Startup Acquisition Stories Podcast w/ Sam Lillicrap, Founder of Alignr

All right, I'm here with Sam Lilly Craft, the founder of Aligner. Sam, how you doing today?

Super good, thank you. And it's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, thanks so much for joining the podcast. So for. For people that don't know you, do you want to just give, like, a brief introduction of yourself?

Yes. I'm Sam from London. I've been a product designer, so UX UI designer for around 10 years now. I started very young, actually. I started when I was sort of 15, 16, and ever since then, I've been working in startup companies. Yeah. As a product designer, leading design teams and so on and so forth.

Yeah, nice. What were you doing? What were you designing at 15? Were you, like, geocities early or you Photoshop or what were you using?

Yeah, I was using Photoshop at that time. So I started very, very early, like when I was 12, actually. That was when the kind of web design journey started. And then when I was 15, 16, I was kind of just moving on to making websites for local businesses. And then by 17 or 18, I was. Well, I dropped out of college, actually, and got my first internship, which ended up being kind of the. Let's say, the. The track to becoming sort of more interested in entrepreneurship as well, because I. It was an unpaid internship. I'm not sure whether it was necessarily, you know, allowed, but anyway, that's what happened. And I made an app for this company, and two months after I left, they sold it for a quarter of a million.

What?

Yeah. So I didn't get any part of that. So it kind of made me, like, fueled me up and it gave me some motivation. And from there, I kind of went along my way and became a freelancer. Contractor and worked for agencies before. Yeah. But going on to do my own thing and work with companies just as a contractor, man.

I guess, maybe, maybe acquire needs to get some unpaid interns and just make some abs. That's awesome. Congrats. Well, so you had a liner acquired. I'd love to kind of dive into that. Do you want to just kind of give a brief overview of, you know, what it did, what problem it solved? Yeah, yeah.

So Aligner is effectively posture recognition technology. So effectively, it uses your webcam to detect your posture as you're working at your computer. So it will detect whether you're slouching, whether your neck is craning forward. So they're the two sort of main metrics. It tracks how much you're slouching in the neck.

How's my posture right now?

I mean, it's looking good, but I can't tell because it's hard for me to say, but it looks good. But the problem is, of course, during lockdown, that's when I built it. A lot of people were working from home and not necessarily having good chairs or anything like that. So that's sort of where the idea came from. And actually I'd started up a startup company before that which was using computer vision technologies of the same sort of technology to do the measurement of the breath for meditation applications. So I kind of. Yeah, yeah. So I used what I learned there and applied it to a different model still in health tech, which is a passion of mine.

Yeah, I'm looking at the website now. It looks like an app maybe I should use because I don't want to have scoliosis when I'm older. I spend quite a bit of time at a computer, so. This is awesome. You built a fantastic product, it looks like. And, and it was acquired. So tell me about that part. You know, you, you list on, on Microcore, how was, how'd you find, you know, the buyer to, to purchase this?

Yeah, so I think maybe my case might be slightly different to other people's because this was basically pre revenue effectively. So I was kind of looking to, to sell it because I'm at the moment I very focused on kind of just my agency and that sort of thing. And yeah, the listing process was super simple, to be honest. I put it up and I think within sort of maybe three to four months I got the first. And yeah, and from, from there on the process was pretty simple actually.

Nice in terms of, you know, you know, transferring the assets. What, what sort of tips would you give to other founders given that, you know, you built this? It looks pretty complex or maybe it's. Maybe it's not. Tell me about like the transferring of, of assets and if you could do anything different or if you have any tips, how would you handle that again?

Yeah, I think the transfer of assets was relatively simple actually. I kind of got on a call with the, with the buyer and we basically we completed it all within, I'd say an hour and a half. Basically just transferring, you know, from my email to his email address, you know, the Heroku instances, which is the text that we were using, GitHub, the repository, all that sort of stuff. And it was very simple. I think maybe the, the toughest part to handle is the transfer, especially when you've got like, let's say a sort of proprietary technology that's not well understood or there's not any kind of. There's nothing out there that is very similar. And so documenting that and making sure that's understood as well by other developers or for other developers is also. Was. Was a challenge. But what I did is I used Loom. So I basically went through kind of this connects to this. This controls that on a, on a screen recording for those who don't know what loom is. And that really helps speed up the process because then he could just basically take this to other developers if he needs to and then he doesn't have to do any of the explaining effectively.

I love that advice. Did you record that Loom before or after you found the buyer?

It was after, yeah.

Nice one. One tip for those listening that I've seen work really effectively is kind of recording like a loom as you go live. I might require just kind of going over the tech stack common questions. Cause most buyers have the same questions like, how are you finding your customers? What is the tech stack? How complex is this? What assets are included in the sale? Who are you? You know, that's a big one because there's a big trust factor in terms of, you know, there's a saying, you can't do a good deal with a bad person by Warren Buffett. So you. I, I love that you created a Loom video because it just, it can solve so many problems in terms of, you know, questions and just making the buyer comfortable in terms of how you trans.

Yeah, yeah.

So good job there. I guess my next question would be, you know, since you've gone through an acquisition, what was maybe like a couple things you do differently or just like just general tips you'd give to other founders that are looking to sell their businesses.

Yeah, I suppose in terms of tips, I'd always say that don't underestimate the power of design in an acquisition or in when you're building a startup in some kind of way. Because, you know, my startup was pre revenue and I think having a good user experience definitely plays into the fact that, you know, the conversion rate and that is going to be better and the churn rate is going to be less. So that's, that's kind of one of the first things I would say in terms of kind of other tips or what I would do differently. I would actually make sure that you tell your bank before you're going to do the acquisition that you're going to do the acquisition. That's something I didn't do. And it actually sort of backfired and they were kind of like asking questions. Where's the, where's this payment coming from? It's coming from escrow, but we don't know what the, the payments for all that sort of stuff. So that's one thing that I think maybe people, maybe they will think about it, but I didn't think about that. And yeah, it kind of just caused a little bit more confusion and stuff. So definitely before you complete the acquisition, I would, I would tell your bank that that's what's going to happen.

Yeah, not, not the worst problem. You know, you're gonna have money coming in. Yeah. Could be worse. Tell me about. So you, you sold a liner again. Huge congrats on that. And then you're working on something new. Tell me, tell me about that a little bit.

What I'm working on now. Yeah, yeah. So right now I run Transcend Studios, which is my UX UI design agency with a main focus on actually improving the UX and Web3 services. As you may or may not know right now, they're not particularly the most easy to use things. So at the moment we're working on kind of products in that space at the moment.

Nice. What's like the most common issue you see with like web3products in terms of like design? But that's such a hard question.

But no, I've got an answer for it. Honestly. The hardest problem is, is getting people to understand like what cryptography is and why you have these like, you know, these seed words which are effectively, let's say, your password for your, for your keys. Getting them to really understand why they need to do this stuff is difficult. And then the fact that they now have like self custody of their assets places more kind of pressure, let's say on the end user to make sure that they're keeping everything safe themselves. And so yeah, making that experience easier and more understandable is probably one of the, the key things that needs to happen at the moment, I think.

Yeah, I think we've definitely seen that with a few exchanges, you know, going down where if people had held. This is a total, we're going taking total tangent but you know, if they had, you know, held custody of their own using, you know, an offline wallet or even just an online wallet, anything except keeping it on an exchange, you know, you could have prevented losing, you know, crypto assets. So yeah, I, I built a crypto company like two years ago, so I was, I was deep into that space. So. Good stuff, Sam. I guess that's kind of all I got. Quick, quick and easy, you know, congrats again on. On the sale. And I guess from here, if people want to get in contact you contact you because they're working on a web3 product and maybe they want some UI UX up, where's the best place to find you?

Yeah, you can either go to Transcend Studio, which is the website, and contact us from there, or you can just get me at Twitter, which is at Samlicrap.

Right on. I'll put that in the show Notes. All right, Sam, well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and congrats again on the acquisition, man. I'm rooting for you.

Thank you so much. Cheers.

All right, see you, buddy.