Sold: Stock Tracker App for $500k with Yahia Bakour, Co-founder of Stock Alarm

Foreign.

I'm here with Yahia, who recently got acquired for half a million dollars for a startup called Stock Alarm. Yeah, how you doing today?

Hey.

Hey. Doing well, can't complain.

Yeah, thanks so much for coming. On the podcast, for those that may not know you, do you want to give a brief introduction of yourself?

Yeah, sure. Hi everyone, my name is Yahya. I've been a developer for I guess four years now, roughly three of which I was working on Stock Alarm mostly as a side project later of a short full time stint. And yeah, now I'm acquired.

Nice. What made you start Doc Alarm? I just looked at the app, it looks awesome. It's a competitor at Trading View, a platform I love. The design is, is beautiful. What made you, what made you start this, this company?

Fun story. I was hoping Morgan could be on the call as well, but he's in Vietnam at the moment. He's my co founder, but actually I was not, I did not start Stock Alarm originally. I actually joined when it was like 100 mrr roughly. Essentially my friend had started it. His name's Morgan. He had started it, posted it on LinkedIn, was trying to grow it and I was like, oh, I actually built this exact same thing but with like a bunch of hacked together spreadsheets, like Google sheets and whatnot, likes Python scripts. And I saw it, I was like, oh. Like I tried to use it, I realized, oh, this thing barely works. Sent them a list of suggestions on how to fix it and then I would be willing to pay like $5 a month or whatever it was back then. He reached out to me, one thing led to another. A few months later he's like, hey, join on and if you help me grow this thing, like you become a co founder. So about a year later we ended up like, yeah, growing quite a bit.

That's awesome. Yeah, I can tell by the numbers you guys did pretty, pretty damn good. Tell me about how did you guys get your first customers?

So I guess the first few were all just friends and family, right? Like people using it or friends of friends using it. Like, hey, someone launched this thing, like try it out. But really like getting the first, you know, getting past just like the first dollar pretty much was all like posting where our customers would have hung out. So at the time it was like Reddit or Quora. People are starting for certain or searching for certain type of questions or whatnot. Like if you look up, you know what's the best stock alerting app on Quora? You'll see like hundred, like tens of answers by me specifically, like, just everywhere. So posting. I like that. ASO worked super well. Right. So optimizing for so many keywords on the App Store worked really nicely. A bunch of SEO stuff that I can get into, if you're curious. But yeah, all of that helped us kind of go from like, friends and family to random people finding.

Right.

So, like, first customers that we aren't forcing ourselves.

I love that. Yeah. And in the early days, you just have to hustle for the first customers. That's kind of the answer is those on social media put out some ads, you know, went on different sites. You kind of got to do whatever it takes to get those first customers.

Yeah, I think, like, B2, I was talking to someone at some point. It was like, dude, why are you building a B2C app? Like, it's just painful for no reason.

Right.

You're, like, struggling so hard to get people to pay like $5 a month for an app. Meanwhile, businesses could be like 40amonth easily for, like, the SaaS thing or whatnot, which makes it really hard to get past that first, like, 100 MRR. Instead of it being one customer, it's 20.

Right.

So it's just a lot more pain initially, but then later on, there's a lot of benefits to it, I think.

Nice. Was there ever a moment, like, you started getting customers, this thing's picking up. Was there ever a moment where maybe you and your co founder sat back and you're like, we. This. This could be something. We're on to something big here.

Yeah, it was. We kept getting a ton of, like, positive feedback on the App Store and then also people reaching out and asking for things. So, like, we were inundated by the amount of emails coming in. Be like, hey, can you please add this time frame for this alert or.

That type, alert, type.

Or can you add indices? Or like, they're. They're just asking for all these things that the app wasn't meant to do. Like, hey, I think there's something here. Because, like, the conversation would be they reach out. They're like, hey, I'd love if you made this change. Or, like, if you. If we make this change, will you pay? And then they'd be, yes, and then we make the change in like, a couple of days.

Right?

Because it's. It's kind of easy. We're starting out. Maybe we ship a bug or two, but it's fine. But yeah, like, when we were doing that at one point, we're like, hey, we're getting a ton of Requests like, we actually have to pick. We can't just build everything. So like, hey, there might be something.

Here that, yeah, that's definitely a problem to have when you have more feature requests and, you know, do it. And then, then it's just a game of, like, prioritization of, you know, which features to build that will have the most impact on. On the most users. So that's, that's definitely a moment when, you know, you have product market fit. I. I forgot one question though. I know what stock alarm does. You know what stock alarm does. Do you want to just give like a brief sort of pitch on what stock? Like the problem that stock alarm was solving?

Sure. So I'll go over the problem and also the value prop. There's always a question afterwards apply. But stock on the idea is super simple. It's, hey, I want to get alerted when something happens in the stock market.

Right.

So it's like an alarm for stocks, pretty much. So the idea, the original idea was, okay, if the price of something goes above a certain limit, give me a phone call. And specifically a phone call, because it goes through, you know, like, if you don't have data for some reason or you don't have Internet, it'll still go through.

Right?

That you can set. Even if you have DND on, you can set like an emergency bypass for certain phone numbers. So that was like original value prop, right? It's like, hey, they'll still call you. But then as time went on, it became, hey, you can customize kind of strategies that'll alert you when something happens. Like, for example, a certain technical was hit or there's earnings coming up or some mixture of those. Right. So it became like a compound alerting, like, kind of platform.

Nice. Was the, was the phone call feature kind of like the, the main differentiator? Like, I've never heard of anything like that.

So it was. Yeah, exactly. So the phone call feature was the main thing that kind of hooked people. And we added phone calls, like, think like eight months before we added text messages, for example. So phone calls were in V0, the app.

Right.

And then later on we added texts, which you think you'd do it the other way around?

Would you, Would you do phone calls when stocks are like going down? So I get a call, it's like, hey, your stock portfolio is like declining like 20%. Like, do something.

So we. You would actually set the alert yourself. So you'd be like, hey, alert me when it drops by 10%. Or like you would set like a trailing stop loss Loss like whenever the alert, whenever the Stock drops by 5%, like if it rises to 30 and then drops by 5 at any point in the future, give me a call.

Right.

So you would, we wouldn't like there's a difference between alerts and signals. Signals like, but those discord like channels will sell you like, hey, buy my signals or something. We were actually just like a pure utility.

Just. Yeah. Using data, basically market data and then getting it to the traders as soon as possible. I love apps like this. Tell me about. So things are going good. You're, you build a really profitable SaaS past. We know it's, it's got, you know, tens of thousands of users, actually hundreds of thousands of users. What made you decide to sell the business?

So this has always been like kind of a fun thing for us to work on also in a sense it was the first real production app that like, that has tons of users that we built all on our own.

Right.

We're all working at big tech companies. So chip code, it hits people. But this was different because we made all the decisions. So it was a real learning experience for us in the sense that, you know, we learned how to optimize for SEO. We learned how to build like an in house referral, like affiliate program, for example. We learned how to, you know, do certain like growth hacks to get more people on certain days or certain times of the year or whatnot. So it was, it was great in that sense. But I don't think any of us were really passionate about it necessarily. And it was taking up a lot of headspace because with something like this you're always on call and it's a very like real time product in a sense. So like Friday night, if there's an outage, for example, and suddenly you're calling like tens of thousands of people, you kind of have, you have to deal with it immediately.

Right.

And there weren't many outages actually there's a countable number in the three years that we're working on. It was more that it was constantly taking up headspace. None of us really wanted to were passionate about it anymore. So we're like, okay, it's time to do something about this.

Nice. So I usually like to start moving over to the acquisition story. I usually like to start at the beginning, but I want to hear the end first. What did it feel like to get five, a half a million dollars wired over to you for someone that you built? What sounds like on the side?

Yeah, I mean it, it hits different. I guess it's it's kind of insane because you're like, okay, it's, you know, we're gonna sell this thing as time goes on, and then, you know, one day it actually goes through.

Right?

And you're like, oh, cool. I mean, we still, you know, we're helping out the buyers. Great people, by the way, but we're helping out the buyers. Every once in a while they need. If they have any questions. You know, it's our code base that we built over three years, and we were three. Three people doing it, so they have some questions sometimes. But otherwise, like, I don't know, it's a weird feeling. It still feels a little bit surreal of like, oh, I built it. People are using it, still using it, and it's out there in the world, like, without.

I mean, you. You. You built something great. So, again, congrats on the acquisition, man. I'm. I'm. I'm impressed and happy with you. But now I want to know, so you. You list on acquired.com. can you tell me what happens within, like, the first two weeks? What did that look like?

Yeah, so, actually, even before, for some reason, I was hesitant to list on Acquire. I had never used it before, to be honest, but I was like, I. I'm not even sure what's going on there. No, off, I. I was asking around. I was, like, curious. I was, you know, seeing, okay, maybe we. We have some previous buyers, maybe we can go back to them and talk to them, see how they were doing. But after a while, we're like, hey, like, this is kind of a huge pain, and none of us really want to work on it actively, so this is even more work to try to sell it. So we went ahead. Like, I went ahead, I went on Acquire, listed it. It was pretty simple overall, right? Submitted it, submitted price range, et cetera, and then got some feedback back, like, hey, from. From your team. Like, someone on the team. Acquire team. So, yeah, I think you guys should do, you know, change this or. Or you should actually upload this. It'll give you more buyers or whatnot. So.

Right. Hey, do you remember their name by chance? Because they'll listen to this podcast. Sorry, Matt, Ebony, Christian.

I can look up the email after this, but I.

Any of those names ring a bell?

Not really.

Okay, well, shout out to my team, because we. We do that a lot with startups, and if you take our advice, the. The data shows, you know, we actually can help you get to a successful acquisition. So I'm glad, I'm glad they reached out and helped. It was.

Yeah, it was super helpful. I think one thing we were kind of iffy about was like our P L because at the end of the year, like we're just three people. We're not, we weren't optimizing for acquisitions, right? So at the end of the year we're trying, like, it's a partnership, we're trying to reduce our tax bill so we just spend it on stuff for like a Tahoe or like, like pay distribution. So we wanted to optimize like, like the paperwork so it doesn't, you know, that doesn't reflect poorly on us or what. So someone from your team actually helped us quite a bit with that.

Yeah, those documents are huge. Some buyers will not acquire startup for half a million dollars unless they have like a clear picture into the financial health of the business. You did a great job putting together a P and L because that also leads to more buyer calls. People that are interested in learning more about the business because they can see, okay, this is a very profitable, fast growing SaaS business. So I guess my next question would. In terms of the number of buyers that you spoke to, how many buyers did you speak to? On, we got a ton of people.

Interested in it, right? And it does sound kind of like, the way I think, the way I phrase it, it sounds like a sexy thing. It's like, oh, zero marketing dollars spent. It gets like hundreds of downloads a day organically, etc. Runs on its own, basically. Like, we made it sound pretty good. And then people, like, we got tons of people reaching out to us pretty quick. But finding the right buyer actually took like a few more weeks. Like people would, they'd ask certain questions about, hey, what is your. What's the split of like paying users between tiers or whatnot? They dive deep into like the metrics, like, hey, how are you getting people? Where are most people coming from, how long before they leave, et cetera? And then I think also like certain people were interested in like different plays on the, on the startup, right? So like some people wanted to take it from a BTC product. They were in the wealth management space, right? So they wanted to like, for example, like take it and offer it to their customers and then at a much higher price point because they have customers already using their products for certain things. So they were interested in a different way. Like they're more interested in tech, for example. So yeah, yeah.

One, one tip for others listening, there is different buyers will want to buy your startup for different reasons. So one that you mentioned, where if it's a company or a buyer that has a similar customer type, that's a strategic buyer. And there's also financial buyers, and they're going to be looking mostly at your P and L and the profitability of the business. And so. But understanding, like, the importance or what they're most interested in about the business, whether that's, you know, how much profitability does it show each year or what, what's the potential if I add this, you know, to my company? Just understanding that when you're speaking with buyers and you could just ask, like, hey, like, like, how do you see this, like, you know, fitting into your portfolio or your company? And that helps you, like, narrow down. Because when you sell a company, as you know, it's. It's a sales process. You. You have to sell the business. So figuring out, you know, where the value is to the buyer is huge. So now my next question is, how did you. How did you end up choosing the buyer that ended up acquiring stockholder?

So I think it was also, it wasn't just about, like, what the buyer wanted necessary. There's also, like, what our priorities were because we weren't just optimized. I mean, it's gonna sound weird, but we're just optimizing for, like, cash, for example.

Right.

We were also optimizing for, hey, how much headspace can we gain, like, immediately rather than be on the hook for, like, support for a year, for example.

Right.

So there was a lot of things that we were also interested in other than cash. So, like, some buyers were like, hey, we want you to spend three months onboarding our team afterwards.

Right.

And even if they're offering more, we wouldn't necessarily be interested in that seller financing. Some people, like, wanted that at certain percentages. We were trying to avoid that a little bit. So it was just about finding the right buyer. Was also, like, someone who would give us terms that we wanted for after the sale, A, and then B, they had kind of a background that. Where we knew, okay, they have a vision for this thing, they're going to take it where we think it's actually going to survive afterwards.

I love. I'm so glad you said that. Because a lot of people, when they go to sell their business, the one thing that they focus on is just the price. And the price is obviously extremely important. But so are terms, because you can get terms. Let's have two scenarios, like, let's say 700,000, but at 30% cash up front, 70% seller finance. You got to stay on for a year or 500k all cash on close 2 months transition period, something like that. Like those terms are, are so heavily weighted. Like when I did my acquisition, that's what I negotiated the most over actual valuation was all cash had closed. I was out of the business in 90 days because those are the things that were important to me. I didn't want to get stuck in a business for four years and then, you know, rest and best, as the saying goes. So I'm glad you, you know, stuck to, you know, what was important to you and actually got it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also like we're all like co founders are like, okay, we want to, you know, know do our own thing afterwards. We don't want to be stuck with it. So yeah, it makes sense.

Nice. And then in terms of, you know, due diligence, transferring, you know, the assets and all that fun stuff, how did that go? Any, any bombs? Was was it smooth? Any advice for maybe other founders?

Overall it was, it was all right. I think one thing is like we're a cross platform app, right? So Android, iOS and, and Stripe. So even though revenue might like revenue for Android and iOS would be higher than what they're actually getting because 15 hit ding. That Apple Android take for a business make under a Millie. If it's over then they take 30, right. So like we're advertising certain MRR and then afterwards they're like oh, actually but Apple's taking like 15 off that. Like we didn't know about that for example.

Right.

There's like small things like that as well as the makeup of the user base.

Right.

Like how many people are paying on the lowest tier versus on the highest tier because that kind of gives them signal on hey, maybe they can raise the price if the majority are in the highest tier, right. So they can raise the price even more and kind of do something with it. Maybe they have different expectations with that. There was one more thing along those lines. Oh yeah. Also our growth rate had kind of stagnated over like we had a weird. You remember the whole GameStop saga?

Yeah. I was gonna ask you like, yeah.

GameStop RMR like tripled in one month. That was like one of our best months ever. And then like basically our, our graph, like it, it is still growing, but it looks super wonky.

Right?

Because there was like, oh, I can imagine. It's like yeah, yeah.

So it's like you're kind of trying to figure out like, hey, how many these are actual users, how many of these are not, which ones are super high value. Because we had a couple hundred wealth management firms using it on individual plan.

Right.

Like one person from this term, one from.

But some as a bot. Even as I'm thinking of this as a buyer, I'd want to dive into that. Like how many like high net worth trade are using this than how many, you know, individual traders?

Exactly. So like yeah, you, you, you kind of, you're figuring out what plays you want to do and how much you can rate. Like I, I get from their end why they were diving so deep into this. But yeah, so like there was like, hey, we might get a ding for the growth rate not being what it used to be, but also might get a plus for. Okay. You have a lot of like users who have been around for a long time who are high net worth dudes.

Right.

Nice. I love that. Yeah. I mean with acquisitions there's always just, you know, questions that you have to answer or just things that come out that buyers will view negatively when really it's just not that big of an issue. And when you're in those scenarios, just being upfront honest is always the way through. So it sounds like you did a great job there. So I guess my, my last question would just be, you know, if you had to go back and you know, give yourself, you know, maybe three pieces of advice when you're selling, you know, your next business, you know, what do you think those would probably would have.

I. I don't know why. In my head I thought it would go a lot faster. It, it still went like decently fast. Like I think an under like start to finish of when we, I started looking seriously was like three and a half months. Ish.

That's, that's fast. It took me three years.

Okay, cool. I was like, no. When we decided to sell until like we actually, when we committed to it.

Yeah.

But yeah, I, I don't know why I thought it would go fast. Maybe I was like overestimating it. But I think it still went at least speed. So I probably have been a little bit with it.

Right.

And then also had more expectations around like how, how much effort would be involved in due diligence right up until like the day you close.

Right.

People are asking questions, hey, what's going on? What's going on with this? How much help you. You need with like onboarding people.

Right.

So setting expectations would definitely be something I, I would expect like, or kind of help myself with. I guess that makes sense.

No, it totally does. I guess, you know, just shameless plug. But I want to hear What. What was your favorite part about, like, the whole acquire.com experience?

I think the whole. Okay, so the UI just changing from step to step was pretty nice. Like, I think it was like, okay, cool, we made it past this or made it past that. Also, you guys, I don't know if you automate this or you have someone in the back, like, kind of like a Wizard of Oz thing, like, clicking it. But, like, the integration with escrow.com was kind of nice, right?

No, it's magic.

Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, no, that was. That was pretty nice, right? Because I was thinking about it. I'm like, do I have to set that up? And then suddenly it just pops up and then like, cool, that's done. So the integration of that was super nice.

Yeah. Just for people listening. So when you get a letter of intent on acquired.com and you move to an asset purchase agreement, all the terms will carry over to escrow.com. so you don't have to set up, like, let's say you have, like, milestone payments or seller financing. All you don't have to set. We like, transfer all that over magically. It's. It's actually pretty badass. But I am clearly biased as the founder of. Well, what do you. Last. Last question. I know I just said last, but what are you working on next?

Yeah, so I just got a new gig, actually, but on the side, started working on something new. It's an issue that. It was kind of annoying me for a while. You know how whenever you're building like a B2C SaaS, specifically, you have to build an affiliate. Like, normally a great growth engine is affiliate programs, right? Like, hey, someone refers someone and they get like a percentage of. Of whatever that person paid, right. They end up becoming a paying customer or whatnot. So I'm building. It's called rewardable IO. It's basically SaaS affiliate tracking. So it ties into your. Almost done. There's a waitlist there. But the idea is that it ties into your stripe. So if you only have a web app, for example, I'm still getting it to work for iOS, but, like, if you only have a web app, you just generate an affiliate link, someone shares it with someone, and then whenever they pay, the person who shared it would get a percentage automatically. And it tracks like, hey, if they refund within a certain period, then don't actually pay out that commission.

Right.

This is awesome, man. Set up a SaaS affiliate program in minutes, up your stripe. Affiliate program with two lines of code.

Yeah, super. I think one thing is like, it's B2B. It's super specific.

Right.

So if you're building a SaaS and you're using Stripe, I'm going to add paddle eventually, but not now. But yeah. So it's interesting. It's also like a multi tenant app. Right. I think I'm using that word right. Where it's like you have multiple portals for different people. So yeah, to be fun.

Nice. We'll definitely put this in the show notes. We might actually set this up@acquire.com we've been meaning to set up an affiliate program. We have some on the side, but not like official. Like this could actually. I'll test this out. Man. Nice job.

Yeah, it's almost done. Give me like a month or two weeks.

Okay, sounds good. Well, hey, man, congrats on getting. Getting acquired for. For half a minute. That's. That's a huge accomplishment. You're already building something new, which I, I think will go bigger because this is a big problem in SaaS.

Yeah. So like, elegantly is also kind of a problem, but yeah.

Right on. I'm rooting for you, my brand. And congrats again.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, cheers.