From Niche E-commerce to a Business Exit at 16

All right, I'm here with Jake Moschel, the founder of ApexSend. Jake, how you doing today?

Good.

How are you, Andrew? Doing good. I'm excited to hear your story. You recently got acquired. Before we dive into that story, do you want to give a brief introduction of yourself for people that may not know you?

Yeah, my name is Jake Moschel. I am currently 16 years old. I founded ApexSend when I was 14 around a year and a half ago. I was doing some other work in e-commerce before then and sales. And then I transitioned over to that print on demand business. Since then, I've done some other work interning at a YC-backed startup, as well as building my next one in software.

Damn, you're 16? I had no idea, dude. How sick. I love young entrepreneurship. What made you start a business so young?

Really just the desire to earn money that started, I think, around middle school. I just wanted some cash to play with. That's really the primary driver. And then this one, Apex Sun, was the first one that really clicked. Prior to then, I'd only made like, you know, a couple hundred dollars doing some other stuff. And this was the one that I was able to really find Product market fit and take off a lot more. Dude, so awesome.

I love it. Tell me a little bit more about Apex then. What type of product did it sell?

Who was it for?

Let's start there.

Yeah, it was a phone case business. It was extremely niche. I was selling phone cases for mountain bikers. And so it would be a phone case with a design on the back featuring the customer's bike, the And I had over 500 bikes on the catalog as well as I think I did like every iPhone from the iPhone SE to the present. And that was the whole product. It was just those phone cases, nice and simple. And I really just focused on that one specific niche of mountain bikers.

Nice. How did you get the initial customers? And do you mountain bike yourself? Was this like a— Personal pain point you went through? You broke your phone on your bike or something like that?

Yeah, exactly. I mountain bike myself and then I got those first customers through social media, just sending out a bunch of DMs to people on Instagram.

Nice. Just hustling. Love it. It sounds like, I mean, you had clear product market fit. You had happy customers. What made you decide to ultimately sell the business?

Yeah, I just wanted to move on to what I thought was next, which for me, I feel like it's in software. And I had the business pretty much on autopilot. I just wanted to get out of it just for that little bit of extra cash as well as just so I don't have it in the background in my head. It's the primary driver.

That's so cool. And you can say you sold a business at 16. That's wild.

Yeah, I guess.

That's super cool. Tell me about the acquisition process. What were your expectations when you first listed on Acquire? Walk me through like, you know, how many buyers reached out? How long did it take?

That sort of stuff. Yeah, it was really tough to find the right buyer, honestly, because it's such a niche product. They'd have to, you really would have to like mountain bikes to get into the business. And it's something that's not super common. So it was just a matter of time. I think after around 2 months of having it listed, I had a buyer reach out to me who was really interested. And we got on an intro call for around 30 minutes, spoke, and I got an offer right then and there and we closed. It was really simple. I mean, there were no, no hiccups or anything. It just, just like got the offer, signed the agreements, just keep signing stuff. And then eventually we each, we had a call to where I transferred over all the assets and then I got the funds.

Nice. If you were talking to another founder and they were looking to sell their business, what's like one piece of advice you can give them?

I think patience is the biggest thing. Like it was a long time chatting with potential buyers. I was like, hey, you should make me an offer. You're asking me all these questions. And then they wouldn't make, they wouldn't make me an offer. They didn't want it anymore. I think just patience to finding the right buyer is the most important thing. Nice.

Did you do anything to prepare for the acquisition? Did you put certain docs together or?

What did you do? The biggest thing was just compiling all the data to build out that data room. That was the most time-consuming thing that I had to do beforehand. Otherwise, it was pretty, pretty easy. Just, I had the descriptions and all those kinds of things already from on the website. And I was just able to pull those. I had, I always just have for everything I'm doing, like short briefs about them written down in my Notes app. So I was just able to pull them from where they already were.

Nice. Did you go through like a lengthy due diligence period or was it pretty quick? Meaning like when you guys signed the letter of intent and then eventually closed, was that like a week-long period or like a couple of months?

It was like the whole acquisition happened over the span of maybe a week and a half, 2 weeks. It was on the call after that intro call, they made an offer. We both signed the LOI and then we did the diligence. I think they asked me. It was just a couple of questions they were asking me back and forth. I sent them proof of all the data, et cetera. And then we moved on to the actual offer and that was pretty quick. I think the documents, I remember the documents were very quick to process as well as doing the escrow was really easy as well.

Nice. Any hiccups along the way? Any, any learnings or mistakes you maybe do differently a second time?

I think the biggest thing is like, I don't think 2 months was long enough. I wish I, I would've listed it earlier, to be honest. So I think more patience, I would've found, I think I could've found an even better buyer to sell it at a higher valuation. That's for sure. So just more and more patience in my opinion.

Nice. What'd you do to celebrate the acquisition? Did you buy a new mountain bike? Did you do anything cool?

No, I didn't do anything cool. I gave a, I gave a nice bonus to The key content guy. That was nice. Otherwise, nothing cool with it. Nice.

I love that. Tell me a little bit about what you're going to do after this.

Do you have any new ideas?

Have you already started working on something or are you just taking a break at this point?

Yeah, I started building over the summer Novix AI. It's a product to help users prevent churn by automatically fixing customer bugs. It's an AI agent. With the AI B2B SaaS, the biggest buzzword there is right now, but that's how it turned out. I've been at it for around 2 months and starting to get some early traction working with early design partners on it right now. It's a lot more of a, I'd say it's a lot more of a venture scale idea versus ApexSend, which was super small market. That was another big reason I wanted to move on. Is I knew it just, it didn't have the potential to unicorn. That's really one of the big drivers as well.

I love it. You're like stair-stepping businesses where you start with like a simple business model. You go to something more complex, figure that out, go to something even more complex. I'm sure you're just going to keep crushing it with every business you start.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's been tough what I'm doing now. It's totally different than before. Especially with it being software versus physical product, as well as B2B, whereas B2C, I found marketing so much easier. And now it's just a totally different game. 100%.

Well, every, every startup founder learns on the go, so you'll do just fine.

Yeah.

Jake, if people want to hear more about your story or follow you online, where can they find you?

I think the best places to find me are LinkedIn or X. My tag is Jake Mochelle on LinkedIn and Jake underscore Mosho on X. It's pretty easy to find me.

Right on. I'll put those in the show notes. Well, Jake, congrats again on that acquisition.

Thanks again for coming on the podcast and hope to see you again on here soon. Yeah, thank you for having me, Andrew. I appreciate it.

Of course. Cheers.

Cheers.