6 Years Building. A Bad Listing Almost Killed The Deal.

All right. I'm here with Jatin, the founder of Utilize, who recently got acquired. Jatin, how are you doing today?

I'm doing good.

Well, congrats again on the acquisition. I'm excited to hear the story. Before we dive into that, do you want to give a brief introduction of yourself for people that may not know you?

I'm Jatin. I'm one of the co-founders of Utilize, and I've been a software engineer for About 12 years now. And I love building stuff and I'm just glad that we could find an eventual exit for our business.

Right on. Tell me about Utilize. What did it do? What problem did it solve?

So actually Utilize is like the company and then Utilize started in late 2019 with the idea that we wanted to democratize software creation. So my co-founder Sameer had this idea for quite a while wherein he thought that software was very rigid. CRM just looks like a CRM for everyone, no matter what the business requires. I think it makes more sense today in the world of AI, where you can infinitely customize your software through prompts. But in Sami's hypothesis was that software should be more customizable. So both of us started working on Utilize.app, which was our first product, wherein we could make apps on top of spreadsheets, but we wanted to keep the whole experience without any coding. Utilize ran for about 3 years. It still runs sort of, we're winding it down, but from there came Notion Apps, which is what we eventually end up selling via acquire. Notion Apps is pivot, was a pivot from Utilize wherein it's a no-code tool that helps businesses build apps on top of their Notion databases. So it's mostly for smaller businesses. Notion database is not the most ideal place to like do data entry, actually edit stuff. So We created a no-code solution so that you can customize the interface on top of it.

Nice. That is slick. What were some of the most common use cases? Was it CRMs? Was it something else?

Mostly it was client portals and like internal systems. So let's say you are a marketing agency and you have multiple clients and many projects running on those clients. You wouldn't want to give them access to your Notion database. What you'd want to give is create an app where each client can see only their ongoing projects and tasks, etc. So we built like a very, very solid, a very advanced set of personalization and data restriction features that actually help like a person can see only their relevant roles, etc. So client portals, member portals, internal order management systems, a lot of garages that use our product, a lot of educational institutions that use our products. So to manage like just record keeping, placements, so on and so forth.

That's amazing. Did any of the use cases surprise you? Like when you first started the business, I'm sure you had a few in mind. Did you have any users doing things that surprised you?

Actually, the surprise came less from use cases because when we were building Utilize.app, we saw a lot of use cases and we saw similar kind of use cases here in Notion apps as well. But the surprise came both to Samir and I. It came from the fact that people would create like 30 screens, so 30, 40 screens to manage their business in one app. So imagine like in WhatsApp, imagine if you had 40 tabs and each tab is doing its own workflow and they just found a way to like weave every aspect of their business under one app. So that is what we found like the most interesting and exciting and surprising that we, with the sample apps we put on the websites, they are like website, they're like relatively simple. And then you look at some of the customer apps and they're like, okay, holy shit, this is quite a lot.

That is super cool. How'd you get the first customers?

Mostly through Reddit. So Reddit was one of our primary channels to acquire customers. Reddit has very strong moderation rules. So within the scope of that moderation, whatever we could do, that's how we got our first customers. Product Hunt helped a little bit. At least it helps less with sales nowadays and just with a little bit of visibility. And then rest of it was just SEO organic.

Nice. Was SEO the main channel towards when you sell— when you sold the business?

Yes. Today SEO is the main channel. Nice.

So it sounds like you clearly had product market fit. You had tons of happy customers loving the product. What made you ultimately decide to sell the business?

So It was a few personal factors primarily that dictated that we sell the business. Mostly for Sameer and I, we have been on this journey for 6 years. Notion Apps wasn't our first product, it was Utilized.app, then it's Notion Apps. And then we thought the business— one, we were both exhausted. We were continuously building and we were in on mode for like quite a long time. We just wanted a break. We just wanted some capital to see us through that break period. And then the second reason we thought it the business is better suited in the hands of someone who can grow it faster because it requires some level of energy and vitality that you can breathe into the product, especially with such a fast-changing market. Because going from no-code to prompt-based applications, it requires a lot of vitality that you have, that you breathe into the product. And we, we just felt it was the right time to hand off the business to someone else.

That's Great introspection, being able to be honest and say, hey, I've taken this business as far as I'd like to take it. I think it would be in better hands with another buyer. And that's a great time to sell the business too, when you have, again, tons of happy customers and there's some clear upside that a new buyer could potentially capitalize on. Uh, tell me about the first week on Acquire. What was your expectations? And then what did the first week actually look like?

Um, so Samir and I, we have been discussing about selling for quite a while now. And then we were like, okay, what is the best, easiest way to sell?

Right.

So, and we have, I have personally been tracking Acquire's journey since microAcquire days. So I've been always curious about, you know, it's, I remember voting on the poll where you were asking to rename microAcquire to Acquire. So I remember voting on acquire.com and I'm glad like it transitioned in that direction. Yeah. So it was, it was fun. Tracking that and it was like the first kind of obvious step. At that point of time, I think June or May 2025, at that point of time we were just trying to gauge the interest. So our first listing honestly was very underwhelming. It didn't have a lot of data points in place and we improved it over a period of time, but we got a lot of interest initially, even with those like scarce, sparse data points that we had put up. So that was interesting to see. And the first week was, was quite good. Like we saw a lot of interest.

Nice. And then how did you eventually land on the buyer that you sold to? Was it offer that they made? Was it the terms? Was it you just got along with them?

Actually, it was. So this was June when we started kind of this process. We had some commitment to an investor who had invested some money with us. So there were some implications there, so we couldn't sell the business right away without taking care of those implications. And then the market was moving really, really fast. And, you know, with the AI app builders coming along, the perception of the market is changing, was changing pretty rapidly. And I think a lot of buying and selling, from what I understood, happens based on perception. So if I think I can build this whole product, which might not be true in reality at all, just by white coding, I might not be willing to put money behind it. So it is the perception that kind of drives the sale, at least the price. And I think we tweaked the pricing a little bit. We reduced it after we got sort of the investor sign-off, and then we were at kind of a sweet spot wherein the buyer had a lot of intent. So even if it was like a few thousand dollars here and there, the intent was very strong from the buyer. And that is what kind of made us to take the final call that, okay, if this person is so, so interested and wants to move everything as with at the speed of light, this is better than like haggling. So that is kind of where we made the compromise and pulled the plug.

Nice. Speed from a buyer is huge. If they're willing to move quickly and close fast, that's usually almost always worth a reduced price. What'd you do to prepare for the acquisition? Did you put together any specific materials? Did you prepare a P&L, anything like that?

Yeah, I think so. After the first listing, Samir looked at the first listing when we like listed for the second time, he was like, this listing sucks. So we need to improve this, the listing in that second kind of, in a rebirth on Acquire. So, um, and, uh, so Samir helped with a lot of aspects of the listing. We, um, the rest of the aspects I took up. We put up more analytics, P&L, um, we, we tried to communicate it, uh, better. And any questions that we got from the initial buyers, I created kind of a document wherein I'd keep answering those questions. So like, Why? What about your competition? What about threats? So on and so forth. Whatever questions I got, I tried to frame it as a question and kind of add it to the document so that if you read it, you have answer to all the questions and then we can proceed instead of like us wasting your time or you wasting our time either way. So, um, P&L, more analytics, uh, better vision, um, better like churn, strike calculations, so on and so forth. LTV, CAC. Everything we kind of try to put it as comprehensively as possible.

There's one part about what you said that really stood out to me is the document with all the questions. That's so smart to do. We call that living Q&A at Acquire, where if you're selling your startup, you put every buyer's questions on one Google document and you just answer the question, keep it there. And then when a new buyer reaches out, you share the document and they go in there and they see 10, 20 different questions from other buyers. They see all the main questions that buyers have answered already. It really saves a lot of time, but it also can create additional interest because it shows that there's a lot of information being shared with other buyers, which can create a little bit of competition. So great job doing that.

Yeah. Thank you.

What would you say the hardest part of the acquisition journey was?

Stripe, without a doubt. Without Stripe? Stripe. I mean, I have a lot of good things to say about Stripe, but like I have gripe with Stripe. The— I think that that's where I think more information could have been provided. And Stripe transfer is one of the trickiest parts of the acquisition process, wherein you cannot manually transfer hundreds of customers. So you have to write some sort of a script. But what we tried to do initially was we tried to get in touch with the Stripe migration team, ask them, like, can we transfer this to a new buyer by just adding them as the owner and they'll change all the payout information, etc.? And the Stripe team came back with the, hey, double thumbs up, we can do that. And 3 weeks later, the buyer has become the new owner of this account, of our existing Stripe account. And but the problem, we get stuck on one step wherein on the Stripe account you cannot change the country of origin. So our country, our company was based in Estonia and the buyer is from the US. So in the 3, 3.5 weeks that we have been talking to Stripe, they didn't mention for a moment that this is the step you'll get stuck at even if you make the new buyer the owner. And without them, without the country origin change, we kind of got stuck. So we are like running 3 weeks behind. Acquisition process and already behind the date mentioned in the APA. And then we had to like figure out, okay, now we have to basically transfer to a new account. So that process also had a lot of caveats. Like I have like a whole document that I'm going to write a blog out of over the next few weeks of all the caveats that we came across during this Stripe migration to a new account.

Oh man, we, we definitely need to of our documentation on that process. It can be confusing transferring over different services and making sure that you can transfer accounts. A lot of times what we see is founders keeping multiple products within one Stripe account, and that's a whole new mess on its own.

I'd like to give a shout out to Jeff Weinstein. And Jeff Weinstein is like head of product, I think, at Stripe. Maybe I'm getting his title wrong, but like it's close to that. Like when we were stuck, like in some limbo on the new account transfer. I had had a chat with him on X, like in 2023, I reached out to him again and he promptly like tried to resolve it. And it is only through like his prompting that we actually saw the finish line. Without it, we could have been in a hot mess. So yeah, I just, just wanted to give a shout out to Stripe, to the senior leadership on the Stripe team. Yeah.

That's amazing. Do you do anything to celebrate when the acquisition closes? You go out to dinner or anything to just celebrate the win?

That's a good question. So the acquisition is actually kind of still not complete as such in the sense that there's still some amount that's left that only ends in like on 14th May is when the account comes in. So I thought I'll hold off on all the celebrations until the full account comes in, amount comes in and So I'm holding off on the celebration, Andrew.

Totally understand. That makes complete sense. If you were talking to another founder and they were looking to get acquired, what's a couple of pieces of advice you think you'd give them?

I think if we divide the journey into two parts, one is like listing. So list— when you list, list with as much information as you can, have a price that is good to attract buyers. So it might be lower than the price that you were imagining, but just, just a tiny fraction below it so that you can attract more bids. I think that is what we got wrong the first time. We kept the price too high and ended up suffering with like conversations, but not materially useful conversations, because even in those conversations, the buyer, the potential buyer would say, oh, this price is too high. And the thing is that what you're trying to gauge in those early conversations is that You want to have like a lot of velocity from buyer's end, and it is at a good price that the buyer thinks that they got a steal deal. And that is when the velocity from their end comes in. And if one is— if it's priced too high, then the velocity just doesn't exist. And then listing it again and again is, um, at some point of time there is a cost of diminishing returns. Um, and like renegotiating or re-bringing down the price and like there is, there are some drawbacks to it. So price it well, hopefully the first time around, uh, take acquired team's help, um, help in kind of pricing it, um, use your own judgment. But yeah, so there's the pre-acquisition kind of part. The, the post-APA part is basically making sure that all your information is ready, um, and some of the most critical, like Google Workspace transfer or domain transfer. So what we did is we divided the list into critical and non-critical items. So just having those lists ready and beware of like Stripe transfers and all, have good research there so that you don't get stuck. So yeah, and the most critical items, get, get them out of the way as soon as possible so that the rest of the items can be taken care of later.

Absolutely incredible advice. I think all of that is gold and can help a lot of founders, especially the part on properly valuing and pricing the startup. I see a lot of founders coming through Acquire where they'll list high and we have such a large data set at Acquire. We know specifically what the buyers on Acquire are looking to pay and around what multiples. And if you go outside of that, interest is very low compared to if you're within the range or even a little bit below that. Because you're right, that's how you create that competitive process and buyers really start moving quickly and you start getting multiple offers and then you have an opportunity to maybe negotiate upwards for from there. But what's next for you now that you've successfully been acquired? You're going to take a vacation, I guess. You still got a couple of months to go, but what's, what's next in terms of building or just life?

Well, there's— I think there are a lot more questions than answers today. So to be very honest, I don't have a lot of answers to this. So, but the idea is to put intention behind whatever I do. And I'm very interested in biology in general, like very interested in some aspects that are hard tech because I've seen software engineering kind of becoming commoditized. So the overall goal is to keep software engineering more as a hobby and like pick up harder technologies that have like a longer scale of like fruition and then kind of do something there. Also something that I believe I can contribute to or is close to my heart. So And being open, open to learning, open to starting from scratch, open to being an intern somewhere as well. So there's nothing that is beyond me at this point of time. Just trying to be open and not have any answers ready. Just let kind of universe speak through the curiosity that I pursue. So that is kind of the goal.

Amazing. I think that's a great idea. Just take your time and see what happens.

Yeah.

Well, congrats again on the acquisition. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast. For people that want to follow your journey online, where can they find you?

I'm on X, but I don't post as much there. JatinNaroda269. And on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, you can search Jatin Naroda Utilize. And like, that's, I think, the best way to find me. And but yeah, this— I hope to write more soon on X. So That's, that's where I would be primarily.

All right. I'll put it in the show notes. John, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and congrats again on the acquisition.

Thank you, Andrew. You have built a great platform. I loved it and been following the journey for quite some time. So I'm very happy to be now like a small part of this whole journey. So Sameer and I both are thankful to Acquire. Shout out to Sameer as well. He has been with me through all these years. And thank you for helping us through this.

Of course. Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

All right.

Cheers.

Take care, Andrew.

Bye-bye.