Startup Acquisition Stories with Lotanna Ezeike, Founder of Creator Check

Foreign.

I'm here with Lots, who is the founder of two startups that had been acquired on acquire.com trip, visa and visa Bot Lots. How you doing today? Doing well.

Monday, Monday evening. So a lot's happened so far through the week.

Yeah, definitely. Well, for those that don't know you, do you want to just give a quick background on yourself?

Yeah, so I always have a boring and a fun background. Boring was of course, in Corpor, so I used to lead product, Barclays bank here in the uk. That's the boring part. The more fun side to my life was I was actually an athlete competing for England and I fell into the whole creator economy space, start up my own startup, did the whole VC thing, did the raising, then the failing. So we actually closed down and wound down last year and I kind of lost the spark I had just because I've been working there for like four years plus and kind of thought to myself, wow, can I actually build product at, um. And I guess the whole thing was kind of like, you know, you build, raise vc, then have this huge, huge exit right at the end after seven to 10 years. But then, yeah, came across microcoin. I was like, okay, let me try and build something small and see if someone would actually want to buy it. And what happened?

Well, you, you did it successfully twice, so. So well done. Uh, what made you want to build trip visa? I guess maybe, maybe another question that might be better is tell me about what trip visa does and the problem it solves. And also visa bot given there little bit similar.

Yeah, essentially. So I'm Nigerian born, lived in the UK for a very long time. I don't have a British passport yet. So whenever I want to travel, I need to get a visa. It's called a tourist visa. Whenever I travel to Europe, which most people travel to, you have to get something called a Schengen Visa. The process isn't complicated, it's just long for no reason. So I essentially found that, oh, I could probably find a way to automate the process for people who were just like me. And I found the target audience being international students who study here in the UK because they also need a visa to travel in summertime as well.

Nice. I love how you had a personal problem and then you just solved it yourself. And then most of the time other people have the same problems. That's one of the best ways to build a business. How long did it take you to build these businesses?

So with the rise of no code, probably a month max. Really? Maybe like three weeks. I Started remember building it in public around let's say first week of August and it launched in September.

That is incredibly fast. Are both of these acquisitions. No code acquisitions?

Yeah. Yeah, literally. Yeah. So Zapier was my best friend for sure.

Nice, I love to hear that. Okay, so you, you build the products. How did you get, you know, your first customers or first users?

Yeah, so I learned a lot from, you know, the VC startup that I had before when I realized, in addition, distribution is the most important thing. So I actually started working on distribution before I even started working on the product itself to see, you know, what's the best place to get the customers. So found three ways. There were actually, there was actually a community of international students who does like a newsletter essentially. So I reached out to the person who owned the newsletter to see if this would be a fit. Then I reached out to universities and their student unions because they always had international student student unions on that end. And luckily enough Facebook actually has an interest called international Students. So those are the re ways I was looking to acquire customers. But my first way of getting proper customers was definitely through that newsletter group that I had.

Nice. I couldn't agree more with you because with startups, you know, if you build the best product in the world, unfortunately people will not randomly find your startup. So you, you gotta focus on, on distribution. So nice, nice job there. Okay, so going, going down the story. So you build the product solving problem, a problem that you had personally experienced and you start to get customers and users. What made you decide to sell the businesses and have them acquired?

Two things. I didn't anticipate the amount of customer service that happens before someone purchase it purchases. So I think I kind of thought to myself, oh, this is what product market fit feels like when you have hundreds of customers shouting at your customer service trying to get you to or get to use your product essentially. And I was a one man band at the time and again, travel wasn't necessarily my space that I wanted to fully go into. Like I knew there were definitely issues that could be solved. So that was the first thing. And then second of all, we had actually received an offer from someone outside of Microacquire. And I think that's what first got me thinking. Oh actually potentially I can sell this on the end. Babu is in a microcquire for the last maybe a year or two.

Nice. Yeah. No, when you, when you find product market fit, it's exhilarating and it's also a little scary at the same time because sometimes they can come at you fast and quick. Like, whoa.

There were certain points where, like, you know, a couple days where I was literally scared to open up my Chrome tab just because I knew there were just so many customers there.

Yeah, well, I mean, I always say the other. The other option of no customers is probably more scary. You know, you open your Chrome tab and there's no customers, then, you know, so it's always something with startups. All right, so you. You got an offer even before listing on acquire.com that's. That's always a good sign. So buyers are interested in what you built. Tell me about the process. Listing on acquired just from, you know, signing up, creating an account. How did that process work for you? Did you hit any bump? What'd you like about it?

Yeah, so I think, yeah, it was pretty simple, you know, especially, you know, connecting your stripe, all that kind of stuff. So I've always had a micro Acquire account for a long time. Just, I never listed anything on there. I kind of just used it just to window shop other startups that were being sold on there. Yeah, there was no issues at all, I think Center Cross. And it got reviewed. It took maybe a day max on the end. I also did like the way they kind of reformatted my description of the company and all that kind of stuff to just me. It look more appealing, or at least they brought out the most important parts that a buyer would care about. So that was pretty simple, to be honest, the listing side of things.

All right, so we're just. We're going down the timeline now. All right, so you. You go. You go live on Acquire. And I'm saying acquire because we we've rebranded. We dropped the micro. Yeah, but we. But we can keep the micro in this conversation. But okay, so your listing goes live on acquire.com. what. What happens after that? Were you surprised by responses? Was it slow? Was it. Tell me about maybe the first, like, two weeks after going live.

All right, cool. So a lot happened, even in the first. Let's say it was quiet the first day, but then the second day, we started getting loads of kind of NDAs being signed. So I was like, okay, cool, this is interesting. I didn't know what level of commitment those NDAs were essentially. Then I end up finding out that most people just automatically sign NDA. It was cool. Then, you know, after they send an NDA, normally I would send out a message to them just to be like, hey, do you have any more questions? You know, I'm here to answer them. Then I was probably saying, Like a week in, I got an email from you guys saying that we're going to get featured on the, on the newsletter. So before the newsletter, I believe we have probably like 10 people acquire. Then after the newsletter it was like 30 in total. So it was a lot of inbound for sure from then. So the first two weeks I had already essentially made contact with two of the buyers or two potential buyers. So one of them used to be an international student and the other. Actually both of them used to be international students actually. So they definitely understood the problem space. One was based in India and one was based in the States.

Nice. So, okay, so you got. Now moving down the timeline, you got 30 buyers interested. How did you land on. And I'm just going to assume were this. Were the situations kind of the same with both startups?

Yeah, yeah, essentially, yeah, they're pretty much the same.

Okay, all right, we'll keep going down the storyline. Okay, so you got all these buyers now, you know, how do you, how did you figure out? And also great job on responding to buyers. That's a huge, huge, huge way to really filter out. Maybe I'm already answering the question for you. Sorry. But one, one mistake I commonly see when people are selling a is they just kind of list their product and then people, you know, they'll sign the NDA and they don't reach out with a simple question. Are you interested? Do you have any questions? Can I help you? Are you willing to. Do you want to get on a call? Literally anything that can be a great way to show buyers that you are serious about selling the business and get them more interested. Okay, so going back to my question, sorry, you went live on acquire. Now you got 30 buyers interested. How did you vet and find the right buyer to finally acquire. Acquire these businesses?

I think, yeah, I looked at a few indicators. First of all, just going to their LinkedIn helped a lot. Just to see, you know, whether what they were saying was true. That's kind of the first thing I just kind of seen their background. Something else that helped was I think there's something on their profile that says, you know, how many acquisitions they've made or the prospective acquisitions they want to make or whatever it was. Then obviously when I go in on a call with them, ask them where they see the vision of this, of course, expect into them, where I see the growth on that end and why they were interested in the first place, that definitely helped a lot. Then Micro Quiet also had this feature of was it like showing your funds or something? Like proof of funds, I believe. So that was pretty good just to show, okay, cool. This person isn't just talking to talk like they're pretty serious on that end. So that's what I kind of used like those three, four things to. And then I think the final thing is always a vibe check at the end of the day, because then that's. That's why I call it on my end. It's kind of like, okay, do I. Because I didn't want to. To essentially just sell it and not help them at all. So I wanted that they know that transitionary period to be able to help them as much as possible, because again, I have live customers there at the end of the day. So I wanted to make sure I can definitely vibe with them so that I can help them, you know, post acquisition as well.

Yeah, you're hitting the nails on the head because that's also super important. Like, if you sell to someone, there's a good quote by Warren Buffett. You can't do a good deal with a bad person. And when you sell a startup, it's not like handing over keys to a car, like, hey, goodbye. Yeah, there's always some questions afterwards. And if you don't have like that goodwill built with the person or you, like, you said it perfectly. If you don't vibe with them, if you don't. If you can't share a few couple, like, couple laughs, you know, like, this person seems reasonable. They don't need to be your best friend. But, you know, like, okay, I can, you know, work with you on this for a period of 1, 3, 6 months is. Is key. So it's not just for the success of the transaction, but also just for your sanity. You want to make sure that you sell to someone that you know is going to be easy to work with. You define everything up front. So, okay, you. You vibe checked all the buyers. Well done. Now, I assume you received a letter of intent and then you moved into two doja.

Yeah, so literally received. So there was two buyers. There's one that was the original person that we were going to go with, but then they kind of went missing after sending a letter of intent, I believe. Yes, they went missing after that. But funny enough, they did let me know beforehand that they were in and out of hospital because of the ankle or something like that. So missing. And that's all over the Christmas period. So I kind of like, let things go. Then I went back to the second. The second option buyer at the time to kind of let them know what's happened so far. And they were just fully transparent that they were still super interested. So after the LOI then went into due diligence, again, they was asking deeper questions about, you know, products. Have there been any kind of refunds, whatever? So for me, I just shared our stripe with them because of fresh new stripe anyway that was just starting in September. So they can just see everything through there. And again of course then listing the different products that we had used, different SaaS products that are used, and how they're connected. So I drew like a user lucid chart to draw. Okay, this is how this is connected to this and this is why these are the ultimate processes. So almost having like a bible essentially of how the processes work on a surface level. So we did that, then they sent the apa. So once they did that, kind of like fully opened up the book to be like, okay, cool, this is exactly how things work. And then we had to then. And this is where the issues began in terms of. Everything was super, super smooth until then. Just in terms of, you know, handing things over just because, you know, like, even though it was a small SaaS software, we were using multiple things and then handing things over is always different with different things. Like with Gmail and Stripe, like because the stripe was registered in the uk you can't just transfer over to the US you have to actually then create a new US one and then do this manual transfer thing, which I didn't know about before then. With the second acquisition, there was Google domains like a dot com. You can't transfer it below 60 days. It has 60 days have to have come past before you can transfer that. So there's little things where I didn't really understand that because again, this is kind of like my first proper acquisitions through there. But everything before then was definitely pretty smooth. It's just when it got to that kind of. We asked then create a Google sheet that listed all the products and then we kind of like green tick to each one that's been successfully transferred.

Yeah, transferring assets can. Can sometimes be harder than due diligence just because like I've heard stories of people having, you know, some, some really good products or businesses inside of a single AWS account. They got to pull it out. Or a stripe account with multiple products in it and they got to pull that out. So just having it all like, consider yourself lucky. I've heard, I've heard some bumpier stories.

So I literally remember like the, the goo. What happened to the Google? Something happened with the Google and the Google locked us out for like three days. And the Google had Google single sign on for the zapier so we couldn't get into the zapier and it was just like. And then it was just like a whole problem. But we're just like, you know what, let's just give it three days and then just do this properly on the phone together. But again, this is where the vibe thing comes in. Right. Because we were able to kind of like laugh about it it as it was happening. But yeah, everything went well at the end.

That's awesome. That's awesome to hear, I guess. Okay, so assets were transferred, funds I assumed were released. And you were.

Yeah, yeah. So for fun, funds were released. I think something else which I spoke to the product team about was around the, the whole kind of like one email to one account or one startup to one account thing. Because remember I sold two kind of near the same time. So I think I was told to create another micro acquire account with like, you know, my email +1gmail.com. So did that and then for the second one which is visible. So just to explain, Visa bot is a chat GPT powered Visa cover letter writer. Essentially whenever you want to travel, when you have to apply for a visa, you have to send a cover letter to the embassy convincing them to give you the visa. So we're just essentially kind of hooked up, up into ChatGPT and it just automatically generated that for them based on the input data or where they wanted to travel to, all that kind of stuff. So the issue was with that was escrow.com doesn't allow the same person to have two different accounts. So I had to tell them, oh, like my normal email, you have to transfer this new acquisition to this original email essentially because they didn't let me to do ID verification twice through there. So that was a bit of a kind of like headache with them because like it's also like their customer service. There's always a new person I was speaking to and it was just kind of annoying for like three, four days. But that ended up being sorted and then yeah, like you said, transfer of funds was done. And again I'm based in the uk so maybe took about four, four or five days.

Nice. I wanna, I wanna personally apologize for only being able to list one product because I, when I started Microquire now quire.com, i'm still getting used to doing that. I, I thought people only worked on one startup at a time, but boy, was I wrong. Oh my gosh. So we're gonna get that Fixed and you won't have those issues moving forward. But glad to hear both worked out. I guess at this point I'm wondering, you know, if you had to give maybe your top three tips. And I know we kind of went over a lot of just really good, good stuff that you did to get these deals closed. You know, if you had to give like three quick tips for, you know, people looking to sell their businesses, what would they be?

Number one I would do is when interest has been shown, actually reaching out to the buyer. So for me, I had a kind of a process where I reach out to them twice. Reach out to them. First of all, when they've sent the NDA just saying, hey, if you have any questions, I'm open to answer. And then the second one I always sent like three days later, just being like, hey, you know, message first time, hope you've received it. And they actually give them a deadline to be like, if you don't respond by here, then I'm just going to decline line on the end. So that kind of got them to respond at least with a yes or no, because I just want a quick yes or quick no. One of those two, second of all is when you are speaking to the buyer. You know, if, if I say this is growth, it's kind of like you don't want to sell them here. You want to sell them that it's about here to kind of show that there's still room for that big growth through there, to let them know, okay, cool, this is the distribution channel that you haven't tapped into yet and they could do so and why they are best placed to do so instead of yourself. And I would say the third thing is just keeping that relationship afterwards, really. Because the person that acquired Trip Visa, and the reason I was actually also selling that as well, is there's a new startup I'm working on at the moment. They actually want to do an angel investment into the new startup that I'm doing as well. So it's always good to kind of keep that relationship. It doesn't have to be too arduous per se, but it's kind of like, you know, it's always. It's good to do business with good people.

That is awesome to hear. Congrats. My next question was literally going to be. I just, I. I knew you were working on something new already. I could sense it. Do you want to share what you're working on right now or is it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, it's pretty Cool. So, like I said, the VC stock start I did before, for the last three, four years, was in the creator space doing invoice financing for. For creators and kind of come back now with a chip on my shoulder, but doing background checks. Creators. So at the moment, we've been able to build tech where you can Type in any YouTuber's name and it analyzes all the videos they've ever posted and, you know, actually flags, you know, racial slurs, profanities, sexual content, whatever it is through there. And essentially, brands and agencies will be using this to see who they want to partner with. So after they've discovered, you know, 10 creators they want to work with, then they put this through this background check thing just to be able to see. Okay, cool. Did they say something in their third video? And essentially, we give them a safety score of 100, kind of like a credit score through there. And it's not just that. It's like, you know, I can say, hey, you know, lots. Who's on? Or who's on you. Who's a YouTuber? Type in his name. Okay. He said a racial slur, and his score is only like a 60 of 100. But not just that. I can actually click view more and actually go to the exact video, the exact minute and second that they said it as well, just for you to put some more context to it through there. So it's super exciting. Looking to launch probably in the next two months, but already got a couple of heavy hitters already as customers, so it's pretty cool.

That is, I could see so many different use cases for that, like people applying for jobs.

Yeah.

That. That's gonna be. I love. I love your stories just because, you know, I always say small, small exits, they lead to bigger things because you learn so much and then it allows you to swing bigger the next time. So congrats on all the success, man. And I'm. I'm rooting for you. And I guess if people want to get a hold of you or just learn more about your story, where's. Where's the best place to find you?

Yeah, I'm pretty active on Twitter, so that's probably the best place. It was just lots. Nomads. L O double T S N O M a D. And that's my LinkedIn. That's just me. Everywhere on social media, to me. So I always talk about the underbelly of, you know, building in public and seeing all the trials and tribulations that I go through. But it's always fun at the end of the day.

Nice. I'll add that in the show notes, but congrats on the two acquisitions and. And maybe a third coming up pretty soon here.

Potentially. Potentially. Yeah, for sure.

All right. Lots. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, and I'm rooting for you.

Thank you so much. Have a good day.

All right, cheers.