#203 - Why Dunder Mifflin Should Be a Real Paper Company & An Inside Look Into MicroAcquire With Andrew Gazdecki

i used to go to an atm machine and just put my card in and say print balance and just look at it and he's like i would just do that like every day yeah i feel like got the rude to world know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back but we have an interview with micro acquire they well we talk all about it then and and it's with hand it's with andrew he he sells startups basically on my required a marketplace for selling startups but we're gonna talk about some ideas first and catch up i i've hired someone jake mcdonald to do research i just sent you you of course hired like a guy who looks like an egg football player and jen he's your like business researcher guy well guys jack so here's the here's the secret which is sean has had a a little bit of help with the research for a very long time and and he his name's is ben and we've talked about ben ben's amazing and i got jealous and i said i wanna ben so i went and hired a ben and his name is jake i had ben or i had jake called ben to get all his research tips and ended did a really good job and i just sent to you sean my notion doc with all jake's stuff it's good right you see how he work at very thorough yeah he's he's wonderful so no we're gonna we're gonna be a little bit more well research although he doesn't start technically kinda till next week this is kinda we're still kinda getting used to things training wheels yeah yeah alright cool yeah so basically we're gonna do a couple ideas now and then andrew andrew's is gonna join andrew's is the founder mike require which is zillow for buying and selling companies so we bought one company on there i bought a basically we bought being and andrew bought a business for for this kid who was like a a college senior we bought we bought him a business to to go run just as an experiment and that was kind of the first time i used it so i think it's pretty cool he's gonna tell us about like his previous company which he sold for tens of millions how that deal came about how he structured it what he did with the money so we we were like alright you're gonna come on you gotta tell us what do he you what did you do with the money so he tells us about what he bought how he invested money his kind of like very boring investment strategy what and why he chooses to do that so yeah we're gonna talk about that with andrew but first a couple ideas alright so i wanna talk about this tweet i saw and it's a tweet from doug lu you know who that is yeah main street yeah ceo of main street founder main street and so he tweeted this thing out he goes isn't it crazy that bubba gum shrimp the restaurant chain does like two hundred three hundred million dollars a year in revenue when forrest gum the movie that it the brand is based on did like seven hundred million like lifetime box office so he's like the restaurant is that real restaurant has produced more money than forrest a sc ever did and i was i was like that's interesting and he's like why aren't there more of these and so i kind of like this idea which is basically you take ip intellectual property a brand from tv or movies and you license it so they did this for for bubble shrimp company and so what i i went and kinda looked up the backstory of this and the backstory is pretty simple it's like the movie happens and paramount is actually the one who did this so i thought i i just kinda figured that some entrepreneur went to them and got the brand but actually it was the opposite so from what i could read or what what i found paramount pictures goes and approaches this restaurant group called rusty pe and they're like hey we want you to create a brand based off the the brand of the movie because it's like a kind of a key plot point in the movie or whatever it's a key moment in the movie and and so some crazy things about this so first they do that it it generates you know two hundred million plus a year it gets it got bought by the fort as i think and and their their restaurant group but it this is also where you know they're actor chris pratt of course he was a waiter at bubble shrimp company and this is how he got discovered he was waiting on a table for this producer this is this director producer lady and he he's like oh i love that thing he made and she's like oh that's great blah blah and they're talking and she's like you know what like you know you wanna be an actor like yeah that's what i'm i'm just waiting tables do i wanna be an actor and that's how he got his break in the movie industry so we'll trying to learn about this just a hell of a lot of googling and my friend we don't all have buff researchers like jake some some of us gotta get our our heads dirty and go do some goo so let me tell you up real quick so do you know so you said the you met you were referring to the fort brothers right so there's two brothers been fort is the cousin yeah so i think he's like a distance cousin so i was gonna i've got correct you but you you know a story but till so there's this guy named till for tina so a lot of people probably don't know this you live in houston if you live in texas you certainly know who this guy is he's a pretty he's a pretty polarizing figure i think a lot of people who know him i think he's a huge asshole he prop he probably is an asshole i mean he's pretty cut through he owns this thing called land land i i've never even been to i think that's its own restaurant yeah it's like a steak chap i think but then he also owns bubba gum shrimp he owns i believe like j alexander's ruth chris steak steakhouse like a ton of like thirty to fifty dollar ahead dinner places so like not particularly fancy but upscale really upscale upscale franchises and he owns about six hundred of them but here's a fun fact i am pretty positive that land is the largest company in america that is owned by one person till for nikita owns one hundred percent of the business he owns literally every single share right around the beginning of covid they were doing something like five billion in revenue and like one point five to two billion in eb that's nuts whether the he owns the houston rockets now so that's that's why that's how he got a lot more famous was because when he buy the rockets people wanna know who they heck this guys so that's kinda crazy okay so so so back to kind of this idea real quick so a licensing ip so doug was basically saying he's like why don't more people do this and he's like why isn't there a paper company that's like the dun mi paper company or and you know and so there's a couple of so i went through and i kind of came up with a list of brands that i think could translate here's here's my list and then you tell me what you would do if you were approaching this or if you think this is a bad idea you can tell me i don't say it's a bad idea that's for sure here's my top five top five brands that i think you could license a credit company so dun bill from paper company yes the office is one of the most popular shows of all time it has like crazy reruns on netflix and there's no signature paper companies i like what is another paper company i have no idea so i think you you'd stand out alright duff beer from the simpsons i think duff beer could be a real beer maybe is a real beer somewhere but i think duff beer is is a as a potential one you don't have too many more you don't have another decade or two left with that one though yeah that one's sort of aging out won bar so anything with willy won i think you could i think willy won painted this picture of like wonder around the factory and this innovative stuff so i think you could take that brand and create cool novel like chocolates and candies out of it another one is if you're an ad agency could you go and actually like franchise or license the mad men brand for for that basically sterling cooper draper or whatever it is vapor price so the name of their agency you know why not why not use that if you're gonna start that agency versus anything else and then i started thinking about alright where else would i go for this and i think the opportunity here is like depending on what age bracket you go for but i think the nineties had a bunch of brands that were famous in the nineties for our age if you're basically thirty or forty right now there's a bunch of brands that have like zero kind of like equity value anymore but the brand names you grew up with it so you so it still means something to you and so we've talked about like warhead or jin jeans or no yeah like a bunch of these brands and i think the move here i think one interesting play here would be you don't actually have to create the product you could create so so another idea is to create the nostalgia licensing company and all it does is it goes and buys options on these brands and then it peddle them to existing makers of products and it just says hey why don't you use we have this portfolio of nostalgic brands you could choose one of these that fits kinda your product category or whatever and you could just be the middleman man basically you buy up buy cheap options on these brands and then you sell them at a kind of a retail price if you can and even if you get one or two hits i think the the business could be quite profitable so that's my random mess licensing idea i went to urban outfitters the other day because there's one near in my house and they had they had you know urban outfitters is pretty shitty but they have like tons of old t shirts and they it's like their their whole genre of t shirts was things that thirty year olds saw their dad's wear and and it was like t shirts that had like the old coo light logo the old bud budweiser logo i forget some of the other logos but like i i pretty remember blind skateboard boards or world industry skateboard or independent skateboard it it kinda like transcend a popular culture i thought but they had a lot of those things but anyway i'm a aboard that's amazing that bubble gum trip does that much revenue who and it's it's still owned by land i guess but dude it's a horrible restaurant i'm amazed at that it's like it's like an apple beans yeah well i dude one one of my first investors of any business i ever had was this guy who owned twelve apple bs and this guy was like you know i went to college at duke and durham which is a very pretty small city and this guy was like one of the wealthiest guys in durham and how he owned like i got ten to twenty out obese and i was like oh you could just do that and he's like yeah here's how it works i was like don't even tell me i i i don't i wanna be more successful than you but and i don't care i'm less successful to you is what i mean i just don't wanna own twenty apple b's like that can't be the end game here i had a friend who worked on their ad agency or his ad agency won that account apple apple bs and they gave him a thousand dollars to go spend at apple b's and told like to bring a friend and order just a ton of stuff so do you understand it and we ordered everything and i'm a and i'm a s i eat anything and i'll eat a ton of food like you like six months of food at out i'm an animal and he ordered we ordered so much stuff and i eat everything and anything and i got it in front of my plate and i was like you guys just microwave the steak and you like this is microwave it it was fucking awful shit alright what what so you wanna talk about that shit yeah what do you wanna talk about about it i just had one cool thing which was i don't know you saw i tweeted this out yesterday but there's a video of jeff bezos so i i thought this billionaire going to space it's like elon doing it and then you know jeff bezos stars blue origin or richard branson has virgin galactic and it's sort like oh okay cool like this is you know golf for you know old white billionaire basically it's like this is a that they're playing it's just a dick measuring contest is what it does yeah it's a things swing in thing and so and so i was like alright well as i kinda of wrote it off i was you know i think elon was in you know sort of first and genuinely for for bunch reasons that seemed real to me but you know definitely there's an ego component to it but what was cool was i found this interview with jeff bezos for the year two thousand so twenty one years ago and amazon at this time was like six years old so was definitely a thing but it wasn't amazon like today it was like you know it was a public company but it wasn't it wasn't wasn't a juggernaut not like it is now and i think they probably only had a couple of categories at that point and it wasn't like prime and doing video and doing all this other stuff and he's sitting down and they're like you know so so you know what what would you wanna do you know what would you do if you could do anything he's like if could do anything and he's like yeah he's was like you know i would love to explore space or space he's like yeah i would love to just explore space and you know he's like you know the space and they're like well you maybe you could do it someday yeah you're a smart guy but if you put your mind to it he's like well it's hard it's really hard and like but i think you could do it and he's like yeah you know it's harder than you think like we haven't made much progress for space and like in the last twenty years you know but the technology is like he's like maybe twenty years from now the technology will be there or maybe we could we could do it and then twenty one years sort of to the day he's in a spaceship going you know in his own rocket company going outer space so i thought that was pretty cool or maybe give it had a different level of respect for it because it's more like somebody having a vision and a dream twenty years ago when it wasn't cool to talk about it or say it and then actual it not just sort of like copy elon yeah so look i think that it is like a like a like a measuring contest a pissing match but i'm all and and at first you're like well that's lame these guys are so rich why don't you do something good but my opinion is this is good it's just so long term thinking that is actually hard see but i do think that we're gonna get good out of this and my opinion is when when rich people wanna give money and they want shit named after them like a building like a hospital wing or they wanna go to space and make a big deal out it and then like maybe in ten years we can capture some of that value of like alright they kinda paved the way at first a lot of people are like well that's bullshit you know fuck these guys but i'm like who gives a fuck that's such that's the that's the most fair trade on earth we name this building after you and you give us all of this honey hey i wrote your name on this yeah great thanks for the hundred mil yes it's like dude let them have that get it cares if they have an ego like you get the money so like in my opinion we should accept it as as good although for sure bezos said something kinda stupid the other day although i do like that he said it because it was kinda funny but at the same time yeah but at the same time i'm like oh you are asking for it so adam a had a great move so bezos flew up to space with his brother and this older woman i forget her name and a young kid i believe there was supposed to be another person on there but he had a scheduling conflict it's swear to god don't that he there's was a supposed to be someone else and there was a scheduling conflict so the guy couldn't make it and they go to space and they're up there throwing skittles that each other's face did you see that they're like doing play bezos he's like he goes hey guys i brought skittles that he brings out a a packet of skittles and he the keep throws was a skit at one person he goes and the guy catches it in your mouth and he go jeff goes let me try at jeff hates the kid the bag of skittles he goes throw i one in my mouth and thought that was kinda fun amazing amazing for skittles i'm surprised he's not like hey i i am amazon sugar circles yeah you know i'm throwing at each other you know like our own house brand so i thought that was kinda cute funny and he lands and he says i just wanna thank all of you workers at amazon as well as all you customers because you paid for this and he's he said that and i was like that's not the best way to phrase that then this morning i i shared this with you i saw business insider article which i think is i kinda love them but at the same time i i i can't stand some of those things they write but jeff bezos was actually an early investor in business insider and the business insider article was written in such a way that it's it was complaining about it and it said bezos flight to space was too cramped and far too short oh my gosh and and i was like oh my god you're completely like okay so a couple thoughts on what you just said that was amazing first of all the couple thoughts on what you just said i hate the haters okay first of all dan just looked it up the person who had the scheduling conflict paid twenty eight million for their seat so that's kind of insane i think their dad paid for their seat or something look up the story dan and tell tell me what what i'm missing here because wow you know how the if you're gonna hate someone don't hate the billionaire who built amazon and then reinvest his money into like exploring outer space hate the trust fund kid who paid twenty eight million for his ticket and and then no show because he you know was doing a tiktok to dance answer something i don't know who i don't know the story behind this but that's kind of ridiculous the i'm so tired of people just like hating billionaires random i'm team billionaire is what i'm trying to say you know people are so dumb they're like why are you wasting money on this do you know when they like do this like when you pay for when you when you fund a space company you're pay you know pete that money doesn't just like go into space and just vanish yeah i think paid george and has like three thousand employees i think when he the money it's going into people's pockets and so it's funding jobs it's funding you know for a technology development and a lot of great technology we have came because of what nasa did for the space program and so you know one of the sill things is thinking that the money just somehow gets vacuum in outer space the second thing is just don't be that guy it's not even that i'm team billionaire i'm team not the guy who's hating on billionaires all the time this happened to actually a second ago club house tweeted out oh like we are open for everybody now there's no weight list or something like that we got a new logo and all the stuff and you know i'm i'm obviously not you know the club house cheerleader leader right so so don't get me wrong but the very first comment the top comment is open for everybody but you don't even have captions on the live audio so it's not open for deaf people and i'm like okay like you know fair point that it's you know and that doesn't have like full accessibility but like that's the top comment that's the first comment like this company has to provide you live audio text captioning otherwise like fuck them i guess it's just the hate culture is so annoying to me and it's so weak and spine to be just like a you know like the the top comment just like oh yeah you did this great thing but you know but whatever and i know that's gonna sound hip critical because i wrote of like a giant thread hating in club house well it it wasn't exactly hating but that's gonna be the easy criticism i wasn't trying to hate i was basically saying what i think some of the like why i think they're not gonna why it's not gonna work out the way they think some of the like strategic product problems i just wrapped it in a funny even you you explicitly said i hope none of this comes true yeah i wanted to win i think it's cool when pitch win but like you know i think people are missing the boat anyways i guess i'm i'm an culture and the the easiest way to find it is go read any like response to anything that elon or jeff bezos sharing these people like people who are doing great things in the world and have won the game the money game they attract this like really annoying class of haters and and i actually think you should rephrase it i'm not team billionaire what i'm team is i'm on team people who who set audacious goals and get after it i'm on do your thing if that's your money do your thing and let me let you do your thing i'm gonna do my thing why why do i need to worry about your thing yeah i have respect for someone who says they're gonna write a book this year and they write a book or someone who says they're gonna lose fifty pounds and they lose fifty pounds dollars shot yeah i'm on team you set what you're gonna do and you actually achieve it and it just so happens that one of the big outputs of business is money and that's a great way to measure it but when i look at something like sean parker before he got involved facebook and before he actually became wealthy sean parker started naps naps a lot of people and it probably was the case it it was unethical and he actually it was a it he did not succeed financially because of it i've always admired that because it was an eighteen year old who just revolutionize something and totally caused a shit storm and gotten the thick of it and made something interesting and so i'm in favor of people who do that and oftentimes those are people who build a hundred thousand person company called amazon but yeah so i i would actually say if you are a billionaire hate out there i think you should actually rephrase it i mean there are people who are billionaires and i think are fucking awful people and i and i don't want them to exist but i enjoy seeing people who put their their stamp on the world and i think that's what we should celebrate not just defaulting to hate the way some people do yeah or or you know it is just in general like how somebody else spends their money that's their that's their that's their business right like i think elon right now is living in like a fifty square foot like pop up house or something you you've seen this he's living in like a a shipping container or something he sold his house he sold his cars he's living in a goddamn like fifty square foot shipping container and uses all you know he put his entire like he whatever he made out of zip he put all he poured it all in went into debt to try to make tesla and spacex happen and like when they win you know he gets rewarded for it but even if he decided to do nothing and never work again and just wanted expansions mansions and butler cool that's is your money do your thing decide you know criticizing other people for how they spend their money it really all that says i wouldn't spend my money that way and i think that's a fair thing to say but i think in most cases the people who are doing this they would do they would spend their money you in the same ways or worse and for the record if i could if i could trade spots with elon musk if someone's said you could trade spots automatically and by way you'll still be the same age that you are i wouldn't i wouldn't do it yeah i what that works not in a million so i trade spots with that guy but i think it's also but he's doing for him good do your think alright here's something of the opposite end of the spectrum have you ever heard of bill's lemonade no alright so go to this website just type in bill's lemonade this is a little fascinating business a friend kinda tipped me off to this and i can't have it names i don't know if they want their name said but basically this is this is a no build didn't and tell me this is like like a business in a box and this business does about five million a year roughly and what they do is they just sell you a look kind of like a course and the materials to start your own lemonade stand not for kids but for like adults like you could start this outside of a of a concert venue or a ball or like at your like local like neighborhood square or whatever and what they do is they basically say hey you can you can here's a business in a box if you have the ability to grab this bottle and shake it you can become a lemonade stand owner and you can make this much money here's how it works and you can download their like little brochure which shows the unit economics it's like every lemonade cost of dollar twenty to make that's your cost and you're gonna sell that for you know four dollars five dollars six dollars depending on your location so you're gonna have you know seventy percent margins on this thing and if you could sell x many per day you're gonna make this much money and they basically just sell you this business in a box it's a very simple business and bills lemonade on the other side they don't take any royalties or franchise fees they say you're gonna get our brand we're gonna send sell we're send you the machine the frozen you know lemonade machine the the shaker the the cups the everything and all you do is you pay for the materials and the like information the course on how to do it and i just have this is kind of a fascinating idea and i feel like you could do this for a whole bunch of other a whole bunch of other like industries as well like whether it's you know snow cones or ice cream trucks or pest control or something like that like i just feel like there's a whole bunch of business in a boxes you could make and if you did that maybe you could even roll these up into one thing which is like hey you don't want a job you want your own business gonna get you a hundred thousand dollars a year and you'll be able to kinda control the hours you work and you're gonna work for yourself are are there people out there who want that trade as a franchise yes and then basically you just say great would you like the lemonade one would you like to run drive an ice cream truck would you like to do this or that and we own all these brands it's sort of like what one eight hundred got junk has where they have the the trucks you can drive the franchise you could buy to be a junk collar or the house painter or there i figured forgot they have three or four of them but i feel like you could create a a a mini version of what a hundred got junk with this dude this is awesome i'm looking at this and i'm trying to find there was a guy when i started my hotdog dog stand there was a guy in tennessee who was doing this exact same things for hotdog dog stand so you'd give them five grand and he would send you everything you needed along with the state rules and things like that any need it for hotdog dog stands bill lemonade is is better because you could spend fit i don't even know what the price is like a couple hundred dollars on here and i'm looking at it now this is pretty badass ass you and and these guys have been doing this forever by the way i'm looking at their i've seen this brand a long time ago yeah this is badass ass and they just have like you can buy all your supplies from there i recognize these cups too by the way right i've seen this thing second thing of baseball game or something but yeah so i think this is kinda of interesting another version of this i think you could do is in the services industry and so like here's like another one which is like let's say corporate shots so i once saw facebook ads so the profile picture i have for this podcast this like kind of like when i'm trying to make this like ominous look it's because i saw facebook ad of a really high quality head shots and like a striking heads chat and it was like i can make i can take a photo of you that will look like this like you can level up your kind of like game as far as your brand your linkedin your website whatever it is you know it's three hundred bucks and like i shoot in you you know in bay area and i i i'll come do a shoot for you and you get to pick your photos us whatever and i just remember thinking oh that's really smart like i never seen facebook ads this is somebody i've never ever seen a photographer doing facebook ads for this but i feel like you could do the same thing here where you could basically sell somebody a business at a box that says hey maybe maybe photos a little too high skill but you could say like any kind of like service and you could say great you're gonna be the service provider in your local area and i'm gonna run the facebook ads country wide and then whenever there's a lead for your area i'm just gonna dispatch it to you you just go fulfill it and it's a business at a box that way great you wear you wear our uniform you know you could do geek squad this way like tech help or something like that you could do it for the thing we talked about with like setting up home home office and home like office video studio what i would do is i would do it for taking so when we run when i rented it out my place so i took pictures and i put it online and i didn't get that much love and then i i went online and i found a photographer to come and take pictures for me and i paid her two hundred dollars and i got way more traction and right my my wife works at airbnb and i think she has told me i don't remember if who told me of i think it was her that told me that the number one difference between a winning airbnb and a losing airbnb is the pictures and and yeah i definitely think you could have airbnb photos dot com or whatever it is and that be and you take twenty five dollars for every lead that you send a photographer and you could totally crush it that way right so i like these little business little box ideas is so this is like you know the opposite of the billionaire space race this is the bill lemonade making five million dollars selling lemonade kits to people which i is cool there was this company called i cracked i cracked was started by a friend of mine a aj four it went out it either it was acquired but i don't think they even kept the brain anymore and what they did was they actually raised like twenty million or thirty million dollars from a recent h and what i cracked did was they were doing this for iphone repair and so i guess to switch a an iphone screen on your phone it takes only like a few hours of training anyone could figure it out after if i just showed you how to do it and what they would do is they would send you leads and they would take a small cut of the charge so they would charge like a hundred fifty dollars to fix your phone and maybe they would take twenty dollars then in order to get leads from them you had to buy iphone parts from them and they would sell you iphone parts and they're doing something like thirty million dollars a year in e comm sales i don't know how much service revenue they're making but just selling right screens they're were doing like twenty or thirty million dollars in sales for the service yeah that's crazy what what do you think went wrong with the business i think they raised too much money and probably spent way too much money on ads they i i'm not sure if it was quite venture scale they got to like twenty or thirty million in sales and i don't know if they could figure out how to get bigger than that and they try to launch more stuff and probably lost focus gotcha but there's other services out there that are just like them that do like thirty forty fifty million dollars a year in revenue also a aj my friend who's the founder he's a wild man and i think that he had like crazy aspirations of like having a drone come and drop off stuff like things like that and i don't know if that industries cut out for that but i do think you could have a nice company that makes thirty forty in sales on this episode of vision gone wrong he had a healthy business and wanted to to change every drones drop off your iphone yeah he was also the one who like paddle boards to work every day or something right like i just need do something crazy like that yeah he had a small little ding boat like a little tiny boat he i forget what they called it but it was it was it's super small like the small like the size of like a little baby desk but he had like an engine on it and he would ride that from where's the oracle office out there like twenty minutes away i forget in california but he he would ride it down the bay to his office at south park and soma yeah i think that's awesome it sounds like a super interesting guy i love it yeah he's crazy alright so do are we gonna get to the episode or the let's do the interview now alright so you're gonna hear andrew and let us know what you think andrew so how do you pronounce your last name ga d my friends call me ga ga alright go ahead sean sorry i never had a cool nickname or friends for that matter but alright so you did that you did your like micro require funding announcement thing yesterday i'm curious does that do anything so you know we're seeing this a lot more where it's like all the famous people on twitter and tech like did something they also are promoting something me and sam have been a part of a few of these what's the result is that like meaningful or is it just like a feel good moment or does it do anything for you yeah so you're your question i would i would say both i mean really yeah the goal of that fundraiser raise was i wanna build my crew part with the starter community and so just having everyone involved in that for feedback and just you know really letting everybody know that this is kind of you know something to watch so good brand value added and then yeah we saw like two point five million impressions on twitter so for those listening micro acquire so andrew you've had a couple companies you sold one recently like a couple years ago which was sounds like a a home run for you but micro acquire although you guys have some really big aspirations right now if we had to like kinda dumb it down it's a newsletter that people pay to get access to and that content is interesting startups that you've vetted and are now for sale that's like the current iteration right well it's not just a news newsletter right like i go to the website don't get i even look at the news newsletter it so it's a mark it's like a marketplace like if you wanna go buy a house you go to zillow you see a bunch of houses for sale i barely read the newsletter okay now my who's who's who's the normal user is it sam or me it sounds like sean so it's a marketplace so you can sign up create profile list your startup up in you know literally minutes then i have a team on the back end that basically creates like a sim completely free we have a streamline streamlined process that does that and then once you go for people don't know it's basically a document that outlines basic details that buyers would wanna know like revenue how much time are you spending on customer support what is the tech stack who your competitors why are you selling asking price market opportunity i'll just basically a pitch deck but more geared towards like i'm selling the business and after you go live on micro require are you thousand dollars worth of subscribers so they pay like two hundred and ninety nine dollars a year right yeah two ninety we're at like six seventy five thousand okay and so the i mean you have this grand vision here but in doing this you i mean there's a what did you describe it did you say zillow for startups is that how you described it once zillow for m and a basically what we wanna build is it yeah so what we wanna build is we wanna build a global and modern m and a marketplace right now the whole m and a marketplace is fragmented and we're looking to consolidate it and really bring in everyone who's involved in m and a transactions like when you get on the other side you know you have investment bankers you have an m and a advisor on the lower end you have business brokers even just people for due diligence or accounting or you know potential wealth management if you're successful in your acquisition so we're gonna be really building a community of advisors that startups can hire but then on top of we're gonna build able tools to make acquisitions super easy we we bought a business for somebody on here so we did a what we call a micro spa which is basically your idea andrew you basically tweeted at me or something like that and we and i was like this is a great idea what we did was we said hey let's put up five grand and into a a holding of blank shell companies so we put get five grand to an entrepreneur and then we'll find them a business to buy on micro acquire we'll go vet fifty deals hundred deals and we'll go find a business for them to buy and we'll go buy a micro business and the other people out that was such a cool idea that somebody was like oh i'm in for five i'm in for five i'm in for and all of a sudden we had a hundred grand i think the the total amount was like eighty five to a hundred grand that we ended up raising from random people on twitter to help this entrepreneur daniel buy his first business and said like he was gonna go get a job and then it's like okay instead you can you can buy this shopify app that's producing revenue that's profitable today and and let's go go by this thing and so that's what we ended up doing which i think is pretty cool and that experiment is is still running so the transaction closed he's figuring out ways to grow it he's sending his a little like investor updates it's awesome and i feel i i called it at the time i said is like when you go to buy like cake mix and it's like just add water this is a like just add hustle or here's a business it's here's the code already written the business is already running revenue is already there and all you need to do is grow it and then you just need to add that hustle into to grow this thing yeah yeah and we did we actually did one with the hustle and we gave a we did the same thing i don't remember who came first but we did the same thing and the guy who wanted it is a dentist here in new york and he's offering to give me free braces as a thank you gracious actually it's four hero he was like yeah i'm still working with him on a finding and business he's he's being pretty picky but we'll get we'll get something good but yeah he's good to be picky he was like what commit for a teeth cleaning retainer braces let me know i i would love to thank you he he's he's he's awesome we've been chatting almost weekly just going over businesses he's interested in i get my opinion and most of them are like no that one's like too complex or something like that but sean i wanna talk about that that deal that we did you have no fucking idea how work that was like i literally had to get not like all like fifty emails come through a dude i we did a legit like like you know we formed a new inc and so a new corporation to purchase and transfer the assets into we you know created stock agreements for twenty plus investors so this was harder than the fundraiser raise that i i just did by a mile and it took like three weeks the legal bill for me it was like fifteen k and i spent like sixty fucking hours it it was totally worth it dan is amazing i i meet with it sounds sounds like it not be working well well well here's the thing is it opened my eyes to a new opportunity for micro require as well which is there's all these amazing operators that don't have capital but again there's so many businesses on micro that you know they're built by builders they aren't looking to scale a business they're not familiar with sales and marketing and so we see an opportunity to potentially allow them to raise capital from other investors just like we did with dan like micro spec specs are kinda getting a bad name so we might need to brand on that but yeah so like if you if you're like you own an agency and you see a product for two million bucks and you have tens of thousands of customers you can easily sell this product too we allow you to basically present that to other investors inside micro and this is just like a napkin an idea this isn't like a guaranteed thing but streamlining that whole process that we went through sean and like that i think could be a really really interesting opportunity we're thinking about that a little bit but by the way the the thing you're describing is it's like it's basically what angel listed did so angel was like great we're a marketplace to connect startups and investors and they started by doing that and then they were like okay cool what else can we do well startups need employees so we'll we'll create a jobs division and then they're like well some of these entrepreneurs wanna be investors but they're not investors they they don't have their ability to raise capital you know it's very hard to raise a fund okay we'll create like rolling funds and we'll create sp and we'll create one click ways for now you to invest instead of just being a an entrepreneur and so they created what's total them a market network which is basically people have heard of a network network just a bunch of like let's say let's say there's ten dots on a screen and they're connected by like little lines that's a network and all the dots do their own thing and a market network is where it's ten dots on a screen and there's lines connecting all of them but there's money signs going in between each right so like on facebook you transfer likes to each other you transfer comments to each other messages but on angel list when you hire someone for a job you give them money when you invest in somebody you give them money when you raise money from for your rolling fund somebody giving you money and so there's every transaction instead of just being a message is money and so if you've never heard this concept before it's pretty important one and in terms of business go go research market networks james carrier and the n nfl team write a lot about this they're kind of the only ones i see writing about this but i think it's a pretty important idea and then once you know oh there's such a thing as a market i work then when you see a business that structure as a market and network work you know it's a good opportunity either to start it or to invest in it that's why i invest in micro require because i was like oh this is this is a market network great i've been looking for market networks to invest in this is a good one yeah so i just wanted to kinda like throw that little theory and if if nobody knows that that term and one of the reasons why we wanted you to come on andrew was i wanna hear about the micro acquire story but i wanna hear particularly two things in this order the first is yeah i want you to go through some of the coolest startups that you have sold or are selling on the platform some of the insights that you've gotten from them and and and and things like that and then also what we should talk about at the end is you sold your last company flights twenty maybe thirty or forty million dollars i forget the exact amount like a a pretty significant amount and life changing amount and you you you told me some crazy stuff that you do with the money i would definitely wanna talk about that but can we start with that one i wanna i wanna hear that one so yeah so before micro car you start a company you sell it for ballpark ish give me a rough range or rhymes with thirty million but you know what do you how did you describe this let's just assume i have you know low eight figures i i candidly don't like to specifically say how much i sold my company for i think it's a weird flex and it's hard to do without feeling like you're bragging so let's just pay it at low a figures but yeah the story there i started company in college i was twenty one it was a no code app builder so was a saas company only raised a hundred thousand dollars for that business ran it for about eight years grew it to over ten million annual recurring revenue employees was over a hundred there was a lot of moving parts of that business we lot those people overseas yeah so you have a hundred employees that or you won't make a lot of profit and you're under paying people yeah so it was it was a make sure of both not under paying people but we probably half the team was in house so our entire engineering team was probably overseas but the way it started was again i'm not a technical founder at all i don't know how to write code at all and when i tell people that they they're kinda wait what but i was in chico and there's no engineers in chico but i just went on up upwork i previously had a job board before that that i also sold and that was a seed money for business apps but found just randomly found an engineer in china his name is raymond chester i'm so friends with him today and he was just a badass ass like he could have been a cto at a silicon valley company and i paid him well treat him well i consider like a brother and considering i didn't know how to hire other engineers or spot good engineers i knew how to manage and that's one tip for people that aren't technical is you know i always recommend don't learn how to code learn how to manage engineers properly and so i ended up just hiring all friends so we ended up having like a house for them and they had like twenty engineers in china and we had engineers in russia we had one in we had a group we had a qa team in the ukraine so you're you're big big communist fan i i i guess you could say though i mean not not by design but you know we we did not discriminate yeah was your customer service based out of cuba or what no no so customer service was in house but we did have twenty four seven customer service so we had some customers for reps in brazil france some other some other areas but customers fast forward to good so you you you build the business and it's good ten million in recurring revenue you you you decide to sell it why did you decide to sell it and then how did you sell it so i was so initially i i tried selling it when i was twenty six i hired investment bank and this kinda leads into micro here as well we did you know a full road show ended up getting an offer for thirty million ended up turn turning down that offer we also had an offer from a strategic company one of the you know big do yourself website companies you could probably guess it i was young i felt i still had gas in the tank and so i wanted to push for you know a larger exit after we went through that process just kept running the business kept growing the business kept saying focus on executing which is the number one way to really sell a business is have a good business so went back to you know executing with my team and then just started getting tired that's the short answer just you know managing them many people monday comes around it's like hey can we talk it's like i get it like you wanna switch jobs like please just you can just email me like i'll write your reference like i love you like i please i don't need to hear like you know we're good or like i'm saying you know it it it just became so much management and i love you know building businesses and the idea each the way the transaction went down was the private equity firm used capital had previously reached out to us i think it was like five years ago or something like that like prior to the investment bank and i know this because during due diligence we had to share all the nda that we had signed and i found him from used capital and i was like oh we've met before nice to meet you again you know let's let's see if we can make this happen they gave me fantastic terms it was in all cash transaction we did a a stock purchase so i benefited from qs bs which if you're looking to sell a business look up qs bs you pay zero federal taxes on up to the first ten million so i saved i don't know what i saved i gotta ask my accountant but i actually didn't even know about qs bs if you're i had qs usps if you're in california it's about fifteen percent so fifteen percent on ten million you save one point five million dollars or it it might be even a little bit more but around one and a half million dollars in savings no it's actually twenty it's more twenty so so i so i saved like two million on taxes and i paid thirteen state well yeah you my bad i i'm an idiot i totally i picked the wrong the wrong one i for sean i i'm calling you the wrong now on for purpose man because you put your name love what your my name there was levels to that joke got you back got you back but anyways so we structured a a really favorable deal for me so we had two million cash on hand which we added onto the purchase price so we had an agreed purchase price and i said i want a stock deal no earn out i'd love for you to buy the cash and the reason for buying the cash is they buy it basically they just put a 1x x multiple onto the purchase price and so typically if you are acquired you know two million cash and the bank account that is dividend back out to shareholders and your your taxed at forty percent so we got q bs on that two million cash quick transition in terms of me leaving the business so i was out of the business in ninety days that's great and what'd you do you said you know you bought a house what what's the mindset so you go from basically before that how much money did you have because you were just paying yourself a salary out of the business right like you didn't like you had you were at sears selling and tvs it's not like you had a bunch of money before that you're running the business you probably were paying yourself some salary but probably nothing fancy and then all of a sudden you come into a bunch of money so describe that transition and what you did what you did with it yeah so i i was okay before the acquisition i i was buying ethereum at like twenty i remember like the day ethereum came on the coinbase base and the etf was coming out like approval denial i was like bitcoin going down let's just move it in this new thing called ethereum so i bought a bunch of ethereum so i have like let's just call like you know high six figures so i wasn't like paying debt you know as soon as we got acquired but right when you go through an acquisition you have a closing date and we had a circle closing date and then all of a sudden there's gigantic amount of money just hits your bank account and you're like what the fuck did i just do that was my feeling i was i was actually kinda scared i was like is this legal like did i just sell drugs like that like you know some people like think like you just celebrate and you're like like i i made it like yeah so i was like the opposite i was like you know candidly i was like chain smoking like a jewel i was like holy shit this is insane you know because you know i grew up poor like you know my dad died when i was six i grew up in detroit i moved to saying clement many when i was you know like five i grew up knowing like what it's like like really struggle for money so going from like that to like an absorbent an amount where you know i'm not flying private or anything like that like i'm not like ball and like some other people you guys talk to but i'm comfortable like i was set like i can literally buy a house cash i could you know put money into something really boring and just you know watch it grow over time so it just it was a life changing moment but my reaction was holy shit this is insane and i hope you know they don't come back and say hey we found something wrong to do what yeah and the business when we do when i did my deal when we did my deal i remember i called the bank ahead of time and i let them know i'm like there's gonna be like a a big deposit and i don't want you to think that like i'm doing something illegal like is there like a a check mark you need to put next to this like i called you i told you like this is normal and they're like no like it's fine and they're like how much do you expect to come in it and i i remember being on the phone like i whispered it i was like i didn't want wendy did do i like it's like around this number and they're like i can't hear you and i i remember saying it again and i had a and i wasn't a little bit more and and i it i it was uncomfortable i was like this is kinda weird saying this and they're like yeah that shouldn't be a problem at all and i'm like well you you don't sound impressed like service shit well we're hired you said sam i i i did this thing for a minute so the for the first thing i did was i hired a a wealth manager to move all the money out of a my bank account you just bought bonds i knew nothing about bonds and then all of a sudden i'm like why is there more money and they're like yeah that's how bonds used to work at least but when i went into wire the money so my office was in la jolla in san diego was kinda like the beverly hills of san diego the guy was like this is the biggest wire i have ever done like can we triple triple triple triple quadruple triple check this and i was like really like the h like there's like ten million dollar houses everywhere like yeah this the base one like i'm nervous and so we wired that over it's a lot of money but what i used do i i was i was just gonna say one other funny thing i do i would go in i this is kinda like a like a lame mood but i used to go into the bank a few times before that wire and i'd pull out like a twenty dollar bill i'd be like hey can i get like twenty bucks out just so they could see my account like like yeah i just need twenty bucks and then they look they and i'd i'd come in looking like this i'm like twenty nine because i was twenty nine when i sold the business so like you know i'm gonna do some immature stuff like i'm not gonna be a professional like you know and i i i you know i i hadn't been married i didn't have a kid at the time so you know it it it it was party time at that at that moment yeah i'd go into the bang i'm building hey just say we was i was gonna say similarly we had this scott james hong who created hot not on the podcast he said the same thing he goes i used to go to an atm machine and just put my card in and say print balance and just look at it he's like i would just do that like every day for like the first like you know week that it that it happened and just what he just wanted to print out the balance on this little paper rip it up and then like go about his day it just made him happen so on this podcast we've had a lot of really we've had a lot of really successful people we've had some people who have sold things for over a billion dollars we've had people have sold things for hundreds of millions of dollars we've had people who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars this is all a huge amount of money but i have found myself when we talk to these incredibly we just had da mesh on the podcast and i was like da mesh is wasn't it crazy i could see your like your hubspot shares you know right now you're worth like nine hundred million dollars that's wild and so you kinda like getting this bubble of like oh yeah it's like you know twenty ten million whatever thirty million whatever the numbers are we're like oh that's like you know that's a nice start you know but then like when you when you think about one person having that amount of money particularly when they're young when they're twenty nine that's a that's a that i i ran the math day had a friend that sold his company and he's thirty two now and he's got over fifty million dollars liquid and i was like dude this is crazy that you have this and we did some research and we found out that there's like six hundred americans who have that much money or more who are also in around that same age it's like dude that's crazy like one of the you know to almost top five hundred richest young people in america that's a an astounding amount of money and that's kinda like what you had andrew it it it's an astounding thing and you talk about like well i can't play private you you i can't fly private but it's like yeah yeah yeah you can it you really can i mean you're like incredibly wealthy if you have that amount a money at at that young of an age the age factors a really big deal here i i i agree because i mean so moving in do deals wanna hear what i bought i told you a chair so the first thing my friends call me kinda like like like a white rapper kinda guy like i love hop like i love fast cars i love big houses yeah detroit man if it was an m and m and b me so i bought a big ass house cash two point five million san mateo run the golf course i see like literally deere run around in my backyard and and i recommended that to you sam because it's like it's you work so hard and when you come from nothing just having i wanted something that i could just be proud of like you come over and you're like damn you don't get this with a regular job and i'm like yeah you don't you need to start a business and i'm happy to talk to you about that because so that's like all i talk about is startups and stuff like that and then also for my wife just for you know supporting me through the years and you know we wanted to start a family so bought a beautiful home and then i bought a c sixty three amg like usa sam but i bought a older one for the yeah bad car for the naturally ass end it was my second one i wanted just like a newer one of less miles and that's that's all i bought and that's pretty that's pretty much it just and then i put the rest into just like really boring index funds like vanguard dimensional i don't i barely injured us i mean so i did the exact i do the same thing and spam the same you you guys dude i did the white person thing to do when you get rich yes i got a black mercedes black amg mercedes i think technically mine is faster than yours just is but i i like i looked it out oh my god but they're both cool they're both cool i got a house i didn't get nearly as fancy but a nice house and then i also put almost every single thing into a vanguard total market index fund and sean and a few other people just mer like kinda kinda mock me like there if they don't mock me i i sean kinda rolls his eyes he's like why aren't you taking risk and i'm like i don't know this seemed pretty risky you and i are the same same type of thing i don't know why sean and all these guys been hang out like i don't know why they like buy stocks all the time i'm like what are you doing go like what do i don't even know how to like what do mean do you do fine it's through a world casino i you know like whatever well you gotta have some fun with i've never sold the stock and i don't and and these guys are doing it like day sharing their screenshots and i'm like you're nuts i think that's nuts i i i guess i guess my view is like what what more money do you need like the way i view it and if you do the math like you know ten percent marker returns compounded for forty years so when you're seven you're set like you're gonna be ball when you're seven you're gonna be like rich just like like you're gonna die with that money and so like for me i don't like checking the stock market i don't care to i don't wanna understand it i no longer own any bitcoin or ethereum like i have the most boring investment strategy so people listening to this that are like in real estate or you know stocks or probably like this kid's an idiot but i like waking up without any money problems i don't have a mortgage i don't care if my stock portfolio goes down like it's just there till seventy it's a set plan i'm not devi from it but i guess for me money buys like just peace of mind like i just i have no worries and so you know tying in into micro require it's like i'm comfortable taking big swings because you know i have a win under my belt comfortable with everything i have i have no material wants outside the lamb lamborghini eu i'd take that if i could afford it or actually get it approved by my wife who's very very cost conscientious italian but other than that i mean you know just love building businesses and that's all i focus on and that's i think that's a key sam is like you know when you go boring it allows you to focus on what you're really really good at rather than trying to like man stocks like investing in startups like what script doing today like who's this new i don't know whatever it's like zuckerberg zuckerberg wearing the same gray shirt every day he just removed one whole thing he needs to think about which is like fashion how i look what i'm gonna wear how i'm gonna address that day and just lets us brain focus on the one thing he wants it to focus on that day so i i wanted to ask you i wanna wrap this up because we're gonna basically use this as like kinda half the episode then half the gonna be a different r but i wanted to ask you because you're seeing a bunch of businesses on micro require every day what you know this is the podcast of business ideas what ideas or niche niches or spaces are you seeing interesting things give us two or three ideas that people should be looking at or spaces that people could be building in that you see opportunity that you would do if you were kind of like you know twenty two again or whatever yeah definitely well for i'm gonna take the cop out answer and i would start with something you're passionate in i think that's huge like if you're not passionate about it there's someone who is and they're gonna just beat you but i think what's really open my eyes about micro require every day i wake up and i get to see the most interesting start ups i was telling someone earlier today like there was a a rabbit breeding company for farmers to subtract like when they make other rabbits or something like that make like a million years something like that like super niche and profitable and i'm like and it's a saas business it's legit probably not like the bet i would not recommend buying that business it's not for me but it just is an example of just how broad i think the future of of the small business economy is gonna be online digital and profitable people who used to want to start like a restaurant or like a plumbing business or something like that those young entrepreneurs are gonna be looking to start a niche saas company or a niche e commerce company like categories that we see a lot of activity in our obviously shopify saas applications lots of communities even newsletters like kind of everything online and like it goes as deep as like we sold this company that was a marketing automation platform for just specific types of dentists and they were making an absorbent amount of profit sold within like a couple weeks but that's kind of where i think things are going is we're gonna have a few really really large companies you know venture going into you know tons of tons of different companies and we're gonna see just probably a handful of winners is my guess and then we're gonna see a long tail and the calculating the someone put this out where you know you have a two point five percent chance of becoming a unicorn when you raise venture capital so those are my odds i'd probably increased it to twenty just with my my my luck my friends call me gas luck that's nickname i have but for the other ninety seven point five percent there's micro require you know if you be build to business and you know you wanna sell for you know a small the life changing amount you're not getting a tech runs you can do that but yeah trends just very very niche very very focused i think is the key and those are the businesses i get most excited about and then if you're looking to buy a business there's a ton that just are built by really really talented and engineers great for ag acquire i'm seeing tons of those and then also for people that are experience in sales and marketing you wanna just like we did with dan sean where we just let's hustle on the same try to grow it that's also a huge upper opportunity let's name a few specific ones you have this one started by this guy named arson neuro off i know how to say out atlas last name because cab cab cab made off i didn't realize that that was a common last name but so this is a b b or can you actually talk about this i'm looking at the email a b b software company corporate gifting i don't even know what that is twenty million in arr three million in profit it looks like right am i reading this right yep yeah so all those are private so i can't name the names the one that what you're viewing at the top is a podcast that it did so our soon sold res pack for half a million on micro require about a month i believe it was like a developer abi api tool there's over a thousand plus startups on my require right now so i i don't have my i'm not that smart my memory is not that good but i keep going yeah no i oh i i i'm looking at one of the ones you had listed here on this idea sheet i guess so that one wasn't one that you sold so i just wanna hear about a specific one a a few specific ones that you've sold as well as like maybe a few specific ones where you saw this and you're like oh my gosh i could've have i should have started this company or like this is amazing i i if people knew that these types of things they existed they would totally be starting things like that okay so i'll talk about the ones that i know i have permission to talk about one was a company called push engage it's sold to an individual named she he runs a firm called ass automotive and he basically is doing a wordpress type roll up and he looks for yeah we we've we've talked about talked about wp get around here a bunch so she an awesome guy that acquisition was in the seven figures that one closes in like she had me fast i wanna close in like two weeks or something like that i don't i don't know the exact details but the founders was happy you ci i was happy another one would be median which sold for a quarter million three hundred i don't know the exact amount alpha the top head but it's basically like a live chat video tool so if you log onto to a website instead of going to like crisp chat like this intercom button i'm seeing right here you can just click it and then like my video pops up and you're like hey like and then i can take control of your this was probably my favorite business because you can you know add it for sales team support teams and anytime someone has any questions and it was they had really really large enterprise agreements with some big big names that i can't say because they're under nda but public companies that you would recognize and that one was interesting another one the marketing automation platform for dentists that one's sold really fast the i did another one with a company called x mark clock which is like a time management solution for construction workers and the guy was based in europe and he sold for over a half a million again less than thirty days all cash transaction i'm just trying to think of the podcast that have done there i mean there's so there's so many so supposed to me like i i think what people should do is if you end up going on micro require i've done this in in a couple of different platforms basically you could learn a lot just by checking out the different businesses so even if you're not ready to buy get the premium subscription or wherever so you can read the like actual details about the businesses and that's like a you know like a three hundred dollar mba that you can give yourself because you're gonna discover all these different niches the patterns you're gonna see which businesses sell for more which businesses sell quickly it'll really shape your thinking so that's kind of my recommendation is whether if you're buying obviously you know it's no brainer but even if you're not buying i think this is great way to learn i've done this i'm looked at probably two hundred online businesses for sale just with the only intention of like learning yeah and that's what that's how my brain just sort of collects a bunch of data so i would recommend doing that but we should we should wrap it here because we're gonna have to do one more segment after this but andrew thanks for coming on man thanks best of luck with mike require excited to to be on board with this thing and yeah thanks for thanks for sharing the story i think people are gonna do it yeah i appreciate you guys have me on and yeah so for m and a coming up appreciate you guys supporting sweet thank you i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back