What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of,
so the rest of us can do the same. All right, I'm here with Andrew Gazzdekky,
the founder of Microacquire. How's it going, Andrew?
Doing well. Cortland, nice to finally connect with you. Yeah, big fan of everything you've
done. Before we start recording, I said, this guy's influenced millions of entrepreneurs
and it's badass, so sad to be here, man. Yeah, glad to have you here as well. You're
doing quite a few things. You've got Microacquire, which is I think one of the best ways to basically
sell your bootstrapped startup or buy a bootstrapped startup. You've got business apps, another
startup that you founded and exited in 2018. I think you sold it for many tens of millions
of dollars if my guess is correct. I don't know if it's public.
I've never shared the exact number. Only my wife, I promised my wife I wouldn't. And the
reason being is it's like a weird flex. It's either not enough or you're bragging. I always
just kind of say, I sold it and made it. My guess is you're being humble. I don't know
the number, but I like to bring people on the show and I guess flex for you and build
you up. You also have another project that I think is super interesting called bootstrappers.com.
Did you buy bootstrappers from someone else? Did it exist before you had it?
It was just available on GoDaddy for like 30K or something like that. And I was like,
give me that. And then I bought it. So bootstrappers.com. I want to talk about this. You tweeted about
this. You said, coming very soon, bootstrappers.com, the only publication dedicated to bootstrapping
startups. No funding rounds, no valuations, no unicorns, just inspiring and motivating
company building stories. And when I saw that tweet, it spoke to me because I'm also kind
of on this crusade to sort of push back against this landscape we have where the biggest publications
only ever write about venture funded startups. And there's so many people doing amazing things
and building life changing businesses that just don't ever get any press and you can't
even find their stories or learn from them. So I'm curious, like, why did you decide the
world needed this? What's your motivation?
You just, I mean, you just did the pitch for me. There's a little bit of beef marketing
in there. I'm sure you know about it where I was kind of calling TechCrunch out quite
a bit. I want to clarify, you know, I have no problems with TechCrunch. It was just,
it was fun and good marketing. There's a good section in the book called rework about beef
marketing. So I figured, yeah, let's, let's call the biggest publication around and get
aroused out of people and that kind of built momentum. And then it also helped people like
agree like, yeah, you kind of only write about venture backed businesses. And some of the
writers were a little defensive, surprisingly, like they would say, yeah, we do. I'd say
that maybe I'm wrong. Can you tell me the percentage of bootstrap startups you've written
about versus the present? And then they get real quiet. Yeah. So the thought was just
to bring light to an alternative path of entrepreneurship that I think is more probable in terms of
how you define success. I saw it as an opportunity as well to just kind of inspire people. And
I candidly grew up, you know, reading all the tech blogs and stuff like that. And there
wasn't as many like funding rounds being announced. There was partnerships like business apps.
As an example, we had like, you know, version two covered, we had product updates covered
partnerships, revenue milestones, like really like, and we break down how we got there.
And now it's just funding round after funding round after funding round. So I felt, you
know, that style of storytelling had kind of gone away. And so why do you think it is
that the sort of mainstream tech press writes about funding rounds? Like, to me, that's
the most boring thing in the world. I'm gonna go on TechCrunch and like the homepage is
going to be so and so company never heard of just raised, you know, $10 million, $5
million, $50 million. And as like a reader, like, what does that do for me? You know,
what is it like, that doesn't inspire me. It doesn't start. I mean, like, I guess there's
some utility if I'm an investor, or if I'm trying to find like an early stage company
to join as an employee or something. But other than that, like, it's weird to me that that
kind of story gets so much play in the mainstream press compared to like the much more inspiring
shareable stories of people succeeding, everyday people succeeding and making millions of dollars
and changing their lives in the process. I mean, for one, it's not a story. It's just
news like, like, you know, 10 articles a day of the same thing. Yeah, it's funny when you
tweeted something about TechCrunch only writes about these types of stories, kind of doing
the beef marketing thing you were mentioning earlier. My, my favorite tweet was like, because
when I write these tweets, I'm laughing hard by now. I wrote like, TechCrunch is a great
PR agency for venture capitalists. I highly recommend them or something like that. Now
I've got like 1000 mics. Their guest speakers are venture back founders, VCs, you know,
TechCrunch, Distrop was just filled. It's it all revolves around venture capital. So
they're essentially a venture capital blog, in my view. And that's, that's really cool.
But again, it opens up a whole new opportunity and opened my eyes to like, wow, no one's
writing about this stuff. And people want to hear about it. You know, so that's how
we kind of MVP, you know, should we actually commit to this because it's a lot of work
to interview founders, get the transcriptions of the interview, distill the story down,
you know, share with the founders so they're comfortable because a lot of times when we
write about these startups, it's their first time that they've been covered in the media.
So you know, imagine your first time like ever having, you know, someone write about
you. It's like their moment. And so we go back and forth and editing with them. It just
feels more rewarding to like have that style.
It is a little bit of a mouthpiece for the venture capital industry. And I think that
like the tech scene in general, the startup scene is it's like, it's a scene, you know,
there are people who are cool and stylish to be seen around, you know, they're celebrities,
there's a lot of like status seeking that goes into building a tech startup nowadays.
And it's not just the practical nature of it, which is, hey, I want to build a company
that makes me feel better, and makes my customers feel better. And that like, you know, makes
my life better, my family's life better, and my employees life better. It's kind of like,
ah, I want to be written about a tech crunch. I want to raise from this particular venture
capitalist. And I think one of the things that you and I have in common is like a pretty
healthy skepticism of that scene. In fact, one of your tweets I want to talk about is
you said that $1 million of profit is better than $100 million of venture capital startup
founders, this should be your goal. And like you put your money where your mouth is, I
mean, you bootstrapped multiple companies. Why are you personally partial to going the
bootstrap route and the self funded route rather than raising from investors?
I guess personal experience. I mean, with business apps, I started so business apps
was my first real company. I started that when I was 21 in college, and it was a like
a no code app builder, it's been disrupted eight times over. Like we could have, it probably
could have been like a really large business, but I raised 100, 100 K for that business,
had a really, really good mentor. His name was Christian freedom, and he built a company
called build.com. So if you need toilets or stuff, like it's like Home Depot online. But
he grew the business at 3 billion in GMB, never raised any capital. Wow. He's the closest
you'll ever get to Ari gold. He's hilarious. And we just got along we just, he did an angel
invest a lot. So it wasn't like an angel investor that has a portfolio of like 300 companies
and like, you'll get five minutes of your time a month, like we would talk on my daily,
if not weekly basis, definitely monthly. And he helped me build the company. And he would
always press me like, why do you need to raise capital? Like, why? Because we, at one point,
moved to San Francisco, started the company in Chico. And we met with all the top tier
firms and even got close to some term sheets. And I just remember telling like one PC in
particular, who was really close, I just said, listen, like, I really appreciate it. We did
the full partner meeting and everything. And I just said, I don't know what we'd spend
the money on because we were so profitable. And then when I went to go sell the business,
I was able to get a great outcome. And so I just feel like it's a more realistic path.
I mean, with business apps, though, I do have to admit like I was kind of in like the right
place at the right time. Like iPhone just came out and I said, every business is going
to try to get on that. So I jumped on it. Right. But to build a business without investors
to like one or two or $3 million and then sell it for, you know, five to $10 million.
Yeah. To me, that is a very realistic goal for entrepreneurs. And then if you sell that
business for, let's say even $5 million and you walk away with like three after taxes
or something like that, you're kind of set for life. Like, you know, you can buy a house
cash, put some money in like, I'm not going to give investing advice, but I just, I always
just kind of wonder like, what more do you need? You know, you can avoid like a decade
of like pain and suffering trying to build, you know, a public and then do you really
want to be a public company CEO? I don't want to go on CNBC and talk about like my earning
reports. You've also tweeted about the feeling of success, you said, and I'm just going to
keep going through your tweets. I pulled up like 28 of your tweets that I want to talk
about. But you said when your startup is able to reach some level of success, the feeling
is hard to describe. It's a rush for sure. And you've had this a couple of times. Obviously,
this app sold for an undisclosed amount, but Mike require, I think you bootstrapped it
to almost like $270,000 revenue in the first 12 months. And that was back in like February
of this year. So it's, I'm sure higher now now we bootstrapped to, I think, um, before
we raised, um, our seed round, we were at like 600,000. Okay. Wow. Okay. And that was
just me. So that was as a solo founder. Yeah. That was like human sacrifice. I was doing
all sport, all product, every newsletter that you read, every social media post, every,
every piece of content. But I just, I felt the marketplace needed to exist that badly.
Um, and this would be a tip for entrepreneurs as well as if you're thinking about a business
to start, the first thing I did was I really wanted to, uh, serve a customer that I love.
Cause I'm a big believer that the founders that go the distance love what they're doing.
And I love entrepreneurs. I love startups. I love talking to people like you. So I knew
if I got that part, right. You know, I started the business without even a business model.
Um, I had no idea how I was going to make money. I just, after going through two acquisitions,
I just saw a very fragmented market. And as entrepreneurs, we're not taught how to sell
businesses and we're not given tools, how to sell businesses. You can hire bankers. Um,
if your business is of a certain caliber, um, investment banks typically, you know,
are looking for the hundred, 200, $500 million acquisitions, you'll see brokers on the lower
end. Um, but there's no like education on like from a, from a seller's perspective,
from a founder's perspective, like what is due diligence? What are the legal steps? How
do you prepare for this? Um, I just saw a market that was just fully geared towards
buyers. And so I thought, you know, there needs to be a resource and a place for arguably
the most important part of the founder's journey, which is the exit. And so I have a pretty
crazy work ethic, but that ties back to, um, my point is just, if you enjoy what you love,
it's not, it doesn't really feel like work. It's like your favorite video game. So every
minute I had to spare, I'm just, instead of playing like Madden or Call of Duty, I'm playing
microwire, you know, like, it's your own video game.
So let's talk about this journey to start micro acquired, because I think it's not
obvious that like, this is something that the world needed. You know, like if you look
at the sort of landscape, there's already Flippa where people were sort of selling their
websites. There's Thomas Smells business. I forget his name of his business. Um, but
he helps people sell companies as well. He's been on the show. There's a lot of different
marketplaces where people essentially know Fe international. People can sell their SaaS
businesses, but you said that you had like a unique insight when you started micro require
and that became like your competitive advantage. And there was something that was obvious to
you that wasn't necessarily obvious to others at the time. What was it like coming up with
the idea to start micro acquire? Why did you think this is something that can work and
it's something that I should start?
It really started with this. People are starting startups at a rate that we've never seen before.
It's never been easier to start a company, which is fantastic. And so, you know, just
doing the math on those, you know, not all those companies are going to reach venture
scale, um, 0.0. So one in 40 companies successfully raised venture capital. So I kind of made
a bet that like, there's this market, a bootstrap startup set don't have an easy way to sell
their business. They're being created at a rate that we've never before seen in history.
And there needs to be a place to bring both buyers and sellers together and allow founders
to sell their business without any friction, completely free. That was kind of it. Just
basically like, I kind of thought about my, uh, personal scenario with business apps where
I need a marketplace where I can, you know, just give you a high level overview of what
my business does, the metrics, that sort of stuff. And then buyers reach out. I have full
control over who I speak to so I can improve or deny buyers as they reach out and there's,
there's no cost. And so I can just kind of test the waters. I can write before really
committing to a broker or cause what a broker will typically do, um, as you know, they put
a price on your business and like you're going to market and sometimes there can be misalignment
with, you know, depending on who you work with, because their goals is to sell your
business as quickly as possible. But if you have a business where like a business apps,
it took me nine years to sell that business with a broker, you know, we'd probably be
seeing, you know, a price tag of like four to five times profit or something like that.
I would never saw, I would never sell my business for that amount. No way. So, you know, I was
always open for offers. Um, and we finally got an offer that, you know, we felt was very
generous. Uh, we took it, you know, I think micro require allows founders to kind of step
into acquisitions without fully jumping in the pool and just saying like, Hey, I'm basically
going to fire a sale is saying to the highest bidder, if that makes sense. Um, but it needs
to be private because if your employees or your customers find out that you're selling
your business, you get questions ranging from my getting fired or am I making a millionaire
or a billionaire, everything in between. And so yeah, that was, I just saw that was cool.
It was like, Hey, yeah, let's, um, let's just make this completely free. And I ran it, uh,
for free for about a year. And then we eventually layered on the premium buyer subscription
program. And that was a request from a founder. Uh, he said, like, I've gotten like 50 offers
from potential buyers. Like how do I sort through all these? Yeah. Uh, and I said,
uh, what if we put up like a paywall and then we, we, so now we vet the buyers, we make
sure you have a working LinkedIn profile. Um, you have a picture, we'll upload it for
you a proper bio. Just so like as a, as a founder, when these requests come, come in,
it's not like Johnny one, one, two, two, two, four. And I have no idea who that guy is.
Um, I want to see where you worked. I want to see references. I want to see like, I want
to be able to do due diligence on you. So that was another, I think unique insight was
just, you know, the bet I made that was obvious to me, but not obvious to others at the time
was MNA activity was going to increase given the amount of startups that were being created
and there needed to be a more efficient way of selling these businesses outside of brokers
or investment banks. Um, and something a little bit more professional than what you would
see on safe flip, uh, or some of the other just sort of Craigslist style marketplaces.
You know, we wanted to be high quality, quality over quantity vetted listings rather than
just anything goes note. We don't list domains. We don't list content sites. We focus on mostly
just bootstraps, SaaS e-commerce. We've started moving into like crypto businesses and like
communities newsletters. I'm curious about this, this, um, this sort of like ideation
phase though, because there's so many, I guess in a way with micro acquire kind of focused
on people who are at the end. Now these are people who are well willing to sell their
businesses and when Andy hackers, I talked to so many people who were in the beginning.
They're like, what should I even start? What should I do? And I think it's inspiring for
a lot of people to hear about your early days. Like, how did you even come up with this idea?
And it's something like you've done multiple times where you've seen like, Hey, here's
a trend, right? Like mobile apps are growing or Hey, like, uh, the number of companies
is growing. And so then you place a bet, right? Businesses are going to need to build mobile
apps or people are going to need to sell their companies in a frictionless way. How can other
people do what you're doing and like spot these trends and then figure out the right
way to capitalize on them?
I would look for, you know, founder market fit. What I mean by that is you have a unique
insight into a market based on your personal life experience. And that does two things.
One it gives you a competitive advantage because you, you've been through the problem that
you're trying to solve. You understand it. You felt when you, when you feel a problem
and you feel like pain, like selling business apps. Oh my gosh, like that was so hard. Like
we went out to market in 2016 and, um, or 15, we hired an investment bank. Their minimum
fee was 800 K $800,000. I paid them 150 K upfront. We did a full road show. We actually
had offers. One was, uh, 30 million from a P firm or 20 million was going to go to shareholders
on secondary and then 10 on primary for 70% of the business. And then we had one of the
big do yourself website builders. You probably guessed the name of them. So we had these
real offers, but it was number one, it was exhausting. And then two, it was very expensive
to have this process done. And so I still had gas in the tank. So I said no to both
offers kept going and then sold the business. Um, three years later after we, you know,
got a lot of good feedback from potential choirs on, you know, what we could potentially
do. And most of that was just really kind of growing revenue, reducing churn, et cetera.
And then funny enough, the private equity firm that we sold to, we had interacted five
years earlier prior to the investment bank. And the reason I know that is because during
due diligence, uh, you got, you have to like go through all your NDAs and everything you
signed and stuff like that. And I found an NDA from them because we had a short conversation
and I was like, Oh, um, but I just always wish there was a way where I could just go,
Hey, my business is for sale silently, privately, none of my investors know. And then if a conversation
leads to an acquisition, fantastic. If not, I'll just keep growing the business.
And what's the first thing you do when you say, okay, I found this trend. I feel it in
my bones. I think the world can be this way. Even if others don't agree with me, the world's
not this way. Like, how do you make that into a reality? How did you do that with micro
technology? You have to make, um, in my opinion, a bet on something that, that is obvious to
you that will become obvious to others over time. And you just have to be patient, you
know, product market fit for some is found in a month for some it's found in a decade.
You know, if you can have the endurance and the patience to just really believe, and you
also have to know it's a tricky balance. You got to know when to, you know, say, Hey, this
isn't working and pivot, or maybe shut it down. Like there's, there's nothing wrong
with shutting a business down. Move on to the next one. Yeah. And right now we're only
talking about my successes, but I have had so many failed businesses. Like I was starting
businesses all the way through high school during every year in college, I had this thing
I would do. Instead of getting a job, I would start a new business. And some of the businesses
are awful. Like, um, everything from, uh, these are kind of embarrassing, but I had
like a world of Warcraft, uh, referral website, but it taught me Google ads and taught me
like design. Um, and the business crashed when the pay-per-click ads for, you know,
buy word of work, have gold went from like 10 cents, like $10. I thought it was going
to be like rich all through high or college for a minute. Cause we made like, or I made
like $50,000 in like three months. And then it just plummeted because the, the pay-per-click
ads were too expensive and the business anyways, but you learned, you tried something, but
I learned it doesn't work. You learn. So I guess maybe that would probably be my main
advice is like your first business doesn't have to be like a heart, like a big marketplace,
attacking a big market. Um, it could be a blog. It could be, you know, a community.
It could be a newsletter. It could be, you know, something very simple, but I think,
I think the key is just, you know, again, finding something that you're passionate about
and just diving in sooner rather than later, because there's really never been a better
time to start a company because there's resources like any hackers where if you need support,
like a community, which I think a lot of founders could definitely benefit from, you know, all
that, I didn't have that a decade ago, like a decade ago, we were all trying to figure
out like, what is the best like way to have, what, how does pricing work? How to, how to
build a sales team, how to properly market the business, how to do PR, like, you know,
we didn't have all this information available today. So, you know, look at, be bold and
don't be afraid to fail and be, be, you know, willing to fail, you know, because when you
fail, you learn the most I've failed and my failures have taught me more than my successes.
And I think just having a love for startups is key as well.
For so many people, it's hard to just come up with an idea that has some chance of working,
let alone an idea that somehow dovetails with their passion and what they authentically
want to do. How do you think people can figure out what it is they're going to enjoy working
on and also have that constraint combined with something that can actually work and
make money?
So, before I launched my require, I was very specific about the type of business I wanted
to build. And most of it was the stuff I didn't want to do. Like, for one, I didn't want to
manage a huge team. So, right now we're 10. And it's awesome. Like, I just basically,
we can all fit in one Zoom screen, we joke around. I love everyone I work with. I care
about them deeply. Two, I wanted a marketplace because it's low on R&D. Business apps, we
have an iOS team, Android team. The amount of engineering power that was required for
that company was kind of ridiculous. And I wanted to serve a customer that I love. So,
I think if you just kind of create a framework around like, okay, this product's going to
cost me a lot of money to make. What kind of product can I create that kind of won't
put me in debt or something like that, or require me to raise capital? Write down what
you don't like to do. If you don't like doing meetings all the time, start looking at businesses
that don't require a large team. Or if you want to build a really big company, obviously,
write down all the stuff that is required for that. And also, the things that you don't
want to do as you're going along that journey. Because, yeah, you want to enjoy the journey
and not focus so much on the destination. Because, trust me, once you get there, it's
awesome. But everyone has those stories of like you exit a business and I talk about
it all the time, like the good old days. Remember when we used to do that?
Yeah, we were up to our hands and knees and support tickets and all this code that need
to be written. And those are kind of the glory days. It's kind of like the fun part.
It's a hard question. The question you're asking, I think, is the question that people
need to just really think about deeply and just be honest with themselves. Like, if you're
good at marketing, maybe you should create something that helps marketers. If you're
a developer, maybe you should create a product that helps developers somehow. You have a
unique insight there and you also have good founder market fit there in those markets.
So that's probably where I would start.
I kind of have a similar process with indie hackers, where I think at the time, I wrote
a list of like seven or eight things that I'm like, these are things I absolutely do
not want to do or do want to do. And unfortunately for me, those were all like experience one
lessons where I had to like start companies that failed in these ways. So that made me
unhappy in these ways for years before I realized I needed to put these things on my checklist.
But it was things like, am I building something that like I can talk to friends and family
about? Because after starting a couple businesses where like I couldn't explain it to anybody
and they just didn't care, I was like, you know what? I don't want to spend, you know,
60, 70 hours a week working on something and then I talked to my friends about it and their
eyes glaze over. So like for me, that was an important part of enjoying what I was working
on. Can I build something that's meaningful and beneficial to the world? Because I just
knew that eventually I wouldn't want to feel like there was some greater purpose to what
I was doing besides just like, will this make me money? Which is also important for me.
Another thing on my list was like, what kind of effort will it take to keep us running
long term? You know, it's just gonna run me ragged and you know, I'll never be able to
take a vacation. I'll never be able to take a break. Like it's just gonna be something
that like will get in some ways easier to run over the long run, which is part of why
I started a community sort of people powered. Another thing in there was like, is this something
that like I can actually market and distribute to people? Like is it basically are the people
who are my customers and fans, people that I know where they hang out and like talking
to them? That part is so key. Because I mean, I'm sure you see this a lot on indie hackers,
that people build these products. And they don't understand like, you got to, you got
to market these products now, like you got to go find customers. But what you just said,
you know, you had found a market fit where you understood where these potential users
or customers, however you call them, hey, where do they hang out? And you went there
and you, you got them all in one place and you did a killer job doing it.
There's another tweet you have that I think is really important for sort of the beginning
of your company. And you said the biggest dilution event for startups is when they're
founded and equity is split between co-founders. Think about that for a minute. I know when
you started micro acquire, you started it by yourself. When I started any hackers, I
also made the decision to start it by myself. Why did you? Why did you not want to co-founder?
Why did you think this is something you can get done alone as a solo founder?
So I've never had a co-founder ever. I don't know. I just work faster in the beginning.
Like when I get the idea, I just go. So, and I think, you know, there's a framework that
again, we're going back into kind of like the typical expectations of a successful startup.
We've got to have a couple of co-founders, you know, need to have complimentary skillsets.
Hopefully you worked at Google or Apple, pedigrees from like certain school. Like for me, I guess
I just don't see the benefit in the early days, at least for me, because it's easier
when you have one person that can make all the decisions and everything isn't just a
debate. Plus you have a 65% chance of breaking up with your co-founder. So you have a higher
chance of breaking up your co-founder than getting divorced. And I don't think people
really understand how many startups fail because of co-founder conflicts. Like I get it for,
you know, you know, the mental support and stuff like that, but there's other ways to
get it. But I mean, I don't want to say like anti co-founders, blah, blah, blah. I've just
never had them. So I don't have experience benefiting from them. My experience has always
been just building the business first, getting it off the ground. And then that's when I
feel comfortable bringing others into the business to help.
What set of skills do you think you need to do that? Like, what is it about you that makes
it possible for you to like single handedly get these businesses off the ground?
You got to be good at everything. We got to be great at nothing. Like you got to know
how to manage product. You got to be able to market, sell, handle customer support.
It's not easy. But again, it goes back to I just, I wanted it bad enough. I graduated
college with like a 2.07 GPA, which is actually the Chico State record for lowest graduate
GPA. I don't come from a family with money or anything like that. You know, I just, I
wanted, you know, my first company to work bad enough. And I just constantly learned
like, how did I learn how to manage product teams? Well, I just hired an engineer and
then I read some articles and books, kind of self taught, like, you know, reach out
to others for help. So I think you just have to have that sort of like, that motivation
that like, you really, really, really want this to work. And there's no way you're going
to let this company fail another tweet you've made in this vein is that entrepreneurships
and startups are a game of grit, not intelligence. And that speaks to me because I think if you
were a gritty, hardworking founder, obviously you are, even if you don't necessarily know
exactly what the plan is and exactly what's going to work. If you're getting like, you
know, three or four different shots on goal every week, you're going to eventually find
out what works. Whereas somebody who's not working that hard, who's quits early, who
gives up, they're only gonna get like a few shots a year. And they're gonna give up. And
so I really liked that sort of mental approach to it. And I wonder if that applied to micro
acquire, you know, like how much was micro acquire you just working really hard and sticking
through tough times and figuring things out versus how much of it was you making really
good decisions and just knowing what to do.
Again, I've launched and I had no idea how I was going to make money, but I knew there
was the market opportunity there. And I've always used startups as, you know, you have
an idea, but it's, it's iterated over and over and over, usually through customer feedback.
And so, you know, the more I talked to customers and the more excitement that I heard from
them, I knew there was something there. And so that motivated me to keep going. And I
think a lot of, unfortunately, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they do give up too early
because they think, you know, year one is going to be zero to a million. Year two is
going to be one to 10 million.
But it really was like that for you. I mean, like, it really was like super successful
for you in the first year. You know, were there times where you, like, you did have
to eat class? Were there times with micro acquire where it was like, I'm on the wrong
track and I need to change things up?
I think, I think I benefited definitely from just market tailwinds. Like I launched a business
right as COVID started. So, you know, that was interesting. And then I prior to that,
a lot of people don't know this, but I was chief revenue officer at a venture back company
called Spith. So I was building this business on the side. And then once there's series
A's, A close, I resigned to focus on my career full time. That was in June. So that was at
the peak of basically we have no idea what's going to happen with COVID. Right. So that's
where I had enough like belief in this business. I just said like they offered me basically
everything from president to chief staff to VP of like revenue, any, anything I wanted
to VP of strategy. But I said like this micro acquire business that I've been, you know,
working on the side, like, like I, this is the video game I want to play. Like, so I'm
going to resign and that's when I really jumped into it. So I mean, yeah, that was, that was
a scary moment. I left, you know, a very high paying job at a company that's doing very
well now. Um, I highly recommend them. If you're doing sales commission calculations
manually in Excel, that's what they do. They automate sales commission calculations for
large sales teams. I had a blast working with them, but you know, that was a tough time.
You know, I went from like a team that I absolutely loved working with, but I knew that if I didn't
make the jump, you know, I got them to like the series a and it's like, okay guys, you
can hire people way smarter than me now. Um, I'm out. I love you all. Uh, I catch up with
them all the time. We had so much fun together, but I knew if I didn't leave at that point,
I'd regret it. And I, I'm also a big, I think about regret a lot in terms of, you know,
it's usually the things that you don't do that you regret and the things that you do
that you're at. And so yeah, so I, I saw momentum and micro acquired people. People started
acquiring companies. I'm like, holy shit. Can I swear on this? Yeah. Yeah. I can say
whatever you want. I was like, holy shit. Like companies are getting acquired and like,
they're sending me the nicest emails. And like, I remember meeting like the founder
of a public company and I was like starstruck. I was like, how am I like, how are these people
finding this? This is insane. It just brought so much positive energy. That's where I knew
I wanted to be. And so I made a jump during a very scary time, a business with no, no,
I had no way, no idea how I was going to generate revenue. Um, it was in the middle of the pandemic.
Um, so great time. You actually is a good time to start a business. Cause that's, you
know, the people are usually not launching businesses, but it was scary. I mean, I didn't
know what the future held. I didn't know micro growth was going to be successful. At that
time revenue was zero. So I was jumping from that to zero. Um, but it just, it brought
me so much like positive energy and I enjoyed it so much that I knew I would regret it if
I didn't jump in full time. So I would say that was probably the hardest time. Um, and
then after that, just having to work that hard, I feel like at times I, I had to will
the business into existence. Um, that, that was mentally draining for a while. I've, I've
hired help since thank gosh. What did that look like? Was that just you sending lots
of cold email? Is it you staying up late, you know, working late into the night? Like
what does it mean?
I was working like probably, I mean, 5am to midnight every single night doing what, uh,
every, every part of the business. So when startups come in, I'd review them, I'd speak
with the founders, improve their profiles, write the newsletter, which at one point,
uh, I'd send out every week. Now we send it out every day because our deal flow has increased.
Uh, so I was writing those all social media posts, um, every piece of content that you
see on our website, all copy on the, on the front of the, of the website. The only help
I had was on the actual engineering side. So I hired an agency to help with, you know,
the website, the marketplace, but customer support. I was on live chat. I do live chat
for my phone. On top of that, I had just become a dad. I became a dad, um, October 29th, two
years ago. So my son's about to turn two. So you might, you might drop us on his birthday.
Uh, so, you know, there's, so I had, you know, family duties I had to take care of. You just
have to want it bad enough. And for me, just the reward of like helping entrepreneurs and
like one of the most like life changing moments of their career, just that was something I,
I just had to pursue. And so, so we were almost out of time. I'll leave you with, with one more
question from another tweet of yours that I really enjoyed, which was that lots of people will give
you advice on how to build or grow your startup, but listen to your intuition because you're the
closest to your business and you're the one living it every day. How do you think, um, a brand new
founder should think about this? I mean, your experience, you've been starting companies since
you were basically a kid. A lot of people are like, I'm 35, I'm 45. I've never done so far in my life,
but I'm taking a leap. How can they learn to trust their intuition and know that it's the right thing
to do when they're sort of swimming in the sea of advice from every single angle of telling them
what they should do? Well, I'll tell you a story about business apps that changed the directory
of the business forever. There was a guy in Switzerland. He was building apps for these big
Ramada hotels. And I, this was when we ran out like 15 K annual cream revenue, very, very small.
And I was also just running the business solo. Um, I had friends in college where we tried
cold calling restaurants for about a couple months and worked out they left. So this was
like a dark time in business apps where it was just me alone in like a 500 square foot office,
probably the size of this room. And I reached out to this guy in Switzerland and he had a
marketing agency. And he told me that he was basically building these apps on behalf of the
hotels and not for the hotels. Um, that he owned, I assumed he was just really rich and owned them.
And so I asked him how can I help you sell more applications? And then he opened my eyes to, uh,
go to market model, uh, where we white label our product and ended up partnering with, um,
a lot of web agencies, instead of trying to sell, you know, one mobile app to one small business at
a time, we started selling hundreds at a time that changed the business. Like we went from like flat
to like, but my point being is like, okay, so you got all this, you know, advice, but you know,
you're closest to the business. And so, you know, when you talk to customers and you keep hearing
like the same thing, you can read one tweet in mind and be like, Hey, that's, that's kind of cool.
But if you keep hearing the same thing over and over from customers or if a customer gives you an
idea and is willing to pay for it, you know, that's when like, you should use your intuition,
which is better, like probably the customer that is willing to pay for a product that you haven't
even built yet. And that this has happened many, many times in micro require to where,
you know, a lot of our competitors or, you know, I don't know if we really have any direct competitors
that I can pull from, but, you know, they focus a lot on pleasing, you know, the buyer, you know,
the buyer, that's the most important part of the business is the buyer. But I'm like, no,
it's the founder, we want to empower the founders to, you know, be more equipped when they're
speaking with buyers, we want to help them maximize their exit. No one's doing that everyone is
favoring the buyer. And so I kind of went the other way, because that was my intuition as a
founder, where I didn't want to help buyers, I wanted to help entrepreneurs and startups. And so
that is a core value of micro require is, we always say that, you know, our goals help
founders succeed, and we want to build the most founder friendly marketplace in the world. And so,
you know, that was a guess that was just like, hey, I'm just, you know, I'm trusting my intuition
of what's a marketplace I trust. And it's one that speaks to me as a founder, and not,
hey, this is where you get really cheap deals and stuff, right? So I love it. And it speaks to what
you said a few times in this episode, which is the kind of building the video game that you want
to play. And if what you want to do in your particular business is serve founders and build
the best marketplace for founders, that's the best bet to make, because number one, you might be
right. And number two, that's what you actually authentically are going to enjoy doing. And number
three, that's your intuition, those are the people you want to serve. So I like this idea of listening
to your customers, and also pairing that with being very deliberate about the customers that
you want to serve. Andrew, thanks a ton for coming on the show. Do you want to tell listeners where
they can go to find out more about what you're up to with all these different businesses and
initiatives? Yeah, first of all, thanks so much for having me on. I really enjoyed this conversation.
And if you want to learn more about micro require, just micro require.com and maybe
follow me on Twitter. I like to tweet or add me on LinkedIn. The micro require,
hey guys, thank you. Alright, thanks again, Andrew. Thank you.