BC STARTUPS
Saved by @zmbnski

Just finished @ryanckulp’s new course “How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies”

https://t.co/wcX0zFXHgL

Here are some main takeaways + my verdict 👇

 (1) Acquisition is the easiest path to entrepreneurship

Don’t have an idea? You don’t have to have one. Buy one.

Don’t know how to code? You don’t have to. Use revenue to outsource development.
Don’t have money? You don’t have to have any. Bring in an equity partner. Leverage a debt from family/friends, tech lender, or even the seller.

Capital is not an excuse.
(2) Acquiring has a few distinct advantages to building

Namely:
- Validated demand
- Leverage debt/equity partners
- Focus on going from 1-10, not 0-1
Validate demand:

Acquiring a business that has paying customers saves you the time and energy you would have spent trying to figure out if there was demand for it in the first place.

Acquiring skips that step altogether.
Don’t waste time building something no one wants to pay for.

It’s easy to be blinded by your infatuation with your idea.

Acquiring forces you to take a truly unbiased and logical look at a business.
Leverage debt/equity partners:

Buying a business doesn’t mean you have to fork over a big pile of cash or empty out your savings to buy outright.

In fact, it’s probably best if you don’t.
Leveraging debt and/or equity partners means you can buy a business 2-10x larger than you would have been able to just paying cash.

Use the profits to pay down debt and float until you can pay yourself and/or pay off your debt.
Focus on going from 1-10, not 0-1:

Going from 0 to 1 — building, validating, and launching something from scratch — isn’t everyone’s forte.

If maintaining, optimizing, and growing is though, acquiring might be a better option for you.
(3) Process is king

Maintaining, optimizing, and growing a business requires tried and true processes.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear

https://t.co/AJhvBIHkvX

Managing multiple businesses makes this ring even truer.
Something that really stood out to me was *making your business ready to sell at any time.*

Getting ready to sell can act as a forcing function to optimizing your business in ways it should have before.
That churn? Yeah, it needs to be dealt with.

Who knows the passwords? Yeah, that needs to be stored somewhere safer.

Spaghetti code? Yeah, that’s a liability.
And when you buy a business, it’s go time. What’s your plan? Where do you start?

I love the approach outlined in the course.
Verdict?

100% worth it. I follow the rule that I don’t have a budget for books — I buy whatever book looks interesting because if there’s ever something to overspend on, it’s on enabling and bettering yourself.

And that applies to courses too.

Get it: https://t.co/wcX0zFXHgL
I’d also recommend @NathanLatka’s “How to be a capitalist without capital”

https://t.co/IsUWmgq5qh
Full blog post review coming soon :)
Btw I wrote this all from memory — good test to see how much is retained.

Also excited to join the Rainmakers Club: https://t.co/hUy8DgUl5x

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1/ When you build a landing page, you’re putting all your assumptions out there. In the early stages of a business you need facts. To do that, you’re better off talking to a prospect. Instead of making wrong assumptions, in a place where you can’t control the conversation. 🤷‍♂️

Later, when you’ve got facts, build the landing page

2/ Figure out who you’re serving and where they are. Then start calling. Need to have one person who wants this “thing” other than you 📱

3/ When cold calling get to the point. Don’t sell. Ask good, authentic questions. Show that you want to help 🎯
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THREAD...

Last week I launched Marketing Examples to Product Hunt.

✔️ 1,500+ upvotes
✔️ Product of the Week
✔️ Email list grew from 1,300 to 3,300

This is the step by step account of how I did it


Step 1 - Don't launch straight away

23rd May 2019 Marketing Examples v1.0 went live. The site had a few case studies, several bugs, and an email box which didn’t convert well.

The old version of me would have thrown it on Product Hunt straight away. But I decided to wait.

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Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is how much money do you need to become an Indiehacker?

Well here’s what my own finances looked like when I went all-in…

A thread 1/n

2/n

Kudos to @jrleonr for sharing a vulnerable post on IH.

Personally I don’t think $12,000 is enough financial cushion to go all-in, start an idea from scratch and get to ramen-profitability. It’s just too short of a

3/n

Here’s how much money I saved up over years of corporate work in order to take the plunge and go indie: $200,000

For context, I’m 40, single and had worked my way into quite senior positions by the tail end of my employment.

4/n

$200,000 was enough cushion for me to work on my own projects for years without drastically changing my lifestyle too much. In retrospect, I think I gave myself too much of a cushion. I basically played around for a year before getting really serious...

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...but on the other hand, trying to stretch too small amount a money to the point where it drastically downgrades your lifestyle, affects the people you love and creates a constant atmosphere of anxiety is also counter-productive.
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GREG ISENBERG
GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone
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Logan Herzog
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@logansherzog
1/ I recently read about Adjacent User Theory and, despite it being focused on expanding existing users. thought there were some great takeaways about prospecting.

2/ General concept is that just beyond your existing users are groups of potential users who would better adopt your product if it were positioned differently. As you expand your positioning, you convert under-engaged users.

In outbound sales it's the same.

3/ Too many startups try too hard to guess their exact prospect profile. This is necessary to find their first successful customer profile, but beyond that, identifying new types of prospects should be more formulaic.

4/ Here's how I've done it to identify 12 different successful prospect profiles in a few months:

- Use the 80/20 rule: 20% of the leads you reach out to should fall outside of your current core prospect profile.

5/ Priority should be on profiles with only 1-2 differences from the current core. Perhaps a slightly different pain point, but not dramatically different.
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