How to Win podcast with Peep Laja

Andrew Gazdecki: Any acquisition that was, shared on social media, we'd put it on a billboard in Times Square, take a picture. And I thought that was clever because when you see that you're like, oh, that probably costs $3,000. But what we, do is we would send 20 tweets at a time to put up on there and they'd run *for 30 seconds. And then we just snap a picture and then we'd share it on social. And so the total cost would be, a hundred bucks to do it. *

Peep Laja: I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. Don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I really want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, how do they win? This week, Andrew Kosdecky, the founder of Acquire.com, the marketplace for buying and selling startups. In this episode, Andrew explains how he capitalized on the proliferation of smaller startups that couldn't sell to blue chip companies. We go into detail how he used creative marketing to grow his customer base and how he hired a team to help him outgrow the micro stage of his company. Let's get into it.

Peep Laja: I kind of think about businesses when you startup, I always say you want to make a bet. And this

Andrew Gazdecki: was the bet I made, three years ago, barriers to entry are lower than ever. so a lot of people are gonna be making these smaller businesses and they're gonna need a place to sell. that was opportunity I saw. And then, The second part of that is a rise in, entrepreneurship through acquisition. So when I used to think about acquisitions, specifically, before I went through one myself, I thought it was just Google comes up, big check, Hey, congrats.

But it's so much different than that. you got to actually sell your business. And

so I thought there's also a good opportunity in terms of just educating, startup founders and entrepreneurs on how acquisitions work. Who are the buyers? What do they expect? What does an acquisition process actually look like? And even just simple things like how do you find a buyer?

Peep Laja: What was the hardest part about this business, going towards the first million in revenue?

Andrew Gazdecki: I didn't start the business with any co founders and I'm not technical, so I worked with an agency to build the marketplace and then I launched it during COVID. So everyone's at their computers, I probably worked, and I do not recommend this, but I would work. 4am to probably 10 at night. I'm also a dad, so, my son was, young. any free time I had, I was essentially working on the business. So customer support, uh, when startups are submitted to acquire, we review each one.

and then writing the newsletters, which educates buyers on new deals that have gone on the marketplace, going on podcasts like this, social media marketing, I was doing, product management and then taking calls for feedback tomake sure I got the product, right.

if I had to just summarize all that, I would say just. Aggressively kick starting the business in a marketplace, you need both sides to be healthy. On the supply side, you need attractive, acquisition offers, and then you need a large pool of, serious buyers for those two to actually connect and transactions get done.

So seeding that just took a lot of energy, time, focus, just doing everything.

Peep Laja: Marketplaces have the cold start problem. And, one of the signs is usually the hard side. what did you find was harder? Getting the list of buyers or getting a list of companies who wanted to get acquired?

Andrew Gazdecki: I focused on, the sell side, getting the best deal flow for different, startups and helping them meet buyers. And the thought process behind that was if you have the best deal flow, buyers will naturally come to your marketplace. And that turned out to be true.

a lot of the focus of our business is. It's to educate founders from the content we create to the features that we develop. every decision we make is, does this help, a founder's life in terms of their acquisition process. So from the onset, the goal was to build the world's most founder friendly startup. Acquisition marketplace. So that was 100 percent the side that I was focusing on. And that was another gap I saw on the market too, is I saw, brokerage firms and other marketplaces that seemed to favor the buyer. And so I thought it'd be really interesting if I just went the other way and just focus on this side of the marketplace that really seemed, not represented well.

Peep Laja: A lot of marketplace companies can't get over the cold start problem. What is that? Here's Andrew Chen, former VP of Growth at Uber. To explain

one of the most interesting things, working in tech has been to see this force that is behind whether you're talking about social apps or Marketplaces a lot that's happening in multiplayer games, which is the idea of network effects Which is the idea that as products gain more users they become Even more valuable and useful over time.

If you're gonna, build a new social app even if you have all the features that you're looking for, the users are just going to bounce as a result.

And so in order to get your product off the ground into something That you're looking for as a startup, you have to solve this cold start problem of,what does it mean to go from zero to one to get enough critical mass, in your network in order to pull off one of, one of these strategies.

Peep Laja: In terms of marketing, I remember seeing you, very active on social, even bringing a lot of, flair and bravado. Now you said you were on a lot of like podcasts and so on. So was social media, most of your marketing, was there anything else you did that worked?

Andrew Gazdecki: the very first thing I did to see the marketplace was actually just borrowing cold email and cold calls. So I'd get on the phone with tons of buyers, tons of startups, because you don't have that credibility yet. trust and credibility and brand is so essential to make your marketplace work. So that was the initial start. And then I started playing around on Twitter and. Seeing, oh, wow, there's a whole ecosystem of startup founders on here. And so that's where I, began marketing, but I also market on,LinkedIn and other platforms. that was definitely, an area that we saw early growth. other things that we did was, I always like to think of marketing in ways of, how can you write the playbook rather than run a playbook that other companies are running? So I would. Do some interesting things like product launches. We'd have Russ Hanneman, the character from Silicon Valley, do the announcements. any acquisition that was, shared on social media, we'd put it on a billboard in Times Square, take a picture. And I thought that was clever because when you see that you're like, oh, that probably costs 3, 000. But what we, do is we would send 20 tweets at a time to put up on there

and they'd run for 30 seconds. And then we just snap a picture and then we'd share it on social. And so the total cost would be, a hundred bucks to do it.

So just thinking of ways like that to celebrate founders and, get people excited about acquisitions, lots of social proof in terms of you can actually get acquired on this marketplace was a big focus from the onset.

Peep Laja: based on what you're saying, celebrate founders. It sounds like you're also a missionary type of founder, not a mercenary, not like let's make money as fast as possible, but you're also like, let's elevate something. Let's, Celebrate the founder as you said.

Andrew Gazdecki: the message I really wanted to bring to the market was, just based off my, own personal experience where my prior startup, I bootstrapped it, retained the majority of the equity and then later sold it to a private equity firm. And I didn't sell that business for an amount that would get me in any magazines or anything like that, but it was very life changing for me. And I thought, Hey, more founders should be doing this. And this was during a time when the fundraising markets were going crazy. Everyone was announcing like a hundred million dollar raises. and so that was also a way for us to champion, self funded or bootstrap companies or companies that Are profitable. And then we also did another thing where we launched, a publication called bootstrappers. com where we even got into like a little beef marketing with TechCrunch.

That wasstrategic cause there was so many financing rounds going on at the time.

So we took a counter approach and I think that's always an interesting strategy as a business is to quote unquote,brand an enemy. And so that was our enemy is. Hey, you guys don't write about, bootstrap companies anymore.

You just write about venture backed companies. And so it makes people pick a side. And,

we try to champion for, bootstrap companies. And again, the reason for that is a lot of bootstrap companies, are highly attractive to private equity firms, strategic buyers, because they don't have, an outsized valuation that they have to sell at,

making that acquisition much smoother.

Peep Laja: Is that media arm still around? Is it still working for you?

Andrew Gazdecki: So we've slowed down on it this year, but we're going to be picking it back up. so yeah, we decided to pull it back cause it became difficult to run. Uh, I still have everybody on staff that was writing, the articles, but the problem that we started to run into was, okay, when do we write content for apart.

com? And then when do we write content for bootstrappers? And then I felt like there was a divide amongst the team. Like we had a separate team inside the company. And so I thought it was better to just align the entire marketing team on, acquire. And so we have slown it down, but likely as we continue to grow the business, we'll bring it back up.

We covered, probably a hundred plus founders in depth. So you can check it out. we really wanted to focus on telling the story of the person where you can get inspired and motivated and leave feeling like, Hey, I can do this too.

Not just raise a hundred million at a 10 billion valuation. Like that's just so far beyond where I think a lot of entrepreneurs are.

So,

that was the goal with, bootstrappers, but we've toned it down, to stay focused on acquire.

Peep Laja: So building your own media channels is a smart idea. You will own the audiences instead of renting them from social media companies, and you'll be immune to algorithm changes. Here's Dharmesh of HubSpot talking about that.

Dharmesh: back when we first started HubSpot, it was just Brian, my co founder and I, and we would go look at people's websites and to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot the software or not, right? I'd do a view source in Chrome and then look at their source codes like, Okay, do these...

They, they have the right meta tags. They seem clueful, right? You can, there's a bunch of signals you can look and look, Alexa ranking, stuff that you do, all day long right now when you research companies.

It was built as a tool for just the two of us. Um, and it's like, Oh, I'm going to put this on the web because I think this is useful. And so like, okay, well, what name can I give it? Well, it grades website. I'm going to call it websitegrader. com. I put that out there and it. Like, it was on fire. Like, like all the early leads, like tens of thousands of people,

I'm a believer in companies kind of controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just Buying audiences and renting them from someone

else.

Peep Laja: The challenge here, of course, is doing it well. At most early stage startups, prioritization is the name of the game. You can do it all, just not all at once

in the early days, it was very scrappy. It was a lot of sheer muscle on your end, long nights, cold calling, just people you knew, as you got, let's call it a little more scale, more team, what changed?

Andrew Gazdecki: So the first thing I did, was hired back my old VP of engineering, VP of product and CFO. Brought the band back together, if you will, because it was becoming way too much for me to manage.

so when you subscribe, Acquire. com works as a business model is you can subscribe as a buyer. And what I mean by that is you pay a yearly subscription to get access to thousands of different, SaaS, e commerce, any type of startup, you name it, and in the beginning. people would complain because they would get, a hundred plus requests from just random people. And so I put it up as a paywall, but I didn't have Stripe connected directly. And so I just had like, you would pay and then I had like a manual way to enable your account.

And

so there was countless times where I'd be driving with my wife and, my son in the back and I remember literally pulling over on the road and be like, wait, sorry, hon, I got to activate this one guy's account. Cause if you pay for something and then you don't get access, you're like, what the heck? So I did that for more people than I can count. And then even scrappier when the business was first built and I fixed this one right away. The idea was to have, really premium market where all the buyers are vetted. and we've taken that to a level now where we ID verify buyers, we verify their funds. but the initial idea when it was just me was I was going to manually review each buyer, but then thousands of buyers started signing up. And so I remember there was an inflection point on a vacation right when COVID started. So this is March of 2020. And I remember this very vividly because what I would have to do is just manually Activate everyone's account just to get in, even as a free user. And it was super just scrappy. And what I had to do is I'm not technical. Sorequested a fix, but for a little bit, I was just clicking like approve, approve, approve, because I didn't think that many buyers would sign up if I'm being candid.

Peep Laja: This is what they mean when they say, do things that don't scale. Most successful startup founders will have stories like that. Recently, we rolled out a new product at Wynter. Or should I say, we said we rolled out a new feature. On demand sales demos. Meaning you can book demos with your exact ICPs on our platform, and we set up all the meetings for you.

I had been thinking about this use case for a while. To test the demand for it, I made a post on LinkedIn talking about it, and asked folks to DM me for beta access. That led to about 100 conversations, which resulted in about 45, 000 worth of this product sold. That product, of course, didn't exist yet. Not a line of code had been written.

So we did all the matchmaking manually. And in the process, we learned how the customers want it. How should we deliver it? What all can go wrong? Only after learning all this, we were ready to automate it.

when the super scrappy times were over, how did you prioritize resources?

Andrew Gazdecki: we started off as we can probably call it as, symbol directory where you list your startup, you meet the buyer, and then you're on your own. And we saw a huge opportunity to streamline that process and make it more efficient. And the ultimate goal is to standardize it. And so we built tools such as a letter of intent builder.

So

rather than going to an attorney, drafting a letter of intent to make an offer to acquire a startup. We have tools now where you can build those documents within our marketplace. And then we've taken it even further where once you get past due diligence, we have an asset purchase agreement builder, and then we have a direct integration with escrow.

So you can fully find companies and then go through the legal process and then also close acquisition securely with escrow. and then we've also done a number of things where we leverage data to only show you. acquisitions that are relevant based on your search criteria. So that was the initial bet.

And what we called it internally is GAP, the Guided Acquisition Process, where we take both the buyer and the seller down a step by step path as a seller, it starts with fielding buyers. So you approve or reject, so you give access into your data room, and then fielding offers, which LOI should you accept. Going through due diligence, accepting the asset purchase agreement and then closing with SRO. So that was the product vision that we wanted to execute on. And to do it, I needed smarter people than myself because I was not technically able to do that.

Peep Laja: lot of time, this is a common wisdom in books, uh, hire people smarter than you, a lot of small companies, especially bootstrap companies are dealing with Google and all, other giants have, spoiled the market by paying, very handsome salaries that no bootstrap startup can compete with.

So usually you can only hire the best people you can afford. Not necessarily the best. What's your take on this?

Andrew Gazdecki: I would agree. I hear now AI engineers are getting paid like 900, 000 and I'm just like, what am I doing in my life? Like, geez. but I think, you can find great talent anywhere. we have engineers in Ukraine. we have. support people in Jamaica, Philippines, so other regions of, and this was the way that we ran, my previous startup.

And for context, I built a drag and drop mobile app builder. but we had engineers in China and, uh, support in France and, South America. So I've always been a big proponent of, looking beyond just, Your geographical location, and we're also a remote company. So it makes a lot of sense for us to, leverage the global town pool available, especially in terms of costs.

So it does get tough though, especially during, 20 and 2021 and 2022 salaries were pretty demanding. And. People were changing jobs very frequently. but one thing I'm really proud of at Acquire in terms of just the team and the culture that we built is, we've only had two people voluntarily leave and both left to start their own business.

Peep Laja: If you're not heavily VC funded, you can't afford to hire the best. But I do believe you need to hire the most skilled person you can afford.

When I was younger, I believed hire for talent, train for skill. And I went on to hire lots of young people with great attitude. And then I learned that it takes a long time to coach someone up in terms of hard skills. At my agency Spiro, it takes a minimum of two years to get someone to a level where rookies can own something without adult supervision.

So today, I believe that you need to hire the most experienced person you can afford. You just move so much faster and get way higher quality with people who know what they're doing and know what great looks like.

You've written, previously that startups is 10 percent strategy and 90 percent execution. Is that what you're consciously, preaching at your business and live in it?

Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess there's a lot of nuance to that. So I'll kind of give you a, my thought process on that. So I think, to find the best direction to head, like I'll say, there's been things I've said online where I'm like, speed of execution is the most important thing. And everyone's like, not if you're going in the wrong direction and it's like, well, yeah, duh. But my point with that is, the faster that you're able to execute. The faster you're able to learn what doesn't work and that helps you find what does work so you can head in the right direction. So it's a way of, the faster that you're able to move in terms of, executing, really does create your strategy because you're constantly testing and iteratingyou're making these small bets very quickly. And that kind of rolls up to your main strategy, because a lot of the times from, at least in my experience, the initial strategy that you start with just changes over time. but then along the way we learn.

And so that's why I always say speed of execution, is truly the number one factor, to a startup success.

Peep Laja: Most of the market, especially the big players, are slow. If you can make two or three moves every time they make one, you have a huge advantage. Speeding up companies is hard work. The quickest and easiest way to cut down speeding up companies is hard work. The quickest and easiest way is to cut down on waiting.

It's amazing how much time gets wasted on waiting. Often what happens is someone or even a whole team is waiting on something from someone else from another team. Weeks of delays. Waiting for someone else to complete something, or worse, waiting to schedule a meeting to discuss something so decisions can be made.

Executives concerned with moving faster are often not aware that this is happening. Or who is waiting for what? It certainly happened to me. Everyone should answer this question on a weekly basis. What are you waiting on this week? Discover the scale and sources of waiting so you can fix it. Speed of execution, speed of decision making, speeding up market feedback loops is paramount.

If you're slow, your competitors will not only catch up with you, they'll run past you.

what's an example of how you guys made Acquire go faster, improve speed?

Andrew Gazdecki: it comes down to just leadership and just the culture. So just having principles, good is better than done. there's been a lot of, I'm sure you could even look at some of our, podcasts that have done previously, like podcast. like good is better than done.

That's my point is where,if. I don't have a perfect mic or something like that. We're still going to push it forward in terms of product. I always tell my team, let's focus on, small bets and small wins, be ones. I actually do have a good example, a recent one.

So, we're redoing our whole entire onboarding flow as you sign up as a seller, cause it's, the last part of the product that. I made and anything that I made is terrible and it's super clunky and it just feels like a big DMV form. And so what we did is we put a small onboarding process to just basically get you to, to first basis.

so we just chip at that and then we learn a ton.the other route would be, okay, let's redo the entire flow. From the onset, we think, well, let's start just here and see how much this impacts conversion rates because we'll have on average, let's call it, 5, 000 startups register for acquired on a monthly basis. And that dwindles down to, 250 listings after everything's hadn't done. So there's a lot of people that, sign up, abandon for one reason or another, maybe it's too complicated. So we learn there and then now we're expanding into v2, which is the other end of, the onboarding flow.

Peep Laja: Another thing that you have, preached loudly is that your favorite, company building approach is talking to customers. That is, it's the most important thing. can you tell me, some examples of how you guys have used talking to customers and maybe target customers to maybe validate direction or, drive growth in any other way?

Andrew Gazdecki: if you go on LinkedIn or, even Twitter, you can see me. Talking to customers pretty regularly. I think that's kind of a great way to, but it can be a little dangerous though, because in one sense, you may be getting feedback from people who aren't really your customers.

Peep Laja: Mm.

Andrew Gazdecki: kind of just, Hey, I think this is a good idea, but

I don't know anything about acquisitions. This is how

you should run your business.

And so you have to filter out what makes sense and what doesn't. but that's kind of like talking to customers, at scale. but we also do, formal interviews. we have different points in the product. Where specifically when you close an acquisition, we have, a form where you can book a call with our team. And so we do, really, standardized user interviews in terms of what worked, what didn't cause we see some, situations where, uh, someone uses just the LOI builder, but they don't use our escrow service.

Why is that? Or you didn't use any of our internal tooling. Why is that? Because we want everybody to use our tooling because we capture the data and it also makes it easier for us to, improve the flow of,

our acquisition process again, with the goal of making things easier, during an acquisition.

So, those are just two examples, but on a regular basis, like even just before we started recording, I was on a call with, Startup looking to sell. my, team, they tell me to back out sometimes, but sometimes I'll pop in on a sales call and, uh, people listening might actually be able to attest to this, but they're like, why are you on this call, Andrew?

And I just say, Hey, I like sales, but really what I'm doing is I like to hear and I like to listen. And then

another example I could probably give is our podcast. I still do our podcast and people have asked me, why don't I outsource that? Why don't I, why don't we have someone else like you're doing the podcast right now, which I

think is great. Um, but what I do is once the podcast is done and the podcast is just. Go over your acquisition story. but after the recording, I usually try to get like a good 10, 15 minutes of just additional information. Like if they said something didn't go right, or they didn't use a certain part of the product. That's a great time for me to be like, Hey, just want some feedback. how'd you get stopped there? Like what happened or what was the worst thing that happened? Um, cause I always want to hear the bad feedback.

Cause

you go on a podcast and it's very positive. But once we hit stop, I'm like, okay, can you tell me what sucked?

Like what did you absolutely hate about the product? And that's another example of,

where I'm talking to customers and you just learn so much, like, and then you actually, from a leadership standpoint, I think if your team sees you doing that, it creates, a culture of empathy for your customers where, we really care and we really listen to your feedback and really will implement it.

Andrew Gazdecki: and then when you have a culture that has this empathy for customers. They can really tell that, you're actually trying to build a product for them.

Peep Laja: Talking to customers is great. Talking to target customers is equally good. You need both. Why? Because speeding up market feedback loops is a massive advantage. To reduce waste, you need to answer questions and validate ideas quickly. To stay competitive, you need to be constantly innovating, on both on your product and your marketing.

And innovation needs insights. While most companies out there still take weeks and months to endlessly discuss what the market might want, Winners get feedback in days to questions like, What do they think of this? Is X a pain for the customers? What is their biggest desired gain? And then deploy iterations and experiments based on those insights.

These kind of feedback loops help you get to things that work so much faster. While this used to be hard to do, with Winter now you can get answers to any question about your ICPs in 24 hours.

Acquire is not the only game in town when it comes to places to try to sell your SaaS, whether it's an indirect or direct competitor. are you actively thinking about competition? Are you actively building moats? how do you think about this?

Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, so I'd say our biggest competition is just the status quo, which would be, business brokering, investment banking. there are similar marketplaces as well. And the way that we try to differentiate is, Really on all aspects, with our service. So we have a team of M& A advisors that, can help you.

So you're not, on your own as you're selling your business. We can, really create an acquisition strategy and we have in house legal counsel to review legal documents. also the tooling as well. but the real, mode is, network effects. So we have 300, 000 buyers. once you get that flywheel going, it's really hard to stop.

And that's, probably the biggest moat that you can have with, a marketplace. And that's something that, we're always trying to improve in terms of activity. How do we reactivate buyers that may have left, to really keep, a healthy marketplace.

what would be your like top three pieces of advice for fellow SaaS founders?

number one, always, when you start a business, write down what you want out of the business. do you just want like 2 million? Do you want, freedom in terms of your time, or do you want to disrupt the market? Because those three buckets are very different and you could be building a company that could. be fully bootstrapped and your goal is to sell it for 2, 000, 000. Okay. That's going to completely change your outlook on how to build the business. Or it's like, I just want to, I don't want to work a lot. I want to go play pickleball or something like that. Okay. That's also going to change how you view the business.

You're not going to be optimizing for revenue. You're just going to be building, a business that makes you happy and pays your bills, and I think that's awesome. Or. You're a lunatic and you want to disrupt the market and you're kind of all in on the business and that's going to change, your decisions as well.

You're probably going to need to raise capital. and that's the bucket that, we're in is we're trying to disrupt and change the market. so that, that's probably the first thing.

Two is Be very specific on who your customer is from the start, especially with the marketplace. Everyone is somewhat a customer, but you have to really. Message to a specific audience in, in micro acquirers example, that was the original name. And then we dropped, the micro to be acquired. com we were focused on, and we still are, is, bootstrap startup founders. Now we do work with a lot of,venture backed businesses and other businesses, but, being really narrow and focused on, own a niche before you expand essentially. And at the beginning, we would only actually accept SaaS listings. So we kept it very specific and narrow. And since then we've expanded to pretty much every type of online business.

And then number three, I would say, Hire people smarter than you as fast as you can, because you can't do it all on your own.

I, in the beginning, brute forced this business into existence, but, uh, I think we could have grown faster if it wasn't just me. but it was a weird time with COVID and everyone during the lockdown. But, bring someone along with the journey if that's probably my third piece of advice.

Peep Laja: What did Acquire do to win?

One, they focused on a specific customer, small bootstrap entrepreneurs. In fact, they were called micro acquire at first, and they didn't grow beyond until they outgrew that customer base.

Andrew Gazdecki: every decision we make is, does this help, a founder's life in terms of their acquisition process. So from the onset, the goal was to build the world's most founder friendly startup.

Peep Laja: Two, they made a good use of social media, including hiring celebrity Russ Hanneman from HBO's Silicon Valley on Cameo to read their announcements.

Andrew Gazdecki: I always like to think of marketing in ways of, how can you write the playbook rather than run a playbook that other companies are running?

Peep Laja: Three, they hired well.

Andrew Gazdecki: Hire people smarter than you as fast as you can, because you can't do it all on your own.

Peep Laja: And that's how you win. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.