Serial SaaS Buyer: What Actually Matters in an Acquisition?

All right. I'm here with Justin Boutlian, who's acquired, what is it like 8, 10 different SaaS businesses?

10 apps in total across 5 deals to date.

Nice. Well, I'm excited to hear your story and dive into all this. But before we do, do you want to give a brief introduction of yourself for people that may not know you?

Sure. So I'm Justin Boutlian. been working in SaaS and BI, I would say, most of my career. Very much a generalist. So, you know, jumped around, did lots of different roles at different startups. I left my last full-time job in 2017. So since then I've been on my own doing a bit of freelancing and then started an agency around the time of COVID helping SaaS and e-commerce companies with their BI. And I also became a digital nomad around that time, 2018. I left Tel Aviv where I was living full-time, and I've been living, you know, jumping country to country since then. So 8 interesting years on the road. I did my first acquisition in 2022, and as I said, done 5 since then. And happy to kind of get into details on why I started and my strategy and approach and all of that. But fundamentally, I kind of had this interesting dilemma because my agency had a bit of profit. And I didn't know what to do with the cash. And I was like exploring my options. I couldn't really invest back into the agency easily. Those who run agencies know it's not really like e-commerce where I can just throw money into ads and scale. So I decided to look into acquisitions. I came across the story of Andrew Wilkinson, the founder of Tiny. And I'm like, yeah, this kind of works. I like his approach. Let me do something similar. And it's been an interesting 4 years playing this game.

That is incredible. Tell me about like how you got started. You mentioned you had profits from your agency. From there, did you just kind of dive in and buy it for SaaS business? Was there any books you read or places you look for information? Like, how'd you get started?

It was really a combination of a few things. I think around this time, and correct me if I'm wrong because I often get the timelines mixed up, but you guys as in Acquire kind of you know, popped up and started to hear about you. And obviously, like, Flippa had been around for a while, so that was on my radar. I read a lot of books in general, so, you know, I knew about Warren Buffett and holdcos and that kind of stuff. But generally, I was just trying to work out what to do with my excess cash. And then I kind of got lucky because I came across the My First Million podcast, and they're a big fan of Andrew Wilkinson, and I happened to stumbled across an episode where they spoke to him. They've had him on many times. He kind of told his story and then I got really interested. And I still remember I was in Greece at the time in Saloniki in the north. And that's when I started to like really go and acquire and go through the deals. And that's when I found my first one, PulseBanner, which I acquired for, I think it was around $45K and went from there. Because of my background, Andrew, in SaaS, And specifically the data side of SaaS, I felt I had a bit of an edge because I could really do a great job on the due diligence and really dissect these businesses like a lot of buyers probably don't do or can't because they don't actually have the experience. So that was also intriguing because I thought maybe I've got a bit of an edge. We can talk about my track record and see if that's really true. But either way, you know, I was fascinated and because I'm kind of this weird mix of technical and good on the business side. I thought this was an interesting space because it's not as risky if I buy the right things. It's more of kind of a business decision first and foremost, thinking like an investor.

Yeah.

And then obviously SaaS, just purely in terms of business model, there's probably nothing better, right? In terms of leverage, high margin. So I said, okay, let me build kind of a thesis. And as long as I stick to it and improve it over time, I'll probably do decently well, probably, you know, beating the S&P 500 in a year was kind of my benchmark. If I can do anything better than that, and I'm learning and having fun, and it's, you know, you're buying assets and all the other benefits that go with that.

Nice. Tell me about just the scale of what you've built. I know you've shared a couple articles. I've seen them. I've shared them on socials before, just whatever you're comfortable sharing. But you said 10 apps. Any details on like revenue and profit? Like how are things after acquiring 10?

So I'm pretty much an open book. I'm very transparent with my numbers on my Substacks. I have 2. Coffee Plus Revelation is where I really share my entrepreneurial journey. So your listeners, if they want to really dive in, they're more than welcome to check that out and go through my posts. I'll give you kind of the high level. So there's 10 apps I've acquired. Most of them are flat or slightly have grown, and I can kind of talk about why. That's the case, ties into kind of my thesis. Last year, the portfolio did about $75K in top-line revenue. Remember, like, I have no employees, no CTO, so margins are very high. Obviously, there's seller financing, which we can also talk about. So, you know, a lot of the cash goes towards those payments. I'm hoping this year to pass $100K. It really depends on how Q4 turns out from a churn standpoint because There was quite a spike in churn at the start of the year for my biggest SaaS. I'm predicting that will kind of continue into Q4. So depends how bad it is. You know, we can get into it, I'm sure. But, you know, growth has been slower this year compared to last, just because I think of AI and a lot of what's going on in SaaS in general. But overall, I'm hoping around $100K top line revenue at a, you know, 85% to 90% net profit margin effectively. So. You know, I treat these as like cash cows. I just want to stack cash and build a bit of a snowball type effect so I can do other acquisitions down the road. I'm almost done paying off one of the final 2 seller finance notes. So that will be done in December, which will free up my cash flow quite a bit. And then I have one more which should be done by around June, July next year. And then, you know, I'll be in a much stronger position cash-wise to maybe do another acquisition.

That is incredible. That's a good size portfolio, especially because it just compounds. Like you start with $100K, I mean, you start with zero.

It's all bootstrapped completely. And also at the start of this year, I effectively shut down my agency. So like a big pivot I did at the start of the year. And thankfully the portfolio is bringing in enough cash to kind of keep me going and allowing me to, you know, have the runway needed to build out my other projects. And I'm hoping either at the end of the year or Sometime next year I can do another acquisition and continue building the portfolio.

Nice. Tell me about the strategy. Like, what do you look for? Uh, are they marketing tools? Are they developer tools? Does it matter? Like, what kind of price do you look to pay? Let's start there.

Yeah, so my kind of overall thesis was I want to build cash cows, very low time commitment on my side. I'm willing to kind of give up growth So, you know, I want to buy something that's maybe growing 10 to 30% a year, very low churn, B2B primarily, even though my first deal was B2C. That was kind of my first big mistake. But B2B, simple, very low churn, doesn't require a lot of maintenance. And historically, most of the apps I've acquired have been essentially marketplace apps. So for example, Slack apps or monday.com apps, and The reason for that is it kind of takes care of the distribution challenge because people are organically finding them through the marketplaces. And for example, my biggest, my most successful acquisition, Meet Slack, which is a popular Slack app, you know, it would get 100 installs a week on autopilot. So there's no marketing budget. I don't know if there's a CMO. Now the issue is it sounds great, but the conversion to paid is very low, less than 1%. So, you know, if I could one out of those 100, to pay me $50 a year, that's great. But it still means I'm getting growth and I'm growing MRR across the portfolio without me spending my time or budget. It's almost pure profit. So that's been my approach. The deal sizes have ranged between, I think $15K was my smallest to $97K with seller financing was my biggest. I've also learned, Andrew, and we can get more into details on this, I'm sure it would be interesting. This approach sounds great on paper. In reality, there's a lot of negatives to it as well, and it's very difficult to scale. So moving forward, I'm not going to be doing these small deals anymore, even at the right price. So it's kind of that argument, if you know the Warren Buffett story, right? He did the cigar butts, right, you know, type deals, and then he moved to buying good businesses at the right price rather than weak businesses at a very good price, right? So I'm kind of also shifting where It's now less about buying small apps at a really good price with like no maintenance and low dependency on me to bigger deals where the growth potential is better. Because once again, a lot of these marketplace apps are nice for the reasons I explained, but it's difficult to grow them. And competition, you know, is high. You have lock-in risk— sorry, platform risk and other issues. So I think it's maybe a good way to start if people want to get into this game. Go ahead and buy something like a Slack app, maybe doing $1,000 to $3,000 MRR, you know, learn the game that way. It's going to be easy to maintain, very high margin. You'll get some cash back, you know, buy it at 2 to 4x, you know, ideally all cash without seller financing or a small piece of seller financing. But you'll quickly learn if you do that, you're not going to build a $50,000 MRR portfolio anytime soon. It's better to buy something, maybe spend $200K with seller financing, get something doing, you know, $7K to $15K MRR that, you know, has been neglected, that there's a clear way to grow that to maybe $30,000 or $40,000 over the next 12 to 24 months. That's kind of what I want to do moving forward. Obviously it comes down to having the cash. How do we get $200K to spend another acquisition? So I'm kind of thinking through some of those options. And it's a question also on control. Do I want to bring in investors, you know, really kind of go all in, or kind of take the slower, more controlled, maybe lower risk approach and just be more patient? Maybe in 2 years from now, 3 years from now, do a big deal and I'm controlling all of it and just go from there.

Nice. What does your day-to-day look like? Like, how much time are you spending maintaining these 10 apps? Is it Your hair is on fire all the time, or is it?

No, surprisingly, it's surprisingly low. Once again, because of my thesis of buying mature, simple, low maintenance. Like I mentioned, Meet Slack, which I acquired in 2023, it's done, you know, over $100,000 in revenue. The amount of time spent on R&D, zero, right? Zero, literally. So I want to buy things which are simple, Not a lot of APIs, not a lot of dependencies, because I don't have a CTO. Anytime something breaks, it's like panic stations because then I have to go and like find someone to come in and, you know, it's expensive and all of that. But luckily I haven't had to deal with a lot of that. But once again, I'm giving up a lot of upside because growth is either flat or very low. And once again, it's difficult to market these apps because in many cases they're kind of nice to have. Conversion to paid is low.

Yeah.

But those that do pay because the price is low, it's B2B, they usually don't cancel. So that's the cool side, right? Dealing with less than 1% churn in a lot of my apps. So it's like playing with the variables, you know, you've got to decide what, what fits. And because I was once again doing consulting, right, most of this time, so I had to look after my consulting clients and trying to grow my agency and pay my staff. This was kind of meant to be a side thing which I wanted to grow Slowly on the side with low risk. So that's a long way of saying a few hours a week at most.

That is so cool. Yeah, that is awesome.

I like to think of it as kind of like the rich dentist buys maybe the gas station and hires a manager, right? Just for some extra cash flow. I'm kind of doing the same thing, but just with digital assets. But I don't have a GM yet, and I'm just doing whatever work comes in. I'm doing myself, but it's support tickets mostly.

Right. Nice. Tell me about what does your process look like? You initially reach out to a founder. I assume you have a couple conversations. Do you quickly move to an offer? Are you more conservative there? And then what does the due diligence process look like?

Yeah, that's a good question. It usually starts with me scanning through the listings on Acquire. I'll be honest, I don't even use any other platforms, you know, so all my deals have been through Acquire. So I start by going through the deals and if something catches my eye, I want to move really quickly. So I'll kind of request the extra information, sign the NDA, and I'll scan through whatever is like on the listing. So for those that aren't familiar, right, you request access. Once it's granted, in many cases it's immediate, but sometimes you've got to wait for the seller to kind of grant you access. Once you have access, you often have some screenshots, maybe a an Excel file with the profit and loss and all of that. I'll scan through that and then I'll immediately move to sending my initial set of questions. I also introduce myself. I explain that I've done deals before. I want to kind of build trust quickly. I want them to understand that I know what I'm doing because I've done this a few times, which also helps them respect me, that I'm not just some schmuck who's wasting their time. And it's really powerful. In cases like with monday.com, where I've done 2 acquisitions from 2 different sellers, the minute I could mention the name of the person who runs the show at Monday that works with the partners, like it immediately made the seller feel that I know what I'm talking about and it'll be an easy process.

Right.

So now my initial questions will generally deal with any major potential red flags or something that isn't clear to me. Also, I want to know if they're open to seller financing. If I know that I won't be able to finance the deal all in cash, I literally today saw a deal that seemed very interesting and that's what I did. And I wrote the seller, he got back to me very quickly, and then he said, no, we can't do seller financing. So I'm like, okay, it's done. Like, I can move on because it was a big deal and there was no way I could get the cash to do the whole deal.

Right.

So usually it's 5 to 10 questions. And in many cases, the answers to those questions will kind of be the go or no go for me. Once I get those initial answers, I will then often send a letter of intent because I want to kind of move quickly and I want the seller to work only with me. Right. Because it's obviously a marketplace and I know he's dealing with lots of people.

Yeah.

So I'll make that initial offer. And so far, like, I think 4 out of 5 times, the initial offer is what we end up with. There's not a lot of back and forth after that. But once the letter of intent is signed, I then start a more thorough due diligence. I move really quickly. And once again, because I'm buying simple apps, I have a lot of experience in SaaS. I know kind of what to look for. And once again, I'm going to narrow in on churn. Is there opportunity to raise prices here? Any levers that I think I could pull that the owner hasn't pulled, right? So maybe it's introducing changes in the product or something like in many cases, The seller didn't even have like an email onboarding flow. So just sending like a welcome email is something I can set up in like an afternoon.

Easy wins.

Yeah. So I'm looking for easy wins. Once again, I need to try and find ways to improve any of the variables to improve the deal. Right. I'm also obviously opening up Excel and running the numbers. I want to see when can I get my money back? I really try and think about it from an investor standpoint. This is also something I learned from listening to Andrew Wilkinson, kind of, you want to get your cash back within like 3 to 4 years at most, ideally with growth of the asset. And then you're looking at, you know, 30, 40, 50% returns on capital. It depends how you want to look at it, by cash or equity. So in some cases, if I have to do seller financing, I know like 2 or 3 years might go by without me getting any of my cash back. And then it's not going to be a great deal. So then I start playing with the numbers, seeing if it makes sense. That's usually 2 to 4 weeks of back and forth, depending on how busy I am with other things. And also how responsive the seller is, you know, with my requests. What I also like to do is get on a call and do kind of a technical review. Not that I'm a technical genius, but I want to kind of let them open up the code. Let me go through it. Look at the database schema. Once again, I'm very technical. So I can kind of do that. I know which questions to ask. I want a list of all the open bugs, any like feature requests which haven't been fulfilled, stuff like that. And then, yeah, then I'll submit an official offer and if they sign it, then we move on to the handover phase. Right. And then that's also could be 2 to 4 weeks. There's escrow involved in every case. So yeah, I don't know how much more. No, that was great.

Very detailed. Step-by-step process. Let me ask you this. You've talked to so many different sellers. What do you think some mistakes they make when they go to sell their business or like things they could do better? Like what's something you come across like fairly often where you're like, oh, this isn't good?

Yeah, it's kind of odd, but because the sellers which put in either a massive amount of effort to make my life easy as a potential buyer, or those that do very little. So the more data you can provide, the better, in my opinion. It could be as simple as uploading a few screenshots of Stripe. You know, show me your last 30 days, last 12 months. Show me the numbers, show me the graphs. By the way, in that initial 10 questions I sent Andrew, I often ask them to invite me already to their Stripe, even though I haven't officially sent a letter of intent. I've signed the NDA, so they're kind of protected. And because I can analyze data, I can go into their Stripe and in 2 minutes I kind of know, is this what I'm looking for? Right? So I'm looking for shortcuts wherever I can. But I think just the biggest one by far is just not providing enough data. I think they should probably read through their listing 2 or 3 times, make sure that they're not contradicting themselves. Sometimes they'll write something that like makes no sense. And then it's like, boom, immediately a red flag. I don't trust you and I'm going to move on. So make sure it makes sense. Also, it's kind of that thing where just be straightforward. Don't overdo it in terms of the language you're using. You know, they'll say like churn is down, but we're getting a million visitors a month, you know, and they'll like harp on the wrong things just out of almost desperation because they realize that this is not really performing well. But we have this one thing I want to really— like, we know what you're doing as buyers. We're sophisticated. So don't do a pony, you know, dog and pony show. Just give it to us straight. Make it easy to consume as much data as you can. It's funny, like some of the like German or European sellers will prepare these crazy PDFs with like 30 pages to sell an app for like $100K. Yet someone selling something for $500K won't even give you screenshots showing their revenue, or they won't give you a proper P&L. They'll just give you like the last 12 months. As a snapshot, you know, so it's a bit all over the place, but I'd say the lack of data, you know, you've got to kind of sell the story and you can't do that without giving multiple pieces of data, right?

Yeah, we harp on that all day long with sellers. More preparation, the better. Like a clean P&L can literally be required by a lot of buyers to actually acquire the business. What is your biggest mistake, Ben? I know you mentioned B2C. The app that you acquired. Any other ones you want to share?

I think it took me probably longer than it should have to really understand the financial side of using seller financing. It's actually a lot more complicated when you kind of have gone through a few deals and seen it in action. So for example, my biggest acquisition, Leeds Black for $97,000, I paid half upfront, the rest was seller financing. It took me 21 months to pay down that seller financing. I actually paid more every month than the contract stipulated. But what people don't understand is that if the app is only making, you know, say it's $3,000 a month on average, and you've got, say, $100 in expenses, but then you're sending $2,500 to the seller every month for 21 months. You also have to pay taxes on the revenue because the seller note is not deductible, right? So what actually, if you run the numbers after like 2 years of owning this app, I'd made like $1,000, right? Now what's, you know, once it's paid off, now obviously the math changes, right? Because now the cash flow is far superior. There's a bit of growth every year. So now, you know, I actually ran the numbers earlier today. And it's a 25% annualized return if I sold it today for 3x, and it's more than 50% a year in returns on the equity part.

Right.

Cause I only put down $45K.

Got it.

So that's a really good return, but it took me 36 months or 37 months to kind of get my money back. I didn't realize that when I did it, I kind of had to map it out in Excel while it was all happening to kind of really nail that. So it's funny because people find me online and they want to play this game and they ask me about deal sizes and stuff. And then they're like, I'll just use seller financing on that. But then I can tell they haven't really thought that through. And it means you could go years without any return while still having the risk of having to pay that loan, right? Every month.

Yeah.

So that's something that I'm more aware of. And I'm glad I kind of have that experience. It's kind of the more CFO side of things. Obviously, I learned the hard lesson of B2C versus B2B, or rather understanding the spectrum of B2B. So I'll give you an example, right? There's a big difference between selling to freelancers, which would be B2B because they're businesses, versus selling to hospitals, right? Which is also B2B. Huge difference, right? One is enterprise. So there's a spectrum, and it's important to understand that spectrum when it comes to things like churn.

Right.

So freelancers are going to churn probably 8 to 15% a month. While hospitals, if you know, if the product's good, they should never churn. It's a huge difference when you're actually mapping out years of cash flow and software as a service performance.

Right.

So I kind of learned that through my first deal was kind of very much on the lower end on the B2B spectrum. And then also the third lesson I would say is I now own 10 apps. And what ends up happening is, so on average, my apps are doing like $700 to $800 a month on average. It's not a lot of money, right? So what ends up happening is if you keep on buying small apps, your MRR will go up over time, but your— the amount of support and potential risk and headaches is going up as well. So I kind of bought multiple apps in package deals at really good price thinking I was smart. Diversification. Plus once again, I'm buying maybe 3 monday.com apps for $15K at like 1.2x. So I'll like get my money back in like 15 months and I don't need seller financing, which looks great on paper. But then you add to it maybe a 30% boost in support time that I need to spend. And then like very little growth. And now all of a sudden it doesn't look so good. Right. So it's not scalable. My model is not really scalable the way I've played it so far. And that's why I said earlier, my next deal will be far bigger and it needs to be probably not on a marketplace. It's more traditional SaaS where I can actually invest in marketing and try and scale it aggressively. And like I said, rather buy something that's doing $5K or $10K, between $5K and $10K MRR that I can double within say 18 months. And that's the way I want to play the game moving forward.

Super smart. So many buyers that I've worked with where they're doing a portfolio approach, they almost always tend to move upmarket at some point. But starting with the small apps, I think is great because you can get really great prices. You can learn a lot. If you're going to make mistakes, I think it's better to do it on a small deal rather than, you know, multimillion dollar deal.

100%.

What's your goal with all this? Where do you want to take your portfolio? Do you want to be at like $100 million a year in 10 years or something?

I kind of set a goal for myself a few years ago of getting to $20K MRR. It sounds very like low, but at that level I can pay myself $10K, put $10K aside every month and scale that way. And I'll be like the happiest man on the planet. You know, I'm a minimalist. I don't need sports cars or anything fancy. There's a part of me that obviously wants to do more. And once I hit $20K MRR, I'll probably set another goal to $50K like the day after. But right now the goal is to get to $20K. At that level, I'm like living well, I'm putting money aside, and I'm kind of playing with the house's money at that point, the way I kind of think about it. But there's also a part of me which is, I see a lot of potential in this space. I think I've got the skills, the experience to play it kind of at the highest levels possible. So every other week I kind of fight with myself because it's like a contradiction what I just said. On one side, it's taking a slow, very low risk. approach. The second, you know, the other side is like, go out there, raise $10 million, do 2 big deals, and become the next Constellation Software. And that would be really exciting. And who knows, maybe in a year from now, that's the story I'm telling you, not the one I just said of $20K. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, but it's a split between that. At the moment, my thinking is also I need to build a track record. And if I had to go now and try and raise millions to do SaaS acquisitions. I just don't think I have the track record, and I think it'll be very difficult, especially in this environment, to play that, to do that. So if I can get to $20K, I think at that point I have enough experience, proof, track record where if I want to— I don't know if I will— at that point I can really up the game and shoot for the moon. And then You know, there's Bending Spoons and there's more and more of these kind of constellation software type holding companies popping up. And I think it's a viable model if you know what you're doing. And that's one way to, like you said, get to $100 million, right? Is to play— you have to play the game at that level. So who knows, let's see in 5 to 10 years where I am and maybe I'll make that move. But it's got to be done the right way, I feel.

Yeah, 100%. I love how you view it in milestones. Like, you don't need to decide today where you want to go. Like, just get to $200K a month and then decide if you want to go bigger. Or maybe you get there and you're like, this is pretty awesome, I'm just gonna grow it a little bit from here, maintain the same approach. That's what I would do, at least.

I think, you know, once again, I'm in a coworking here in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and I met this really ambitious, you know, 25-year-old. And he said to me last night, his goal is to make $5 million in the next 5 years. And I thought to myself, like, I understand where that's coming from. That's how a lot of, you know, people talk. But if you can go from $0 to $1,000 a month, and then you can prove to yourself you can go from $1,000 to $5,000, and then maybe $5,000 to $10,000.

Yeah.

Now all of a sudden you've got something that's realistic. Because anyone can say, I want this amount of money in this amount of time. It doesn't cost you anything. But if you don't have a viable plan to kind of get there and then prove to yourself. And maybe you'll— and maybe he'll make it, but I think the vast majority of people wouldn't get to $5 million in 5 years at 25 with like no real network or skills or anything, because he's just starting.

Right.

So I think it's better to kind of break it down. And once again, the one beautiful thing about business is it's a never-ending game and we're all living longer and longer. So why not play the game like that? where there's no end to it. And I just want to go from strength to strength, but I want to prove to myself that I'm climbing the mountain, right? Instead of just saying, I'm going to be at the top of Everest in 6 months. No, get to base camp one, and then it might take you 3 years to get to the next base camp, but see it as a journey, right? And that's what I try and remind myself all the time.

Yeah.

And then obviously you've got risk, you've got other kinds of factors. It's a lot more complicated than people often make it sound, right?

I love that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs could benefit from that perspective, 100%.

This is why I'm so transparent and I like to publish my numbers, because I know a lot of people enjoy reading it, but it's also for me. I want to kind of, you know, show myself. And this is why I've got these big, like, Google Sheets that I maintain every, you know, all the time. Every week I'm plugging in my revenue numbers so I can actually see, like, the KPIs and how I'm growing. So like with the, the SaaS portfolio, right, I started with nothing 4 years ago and like this year hopefully it'll hit $100K. I can map that out, like I've got it all, I've got all the transactions, everything, right? It's like, it's real, it's not fake.

Yeah.

So that's really motivating, right? Because we often get stuck in the now and it's like, why aren't I here? But it's like, where were you a year ago or 2 years ago? And always remember that. And most of the time when we see incredible success, we don't see the 5 to 10 years of struggle that the person went through, right? And I have this incredible screenshot of MrBeast, right? He's the biggest YouTuber in the world. Like, people should go and look how many followers he had after 1, 2, and 5 years. Like, we'll be shocked. This guy struggled. He had nothing for like 7, 8 years before all of a sudden it took off. And in so many cases, you've got this like You know, hyperbolic type growth curve, because that's the game you're playing. It's nothing and then it all of a sudden takes off.

Yeah, that's why I think it's so important to like really enjoy what you're doing, because I mean, like using MrBeast as an example, he just loved making YouTube videos. I've seen a video of him when he was— I think he was like 16 or 17. It's like a time capsule video. He's like, 10 years, like I'm gonna have like 1,000 subscribers or whatever. Yeah, it's just incredible. Like 5 years later, he's Obviously famous and doing really well, but you would never have the success if you didn't like truly love making YouTube videos.

Yeah, it's having the grit. It's just, you know, fighting and celebrating the small wins because that's also part of it. And it's like a mind game most of the time, right? Because every day sucks in business. It's like, it's very rare where it's like an awesome day. There's always something that will pull you back down to reality. So, you know, celebrating the wins, setting realistic and smart goals that you can work towards, and compounding, right? Every week you want to be in the gym, lift an extra kilogram more than the previous week. And just remember, we live until we're 100 these days, right? So there's— it's a long roadmap. It's a long road, right?

Yeah, it's a great perspective. Well, Justin, last question. What does the next 12 months look like for you? Are you gonna Do another acquisition? Are you gonna just hang tight? What does that look like?

So my focus right now is really on, on building up my newsletters, right? So I mentioned I made this pivot at the beginning of the year. I'm building up my Substack, my, you know, building up my audience. I've got still one consulting client that, you know, takes some of my focus, but it's really just focusing on— I've got 4 main areas. So it's the consulting, as I mentioned, I've got my newsletters, I've got the portfolio. And recently we didn't talk about it, but I've also started to build my own SaaS. So I've got Project Echo, which is a SaaS I've been building the last few months. So I'm doing all the work, I'm vibe coding that and I'm marketing it. Once again, working towards that goal of $20,000 RR across everything. So that's really going to be the focus for the next 12 months. There's no initial plans for another acquisition, but it's mainly because of cash, right? Revenue is down because I moved away from the consulting. I kind of did that pivot, still paying down a lot of seller finance loans. So hopefully in about, call it 9 to 12 months from now, I'll be in a better position from a war chest standpoint that I can do another acquisition. But who knows, right? Everything, every week's different. If I see something that's like incredible, I might fight or get a loan from a friend or something to do it. I've got this bad habit of going through Acquire, even though I know I've got no cash for an acquisition, but You know, just because it's fun for me. But yeah, just trying to do my best to stay focused on these 4 areas and continue to build audience, my newsletters, and the SaaS, working towards a $20K a month MRR goal. Right on.

Well, dude, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all this. I've truly enjoyed chatting with you.

Yeah, thank you. And all the hard work you guys do at Acquire, it's a great platform. I've recommended it often. I wouldn't Be in this position with my portfolio if it wasn't for Acquire. And yeah, all the strength to you guys moving forward.

Next acquisition you do, let's, let's do this again. We'll bring you back on the podcast and then you can break down the deal and share a bit more.

That'll be fun. Cool.

If people want to follow you online, where can they find you?

So the best place would be on X, just_butlian. I'm also very active on LinkedIn. You can find me there. And then I would say my Substacks. So Coffee Plus Revelation and SaaS Decoded is the newer one, which is focused on helping SaaS founders scale and grow their businesses. So any one of those, and I cross-post, so you'll inevitably hear about the others no matter where you follow me. Right on.

I'll make sure to put all those in the show notes. Thanks again for coming on, Justin. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Andrew. Much appreciated.