Andrew Gazdecki walks through Acquire.com's new guided acquisition process launching June 7th. The platform automates the entire deal from buyer evaluation through escrow, including letter of intent creation, due diligence, and asset purchase agreements. It's designed to standardize how startups get bought and sold.
How's it going? My name is Andrew Gazecki. I am the CEO and founder of Microacquire. And today I'm really excited to announce what we're calling our guided acquisition process. And the goal here is to really standardize startup acquisitions for both buyers and sellers to help more startups get acquired. And so essentially what we built is a automated M and a advisor that walks you through every step of an acquisition. Start starting from evaluating your buyers, to fielding offers, to reviewing Lois, to passing due diligence, providing resources that you need to properly complete the deal, or creating a data room escrow, how to transfer assets and a ton of resources to really empower you as a founder or as a buyer to close a deal even faster than ever before. And so going through this, I'm logged in as a founder now, and what I'm going to do is log into a buyer. So pulling over a buyer account, I like this startup here. I reviewed it. It's a SaaS startup scheduling tool. Looks pretty cool. So what I'm going to do is send a message over to the seller. Now, the seller is going to receive this request and they're going to be able to approve or deny my request. So as you can see, this message just popped up in my chat box when evaluating buyers. And so what I'm going to do is give Stephen access and send him a message back. Sure thing. Happy to chat. Now, what's so great about the guided acquisition process is we walk you through every step of the way. So if you have any sort of questions on what you should be doing at this step, we have resources available for you to help you move down each step of your acquisition process. So now I'm going to move over to the buyer view again. So now I'm logged back in as a buyer and I'm going to go to the startups that I'm currently interested in. And I currently just received a message back from the seller. So now you can see the guided acquisition process for buyers as well, walking you through how to draft an loi, how to send an loi, how to negotiate an loi. And so from here, what I can do after reviewing the startup, I can go ahead and quickly make a letter of intent. So for brevity purposes, I'll show you just how quick this is. To create a letter of intent. On Microacquire, we have a bunch of different terms that you can include, such as a confidentiality clause. I highly recommend using an escrow service and splitting the cost. Whatever you and the seller Determine to be fair. Then you can even download and review this letter of intent before sending it. So now everything looks good and what I'm going to do is go ahead and send this loi so Stephen H. And that's going to be sent over to the seller. I'll send a nice message with this loi. It was great speaking with you. I'm excited to issue this letter of intent with the terms we outlined and I'm going to go ahead and set a letter of intent and we get some nice confetti here and I'm going to go back to the seller view. So now I'm in the stage of viewing offers and I'm fielding Steven's offer and I can look at my whole buyer list here. But Steven has sent me a letter of intent so I probably want to do some research on him. So one also huge upgrade that we've enabled on Microacquire is more information about buyers acquisition experience, their acquisition criteria, their interests, their bio. We also ID verify buyers so there's more security and trust within Microquare which are pillars of our marketplace. So Stephen seems like a pretty reputable guy. I enjoy my conversation with him. I'm going to go ahead and view this offer view LOI summary. So $5,000,000 purchase price, these are just the high level terms. Then I'm going to go ahead and sign this and see if I can make a deal happen with Steven Iser. Now again, every step of the way I have tool tips that help me through this acquisition process. And now we're going to be entering due diligence. So this is where a data room would be helpful putting together P and L. If you haven't already done these materials I highly recommend putting together in advance, but definitely check them out if you need examples. And so what I can expect next is light due diligence with the buyer. So I'm going to move back over to the buyer view and I'm going to go to my chat log with the seller. So now I'm logged in as a buyer. I can see that Steven the buyer has sent me an LOI and I've accepted it. And so now as a buyer, the next thing I'm going to want to do is send send over a asset purchase agreement. So I'm going to click this box here and upload a document that outlines the terms of the acquisition. And as a buyer too, you're able to go through these tool tips and get an understanding of what you should be doing with due diligence. How Technical due diligence works. Just so many resources to really help educate you on how to properly go through an acquisition with all the typical headaches that you see in the marketplace place today. So now I'm going to go over to the seller view again and accept the asset purchase agreement that Stephen just sent me. So now we're at the stage of passing due diligence. I've shared information with buyers and now it's time for me to sign my asset purchase agreement. So I'm going to review this and then I'm going to accept the asset purchase agreement. And that's going to move us into the next stage. So now the next stage would be waiting for the buyer to start an escrow transaction. So and then after we start escrow, we're going to be transferring assets, verifying funds, and to do that, what I'm going to do is start escrow. So now logged in as a buyer again and I'm going to start escrow. So this is where we're actually going to be closing the deal. And I'm going to check off a few boxes. I perform due diligence, I have completed an asset purchase agreement. We agree to use escrow.com and I'm going to start the acquisition as a seller. When I log in, I can see from the top, I started with Steven with a conversation, I fielded offers, I accepted his letter of intent, we went through some due diligence, and then I accepted his asset purchase agreement. And now we are in escrow. And once everything looks good and Steven is happy, he can start his escrow process. And once that's received on my end, I can go ahead and mark my startup as acquired. And just like that, you've been microacquired. So what we're really trying to do is again, streamline and automate and bring order to a really complex process by making it extremely simple. And this is really just the start. And some other items I wanted to point out is just the ability for sellers to verify their identity with Persona. So as a buyer, you can trust that this is indeed the owner of the business. And then as a buyer, what I can do, again, going through this guided acquisition process, I can complete my profile and provide information on what I'm looking for. So as sellers review my profile, they're much more likely to respond to me or understand what I'm looking for. And then this will eventually lead to data driven acquisitions, where as a founder, if this startup matches a certain amount of buyer criteria, we can essentially give you relative odds of what the chances of your startup are being acquired based on how many buyers match your criteria. So this is really just the start of us, you know, really rethinking acquisitions for the whole startup ecosystem. I'm super excited, and if you have any questions, we're definitely here to help, and I look forward to seeing more startups get acquired. Cheers.
