A founder turned down an acquisition of a startup claiming $300K-$400K monthly revenue and a proprietary method to rank content on ChatGPT. The secret was just aggressive guest posting that gamed rankings short-term. The team walked away, valuing sustainable business over inflated metrics.
Someone pitched our company recently. It's, uh, one of these AAO companies, and I don't know what it's called. They're a startup that helps you get rankings on ChatGPT. They're like, we have this proprietary way, you guys should buy us, we would be bigger together. And they're trying to sell to us for cash. I don't know what their numbers are, my team does, but I believe it was something like $300,000, $400,000 a month in recurring revenue, decently low churn. I could have ended up buying it for like 7, 8 times profit, 10 max. When we looked at it and when they're showing us what they were doing, dude, it was just a ton of spammy guest posts. Yep. And I was like, so you want us to buy a company that's not going to last? But when they pitched us, they're like, they got this proprietary way that ranks really well on these LLMs. This is going to be game-changing for you guys. It'll give you a leg up and it'll help all your clients rank super fast. And they were showcasing in the deck like how much faster they're getting results than everyone else. And it was a really quick turnaround, but it's through spamming. The moment we got on the phone with the team and they told us how they're doing it, right away we're like, this isn't for us. Oh, you— so you ended it pretty quickly? We were just very transparent. We're like, look, we think this is short-sighted. We gave them honest feedback as entrepreneurs and We said we don't think— technically, when I say we, I'm saying my team did. We're like, we don't think this is going to last.
