like my pitch success rate to, let's say, TechCrunch is probably 1%. Like, okay.

Yeah.

Just any product release, you know, name it something cool, pitch it. You know, you have an idea for a guest post, pitch it. So just persistence, I guess you could say. Cool.

Um, so this is gonna be interesting times to see what happens, right, with San Francisco and, you know, how companies start shifting to other cities and building other— or even outside of the city, way remotely, right?

Yeah, I got a lot of friends moving out, moving to Tahoe, moving to anywhere, literally. So yeah, it'll, it'll be interesting to see, but I don't think anyone likes being in an apartment you can't leave, paying And absorb it now. So—

Exactly.

It'll be interesting.