Top Startup Listings on Acquire.com: October 2025 Edition

Andrew Gazdecki and Rainier Renee walk through live startup listings on Acquire.com, mostly SaaS and AI businesses. They cover deal structures like seller financing and earnouts, what buyers should ask founders about churn and customer concentration, and typical valuations for these types of companies.
Questions this video answers
About five years.
Over half a million registered buyers.
Over 85 countries.
Over half a billion dollars in transaction volume.
Over 2,000 listings.
Foreign.
Here. In a second, we're going to be going over some awesome listings on Acquire.com sharing our thoughts, how to negotiate them, structure the deals, things to look out for. And with me today, I got Renear Renee, one of our top advisors at Rainier. You want to just give a quick intro?
What's up everyone? It's good to see some familiar names here on the attendee list. It's been a while since we did one of these, but I'm happy to share how the market is doing, what buyers are looking for, and just overall market trends and what to look for. If you're a buyer looking at our listings, some pitfalls to avoid and just some common things to make note of.
Right on. Appreciate you joining Rene. These are always fun to do. I kind of miss them. And just as a reminder, we'll, we'll do Q and A at the end too. So if you have any questions, just put them in the chat. We'll do our best to get to those at the end, but without further ado. All right, this is the top startups listing webinar. Super excited for this one. Again, it's really fun. We go through some awesome deals on Acquire, give our thoughts and just as a quick agenda, we're going to do introductions, explain why you're here, and then we're going to review some deals. We're going to go over live listings on Acquire, how to think about them, questions to potentially ask the founder how you could think about deal structuring. And then at the end, if you're looking to buy or sell a business, we'll talk about how you can match with us to make sure you're in the best possible hands. As a way of background, if you're not familiar with acquire.com We've been in business about five years. We have over half a million registered buyers, which is absolutely wild. When I started the company five years ago, I never would have imagined having this sort of response in the market. So again, I appreciate every single one of you. We've done acquisitions in over 85 countries. We've closed over half a billion in transaction volume. And then today on the marketplace, we have over 2,000 listings. So lots of businesses, lots of startups across a number of different categories. And every single day we close about two to three acquisitions. So total last year was over 500. So a ton of activity on both the buy side and the sell side. A little about me My name is Andrew Gazdecki. I've helped thousands of startups get acquired through acquire.com, i've also built and sold multiple startups of my own. Prior to acquire.com, i bootstrapped a SaaS business called Business Apps to about 10 million in recurring revenue. That business was acquired by a private equity firm and going through that process just opened my eyes to how difficult it is to get acquired. And I wanted to build something that really help founders and others get in the acquisition game. And my promise today is I'm going to do my best to help you navigate, evaluate, negotiate and close some amazing acquisition opportunities and passing it over to you. Ranier.
What's up everyone? This is Ranier. My background has been in M and A capital markets and investment sales for over a decade. I've seen thousands of deals. Good deals, bad deals, crazy deals, you name it. Previously from Acquire, I was at Empire, Flippers, Cushman and Wakefield and also Marcus Milchap. My goal is to help clients just avoid the many pitfalls, especially if it's your first time going through one of these acquisitions. Just know that I've seen all different types of deals and we're here to help you avoid some of these mistakes and also just get the best experience. Especially because a lot of these deals are life changing.
100%. Me and you were near. We've been together on a ton of just awesome deals and also some crazy ones too. We don't have to talk about the crazy ones, but we've seen pretty much everything. The good, the bad and then more often than not, the amazing and like Rainier said, the life changing. Okay, why are you here today? So we're going to be seeing the best deals and what makes them special. This is going to be a monthly showcase of our biggest and best SaaS deals. We also have some other categories today such as agencies. We also have a Shopify app. These are pre vetted, recommended by our advisors and at the end we're going to be doing Q A with any questions you have about businesses or just the marketplace in general or our process or anything in between, how we maintain high quality deal flow. So at Acquire we pride ourselves on the highest quality deal flow. Right at the top we have expert support. So we have an in house M and A team, plus acquisition success managers. We also have a really strict vetting process. So we only let in about 45% of the startups that list with Acquire. So this means every single day we're looking at listings, we're asking questions, we're diligencing them even before they get to any of our Buyers. Just to make sure we have a high quality marketplace, we have a guided listing process where we ID verify every single seller. This is to ensure security and again, the highest quality deal flow on the platform. We'll look at their business, we'll review their P and L, doing everything we can to make sure that it's a legit opportunity and keeping the platform secure. And we specialize in SaaS. That is our biggest market for sure. I have a background in building SaaS businesses. We understand these types of businesses better than any company in the world. So we give you the biggest pool of SaaS founders and if you're a SaaS founder, we give you the biggest pool of SaaS buyers. And we've also expanded beyond just SaaS. So if you're looking for a different type of business such as a marketplace or a mobile app or a content site or newsletter or crypto business, you name it. E commerce. We have hundreds of businesses across multiple different categories. So Definitely go to acquire.com Check all the categories out. You'll definitely find what you're looking for and we're going to dive into what you all came to see. So to kick this off rare. Are you ready?
Let's do it.
All right, so right at the top, this business right Here is an AI powered SEO content SaaS. They have about 5000 customers, 631 in TTM profit 37% growth, growth asking price 3.1 million multiple on this, 5 times profit, 4.5 times revenue. The margins are looking extremely healthy on this business. So right now I'm just going to go through the listing, kind of share my high level thoughts and then I'll, I'll pass it over to you, Rainier. So I love seeing the high customer number. That likely means that there's a diverse group of customers rather than say 20 really large enterprise customers where if one of the customers cancel, revenue drops quickly, the business is bootstrapped and profitable. The margins are extremely healthy for this size of business. So right, right off the bat I'm wondering, you know, how are they acquiring customers and how are they maintaining such a high profit margin? What does the team composition look like? Because they're also growing too at 37 year over year growth, high margin, low overhead, small team. Right off the bat, this is really what stands out to me. I'm guessing that customer acquisition is probably done through an organic channel given that it's an extremely profitable business. So they're likely not spending too much on marketing. I also like the category as well. Martech, Sas I think is really interesting. You hear about vibe coding a lot. I think there's a lot of room for vibe marketing to potentially come up. Strong unit economics. Multiple is good as well. Low churn. Other things that I like to quickly scan for as well is years in business. So it's been around since 2023 Rainier. What's, what's standing out to you on this listing?
Yeah, this is a great deal. It's got a huge profit margin. That's the first thing that draws my attention. And from a buyer's perspective, it's, you know, it ticks a lot of different boxes that you're looking for. Especially as you mentioned, the customer concentration, diversity in terms of 5,000 customers. You know, there's not. Sometimes you got to look out for some of these businesses that have a few big clients and if they fall off, it hurts your revenue versus this one. It's got that diversity of 5,000 clients. My real question is, why is the seller selling? It's two and a half years old, looks like things are going great. What would be that reason? And every founder has a reason. If they got another venture, they want to take chips off the table, they want to move on to something else. And so if I was a buyer, I would reach out and say, hey, Mr. Or Mrs. Seller, what is your ideal buyer profile? What is your ideal exit? What's more important to you? Is it cash up front? Is it the team transition? Is it retained equity? What's more important to you? Because even though this is a 5x profit and 4.5x revenue multiple, a lot of buyers sometimes get stuck at looking at certain metrics or multiples. But what they don't tell you when deals close is sometimes you could get really creative on a deal structure and get creative with some cash up front, some retained equity, and make it a win win situation for both the buyer and the seller.
I think that's a great item to point out. Renier, how would you think about an offer for a business like this? They're asking 3.1 million. Would you do all cash on close? Would you do a percentage of seller financing or an earnout? What do you think would be a good way to think about structure when it comes to a deal like this?
Great question. And that's something that I would approach the seller to ask them. What is your ideal exit look like? And for them, if timing is of the essence, hey, I'd rather just close quickly. I'm willing to take a discount, make an all cash offer at a discount or if they're more concerned about getting the highest price, but maybe getting paid out over two to three years with some performance based metrics and earn outs or some seller financing or some even retained equity so that the seller could get a, a second bite at the apple if there's a future exit down the road. So to answer your question, if you're a buyer, it's great to make an LOI and make an offer. What's even better is if you have an offer that has three different terms where it says, hey, if you're more concerned with a quick close, here's an all cash offer. If you're more concerned about the dollar number, here is a more creative offer structure and then here's something in between and then that way you don't just get shut down. If you make an loi, it's here's three different offers on an LOI and we can get as flexible as needed depending on what's most important to you.
I love that because you let the founder essentially decide do they want all cash at close. If so, the offer may be lower on price and if they're willing to be patient and maybe work or wait for the full payout, price can structure that in. So I think what you're describing makes a win win. So you let the founder decide and you get more of a, a pulse of what they're looking for as well. Because that's such a key question is what kind of exit are they, are they looking for? One last thought on this too is I, I always love diving into the products as well. Where in SEO and AI powered content. I wonder what about this content makes it so effective? Is it the structure of the post? Is it some system where they're able to figure out what posts are missing within certain search terms? Do they find gaps in a search market? Understanding how effective the product is and how much time it saves from say, manually cranking out these types of articles I think would be interesting to see as well. All right, Renee, are you ready for the next one?
Oh, let's move on.
All right, I'll let you kick this one off.
Nice. This one is a really good deal. I was just looking at the numbers and looking at the data and this is a great deal in terms of good fundamentals in terms of a SaaS business. So I'll run it through. So the asking price is 8.5 million, 5.2x profit, 2.4x revenue, steady annual growth rate of 3%. And what this business does is it's a top ranked B2B. Marketing, education, SaaS. So, so think of training videos for education courses. The customer mix, if you look at it in the middle there, it's 30% SaaS, 30% agencies, 30% other B2B. So it's a lot of enterprise team plans with stickier revenue. I like how even on the bottom of that paragraph it says this is a scalable business, it's not a dependent one off course sale. This is something where big companies and big enterprises use this to train a lot of their team. So I like the stickiness of this. So again, referring to some of the metrics that I really, really like.3% stable growth rate. This business was founded in May of 2017. So over eight years in business. One of the main things that I like when it comes to looking at businesses is having at least that three year threshold of seeing year over year growth. This one has even more history of over eight years in business. And when I look down at the very bottom of the listing, Andrew, it says the reason for sale is the lack of time. So again, at the end of the day, founders are humans. Things happen. We either want to move on to the next venture or something happens with family or business partners. If I was a buyer, first thing I would ask is hey. Is say hey, I love what you're doing here. You've done an amazing job. I'd love to know more about the for sale. The business fundamentals are really great. 46% profit margin, eight years in business. I'd love to know who your ideal buyer profile is and what an ideal exit looks like for you. What is your ideal offer that you're looking for? Mr. Or Mrs. Seller?
I think that's great.
What do you think?
Yeah, great business. I think one question I always like to ask when thinking about deals like this is when you, when you're the founder of a business, you know everything about the company. You built it obviously, so you know where the most opportunity is. So I'd want to talk with the founder and get their thoughts on if they were to stay in the business for another 12 months, where would they focus everything? If they had an extra 2 million to invest in the business, how would they use that to grow the business? I like seeing the, the customer mix right here. 30 SaaS, 30% agencies, 30% B2B. But I'm wondering if there's an opportunity to pull on one of these levers. Is it the SaaS lever? Is it agencies? Is it other B2B? Where is the most opportunity if a new owner was to step into the business because I think it might be difficult to focus on all three levers, or maybe they can. But yeah, talking to the founder and understanding, you know, where they're seeing the most opportunity, what would they recommend? What is missing potentially from the product compared to their competitors, how do they compete with competitors? Meaning why do customers decide to use their product over another one? There's just so much you can learn from just sitting down with the founder, understanding the opportunity from their lens, and then potentially just having that as the roadmap to what is the new owners, you know, month one, month two, month three, first 12 months look like and just having the person that's been in the driver's seat for, you know, the past eight years help you with that. So that's, that's probably where I would focus is, you know, where is that growth lever and really leveraging the founder, given how much they've been in this business for the past, you know, eight something years.
Yeah, that's a great point, Andrew. At the end of the day, as a buyer, you're going to be spending time and resources after the acquisition and instead of trying to figure out and guess, okay, let me focus on these things, ask the founder directly again, if you had all the time and money to throw in and focus on certain areas, what would you do differently? And they'll tell you, this person has been in the business for eight years. They'll say, hey, look, this was always on the roadmap. Of course, time and resources is always an issue. And if I did have all the time and resources in the world, here's what I do, I would focus all on SaaS. That's the highest margin with the stickiest customers, something like that. And they'll tell you exactly versus you as the buyer trying to figure out, okay, let me try to see if this is a good move or this is a good move. And again, if you can get creative with the deal structure by keep keeping the seller involved for either a transition period or maybe as an advisory role or even with retained equity, they're going to tell you exactly what you need to do to improve because they've got skin in the game and they want you to win as well.
100%, I think also, what mistakes did you make, what things haven't worked? I think that's just such overlooked information that's so valuable to a new owner and then completely agree with you on the transition. If there's an, an opportunity to retain the founder even for a small period of time, that can be a huge win. I think a lot of buyers don't know. You just have to, to ask. The founder may not be open to it. Maybe he truly is moving on to something else. Or maybe they're not. Maybe they're willing to stay on for a period of time, full time, part time. And then if you could structure something that makes it win win, I think it's, it's a great opportunity for everyone. But yeah, definitely, you know, leveraging the owners of the business to understand what they've been through, both good and bad and worst things, that if they could focus or double down in certain areas, where would that be? That's, it's, it's a, it's a road map. It's a big unlock for, for acquisitions. All right, ready for the next one, Renee?
Let's do it. Let's move on.
All right, let's go. Okay. This next One is a AI Prospecting SaaS. It's had 10, 25 year over year growth. Wow. 296000 in TCM profit. Low churn. Right off the bat, that is a jaw dropper. That is a perfect SaaS business. If you were to build it something that's growing fast, it's profitable, it has low churn. It's in a Fast growing market. AI prospecting, asking price 2.3 million. It's looking for a 5x profit multiple or 3.9x revenue multiple. Margins are extremely healthy given the growth rate. And let's dive into this just a little bit more so understanding the product. To my knowledge, this is a product that helps sales teams essentially build customer lists where they can reach out, contact them. A large amount of data is involved. They're able to draft I believe, cold emails extremely fast. So unifies an inbox as a built in CRM. It's white label ready so they can work with sales agencies. So probably a very, very robust product. I'm also thinking who is. What does the customer percentage look like in terms of how many are sales reps using the product versus the white label opportunity? I'm sure there's a percentage split there. I'd love to dive into that, but perfect for sales leaders, marketing agencies and entrepreneurs ready to scale beyond referrals and networking. So this is definitely a big, big market. 583,000 in TTM revenue. 456,000 TTM profit. 714,000 in any recurring revenue. Business has been around since 2023. Competitors, some big names here. All companies that I recognize. I, I love this space. I think it's such an interesting space where we've seen a lot of really high growth startups. And I think the number one question I'd have Ranier is a business like this and these competitors here, they're all past 10 million in recurring revenue. 20, 30, 40, 50. I'd just be wondering if the founder was to stay on in this business, how would they get it there? Because I think this one is on track to do numbers like that. So again, diving in with the founder, what's working, what's not working, where's the big opportunity, where are the gaps in the product? I don't know. Renee, what do you think?
Yeah, this is great. This is insane growth. Thousand percent year over year growth, thousands of years. And the TAM here is, is huge. It's the first thing that this reminds me of is when I first started in brokerage I had four or five different software I would use to find leads to use a CRM and then to cold email and then to cold call. This is all in one. So this just makes life easier for so many of these customers that I can resonate with. And again with those big competitor names you're playing in, in, in a really great space, fast moving space. And just really from a buyer perspective I'm trying to think of here like who the ideal buyer profile is, what, why the seller is selling. So if we could scroll down to the bottom two years in doing great exiting to launch a SaaS incubator after completing an eight figure exit. Okay. So again, this is a great reason. You know, life happens, things happen, founders move on to other things. But the current managing director is willing to stay on for up to 48 months to ensure that's huge, that's massive. Again, we were just talking about that on the last listing where if you can have someone that's been with the business and knows what mistakes they've done, what roadmap and if they had all the time and resources available, what they would focus on. That's all amazing there. So again, you got a motivated seller here, things are going great. If I was the buyer, I would jump on this fairly quickly because it's just under the private equity kind of threshold of what they're looking for. So you're not going to be competing against a lot of the big dogs there. So it's, you know, this is a really good price point and deal, very reasonable multiple and asking price. And again, if I was the buyer in your shoes, I would first ask the sellers what is more important to you? What is your Ideal exit look like, what is your ideal buyer profile look like? And then cater an alloy and offer through those terms 100%.
I love the point out of the managing director staying on. I think that's huge. I think this would be a good buy for someone that would be willing to jump in and, and try to grow this thing to 10, 20 million in your current revenue. I really believe the opportunity is there. It would just be a function of understanding what's working. Do we double down on doing more of that or is there another opportunity we should be going after? So I think definitely a growth minded entrepreneur and I can't confirm the founder, we helped him with his eight figure acquisition. He is looking to move on. Very, very smart individual. So I think this one in the right hands could definitely continue with this growth rate. But it's really going to come down to, you know, understanding how to get there. And I think the founders always have that information.
Yeah, I think this one's going to go quickly. This is a great fundamentals.
These ones always go fast. You know we tend to see SaaS and usually two different buckets where it's high growth but not very profitable or very profitable with slower growth. And when, when we come across opportunities where there's both, there's high growth, big market, profitable, low churn. I think that's where we, we start to see opportunities that go really, really fast. So if you're interested in this one, definitely check it out as soon as possible and reach out. All right, move on to the, the next one in there.
Let's do it.
All right, this one's all you.
Cool. This is a B2B AI automation agency. Asking price is 1.3 million at a 3.3x profit and a 1.4x revenue. And this one has excellent growth as well. Not a thousand but twenty percent which is still amazing. 21% growth. Profit margin is about 50%. And so this is a profitable US Canada based AI development agency that focuses on specializing in AI automations, chatbots integrations. One thing that I really like that the seller had pointed out here is they spend 25 to 30 hours per week on the business and then just like you highlighted there, sticky B2B retainers, predictable cash flow. This is great in terms of being one of those lifestyle type of business opportunities. When you look at some of the description from the seller, I was looking at this earlier and he says his team, they already have their SOPs in place. They have a bunch of reusable components for repeat delivery. So that's the first thing that I look at when I'm looking at this deal and then on the bottom, Andrew's reason for selling, starting a new venture. Again, life happens. You have other interests, you have other things you want to focus on. Totally fine. As a buyer. Great. That's amazing. You can take over this opportunity. And if I go to the year founded March 2018. So again, seven plus years in business, you have enough time to look back at the records year over year, how they've done over the seven years and with that amount of time and still growing at 20%, that's absolutely amazing. And especially when they're focusing on the fast moving space of AI and automations chatbots. So that's, that's overall great. Andrew, what are your thoughts on, on this listing?
I think it's a great business. I these are probably some of my favorite opportunities on acquire. I think that the buyer profile with this would be probably a first time buyer where it's an entrepreneur looking to step in a business. Maybe they have some growth experience, some sales experience, some marketing experience. Maybe they already own an agency or maybe they own a SaaS business. I think businesses like that are great for that buyer profile. And then I guess my, my main thought would be what does the day to day look like for the founder? You had mentioned that it's you know, 25, 30 hours per week. But what specifically are they focused on? Is it a specific expertise? Is it general management of the team? Is it marketing? Is it something else? Because it's good to understand when you buy businesses like this, of this size, you were generally walking into an operating position in the business. You need to take over what the founder's role was before the acquisition. So I think deeply understanding that would be where I would spend a lot of time. And again, I always like to think where's, where's the growth opportunity? Because if you acquire your business, I have to assume that you're going to be looking to increase the growth rate from 21% to maybe 30 or 40%. So just understanding from the founder's point of view, where is that opportunity? Why do clients choose them over other agencies? What is the main service that they provide? Is there an opportunity to productize that, to make it more streamlined? That's probably where I'd be thinking, Renee, how would you structure a deal like this? How would you think about that?
Yeah, and so I would structure it with the thought of that first time buyer looking to acquire lifestyle business. Looking at the 25 to 30 hours per week. I would emphasize the part of training and transition, just as you mentioned, Andrew, where there's at least a month or two of proper training and transition and a possibility to retain the seller to have some consulting type of hours if needed past that training period. And from there, if you look at some of the upside and low hanging fruit, it says raise pricing, ramp up. If you could go back up to the top a little bit, Andrew, it said raise pricing and then ramp up content, SEO, digital, social, expand markets. As a buyer, it's totally fine to say, hey, you say that this is clear upside. What have you done? How come you haven't done it? And also keep in mind everyone has limited time and resources and that's probably why they haven't focused on it. But again, if you ask the seller if you had all the time and resources, how would you go about raising pricing, ramping the content, SEO, digital, social, and 9 out of 10 times they're going to have a very specific planned out roadmap for it and they just haven't gotten to it. So in terms of deal structure, try to get as creative as possible. If you again talk to the seller and if price is of importance, you can get creative with some seller financing, potentially some performance based earnouts. Again, emphasize the training and transition period if you're a first time trying to get into the space. But if timing is of importance for the seller, keep that in mind and then maybe they'll take a discount if you can close in a faster time period. So again, it really depends on what the seller is most focused on. If it's price, if it's timing, if it's transition, make sure you get a clear answer to that before you shoot off a random loi. Because if you shoot off a random loi and it's a price that's really low and even if it's a fast close, that that could potentially be getting a start on a bad foot with negotiations on the other party. So just always try to get an idea of what's most important in terms of buyer profile, ideal exit, ideal deal structure, things like that, before you shoot anything off to the seller.
100%. I think that's great. I love what you said around just speaking to the founder in terms of transition. Because as a buyer one of your main jobs and focuses should be just reducing the risk of the acquisition. And there's a lot of risk in terms of the founder walks away or the founder doesn't share the success of the acquisition. It's rare, but there's easy ways to prevent that. Which is retaining them with, you know, could be a couple hours a week. It could be a very, very small amount where they do simple things like introduce you to clients or their team and be available for questions. Almost all the acquisitions that we see at acquire.com have some form of transition support available. It gives you an opportunity to, to learn where's the upside. Hand things over smoothly so there's no bumps. And again, it's all negotiable. You know, sometimes we see situations where the founders stay on completely for a period of time and those can be amazing situations for everybody involved. But it starts with just asking, having the conversation, understanding what is on the table. And again the, the goal there is to make the acquisition successful and create a win win acquisition for both the buyer and the seller. So I love that. Great tips. Renee, you want to move on to the next one? What do you think?
Yep, let's move on.
Let's go. Okay, this one is me. So we have a venture backed cold email SaaS with AI powered campaigns and smart inbox management. I love these types of spaces. I actually, I like acquisitions too where the company is VC backed. And the reason being is that tends to have a lot of opportunity for buyers. Meaning right off the bat when I see venture backed on acquire.com that generally to me can signal that it's not a billion dollar business. And the founder doesn't see that happening and he's willing to let go of the business because of that. Which provides a huge opportunity for a potential buyer. Because you don't need a billion dollar business, you don't need this to be 100 million dollar a year revenue company. That'd be amazing. But in acquisitions you're looking for something that could provide hundreds of thousands in profit per year. And I think this could be just that with a lot more upside. Potentially millions with the right growth minded entrepreneur. But looking at the numbers, about half a million in TTM revenue, about 150,000 TTM profit. The multiple on this I think is very, very generous at 3.6 profit, 1.1 revenue. By generous I mean this is clearly priced to sell. In my opinion. The founder is likely looking to move on to a new venture or something else. We can get into that in a second. But diving into more on the listing, it's a no, no code cold email automation platform designed for B2B founders, growth marketers and agencies. It allows users to launch high deliverability outreach campaigns without technical setup. So similar to the last listing about two listings ago, but on a smaller scale, I Like to see venture backed with a 2 million recent valuation, 3000 customers, major upsell potential via AI reply, add ons, LinkedIn, lead scraping and agency white label options. Again I love products like this. I think we're so used to using so many different sales tools. I like seeing these startups combine a lot of these functions into what I assume is easier to use lower cost platform where sales rep could potentially switch off of having 10 different tools and can just use one. What else we got founded in 2024 so this is going to be on on the newer side of businesses that might be something to to think about. Lots of info on here. Raniere, what are your initial thoughts?
Yeah, this is a great one. Very similar to the listing we had two listings that we reviewed two listings ago. I think again this, this is a deal that's bite size great for someone that's new in the space getting into maybe their potentially first acquisition with something that has just one year of history. You've got to get really creative in deal structure to mitigate your your downside risk because again this has done very well for itself. It's a very impressive business, but it only has one year of history and that's why a lot of seasoned buyers, private equity groups, they won't look at anything under three years but that's a good thing for another private buyer. Private operators have some of this value with such a young business. The main thing is you need to mitigate your downside risk by making an offer that is contingent upon performance based metrics, maybe some delayed payments somewhere where the seller is also incentivized that the business continues to grow and doesn't fall off a cliff immediately after the acquisition. So that that would be my main point of advice is to make sure that you try to keep the seller involved as long as possible and that they have skin in the game post acquisition.
100% I think this business I think is super interesting in terms of just how much you're getting for the price point. Meaning if you were to build the product, try and go out and get 3,000 customers, build a profitable operation, assemble a team, build the processes so customers can repeatedly get the product and utilize the service. I mean you're saving years of time. And so if this space is interesting and you think that there's upside and tools like that, I think this is a great acquisition for an entrepreneur that is looking to step in. A CEO has experience utilizing some of these sales SaaS tools and sees the opportunity in the market and is willing to pick this up from where we had half a million in TTM revenue, up to 1 million and 2 million and 3 million because it could definitely get there. The markets that this business plays in or near, I think definitely supports having multiple players where you don't necessarily need to come in, you know, first, second or even third. You can be the 10th most widely used sales AI tech platform and you're generating, you know, millions in, in revenue per year. So I think if you see that opportunity and you're familiar with this market, that's who I can see, you know, purchase, purchasing a business like this.
Right. And I agree with you as well because it's, it's one of those, it could be a perfect lifestyle business. Again, you don't have to be number one or two in the space. If you're number 10 and you're, you know, having a lifestyle business and you've, you're in a space that's fast growing and exciting. The great thing about this deal, it's the asking price is around half a million dollars. So it's going to be on the lower end that private equity is not competing and making fast big offers against these type of deals. This is a perfect spot for a private operator or maybe a team of two or three that is familiar with the space or familiar with running businesses. And this could be a perfect add on to your existing portfolio or this could be a great start to your portfolio by being your first acquisition. So again, there's obviously risk with some of these newer businesses that are about a year or so old, but there's also a lot of opportunity. So the main thing that I would suggest figure out what's important to the seller, what type of exit they're looking for and if they're willing to stay on and help in terms of reaching some performance based metrics on either delayed payouts or some way to keep the seller involved post acquisition. I think that's going to be a really good find. This is kind of like a golden nugget here. That's a good find here that a lot of buyers were will overlook because it doesn't hit the three year history of operations. But I think this is a great buy for a lot of buyers that are willing to dig deep and take a risk on something like this, 100%.
I think one way to look at these types of deals too is it's, it's really in reach for a lot of individual operators or first time buyers because you could structure something at you know, 350, 400,000 cash at close and the rest of the seller finance are based on an earnout. So you wouldn't need bank financing, you would need an SBA loan. And then you have part of the payment tied to the success of the business. Potentially I think it becomes really in reach. And then if you think, okay, how do I see a return on investment from that? Well, it's going to be from the profit of the business. So if the profit of the business remains constant or if you're able to grow it from where it is today, I think this could be a good investment for someone willing to dive in and roll up their sleeves for sure. Cool. All right, moving on to the next one. Was this one for me or for you, Renee? I can't remember.
I could kick this one off. So this is the venture backed AI automation platform and app workflows. So in terms of asking price, it's 2.5 million 2.6x profit multiple and a little under 1x revenue multiple. So this one has a strong profit margin as well. 33% profit margin, stellar growth, 326%. First thing I ask is, you know, especially with this big growth, we saw the thousand percent one earlier. Just ask the seller directly, hey, this is really impressive growth. What caused it? How did you do that? So don't be afraid to ask those type of questions. The next thing that I, that I look into is the founding date. So this is May 2019. Again it's above well above the three year threshold that a lot of buyers look for. This is six years in operations and if we start looking at what it does, the key highlights combines browser based automations with App based workflows plus AI agents for advanced task execution. Large customer base of 6000 plus customers with strong upsell potential. Again it's got that diversity and it doesn't have just a few clients that could fall off or a few customers that could fall off. It's certainly diversified with 6,000 plus customers backed by a top accelerator. Scalable global operation. Major growth opportunities via upsells marketplace. Launch AI assisted integration. Again, whenever a seller markets that there's quick low hanging fruit or easy upside, it's totally fine to ask them as a buyer. You mentioned this. Major growth opportunities. What have you tried? What mistakes have you done? What would you do differently? If you had all the time and resources in the world, what would you focus on and how would you go about implementing it? Those are the first things that I think of. And then Andrew, if you mind going to the very bottom for the reason for sale.
Yeah, that's what I'm learning.
I really like this one because it's very straightforward. It's lifestyle change, starting a new venture partner or family needs potentially a combination of those three. What this signals to me is you've got a motivated seller and if you look at the profit multiple and asking revenue multiple, it's price to sell, they're looking to move on quickly. So again, if you're the buyer, feel free to ask the seller exactly what's more important to you. If I were to guess, timing is of an essence in this case, but overall good fundamentals here. Again, I really like that it's 6 plus years old, 33% profit margin and recent stellar growth rate of 300 plus percent. Andrew, what do you think?
I think this is an amazing opportunity. It hits all the boxes I like, it's in an interesting market, it's extremely profitable, it's growing fast. I think a lot of people might be just surprised. Why sell a business and at a multiple like this, 2.6 times profit, less than 1 times revenue. And I think a lot of, a lot of people don't understand, you know, some entrepreneurs, they, they've come on to different opportunities, maybe they're building another business. We see this all the time@acquire.com where they just legitimately don't have time to focus on this business and they're willing to price the business to sell to reflect that which provides a huge opportunity to potential buyers. This one, it's even been on the Inc. 5000 list. I think companies like this could be huge opportunities for someone to acquire the business and probably right size it. And what I mean by that is it's venture backed, it's got, you know, 300 growth, but it's not 5,000, it's not 10,000% growth. It's not going to be a unicorn, it's not going to go public. And that just may not be interesting to this company's investors or the founder. But again, that's an opportunity for potential buyer to buy the business, operate it more like a lifestyle business or just a really profitable small business rather than trying to turn this into a multi billion dollar company if the founder doesn't believe it can get there. So again, that provides a lot of opportunity for potential buyers. I expect this one to go pretty quick. Again, it hits all the boxes, it's fast growing, it's extremely profitable, it's price to sell. I would just want to spend a lot of time with the founder understanding the reason for sell and where is the opportunity within the Business. What have they seen working? What have they seen not working? They mentioned here that they compete with Zapier and other automation companies. I'd love to learn more about that gap. Is it one that can close really quick? Is there some defensibility around what they do? But again, I think this is an awesome opportunity.
Yeah. And again, as a buyer, your goal is to uncover hidden value that other buyers are missing out on. Because on our marketplace alone, we have over a thousand plus active listings and there's tons and tons of buyers. And so you're competing against tons of buyers all the time. But my advice to you, if you're a buyer that's looking to go the extra step to win deals and find and uncover hidden value, someone's going to look at this multiple and say, hey, look, there's something wrong with it. The multiple's too low, it's too good to be true. But at the end of the day, as Andrew mentioned, just figure out what the reason for sale is, what the motivation is. At the end of the day, founders are humans and things happen. Death, divorce, taxes, partnership dissolution. Anything can happen. Life can happen. And that's why someone has to sell urgently. So just ask the seller what their ideal buyer profile looks like, what their ideal exit looks like, what their ideal offer looks like, and you may never know. You may come upon the sweetest deal that every other buyer had passed on because it became too good to be true.
On paper, I think that's excellent advice. We see it all the time. Yeah, life truly does happen. I think one of the more common reasons that a lot of people don't expect with businesses on a part, just acquisitions in general, is founders moving on to start different businesses for one reason or another. Bigger opportunity, it's more exciting. They've lost interest. Again, those are opportunities for, for buyers. All right, Raniere, next, next listing. What do you think?
Let's do it. Let's move on.
All right, this one's all you.
All right, so this is an AI job search tool for job seekers to accelerate job search process with AI resumes and cover letters. Asking price 2 million profit multiple of 3.2x. Revenue multiple of 1.4x. Looks like a flat growth rate. In terms of profit margin, it looks like a 45, 50% profit margin, which is excellent. It's a lot of these fundamentals if you keep continuing to go down. Let's see. So thousands of customers, lean team, high margins. That's good to hear. End to end workflow, untapped growth, SEO, content influencers, Affiliates, big upside, fully automated by plus usage tiers. So the first thing that I look for and that I'm looking at the listing is it's flat and stable growth from last year. Again, it's totally fine if you're the buyer to ask the seller, what happened, what would you do differently? No one's going to get offended. It's totally fine to ask those questions. And it's your job as the buyer to figure out, did something change in the industry, in the marketplace, did they make a big risk on marketing in some areas area. And it didn't work. Figure out what exactly happened for that 0% growth and what they would do differently for the following year. And then, Andrew, if you could go to the very bottom. My favorite place to go on the list.
For sale.
Exactly.
Reason smart.
Exactly. So if we go here, it's financial gain starting a new venture. Just as Andrew said before, sometimes you work on something, you take it to the highest level you can, you want to move on to the next thing. It's totally fine. So if you scroll up a little bit to the founded date, it's just over two years old, July 2023. And what we find all the time is a lot of these different founders, they specialize in creating something from nothing. And then they don't enjoy or they're not good at, or they would rather pass it on to someone else that wants to focus on the sales and the marketing because that's just. They just don't enjoy it or they just don't have the time and resources to focus on it. It's so much more enjoyable to just specialize in something, focus it, rather than trying to hit your head on the ground and try to figure out all these different ways to make it perfect. So it seems to me that this founder has taken it to a level where he's satisfied, he wants to take some chips off the table, move on to the next thing. And what that means to me as a potential buyer is, hey, two years old, proven market fit, lot of upside here, a lot of potential. It's at the deal size where it's not competing against too many of the big private equity groups. Priced reasonable price to sell at 3.2x overall. That's how I look at it. Andrew, what about you?
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head on the listing here. It says our team is deeply rooted in engineering and product development. A founder or operator with a background in growth or distribution could unlock substantial upside. I realize pretty much every listing or founder is going to say that, you know, if there's just more growth or distribution, the business will grow. But a lot of times what we see at acquire is these really, really well engineered software products that really are missing a sales and marketing aspect of the business. And if you have that type of experience, like Renee, I think you pointed out perfectly where a lot of founders are technical. They're technical builders. And when it comes to actually building the business, it's not enjoyable. They aren't successful in it, and it's not fun doing something that you're not successful at, you're not good at. If they don't have interest in doing it, then the business is going to stay where it is and eventually it might not be worth anything. I think in this scenario the founder realizes that and they price the business after some time of not being able to grow the business and that presents an opportunity for a buyer that could step in and really breathe in some new life and some new energy to grow the business. I know I've been saying this a lot, but I think, you know, just sitting down with the founder is probably my first thought. Understanding what hasn't worked, I'm sure he's tried a lot of different things and a lot of those things maybe haven't worked out as expected. But what are those things? Were they things that just don't work or were they not executed correctly? One thing that I see a lot is just marketing campaigns that are just poorly executed due to lack of resources or just lack of commitment or lack of really just experience. I think marketing is one of the hardest things to do for startups. But I have a general background in marketing, so I can understand where, you know, paid in campaigns can go wrong. Or maybe they weren't able to successfully launch an affiliate program, like I'm reading here. But understanding what the founder has done and hasn't worked I think is just gold knowledge. And I'd really dive in there because again, that could be just a full roadmap to potentially how to grow the business. Because it, it doesn't seem like this is a situation where customers hate the product they're canceling like crazy. It just seems like they need more marketing and distribution. If you can figure that out and unlock that for the business, I think this could be a really, really good buy.
Yeah, even though it was flat, it's, it still maintained a 45 profit margin. So all this screams to me is upside. Especially if you've got a sales and marketing background, you can definitely run with this. So I, I think this is a great deal. This should sell fairly quickly in my opinion.
100. Yeah. When we see deals like this that are priced to sell, they, they typically go very quickly. All right, last one, Raniere.
Let's do it. Finale.
All right. Grand finale. All right, I'll kick this one off. This is an AI powered insight and marketing tool that helps Shopify Shopify brands turn data into growth. They're asking 825,000. The multiple on this is 5.4 profit, 3.9 times revenue. 31 annual growth rate around 200,000 in TTM revenue, around 150,000 in TTM profit. I love businesses like this. So this is a Shopify SaaS business. I love those businesses because the distribution is just built in. I think that's amazing. They're just really hard to get off the ground because you're competing with so many other products in that marketplace. But in this scenario, this is already a five star Shopify product in the analytics and marketing space. After 30 days, it sinks 400 million customer records into 12,000 segments and pushes them to Klaviyo, Google Ads Meta and tick tock 400 plus active merchants. What else is standing out to me? I love data and analytics play. I think products like this are typically very, very sticky. And you could make an argument that a product like this could just organically grow on its own. Where Shopify as a brand and a platform continues to grow, more e commerce businesses are launched on the platform. This is already positioned as one of the recommended tools to use if you're looking for analytics or a marketing platform. I think the asking price is is very reasonable. I'd want to know date founded since 2017 and then probably other competitors too. So I'd really deeply look into how does the product compare to these three competitors here? Lifetimely Polar analytics retention X. You know, I try them all out, I'd see which one. Where's the strengths, where's the weaknesses? Talk to the founder about that. How do they see them positioned against these three competitors? One great question I always like to to ask is, you know, how could a competitor take everything I have? If there's an answer to that, what could their competitors do to completely take away the market share that they've gained? Just as a good thought exercise, the reason for sale. Starting a new venture again Raniere, common trend here. Fun fact that's that's the number one selling reason we see at Acquire. What do you think Raniere? What's your thoughts?
This one's great. It's almost eight years in business five stars 400 plus active merchants 75% profit margin. It just hits a lot of the fundamentals and again with the price point as well. It's just under what these big private equity buyers are looking for. So you're not competing against 10 other offers that are all cash and it can move quickly. So this is a really good price point. I think in terms of upside and low hanging fruit, I would get a firm understanding of again what Andrew said, how to protect your moat in terms of competitors, but also figure out the upside of how you can increase pricing, get more customers, figure out what the upside here is because this business has already taken off and done really well over the last eight years. Get a firm understanding of what it will take to keep it going and also to increase more value 100%.
I'd want to dive into just how sticky the product is. What are customers saying? Because again, with Shopify and analytics platforms, I think that could be a really, really sticky product and it could potentially grow on its own. I could be wrong in and thinking that, but I think this is, I see entrepreneurs all the time with a huge portfolio of Shopify SaaS applications as well. So I'd want to know how much time is spent operating this business. I could see this one going really quickly as well. I don't imagine there's a sales team function involved in this. It could be relative to, you know, set it and forget it. I'm not exactly sure. But again, that's why Shopify apps are, are so awesome. I always call them SaaS applications with training wheels because everything's built in, the analytics, the distribution, the management to some degree. So great business. I think this is a good look for a first time entrepreneur looking to step in the CEO role and is excited about the e commerce space. I think this could be a really good buy.
Yeah, agreed. This, this just screams out lifestyle business, lean operations, small team, automated workflows. A perfect entry for first time acquirer.
Right on. All right, well that's all the listings. That was fun. Raniere.
Yeah, there's a lot of good ones, man, they're awesome. I was just looking at our numbers and we've got thousands and thousands of deals on our platform. But some of these that newly hit the market, they're very exciting and again they go by quick. So make sure if you're a buyer, just reach out to the seller, see what they're looking for. And again it's, this is all super exciting and I hope that you learn from some of our feedback and some of what we've seen in the market. So that way you're well positioned to win out on some of these deals and build a good relationship with these sellers so that you can acquire a really good deal.
100 I always joke one of the hardest things about running acquire.com is not acquiring anything. Sometimes when I see businesses even I think like this is a good opportunity. And like you said, there's you know, over a thousand listings on Acquire. So if you're looking for e commerce or marketplaces, there's been some really good newsletters, some really great content businesses. Definitely check those out. Acquire.com you can set your filters, get instantly notified as well. We get new listings every single day and yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed that. I know we're we're at time so I we were going to save some for for Q A, but we're right at the top of the hour. So if you have any questions and you want us to get to those, feel free to to go to acquire.com we're there to help and hope to see you guys next time.
See you guys later. This was fun.
Thanks everybody.
See y.
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