Startup Acquisition Stories With Adam Senese, Founder of Linq Commerce

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I'm here with Adam, the founder of Link Commerce, who recently got acquired. Adam, how you doing today?

Doing well, Andrew. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I know we did like a triple reschedule for this one, so I'm super excited to chat and that's on me. But for people that may not know you, do you want to give just a quick introduction of yourself?

Yeah, sounds good. Adam Sinise. I founded Link Commerce with my brother. We created an app for product bundling on the Shopify App Store. My personal background is about 10 years in product design. I've always been interested in technology and software and how it scales and so, yeah, I've been in it ever since this was our first, I would say semi successful venture that got some traction and.

Yeah, nice. Tell me about design. What were you, what did you start playing with when you got started in design? I'm like a really bad designer. I started in like GeoCities and Photoshop. What'd you start in?

So I went straight to sketch. If you've ever used any of the product design tools. Right when I got into it, they were starting out and they were like leagues above the rest. So I ended up just designing anything I could think of in this tool. Now I'm on Figma, but a little bit there. So I started off in software sales but really noticed like the power of product design and how that's like the new industry. It's software engineers were in such high demand, product design was that differentiator. So that's how I got into it. I thought I need to understand how to tell a story with these screens. So I've always been a visual learner and that sort of matched my personality.

Nice. I got up to Photoshop and I've just never stopped. So I feel like I, I couldn't get into Photoshop.

That was, that was always a tough one to learn.

Yeah, I've been using Photoshop since I was like 15 or 16 anyways. But yeah, the best part about design, and maybe this is a tip for entrepreneurs, I'm sure you'd agree with it, but instead of building like a whole product, just design one like a prototype and then show it to customers before you build it. That's why I like design so much.

Yeah, you can get a lot of insights just from showing a few screens and getting their feedback if it makes sense and if there's any value and.

Save a lot of time and money too. But hey, let's talk about the Shopify SaaS that, that you got acquired. Tell me about, you know what? Where'd you get the idea to start it?

So the story there starts on vacation. So I was going to Iceland.

This is every. Every entrepreneur goes on vacation and comes back with ideas.

Yeah. And I was going by myself, but right at the last minute, my brother ends up joining me on this trip. We get our AirB and we're hanging out, but there's a storm going on, so we get sort of stuck inside of the Airbnb. And we were just talking back and forth. Shopify was becoming more and more popular. They opened up the App Store in the last few years, and we decided, like, hey, let's sit down and find a category or subcategory that we thought was underserved. And so we basically just hopped on the computer, found one that had a few apps competing that we thought a lot of people would be interested in, and found product bundling. We thought, there's only a handful of apps. Why not make one that sort of differentiates itself and see what happens with an app store like that.

Nice. They're also great acquisitions. I personally have acquired a Shopify SaaS in the past, and it was awesome. I call them like SaaS on training wheels. You know, the analytics are all built in, the billing, the distribution. That's awesome.

That was a huge part of it.

Yeah. So. So if there's other people listening out there, Shopify SaaS, if you're looking at a first acquisition, they can be great because, again, everything's integrated. You don't have to have, like, Google Analytics and all the other, you know, items to support a regular SaaS. But tell me about, you know, was there a moment building this. This product where you kind of sat back and you're like, oh, oh, damn. I think we, like, we really got something on our hands because it's hard to get your first customers.

We. We were fortunate. So this was around 2020. So right when Covid was starting.

Oh, that's market timing, man.

Yeah, it was really a market timing situation. So we knew we were building for Shopify stores. We wanted something that was simple and different. And luckily, right when we launched, that's when everybody moved onto Shopify. Everyone started their own store. I think that was a record year for new Shopify stores. And so we launched, I think, beginning of the year and then soon after, in the first month, we had at least a thousand users free and paid. And it was. It was almost overnight. It was very, very crazy. Just because things were shutting down, people needed to find new streams of revenue. So they're opening up their own stores. And yeah, we got lucky there. Definitely it doesn't happen like that all the time, but that's one of the things. You just sort of have to be in the market to get those sort of opportunities.

That is mind blowing. A thousand signups and did you say the first day or the first week?

It was the first month. Within that first month, we were already at at least a thousand customers.

You want to know what the three factors to building really, really successful startup bar?

Go for it.

It's flawless execution, market timing, and a little bit of luck.

I can agree with that. Yeah, that's a big part of it.

You can only control one, which is the execution and then market timing. Maybe. But having those tailwinds like when the E commerce boom was happening in 2020. So good for you, man. Now let's go over the acquisition. So acquisition closes. It's closing day. How did it feel on that. That wire hit your bank account?

It felt good. Acquire.com made it super easy to find a good buyer that we could get behind where we're like, okay, they can handle our app. And once it was done, it felt like a weight off your shoulders. But then you're also thinking, what do we. That was probably the number one thing I was thinking is what are we going to be spending our time on going forward?

Yeah. What were your expectations when you listed on acquire.com were you thinking like a couple buyers? Like, I don't know.

Yeah.

And then what actually happened?

So I can get into that. We, we were. During that whole crazy boom, we were getting a few people just reaching out here and there, asking to acquire the app. But we weren't really on the offensive there. We weren't trying to. To find anybody in particular. It wasn't even on top of our mind. But then after a few years, we just didn't feel like we were the right team to sort of take on some of the opportunities we saw with Shopify bundles. So it really just was a natural thing to go on. Acquire.com it is the largest marketplace for these things. So we expected to get some buyers or interested buyers. And yeah, I think we had 50 people reach out to us, maybe five or 10 who hopped on a call. And towards the end we found somebody who was a perfect fit. So it was a good experience overall.

Nice. In terms of finding that. That perfect buyer. What. What stood out about that buyer?

I think especially with finding a buyer, there's some conversations where you feel that there's not a. You're not going to be able to easily get to an agreement. It might be a more tough conversation to get something where you're both happy. Often it came with, like, seller financing. And if you're not a super expensive SaaS app, you don't really need that type of additional complexity to a deal. Sometimes you just want it to be clean and trust that the process sort of figures it out yourself. Let me rephrase that. So.

Well, there's a really good quote I think you're kind of alluding to and tell me if I'm wrong, but you can't do a good deal with a bad person. I've never seen an acquisition go through where, but where the owner and the buyer are just arguing the whole time and stuff. Like, you got to get along with this person. I think that's the best way to think about when you pick. It's not the top thing, but it's definitely on the top list.

Right. And if you could, you could tell if somebody's trying to find a extra good deal. You sort of have to trust, like, where you found your valuation, where you think the opportunities are, and if you're finding the right buyer who sees those same opportunities, it's going to be a lot easier. The whole process of figuring out, is this the right opportunity for them is a lot easier if they could see that vision and are on the same page with you not trying to take advantage of the situation at all.

Yeah, I know this is super obvious, but I love how you got on calls with buyers because you would be surprised at the amount of, you know, founders that I meet that, you know, will will list on acquire.com expect buyers to kind of just spin an offer and not understand, like, you're in a sales process. You have to sell your business. You have to speak with buyers, you have to go over their questions. You have to provide, you know, I'm sure, due diligence documents prior to even getting a letter of intent. So again, for anyone listening out here, you're listening on acquired.com. did you work with anyone on our team? Did you speak to anybody prior to going live in the marketplace, which is general acquisition advice?

We just had the back and forth within the app, but nobody formally walking us through it. It was that easy.

Nice. That's great to hear. We do have a team where we'll walk you through an acquisition strategy, best practices, best tips. But I want to hear from you if you had, you know, let's say, hey, Adam, I'm looking to sell, you know, something a SaaS business on acquired.com what are the top pieces, pieces of advice you'd give me?

I would say get it out there as early as possible and just keep refining your post. I know you guys provide a lot of great feedback on the listing and there's always more you can add, but it's good to just start fielding offers, getting conversations going. You never know if it just resonates with somebody and, and just feels like a good fit for what their plans are. I would have actually probably listed earlier when the boom was at a higher peak, but we just never ended up going through acquire.com at that time we were just heads down on the app.

Nice. You got two more pieces of advice you owe me.

Let's see, another one would be.

One could be like talking to buyers. That honestly, as obvious as it is.

I think two points with talking with buyers. I think that yes, hopping on a call is great. A conversation is much easier than a text thread of 20 or 30 questions. It's easier just to sit down and sort of talk through and show everything that you need to show. A video call works great for that. And then also trying to do sort of the valuation beforehand so you have a good idea of what price you're looking for in a range. So that was one thing. You guys recommended going in a little bit lower. And it also helped us get more of those conversations started. And then once we found somebody who was a great fit, we ended up getting more of the price we were looking for, which is a great turnout at the end.

Awesome. Yeah, that, that last piece of advice is something that is, is counterintuitive, but when you go to sell your business, you actually do want to, or I always recommend pricing it lower than your final number that you want to hit and write your final number down, but go a little bit lower than that. And the reason you do that is because just like in sales, you want to get as many people interested as possible. So you have as many conversations as you can of buyers and then you start moving those buyers towards formal offers. And the more offers you get, the more you're able to negotiate up on, you know, the final price. Or even just terms like it sounded like, you know, your acquisition may have been, you know, all cash or whatever structure is important to you or terms like you don't want to stay in the business or you're only open to a three month transition period because buyers have a very strict mandate in terms of what they'll pay. So understanding that is absolutely critical if you price too high. Basically, buyers will just kind of look over it quickly because also, you have to understand most buyers are looking at 10, 20. If you're in private equity, you're looking at 100 businesses per day. So you definitely want to price it correctly. And then, yes, you have to speak with buyers.

Yeah, I, I can. Plus one that I think it's better to have the conversation and get the ball rolling, even if. And get more of those conversations started before. Like cutting off the conversation on the post where you know you're scaring them away with something that's way too high. I definitely think that you want more leads when it comes to an acquisition.

Absolutely. And again, you don't have to sell at that price. Like, you don't have to. As it draws in as much buyer interest as possible and it gets buyers to review your. Your business, look at any documents that you've uploaded into your data room. So when you have that conversation, they're excited about your business. And that's really how you raise your final acquisition price, by having, you know, multiple interested buyers and essentially creating a bidding warrant. So, well, well done on that, I guess. I don't know. I love asking this question. What was your favorite part about the acquire.com experience? Was it, you know, the wire hitting your bank? Was it, you know, the ease of finding buyers? Like what. What was, like, the funnest part?

All of it. I think it's fun to see people interested in something you've created as, you know, like, these are often a lot of side projects or things that nobody expected to be worth so much. And if you have, like, a really focused community who are all active in buying these SaaS products, you really can't beat it. It's. It's so easy. And all the conversations and the notifications just make it really seamless on finding and vetting, knowing sort of where you're at in the market. Are there people interested? Yeah, there's really no other resource out there that can do it end to end like you guys. And yeah, it just shows how quick, like, we were able to go from listing and six months later, selling. That's a pretty powerful thing.

That's awesome. Well, congrats on, on the acquisition. Now my next question is, you're an entrepreneur. What are you doing now? Because you're definitely not laying on a beach by the look in your office.

Definitely not. It's still winter here, but yeah. So right now we're working on an app called parallel chat, parallelchat.com we're creating a user experience layer for SaaS companies to sort of have a no code solution to add chat and AI search and other things that just make user experiences more seamless. So right now we have a soft launch with chat and search and over the next few months we're adding in some user adoption things like modals, checklists, product tours. A lot going on, but we're excited. We think AI and software is really an exciting time and a market that we're really interested in going after just because we're both software people. So yeah, that's where we're at.

I love it. What was the name of it again? Parallelchat.com More leads, less churn and happier customers. Is that you?

Yep.

Yeah. This is. Is awesome. I love, man, you got acquired. Now you're going bigger by the sounds of it.

That's the plan. We're just, you know, we started really small a while back. Shopify was the easiest way. Like you said, it's a great market to get into. And now we want to build more of a full solution that we own, more of those pieces of the puzzle that are maybe like offloaded with Shopify. Yeah.

This looks awesome, man. Well, hey, I'm, I'm rooting for you. Wow. And the website's beautiful too. 24. 7 lead generation qualification gauge. Understand our user needs. I love products like this. So I'm going to check this out. But Adam, hey, thanks so much for coming on the pod and you know, sharing your, your acquisition story and I'm rooting for you, man. I'm going to put this business in the show notes because this is, this looks very interesting and hope I get you back on here, you know, one day or maybe like a seven or eight figure acquisition.

Yeah, hopefully this around two. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Andrew.

All right, Adam. Appreciate you, Dud.

Take it easy.

Bye.