Hey folks, I haven't been here in years and for some reason when I saw the email about closing the gates I remembered this place and decided to upgrade.
My deal is I have this 25 year-old lifestyle business (SaaS and web services), and it's been great, but I'm also in my late 50's now (well, maybe late, mid-50's), the biz was lifestyle while our daughter grew up and I wanted to be around a lot, not out there grinding and on the road 300-days a year like a lot of other tech founders I knew.
The kid is off to university this fall, the private equity people have been hounding me for years - finally took a few meetings and realized a few things about my situation:
With this in mind I started moving toward a steeper growth trajectory a couple years ago - brought in a CRO (we had never done any marketing or advertising before then) and we're also rolling up some of the competition who are hitting retirement age and exiting.
Have a couple other businesses now under the corporate umbrella, picked up a few pre-revenue micro-saas businesses that complement the core offerings quite well.
Also, under lockdowns I started a premium newsletter because I was always enamoured with the information publishing business - it was either that or go bonkers and it actually took on a life of its own, we have several properties now.
So that's where I'm at. When I remembered these forums I thought this is probably a great place to reconnect to for where I'm headed.
My deal is I have this 25 year-old lifestyle business (SaaS and web services), and it's been great, but I'm also in my late 50's now (well, maybe late, mid-50's), the biz was lifestyle while our daughter grew up and I wanted to be around a lot, not out there grinding and on the road 300-days a year like a lot of other tech founders I knew.
The kid is off to university this fall, the private equity people have been hounding me for years - finally took a few meetings and realized a few things about my situation:
- This is a great business, it was on a moderate growth trajectory out of sheer momentum, but it would actually be pretty tough to replicate
- The private equity guys are just trying to arb the spread between private, founder led companies (3X to 5X EBITDA) and public markets (10X and up)
- Any offers from private equity are for less than what I have amassed in retained earnings over the years (which I've kept 100% in Bitcoin since 2013)
- The business is the asset, not the massively eroding cash they're trying to get me to trade it for
With this in mind I started moving toward a steeper growth trajectory a couple years ago - brought in a CRO (we had never done any marketing or advertising before then) and we're also rolling up some of the competition who are hitting retirement age and exiting.
Have a couple other businesses now under the corporate umbrella, picked up a few pre-revenue micro-saas businesses that complement the core offerings quite well.
Also, under lockdowns I started a premium newsletter because I was always enamoured with the information publishing business - it was either that or go bonkers and it actually took on a life of its own, we have several properties now.
So that's where I'm at. When I remembered these forums I thought this is probably a great place to reconnect to for where I'm headed.
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