I Bought a SaaS Business and Will Add $300,000 in Value - Here's How!

I just bought a software business that I'm confident I'll add $300,000 in value to over the next 12 months. I want to show you what the business is and how I'm going to improve it so that you can do the same. I'm Jameson Camp, and I don't really know how, but I ended up buying and selling internet businesses for a living. In 2020, a partner and I were lucky enough to sell a portfolio of financial news websites and cannabis-related websites to a public company for a large amount of money. So since then, I've bought and sold a bunch of stuff, including stuff like this direct-to-consumer hearing aid brand, that we sold to Open Store. We were their first acquisition, a private equity firm in Miami. Let's see, bought and sold some content sites, things like little sites like dog frisbees, some large theme page networks with over a million followers in them, and advised on a ton, a ton, a ton more. But I wanna get in to show you guys a little bit about the site, the business that I most recently bought. It's actually the perfect business for me, and I think that I really want to stress that. Whenever I do consulting work, for people to help them find businesses to buy. It's about finding the right deal for you. And you're not gonna believe how perfect this business was for me. So stick around, 'cause I'm gonna show you the business I bought, I'm gonna show you the plan we have to improve it as is, and then I'm gonna dive into the actual marketing strategy to improve this business and add $300,000 in value to it. And I think you can do it in the next 12 months, and I'm gonna cover it in the 5 minutes of this video. Okay, so what is this business all about? So anyone who knows me, if you listen to what I just said, is that I talk about, I buy and sell internet business for, businesses for a living, and I have a large audience, like, 80,000 on Twitter and 25,000 on TikTok. And now I'm trying all this YouTube stuff where we talk about the businesses that we're buying and selling and we end up getting a lot of clients that way for buy-side advisory. And I helped, you know, I've helped over 100 people now buy a business. So the one that we purchased is called OffMarket.so. And I'm very, very, very excited about this business because as you can see, it's sort of like the perfect business for me. Find acquisition opportunities using data no one else has access to. So forget just my very clear audience. I'm constantly buying and selling internet businesses. I consult on buying and selling internet businesses and actually have a much larger plan that I want to share with you guys in a minute that explains why this fits perfectly into my little ecosystem. So I also have a newsletter called NanoFlips where we talk about these little internet businesses that people can buy and sell. I bought OnlineAcquisitions.com. NanoFlips will become that, but for now, um, it's going to be a very easy way for me to market this business. So just right off the bat, let me know if you think this was a good buy for me. If you guys know me, let me know in the comments any questions you have, or let me know if you think this was the dumbest thing I ever did. Now, kindly, I actually bought this business with zero cash up front, and I really hate when all these gurus are like, buy a business, no money down. But I actually did buy this business with zero cash of my own up front, and I will explain that in another video. Um, I get a little weary showing people how to do that kind of stuff because I don't want everyone to think that they can just go buy their first business with zero money up front. I've been doing this for a long time. I have a lot of authority. Um, people trust me. I understand how to put together capital stacks. But obviously if you check out my Instagram or my Twitter or my newsletter or this YouTube, you subscribe to this YouTube, I'm gonna start breaking down all the different ways of doing exactly what we do. Okay. So a little bit of why I bought this business specifically, other than I think I can very clearly add a lot of value to it. Um, I have a bigger thesis, right? So in 2020, myself and a partner sold a portfolio of businesses for about, for low 8 figures. Um, and that was a huge win. It changed my life and it changed the narrative of my life. Even way before that, like 15 years prior, I guess I was like 18, 19 years old. I built an ad network. I was a pretty large affiliate marketer. So I built a CPA network and we sold that. Um, and I bought a, a website that I folded into that network. It's a whole different story as well. But, um, ever since then I've worked on some deals including the hearing aid brand that I bought, which we took from $50,000 a month to $300,000 a month and sold that just in under a year. Bought and sold a bunch of little content sites and like all the different stuff I said. But I realized I turned down some money recently from a firm, um, basically independent sponsor, um, search fund sort of model where it was like I was gonna put up $100K and they were gonna put up a couple million bucks and we were gonna go buy an internet business together. And what I realized was that I was just going to be buying myself another thing like I had bought myself before. Um, you know, I had done deals in this sort of low couple million dollars a year in top line revenue. And it's a great space and I can show tons of people how to get to that. And I can show most of the people, it's easy for me to get anyone to buy like a simple side hustle. They can grow into like 10 or 20 or 30 grand a month, you know, this million dollar side business possibly. But the next step up, the one that I want, I want to go buy businesses that are like $3 to $5 million in EBITDA so that we can— I can actually do what I do best, which is put together the strategy, raise some capital, run the media side, and we can find amazing operators to go run those businesses for us and pay them really, really, really well and, um, and bring back fantastic returns for our investors. So my goal over the next like 12, 24 months is to take this business I have now, NanoFlips and OnlineAcquisitions.com, the company that just bought OffMarket.so, the business I'm going to show you I just bought and how we're going to prove it, and to grow that subscriber base as big as I can so that all my followers and subscribers can take part in deals with us and we can raise $10 million equity chunks and take on some leverage and buy these $3 to $5 million EBITDA businesses and build this very cool sort of modern version of a holdco or PE firm. So anyway, OffMarket.so fits perfectly in the business I bought, fits perfectly into this thesis. And, uh, let me show you why. Okay. So back looking at this, at this site, it, it was like nothing. The owner, very cool guy, coder, built this database SaaS, right? Called Off Market. I love the domain. I'm a, I'm a geek. I was a sucker for that, right? But the site is not particularly well built. He did a great job. This is not me knocking him, but as you'll see, like there's nothing really special about it. It's kind of ugly. It's not focused on conversions. I knew there was a big opportunity because of A, my list, right? Like my audience. And B, um, because I just know how to make this convert better and how to make it make more money. So like, this is where this gets really exciting. Let's talk about some of the ways I'm going to improve this business right off the bat. Okay. So first off, there needs to be like what we call win-back campaigns, abandoned cart campaigns, all these different things. And so we're going to use MailerLite specifically to make that come together. Now, what I mean by win-back campaigns, I mean that once you sort of leave, if you churn out, if you, if you purchased a subscription on Off Market SO and you decide I want to leave it, how do we win you back? What is the automated email structure that goes out to win you back, right? So we want to add in those win-back campaigns. I want to add in abandoned cart campaigns. What happens when someone goes and they go to add in, they go to sign up, they go to get started, and they end up going through the process but they don't end up buying it exactly, right? This one automatically logged me in, so forget that., but oh no, you're not subscribed. This one did not automatically log in. Okay, cool. Um, but you go to get started. And what if I get through here but I decide last second I'm not interested, right? We need to have an email campaign that goes out from MailerLite to win them back. We might need an SMS campaign that goes back to, um, sorry, not win them back, but through an abandoned cart, right? They abandoned the cart at purchase. They initiated checkout and I see initiated checkout in terms of Ads Manager, we'd call it. And then, um, we want to go give them the opportunity. Maybe we offer them a discount. Maybe we offer them a bundle. Maybe we just offer them an onboarding, right? Maybe we offer them a demo. I mean, right. So that's the very clear win there. And then I think we can actually add in some onboarding processes as well, um, that make the retention better. When someone signs up, what's the 30-day flow they get that helps them walk through how to use Off Market, that helps them walk through how to get the most happiness out of this, right? Like how to get everything out of it. This copy's fine, but we need to really redo all this copy. Now, if we're talking about the landing page itself, which clearly could be made better for converting, I mean, I got some friends who run this business called 72 Hour Sites and they build some beautiful stuff. I may actually end up using them just because the way they structure, you can see any of it, it's gonna be sort of header, VSL, it's gonna go, you'll see any of these structures. Lemme see if I can break one down for you you guys real quick, right? VSL under the signup form, VSL. You know, the thing is that this VSL on off-market, it's just not a very good one. Actually, it doesn't even exist. There needs to be some video here of me describing it, explaining it, how to use it, right? We need some reviews. We need less, you know, I find that software business creators, they get sort of stuck in features and not marketing. And I'm great at marketing, so We'll dive into that. So we're gonna totally redo this landing page. I might use 72 Hour Sites, um, for my friends to use it. If not, we'll do it ourself in-house or find a contractor and we'll do it on— it's built on Webflow, so we'll keep it on Webflow or Framer. I'm actually learning to like Framer a bit more than Webflow just cuz it does the same thing and it's a little bit more affordable. But let's take a look at actually some of the other ways to really quickly improve this as well. Okay, so there's like tons of little other softwares ironically that you could use to increase the conversion rate. Um, but this is one that's a really easy win. It's called Sales Pop-up. You'll see in the bottom of the corner, someone has just subscribed 4 days ago, verified. It's, it'll go away. It'll come back again. The point of it is you'll see it's gone and boom, it comes back. It just, it creates a level of social proof, right? So this is one we like to use a lot. One of my friends, Fraser, uses this. He's crushing with it. Um, so we're gonna add in this as a SaaS, as a, as a, as a thing to it. But let's talk about some of the other stuff too that like These will help increase conversion rates a tiny bit, right? Like nothing insane, right? But go from 0.5 to 1, that's huge. It's double. I think that actually, let's take a second, talk about that really quickly. If you can get something to go from 1 in 100 people, 1 in 200 people, a 0.5 conversion rate to 1 in 100 people, right? Only getting 1 in 100 more people to sign up will literally double the revenue for something. So that means for every dollar that you add in profit every year, you get $3 more in enterprise value., when you sell the business or sort of the actual value of the business, which is mind-blowing. And you think of it this way, there's 12 months in a year, right? So if you, every dollar you add a month in profit, it's about adding $36 in enterprise value to the business. So that doesn't seem super powerful, right? But when I start thinking like, how do I add, can I add $1,000 a month to this business? Because if so, that's amazing, right? That's gonna add $36,000 in value to the business. If I had $10,000 a month to this business, is gonna add $360,000 in value to business. It's kind of nutty and mind-blowing, and I don't wanna get too caught up in that, but I just wanted to hammer that home before I show you sort of the big sweet spot juicy thing that I see as the way to drastically improve this business. And I think what's really cool is that you could probably use this for almost any database SaaS and a bunch of different software businesses if you're looking around places to find them. Okay, so this is this guy I know, Alex West, great entrepreneur. I met him when he first started building this and he was like asking for help, and now he's like, thinking a million-dollar ARR run, uh, runway. But Cyber Leads, check out Cyber Leads. It is a database SaaS, right? It pulls together these databases and sells it as it's updated monthly. That's what we're doing with Off Market SEO. With Off Market, what happens is we— you put in your criteria of what you're interested in buying, and as an internet-based business, and we organize all that data for you. We find the businesses, we organize the data, and then we pull all the contact information so that you can reach out to those businesses on your own, and you can pitch them. Now that's pretty cool, right? So I've got 15,000 email subscribers, 120,000+ followers. Do I think I can get another 50 to 100 people on that over the next 6 months just from my following? Yeah, totally, right? So that's obviously an extra $5K in MRR we can add in. But where's the real magic coming? The real magic comes in, and you can see right here, by the way, he— Alex has done a great job here on this business, as on this landing page, right? Just a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of Testimonial, testimonial, testimonial, testimonial. Very clear social proof. At the, at the top you can put in your email. Anyway, to continue and simply breaks it down how it goes, but let me break down one thing I love. So they've got their free version. We've got a free version where you can access it for free. There's the monthly for $97 or yearly at $497. That's sort of where we're at with different pricing as well. A little bit cheaper. We're a little bit more affordable, but here's where I love this. The done for you. I book the calls, you close the clients. He has this offering at $1,997 per month. So that's what we are gonna add in as well. This done-for-you service, it'll be mostly for private equity firms and family offices. They're the sweet spot of investors who might be interested in spending $2,000 a month to get proprietary deal flow booked on their calendar. And obviously if someone's just a high net worth or just a searcher, we can fit into that. We can obviously help 'em buy a business and, and book the calls for them. But what we will do, instead of just selling the database, we will send the emails for them and we will get the calls booked for them specifically with people that wanna sell their businesses. So in private equity, everyone that works in PE loves the term proprietary deal flow. I will be able to bring them proprietary deal flow for $2,000 a month. Now, if you run a $100 million fund or $200 or $300 million fund, you know, spending $25 grand a year to get, let's say, another 100 businesses on the phone that might sell to you that are gonna come below market pricing cuz you're buying them off market. They're gonna become, they're not getting competitive with other buyers in the buyer pool. That are interested in creative deal structure, you will pay $25,000 a year to get another 100 calls a year booked because you're gonna close like 5 of those. And I promise you it's worth way more than $25,000 a year. So we are gonna add in, my goal here is to add in just like 5 of those customers a month, right? So that's not rocket science again, right? If I can get 100 people into the normal offering that, that, that, that we have here at $79 a month,, right? And I believe that's truly possible. Can I get 1 in 50 of them? For sure. Can we go through LinkedIn Sales Navigator and find the right people and reach out to them and do cold email campaigns and run ads specifically to the, to the right firms? For sure we can. So let's look at the math really quick. Okay, so ChatGPT is actually one of my favorite tools for just running simple math like this. So let's say I'm buying a business that makes $100 a month. We are going to add 100 customers to it at, say, $9 a month, and 5 customers to a monthly pro at $1,197 a month. What will this change the revenue to? And you'll see it's gonna actually just like do all this math in front of us. We'll make it analyze real quick. Boop, boop, boop. Before they take over the world, do the, do the work for us. Okay, so in total, it's going to add us up to now $17,985 a month, right? $18,000 a month. That's pretty good, right? So let's, let's say this business is worth a 3x net multiple, and the op ex and CapEx each month adds up to $2K. So OpEx and CapEx, operational expenditures and capital expenditures. There's almost no CapEx in this business. It's all OpEx essentially. But we've got a server for like $30 a month. We're running our scraper. We'll have a VA, a sort of small, low-level business manager that manages it, maybe some outreach for a couple grand a month. So let's say $2,500 a month. What valuation does it make this? Business. I'm gonna let it run one more time. I find this sort of fascinating. I love— it's the easiest way to do this kind of stuff now. 3x yearly, not monthly, is the valuation. So one thing about ChatGPT and all them is like, I love them, but you clearly need to know what to input and how to check on it. So like, that's just a total misunderstanding of what it— of how this works. Okay, cool. So $467,000. So I think I'm underestimating at saying $300,000. But let's just be safe. I genuinely believe that through that stuff, I will be able to add $300,000+ in value to this business. I probably will not go flip this business because it just fits so much into like my little ecosystem in which I'm gonna have my newsletter, in which we're running ads for the newsletter, and then through that newsletter, we get people to sign up for this business, and then we eventually help put together deals for people where we bring an advisory client to the newsletter, and then after that, we end up raising, to buy deals with other people in the newsletter, right? And so it'll fit perfectly into my ecosystem, but it's probably not the immediate way that I'm gonna, uh, I'm not gonna just flip this business quickly. It'll be, it's more valuable to me as it is today than it will be to someone else today. Maybe in the future though. Okay. So just like as a reminder though, it's not all rainbows and roses. This is like pro formas. I always say that pro formas are worth the digital paper they're built on. These are just assumptions that I've made. Now, they are assumptions that I think are reasonable. There are assumptions based on things I've done myself before, but you know, just quickly as a reminder, you know, I did like a little, I did one Instagram post about it. I'm actually gonna show you something that's really interesting. One way I know it's gonna work, you know, it came, when I bought this business, it was doing $133 a month. It was nothing. Um, we now, it's now up to $209, right? I got that from doing this post on my Instagram. So that's one way I'm gonna grow it. And I want, subscribe if you wanna see how we grow this business. I'm gonna actually take you behind the scenes of growing it all the way through., but I just did this reel. I don't have a lot of followers, by the way, 5,000, right? It's not like I have some massive following, 5,000. I just did this reel right here. So you'll see me doing more content like this, right? Please fire. But do you know about, right? So we don't need to dive into that, but that brought in another couple sales. So my point is we're gonna keep cranking on that kind of stuff and it's not always gonna work, right? You're gonna see, but we're gonna see the slow grind up, you know, into being a much bigger business. Than it currently is. So I would love to hear what some of your guys' thoughts are in the comments below of like other ways that can improve these businesses. Are there softwares that you love? Are there conversion rate hacks that you love? This stuff has worked for before because I have a lot of experience in e-com, a lot of experience in content sites, and I actually was an SVP of digital for a large telemedicine SaaS. So I've got a good understanding of running the software side of marketing and growth, but you never know what you don't know, right? And I always like to sort of crowdsource this. This is the magic of having audience. And putting things out there, building in public on the internet, is I can get ideas from other people. So if you guys have ideas of other things I should be doing, please put them in the comments below. Please, please, please. I would love to dive through them. So yeah, so I've actually learned a bunch through this one, and in other videos I will make sure to break down how we did the capital stack structuring. So I paid $0 cash upfront. I'll break down all the transferring, we do GitHub, how to do the emails. But when you have a checklist of this stuff, we build these checklists, it makes it 100 times easier to do it. And I've hit walls myself, you guys. I think one of my biggest shortcomings is I've essentially worked for myself my entire life, except for when I sold a business in which I was like an acqui-hire a little bit, I had to work inside the company that bought us. So I've had to like bang my head against the wall, learn through YouTube, learn through Twitter, and learn through just trial and error. So I've failed at a ton, right? Everyone likes to share their wins, I've shared some wins, but I've also failed at a bunch of other stuff before. I like buying businesses 'cause it sort of scales skips the zero to one, and if you buy something good, it doesn't just go to zero, even if you kinda mess it up a little bit. So this is super exciting for me, hopefully this is exciting for you. I do not think this video will go viral. This is just like, if you're a weirdo who loves entrepreneurship and buying businesses, subscribe. This is exactly what I'm doing on this channel. You can go and see, I've talked about it a lot before, but I'm gonna show you guys inside, behind the scenes of some case studies of exactly how to buy businesses, exactly how to grow those businesses, and exactly how to exit those businesses. I'm really just a marketer. I'm basically gonna teach you all how to do tons of different marketing and then how to apply that to businesses that you buy. So last thing I'll ask is what do you wanna see more of? I'm a huge fan of selling into what I call latent demand. I'm not selling here, but I wanna be building into latent demand. I wanna create videos on things that you find interesting and exciting. So what do you wanna know? Do you wanna know how to structure deals? Do you wanna find the right deals? Do you wanna market deals? Whatever it is, let me know in the comments. And I will create more content basically for this. Because once I've— you'd be surprised, once you build that content library out, then when someone asks me a question, when a potential client asks me a question, we have something internal, I can just say, here's a video on it, don't worry. So, um, we all actually have the same questions and thoughts even though we're unique. So let me know what you need to know. Hopefully you guys subscribe. Hopefully you find this interesting. Cheers. Thanks, y'all.