They Got Acquired
We help entrepreneurs sell their business
For this new lead-gen model to work, we need to focus on one thing this year: audience growth.
We haven't put much effort into growing our email list in the last few years because we didn't need a huge list for the monetization approaches we were focusing on then.
But now we do. So here's what we're doing to grow our 8,000 subscriber newsletter this year:
Opt-ins. We're releasing lots of free reports and resources, starting with our Sale Multiples Guide in January. We're working on a new SaaS deals report, a big list of firms that buy SaaS companies, and more. These resources are all free and behind an email wall, so readers can get them in exchange for their email address. We're also looking at adding a sponsor to our course and making it free so it can reach a lot more founders.
Webinars. We're about to experiment with free webinars, in two specific formats. One is educational, where we'll dive into a part of the sale process to help founders learn. The other is the one I'm really exited about: showcases. We want to bring together a group of M&A advisors, a group of exit-readiness coaches, a group of lawyers... and give each of these professionals a chance to pitch our community of founders on their services. It's a chance for these experts to get in front of potential clients, and a way for founders to save tons of time by vetting a bunch of service provider options in one hour.
LinkedIn. When I decided to go all-in on LinkedIn this year, I did not expect just how fun it would be. Seriously. I love writing and sharing stories in a way that's helpful to others, so I keep showing up and doing that day after day, and that grows my LI network. I'm at about 11,000 followers there now and aiming to grow at a pace of at least 500 per month. But that's really a vanity metric; what matters is how many high-quality leads and newsletter subscribers LinkedIn brings our way. And LinkedIn absolutely kills it in terms of driving quality leads. As part of this strategy, we also launched a LinkedIn newsletter from my personal profile. We hit 1,000 subs in the first 24 hours! I'm writing a post for LinkedIn on the thinking behind that launch.
A little SEO. I don't want to put too many eggs in this basket because SEO simply isn't reliable anymore. But I do think founders are searching for the kind of information we provide, and I want They Got Acquired to show up when they do. So we're publishing some of the resource and advice posts that have long been in our queue.
Experiments. We're trying a bunch of other things, like partnerships, guesting on podcasts, joining communities, building an AI version of myself who can coach founders who want to sell (that's coming soon!), and more.
What am I missing that we should think about to grow our audience this year?
Wow. This January felt like an alternative reality with so many snow days and illnesses and all of the terrible news coming out of this administration... and yet, when I looked at our dashboard today...
We met our revenue goal for referrals for the first month! ⭐
This new model, whereby we match founders with M&A advisors and bankers who can help them sell their business, truly feels like a win-win-win.
⭐ It's a win for founders, who don't really have anywhere else to get recommendations for good-fit, vetted advisors. They so appreciate it. Whenever founders hear we get a cut for referring them, they always say something like, that's fantastic, I'd love for you to earn given how much you've helped me.
⭐ It's a win for advisors, who want these qualified leads. It was so easy getting advisors to say yes to enrolling in this program, which was a stark comparison to what it was like trying to sell them access to the M&A platform.
⭐ And it's a win for us! Under our new model, we not only get a commission when a founder sells their business with our partners' help, we also get a small flat fee for each introduction. This allows us to build an entire business around sending leads (which is a classic monetization method for media companies), which we couldn't do on contingency fees alone.
We had more inquiries this month from founders than ever before. I think this is due to a few factors:
It's the beginning of the year, and we all come in hot in January.
Everyone's looking for M&A to improve this year, so founders are slightly more keen to sell.
Our audience is growing. Between efforts to increase the size of our email list and lots of intention on LinkedIn, we're hearing from lots more founders.
It's great to meet our revenue goals for this first month, but it's only the beginning. My hope is that this momentum continues into February, even when that new-year energy fades. Here we go!
A few months ago, we made the hard decision to stop building our M&A platform.
It was a tough decision that came with a lot of feelings. I was so bummed to give up on a project that 1) I enjoyed building 2) I thought still had potential (even though I'm not the right person to build it and 3) my team and I had put many months into.
And I still haven't really announced this publicly. I'm not sure whether I will or not.
But as soon as I made the decision, I felt immense relief. This was SO the right choice.
Here are three reasons why we made this pivot, nearly three years into building this business:
We heard from M&A advisors they all wanted one thing (instead of what we were trying to sell to them): leads. I had this feedback on my brain for months, and finally decided to listen to it.
When I put together a plan for 2025 for growing the platform, I knew success required going bigger. I needed more resources to grow a team to make the product robust enough to be truly useful for our users. That mean either investing more of my own money into the business, or raising money. I had this ah-ha moment that this was the kind of project that couldn't be done well with a bootstrapped, lean mindset... it needed more to work well. And I realized I didn't WANT to do what it would take to succeed. At this point, I want to work less, not more. I want ease and joy in my work, not anxiety. Kind of crazy after coming this far, but that was the truth.
Alongside these two realizations, we'd been piloting a program where we sent leads in a new way to our M&A advisor partners -- and it was going really well. So well that I knew it made sense to move in that direction rather than the direction we were going.
So we scratched the M&A platform, and moved to a model based around referral partnerships and sponsorships. We've done both of these since our inception three years go, but finding a new way to do this make it sustainable, and created a path to leaning solely on these two revenue sources.
What I love about this new model is that it's entirely in my wheelhouse. I'm good at most of the things we have to do to succeed this way, including audience growth. And we're not starting at zero, since we've built these partnerships over the last three years.
It feels really good to move in this direction. More on that in the next post.
Something I'm hesitant to admit:
I built our M&A platform myself.
I'm reluctant to share this because I'm afraid it makes us look small. The tool couldn't possibly be amazing if a non-developer founder built it, right?
I shared the story on LinkedIn today:
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Your idea for theygotacquired sounds great. If you need technical help or someone to help you fix and maintain the website feel free to reach out. I assure you that you will be getting quality work while not having to drain your budget
Today we're closing a revenue-generating product so we can put ALL our resources and energy behind They Got Acquired Data, our M&A platform.
This is a scary move because sales from the platform aren't covering our expenses yet. But I know we'll never get there if we don't turn all our attention to it.
I made this decision in part because I've been so squeezed for work time over the last three months of summer. Tomorrow the kids start back at school, and I should have relatively regular work hours again (9 to 3 daily, plus any other hours I can find here and there).
Let's see where this takes us through the fall!
Something simple I did last week that gave me a huge morale boost...
For months, I've been tracking one metric for our M&A intelligence platform: how many deals we've pushed live in the platform.
That's because we need a critical mass of deals for the platform to provide insights.
We've tracked thousands of deals (7,147 as of right now) over the last couple of years. These are all online businesses that have sold for 6, 7 or 8 figures. Now we're fleshing out and double-checking the metrics for each one, then publishing it in the platform.
So I've been digging into AirTable daily to check the count. But last week, I found a way to make this tracking way more fun and motivating...
📊 I created a dashboard that tracks this metric automatically, shows us how many deals are live, and displays it prominently.
The dashboard also shows us dozens of other stats we're interested in, like how many buyers are live in the platform, how many deals we have sale price for, how many deals we've written stories about, etc. (I'm including one of those in the image below.)
But that high-level number — how many deals are live — is the most important, because it helps us measure when we're ready for users.
📈 I've always loved dashboards for sharing information with a team. But it didn't occur to me until now to create one for this project, because it's just me and our data editor tracking this.
Yet now that we have a visual tracker, I can't believe I didn't do it sooner.
It's super motivating to see progress in a dashboard, and it helps me remember that even amongst all the opportunities each day, making this number climb is my top priority right now.
I keep the dashboard open on my second screen, so I can watch it climb every day. This alone has boosted my confidence; it reinforces the progress we're making.
Our data editor finds it motivating, too. And she now has visibility into all sorts of metrics that are important for our goals. Even for a small team like ours, this is helpful for staying aligned.
🚀 Don't underestimate the power of visualizing your core metrics on a dashboard everyone can see. Even if your everyone is just a team of two.
We're not launching our M&A data platform.
We're doing this instead 👇
For months now we've been building an M&A intelligence platform focused on online businesses that have sold for 6, 7 and 8 figures. The goal is to help founders, buyers and brokers pull insights on potential buyers and comps for relevant deals.
We've already had some early successes! Including a founder who used the platform to identify good-fit buyers, find their contact info and book calls. She just sold her business 🎉
Now, we're at a big milestone: we're adding early users to the platform.
But you won't see a big, splash launch from us.
Here are 3 approaches we're taking to adding early users that go against conventional wisdom:
👉 1. We're skipping the initial loud launch.
Instead, we're slowly adding users one-by-one, ensuring the platform delivers value, and collecting feedback and testimonials.
Splashy launches create unrealistic expectations. They suggest the flood gates will open, which rarely happens. Even if you've built an audience ahead of time, a consistent trickle of sales is more likely.
And in our case, we'd prefer the constant trickle. We want to see how customers use our product and learn how to support them before adding hundreds of users.
Melissa Kwan took this approach, and shares how it went in her ProfitLed podcast. I'll link to that in the comments.
👉 2. We're not launching an MVP.
MVPs aren't good enough anymore. Instead, we're releasing a product our customers will get huge value from on day one.
I like how Jason Cohen reframes this; he says you should release an SLC instead. That stands for Simple, Loveable and Complete.
His post on this topic shaped how I thought about making our product ready for users. I'll link to that in the comments.
👉 3. We're not adding early users for free.
Many founders offer free accounts for their first users so they can get feedback.
But the biggest thing we're testing right now is whether brokers, buyers and founders will pay for access to insights that will help them maximize their deals. Giving the platform away wouldn't help us answer that question.
We need to know asap whether this is going to work. At the same time, we need revenue to keep building.
💸 So here's what we're doing instead of freebies: offering discounts for our first users.
Not to convince you to use the platform, but as a way of saying THANK YOU — for trusting us enough to use our product first.
Thank you for betting on us, for believing that we can provide insights that will give you a significant edge in lower-to-middle market M&A.
And thank you for being open and honest about what you need, so we can learn how to serve you better.
I've never considered myself an indie hacker.
But I've embraced that mentality over the last year as we've built our M&A platform — and I've really enjoyed it!
It's insane that we can build a platform of this scope with no-code tools.
And yet, I also find it kind of crazy that despite how many great tools we have available now, pulling this off still requires a labyrinth of software that's all interconnected.
🛠️ Our tool stack for the M&A platform includes...
• AirTable (houses the data)
• Softr (powers the platform)
• Make (runs our automations)
• Stripe (for payments)
• ConvertKit (onboarding via email)
• ClickUp (team task management)
We also use some Zapier (legacy automations), WordPress (stories that live on our website), Google Forms (for Q&As), Loom (for onboarding), ProBackup (backing up AirTable), Feedly (to track deals) and more.
(Shout out to Cole, who coached me through the Softr build. None of this would be possible without his brain.)
Now that we're starting to add our first users and see the fruits of our labor, I'm realizing:
🤔 Working on this project has made me rethink what I want from my business.
I've always considered myself more of an operator; I'm good at arranging all the people and pieces so everyone can do their best work. I prefer to delegate most of the work to a team, so we can move faster together.
But getting deep into the weeds on this build has been so much fun. As a bonus, I'm intimately familiar with how the platform works and what's possible, which is helpful for our future roadmap, fixing bugs and more.
💡 Conventional advice says that as you grow as an entrepreneur, you should work more on the business rather than in it.
But what if getting your hands dirty brings satisfaction and joy?
I'm Alexis Grant, founder of They Got Acquired.
Our M&A platform helps founders, brokers and buyers pull comps for relevant businesses and identify good-fit buyers. It's the first tool of its kind for the "everyday" founder who expects to sell for 6, 7 or 8 figures. More details here: https://data.TheyGotAcquired.com
We got our first testimonial! And it's a strong one, from a founder who used our platform to identify potential buyers, grab their contact info and book calls.
She sold her business!
Wish I could attach a screenshot, but here's her message:
“Browsing past deals gave me a sense of what was possible for my business, and seeing the contact information all in one place also saved me a lot of time. I was able to book several meetings in a short timeframe and move quickly.”
-Nathalie Lussier, Founder who exited AccessAlly in 2024
We've got 1,000 deals in the live database!
And our process is going more smoothly now... it's taking me far less time personally to approve the deals because of the hard work of our data editor and researchers.
I'm aiming for 1,200+ deals before we put more paid users in. (Already have a few in there with specific needs that we could meet!)
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