Startup Acquisition Stories

Have you ever fantasized about quitting your job and living off savings until you built a successful business or ran out of cash? SaaS builder Kamil Zowczac nearly accomplished both at the same time. While living in Bali off the money he’d earned as a project manager at a startup, Kamil taught himself to code and built a fast AI reel-video creation app called Copycopter. Marketing his product was...

Founder Sukhpal Saini thinks you should consider offering lifetime subscriptions (at least for a time). He knows because he built a Shopify interface for Stripe that just couldn’t hold down recurring customers. Called Reetail, Sukhpal operated the application for two years and got consistent users. The problem was they all were selling products in relatively low volumes. It was hard for them to ju...

While working full-time as a pharmaceutical sales rep, Bobby Dimovski noticed that medical professionals were: Always looking for new ways to grow their business. Usually 10 years behind on marketing trends. Hard to access (unless you were a pharmaceutical sales rep). Armed with this information and wanting to save for his kids’ college fund, Bobby founded a healthcare-industry marketing agency, 4...

After building and selling one of the first ChatGPT plagiarism checkers on the market in 2024, Tomer Tarsky decided to search Acquire.com for another project in the edtech AI space. He found a promising business, grew it for seven months, and sold it for three times the purchase price. The business Tomer stumbled across was called Seamless For Science. It was an AI literature review generator with...

Are you a developer who’s bad at email marketing?  Ironically, you may be in a great position to build the next big email marketing tool. Onur Genes wanted to promote his software development agency but couldn’t write good sales emails. He developed Nureply to help him send better automated cold emails. Eventually, he sold subscriptions to his development clients transforming his helpful tool into...

Ian Blair has been an entrepreneur his whole life. As a kid, he sold lemonade, and then graduated to golf balls in adolescence.  While in university, Ian found his calling for the next decade: white-labeling Andrew Gazdecki’s Bizness Apps app-building software to churches. Later, he built his own template app builder, except with more customizable features (Bizness Apps meets Wordpress is how he d...

Have you ever heard of the career readiness industry? It’s a rarely reported on but active auxiliary industry spanning career coaching and development, edtech, vocational training, higher education, and more. Just career coaching and development alone is valued at $45 billion. Harris Osserman founded Talk Hiring originally to turn voice notes into job applications as a B2C career-readiness product...

Software businesses can be immensely profitable in very little time. But they can also die just as quickly. Software engineer Mark Jivko built Go index me!, a tool that speeds up Google page indexing, in six months for a bit of extra cash. He grew it to over 150 regular customers and thousands of dollars in sales in under a year. But Mark knew building an app that only relied on the Google APIs wa...

Nico Jeannen just made a quarter-million dollar sale a couple weeks ago with the acquisition of his transcription product, Talknotes. It’s his second sale after a string of roughly 17 startups that have seen increasing success. Here’s how he made TalkNotes. One day, Nico was trying to get Google to transcribe a voice note for him when he noticed the quality was poor. He crafted a prototype transcr...

How important is your peace of mind to you? Brazilian founder Guilhermo (Guy) Oenning built a SaaS business called Fider , monetized it, and let it quietly earn him $1,000 a month for three years. He sold when he realized it was taking up too much mental space that he could use to focus on other, more profitable projects. After a quick onboarding to Acquire.com, Guy started receiving NDAs within h...

When you lack the experience and money to scale your agency, what should you do? Jovan Meljevic created his agency for B2B SaaS businesses, Bountyhunter , when he noticed a shortage of people and agencies experienced in startup growth. His business grew quickly aiding clients with everything from SEO to customer support to product analysis. Although Jovan was on a good trajectory, after five years...

Would you sell your business right as it was going viral on social media? Victor created his AI landing page builder, Sitekick.ai as a way to salvage a previous project – a slide deck builder called Slidekick. He thought this too would be a flop, but he added AI capability right as ChatGPT kicked off and went viral on YouTube when a vlogger found his website. In one day he jumped from one email a...

Curious what a professional small startup acquirer cares about when scouting a business to purchase? There are a growing group of people who make a living out of acquiring growing startups and taking them to new heights. Pascal Levy-Garboua, founder of Noosa Labs is one of these experts. Pascal started Noosa after 20 years in tech – mostly startups. He sold his first chatbot more than a decade ago...

What are the three biggest mistakes SME buyers make when choosing an M&A lawyer? M&A professional Eric Pacifici says new buyers often pick lawyers who: Aren’t entrepreneurial Bill hourly rather than flat rate Don’t have M&A experience After years of cementing billion-dollar deals at Kirkland & Ellis (the largest firm in the world by revenue), Eric decided he liked smaller deals bet...

What’s the trick to buying offshore businesses as a US buyer? Bryan Digiorgio of 1840 & Company says buyers need to understanding two things: It requires a lot of documents and processes You need to get started with them as soon as possible because they’re sequential Bryan’s had a bit of experience on this topic, his main business today is setting up remote teams for other businesses in other...

Selling your business to a buyer in the same country is tough. Imagine doing it across international borders. Miguel Diaz spent three years building Swearit , a blockchain-based authenticity verification platform. However, he realized that it could scale better in the hands of another founder so he looked for a place to sell. In Miguel’s opinion, most other startup marketplaces were too broad. You...

Jeel Patel and his father built InvoiceOwl, an online invoicing tool for tradesmen like plumbers after Jeel noticed his family’s landscaper using an inefficient paper invoicing system. Three years later, they sold the company for six figures on Acquire.com. Listen to Jeel share his insights and learnings from running his startup to the acquisition process: How Jeel discovered there was still room...

Acquisition lawyer at Scale LLP, Doug Mitchell, recalls one of the closest calls he’s ever encountered while advising a sale. For this episode of SASP, Doug sat down with Andrew Gazdecki to discuss: What kinds of deals he does What lawyers normally manage in SME deals How much he charges for his retainer And what Doug does in his free time. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Be sure to subscribe to see the new...

Lebanese founder, Nour Shaaban just sold his SaaS business on Acquire.com for a life-changing sum. While he can’t reveal too many details due to his non-disclosure agreement (NDA) , he agreed to hop on the SASP podcast to talk about his experience building and selling his business. Listen to Nour’s chat with Andrew as they discuss: The benefits of the Guided by Acquire process that can’t be found...

Luke Sheppard recently finished his bachelor’s degree at BYU with a little more spending money and work experience than most grads. He just sold his startup at 23 years old. While attending university to study business, Luke launched a company called Revive Ratings. It was a marketing SaaS targeted at insurance agencies. He sold it in just over two years on Acquire.com. To successfully launch his...

In a moment of frustration, David Idol created his first successful Chrome extension, Computer Mouse for XCloud. In just a few short months, he was making $4,000 per month in revenue and he eventually sold his project for 5-figures. Here’s how it happened. David was working at Microsoft for Xbox Live when they launched XCloud, their cloud gaming application. It let players stream games from other...

What would you do if you were stuck in a cabin during an Icelandic snowstorm? Adam Senese and his brother came up with their Shopify app for product bundling, Linq Commerce , trapped in an Airbnb for the day during the dead of the Icelandic winter. The cofounders went home and launched Linq Commerce in early 2020 right as covid hit the world and people scrambled for new ways to make money online....

If someone told you they did what you just read in this title, you’d probably think they’d committed a crime. But Qayyum Rajan’s good fortune was a surprise twist of fate. Early in 2023, Qayyum sold his business, ESG Analytics, to a private equity firm. But, his acquirer ran out of money and offered the business back to him for next to nothing a few months later. Qayyum got back in the driver'...

Most venture-backed startups fail. It’s a well-known fact, yet many venture-backed founders choose to burn out and ride their dying startups into the ground. Few realize they have options like M&A that could salvage their business for both themselves and their investors. Wil Schroter, founder of Startups.com knows all about failing startups. He founded nine different startups over 30 years des...

Working a nine-to-five can be a great launchpad for a successful SaaS application. Just ask Belgian founders Dani Ibanez and Drilon Sqn. Using their industry experience, they created a review application for Shopify called TrustReviews and sold it for six figures. Dani and Drilon look similar (and even finish each other's sentences) but they've pursued very different careers. Drilon is a s...