Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - 92% net margins in Amazon print-on-demand merch - Acquisitions Anonymous 251

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

On this week's episode of Acquisitions Anonymous, Michael, Bill, Mills, and Heather discuss various aspects of a business that involves selling custom-designed merchandise on Amazon. The conversation touches upon topics such as the competitive nature of the business, intellectual property issues, potential growth strategies, and the role of artificial intelligence in the industry. Throughout the conversation, they offer insights and observations related to the business model, including its potential for scalability and the need for continuous innovation and adaptation.Today's listing is found on Quietlight:Quiet Light is a business brokerage firm that helps entrepreneurs buy, value, and sell online businesses. Every Advisor on the team has built, bought, or sold their own online business and is committed to providing relentlessly honest advice and personalized recommendations to help owners succeed. Because they’re entrepreneurs themselves, they don’t only understand how businesses operate but also what it’s truly like to be in your shoes as an owner. With their proven, hands-on process, they’ve accompanied countless others along their buying and selling journeys. Thanks to this week's sponsors.Acquisition Lab and their team have been longtime supporters of the pod.Created by Walker Diebel author of Buy Then Build: How to Outsmart the Startup Game, is an accelerator with a highly vetted cohort-based educational and support community for people serious about buying a business.Acquisition Lab exists to help people buy a business and navigate all the complexities of the process, as well as provide a trusted framework, tools, and resources to support you from search to close.If you are serious about buying a business, check out acquisitionlab.com or email the Lab's director Chelsea Wood, [e-mail].-------------CloudBookkeeping offers adaptable solutions to businesses that want to focus on growth with a “client service first” approach. They offer a full suite of accounting services, including sophisticated reporting, QuickBooks software solutions, and full-service payroll options.Subscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I am one of your hosts, Bill Dallisandro, and this episode, you have all four of us, and we are breaking down the merch by Amazon business model. What the heck is that, you might say? Well, this is where you can upload graphics, create a print-on-demand shirt or mug or, you know, anything else business. And if someone buys your design, Amazon will print it and drop ship to the customer

all in real time. The business we are looking at today has 92% net margins, which I think takes the cake for best margins we have ever seen on the podcast. So we break down how the business model works, kind of even a little bit larger than how the specific business works. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This episode of Acquisitions Anonymous is sponsored by Acquisition Lab.

Acquisition Lab and their team, they've been longtime supporters of the pod, and they provide a really great service for people who are looking at, and to acquire a business. So it's created by Walker Divell, who's become a friend, the author of Buy, Then Build, How to Outsmart the Startup Game. So Acquisition Labs is an accelerator with a highly vetted, cohort-based, educational, and support community for people who are serious about buying a business.

So a lot of our listeners like you, you turn in every week to our deal reviews, you want to get in on buying a business. You're on this podcast because you're trying to learn how to buy a business. But if you're not quite sure where to start, Acquisition Lab is a great place to start. So they exist to help people buy a business and to navigate all those complexities of the process, everything you hear us talk about on the show. They provide a proven framework, tools and resources that support you all the way from search to close. They do it. There's a whole bunch of educational material and support.

So if you're serious about buying a business, check out AcquisitionLab.com or you can actually email the program director, Chelsea Wood, directly. Her email is Chelsea at buy then build.com. I don't know, guys. I feel like I've gone through all my schick already before we click record. So somebody says something funny. All right. Well, I will just say you have got to join us on YouTube this week because if you follow the show, Gurley's camera setup is a little different every single time.

But it's camera setups, and that's how you know this is live. Gurley's camera setup is a little bit different every time. And he now has set it up so he can flip us off while he's recording because we can see his hands. Two thumbs up. Actually, I was with Ty this week because we had a leadership offsite for all the CEOs and CEOs that I work with. And so we went away to like Texas and like Ty's talking about some. I was like, dude, business idea for you. And I was like, we should sell like killer Zoom set up like in a box.

Like we just send you the stuff. And then we like consult with you for like a half hour and you have it like perfectly set up. So anyway, that's what it's like working with me because I got ideas for days and then no execution. I'm your first customer. Send tie to my house. Right, my house too. I think it's not that hard actually. So to pitch you guys on this idea, like, I know all the stuff.

There's like four things you need. And then like we just like get on FaceTime with you and say set it up like this. And like we record like one of those Ron Pull Peel videos where you know like the set it and forget it infomercial guy if you're old enough for that. And like I just like explain you how to set up and then we do a FaceTime with you. It's like so anyway. Curly, I'm laughing my ass off here because you're like it's so easy. But we've been friends, and I've watched you for like two years, spend thousands of dollars and iterate in like 10 different positions.

And like, I move the light over here. And is it better. And the end product is very good. But I don't know if easy is what I would characterize it. Well, it's kind of like the plumber. Yeah, he shows up and he does like twist one screw and like fixes your whole like HVAC system. And you're like, well, wait, that was only five minutes for you. And you neglect the three years he spent learning how to fix everything.

So that's what I kind of feel about. You just said you, that's exactly how it is. You just said you call the plumber for your H-back problems, though. I'm concerned. Yeah, it shows you how much work I actually do. Okay, so let me pull up this deal. All right, so this is a Quietlight deal. So, kudos to Quietlight because I always have well-written teasers in my opinion.

So quietlight.com. So merch by Amazon business with massive capacity, allocations available, and untapped growth. A lot of buzzwords there. So revenue-wise, how to... $126,000, income is $116,000, and they're asking $300,000 for it, which is 2.6 times multiple. Launched in 2019, this Merch by Amazon business has over 10,479 designs and 153,030 unique products. So what does that mean, Bill? So this might be the best gross margin business or net margin business we've ever seen.

It's a 92% net margin business. So what this is, this is a merch by Amazon business. So think about this is like print on demand. So you upload, so Amazon has this platform called merch by Amazon. You are like a seller. It would be like an Amazon seller. You upload a bunch of art files and configure it and say, this one can go on a mug or a hat or a shirt or, you know, a pencil or a whatever.

And then Amazon, if someone buys the shirt with your design on it, Amazon has print on demand partners that are invisible to you, the business, the seller. who will print the design on the shirt, just in time, and mail it to the person who bought one. So what this business is is basically a content business, right? That's why they have 10,479 designs and 153,000 unique products. So what that tells you on average is each design is on 15 different products. But they're not holding inventory. This is all create on demand stuff.

They've just uploaded artwork to Amazon. Someone buys something on prime, and the wheels spin into motion. and it gets created and mailed to the person. So if I want to do like a Girdly merch store, I could do this. Absolutely. Hot damn. Yeah, I mean, there's a million other website. So like T-Spring was one of the first ones that did is for T-shirts.

There's one called CafePress.com, which would probably be easier for gurdly merch. Because like specifically for that. So there's a ton of these that existed kind of off Amazon and probably like three or four years ago Amazon launched this merch by Amazon platform to compete with that. Are they usually thematic, Bill? Like, oh, this is a great merch by Amazon and like they do pets and another one does. Or is it just like I just have a, how could you differentiate the content that much? You couldn't.

It would be pretty hard, right? I mean, you would do it like with IP, right? If you had, you know, Disney's cars or something. If you had unique characters in IP, you know, that gets defensible. And I'm sure this episode will try to keep it from going there right now, but this is going to veer into AI. territory pretty quick. Further down the episode, I think.

It's interesting you bring this up because I don't know if you guys remember I bought that Beastie Boys T-shirt. Then I wore it, and I still have it. By the way, it's super comfortable. But I remember going on Amazon to buy it because I was like, you know what I want? I want Beastie Boys T-shirt from their fight to the right-to-party thing. And there were like 50 people doing the exact same design. Like they were all over the place with exactly that on Amazon.

I was like, yeah, this is more popular than I thought. And I guess it's one of those things where one person gets the idea and then everybody else copies it and puts it on Amazon. Because the bear in entry is zero. It seems like it. Zero. Okay, so you just, the next couple sentences explained by merch by Amazon works, print on demand business model.

So merch by Amazon sellers have a capacity rating determined by Amazon itself that limits the number of products that can be sold. In this case, the seller has been approved for 100,000 designs, which means they have a lot of room to grow. Once designs are created, the hard work is done. Those designs can continue to sell for years without being managed. successful merch by Amazon settlers are being strategic with what designs they put on the platform

and are trying to use as much capacity as possible. So it sounds like there's like this marketplace of excellence that Amazon's trying to create where it's like, okay, you can put up at least 3,000 designs, but that's it. So people put up their best performing ones and take down the low performing ones. So ideally, I think Amazon sees that as a way that they would only have the highest performing stuff

getting promoted and on the platform. Is that how I should think about it? Yes, except this one business is, approved for 100,000 designs. And there are millions of sellers. So the volume here is bananas. All right. So there are several growth opportunities.

The sellers believe that expanding into international markets could be a good move. They attempted advertising on Amazon for a month, but did it not have a good handle on how to do it well and pulled the plug? They believe a new owner should focus on growing the Amazon ad spend. They recommend hiring more designers to increase the number of designs

on the platform up to the limits. And they believe that with 50,000, to 100,000 designs on the platform, the business would be much larger. The business also has a Kindle direct publishing account called KDP, and adding content there could be a great area for growth. That last sentence just took a total right turn, so I'm interested in digging that too. With very little day-to-day work, no inventory or customers to manage in a capacity for 10x increase in designs.

This business is in a great place for a new owner to take over and help reach its potential. For the sellers, this was always a side project and has did not fit well with what they're doing for their core business, so they would like to pass it on to somebody else. And it is listed by Brad Wayland. Brad looks really friendly. Do you know Brad personally, Bill? I don't know Brad personally, but he does look very friendly. And I would be willing to bet he is because I've never met a Quietlight broker that was

not in fairness. So I bet he's a good dude. He looks like the type of guy you, you know, love to have over for Thanksgiving. So I'm what's cool. And this is, you know, me not trying to show Quietlight here. But like Brad, I don't know, Brad. But if read his bio, like he was an entrepreneur. first. So this guy boosted out of business to millions and sales at hundreds of employees.

He was on the by side 26 times. Like, this is why I like Quietlight, because they recruit people as brokers who used to be entrepreneurs rather than people who used to be real estate agents, which is like so true for so many other intermediate, you know, sets of intermediaries. So like, this is why Quietlight is my go to for an internet business brokerage, period. So, okay, mini Quietlight commercial over, but. It says he sold a content portfolio to private equity. And so that's probably pretty strong when it comes to this is kind of a quasi content portfolio, if you could call it that. I'm just thinking, Bill, like what, you know, the barriers to entry, they make it sound like there are some with Amazon.

You can't just overnight probably get an allocation of 100,000 designs. But also, you've done business with Amazon. How do I stumble across this person on Amazon's search base? I say custom t-shirt or something like that in search query. Well, no, you would say, what you would say is, to use Michael's example, like red Beastie Boys T-shirt. And boom, like, there it will be, right? Because they've designed a red Beastie Boys T-shirt.

And then if you buy it, Amazon will print it and mail it to you. So you're not finding it based on, like, I would bet there's zero brand of their own here. This is entirely about the designs and discover. So each one of these 10,000 designs is functionally, it's. own mini business, right? Like what keywords is it ranking for, all that stuff? So when you're, if you're this business, like what you are in the business of is two things. One, coming up with cool designs from a white sheet of paper, which is hard and requires artistic talent, or doing a bunch of keyword research and going, oh, there's a lot of volume for red B.C. Boy's T-shirt. And there's

one or two there and they're both kind of crappy. What if I made a good one? Right. And then you do some graphic design and you upload the file and Bada Bing, even without ever printing one t-shirt. now you've made, in quotes, a nicer, better BC Boys T-shirt, and hopefully people start buying and you make money. I'm pulling up my Amazon account to show you this in practice, and then you can also, you can make fun of me for all the recommended items. It's like camera, mics, lights. All of Michael's deals are Zoom set up deals.

Yeah, so this is all the stuff that comes up if you type in Beastie Boys T-shirt, and it's just like, it looks like it's all of the stuff you're talking about, exactly. So I don't actually know, you know, if you're with us on YouTube, Michael's got a whole bunch of Beastie Boy T-shirts on Amazon. I don't know how to tell which of these is a merch by Amazon listing and which of these actually already exists in the warehouse. And also what's being printed on demand. That's the big differentiator, right? Yeah, you can't tell. Okay.

What's interesting, too, about like, let's just stand the Beastie Boys thing. Like, Beastie Boys, this one that Michael pulled up is officially licensed. So a big part of this business is probably trademark infringement. So this implies there is a ton of non-licensed beast. Now, I'm not imputing this one business, right? But all of the best keyword terms are probably branded IP, right? Beastie Boys, Cars movie, which my kids really into, you know, who knows what, right? Disney, fans, all that stuff.

And, you know, the Chinese people don't give a crap because there's no enforcement. So they will spend up unlicensed Beastie Bowls. was left, right, and center. So this can be very hard in businesses like this to keep your nose totally clean and also compete at all. Go back to the top, though, Michael. So it seems like if you're using some protected, you know, image or graphic or something of theirs, then obviously you do need to be protected.

But like, and I'm not a huge Beastie Boys fan, but no sleep till Brooklyn. Does that look like that graphic, is that, is that an album cover? or is this something somebody's done that's kind of riffing off of the subculture of the BC voice? I think this is a riff. Okay, so this one is Amazon Merch on Demand. You see it right there, right above the colors? Yeah, there you go. So this thumbnail is auto-generated.

So there's all these different colors, right? So they have all these base t-shirts. And then what this is is the seller came up with this graphic. I don't know if it's directly off an album cover or whether they just designed it in a riff. But all they did was upload the photo. and then when you buy it, this will get printed and mail to you. This one is actually ships from sold by Amazon, so they do their own. They will, and typical Amazon fashion compete with you, right, with their own graphic designers.

And this starts sold, as Michael's showing, 50 in the past month at 20 bucks a shirt. So, Bill, if they're selling it for $20, what does the business like we're looking at? What do you think their margin is on something like this? I bet it is less than half. So basically what it will be, I bet Amazon will let you set your price, your retail price, and they will charge you like a cost per shirt. Yes, that's how it works. So like the cost of a shirt, I think is like five bucks or six bucks or something.

Right. And that includes the printing, the postage, all this stuff. And then if you want to sell it for seven bucks, you'll make a dollar. If you want to sell it for 20 bucks, you'll make $14. So that's, so there's price discovery also. Okay. All right. Can I have a moment for Gen X Corner?

If I tell you, if I refer to Abe Vroeman as the Sausage King of Chicago, do you guys, who knows who I'm talking about? I'm Jen Dix and I don't know. It's from Ferris Bueller's Day office. It's a fake name he used when they went to the restaurant. Abe Foroman, he claimed to be the Sausage King of Chicago. He's like a 19-year-old kid. So anyway, sorry.

That part may need to be edited out because it's terrible radio, but anyway. I love it. I will take it one generation down. I used to have a shirt that, said the beats killer tofu tour 96. And if you're NC Mills is now an audience, that's from Doug Funny. Yeah, you're, so that's a different generation, but same thing. I love shirts. I think like the key to this business is the kind of nuances of subcultures. You know, like the Target moms want like the Rose A All Day shirt. And that's not protected. You know, that's not something

that somebody has trademarked. But you could put it on here and sell the shirt and, you know, Disney's not coming after you, you know, to say, you know, hey, quit, quit ripping off, you know, our Star Wars brand or something like that. Yeah, I think you have to find little niches where you kind of know the sort of sayings and graphics that people would like. Heather, would you wear a school? I just pulled it up. Would you wear a schoolhouse rock knowledge's power t-shirt? I probably wouldn't, but I, you know, it does bring me back to my childhood. Do you guys know what that is? Yes. Yes. Holy crap. You millennials know that too? Amazing.

So here's the challenge, right, with this business, because you guys are right. It's about coming up with clever ideas that people want. Here's a problem with this business and like almost any business on Amazon where the barry entry is low. As soon as you start selling a lot of your clever Beastie Boys shirt, 27 different iterations on it will pop up. And even if you trademark your artwork, they will just tweak it just enough or they won't and you won't be able to enforce it anyway because they're in China.

So that's the other thing about this business that's important to know is they make it sound like, okay, you launch this design. Like you would kind of think that it's like a venture capital portfolio. Like you launch a bunch of designs, half of them don't work, but like a couple of them really work. And then you just kind of repeat that process. And it is like that with another wrinkle, which is that even your ones that work, then they decay, right? Because they pop and then all the competition comes in and squeeze.

This is all the margin and volume out of it. So you're in this constant new product or new artwork treadmill because the competition is so brutal because the barrier entry is so low in merch by Amazon. And this business, which by the way has $127,000 of revenue is not the biggest Amazon merch business in the world. They are authorized for 100,000 designs and are using 10,000 of them. So they, on one hand, have 90,000 designs of dry powder. On the other hand, so does everybody else to come after every skew that works in your catalog.

So if you buy this business, it's not a like portfolio of set it and forget it, unless you have exceedingly strong IP and a demonstrated process to take down infringers. So if I were, if I were diligent in this business, I would want to say, show me your best selling designs. Like, let me go through your top 50. For each one, I want to understand the intellectual property status. Do you have any kind of IP protection? And if you do, okay, great, show me your process by which you, without taking up the owner's

time, gets all the copyright infringers taken down. And this will look something like every day or every week conducting a certain number of searches, gathering the infringers, submitting them to Amazon as tickets, following up, and tracking like what fraction of them got taken down, right? A good business in this space, like I have some friends that run a T-shirt business. and that is like their secret sauce. You would think their secret sauce is making t-shirts. Their secret sauce is protecting their IP and whack-a-mole.

So their decay is not so fast. All right. Taking a quick pause here. I have something to tell you. This is Michael. I hate bookkeeping. I hate bookkeeping. I hate doing HR.

I hate doing all that kind of stuff. But for bookkeeping, I have found a solution. It is my friend Charlie's business called cloudbookkeeping.com. So that's cloudbookkeeping.com. they are your perfect partner if you want to get bookkeeping out of your hair and focus on making your company

your customers happier and more successful. So please give them a call. Call Charlie, cloudbookkeeping.com, tell them we sent you. They're a great way if you're a business buyer, if you're a business owner, you're tired of hassling with getting your bookkeeping done.

He's got a whole fleet of people that are well trained and work for him. He's located here in St. Antonio so I can tell you because of that, he's awesome. And they're a great partner for you to potentially call to help with all your bookkeeping needs so you can do the important stuff in your business rather than worry about getting your books right. So give Charlie a call, cloudbookkeeping.com, and now back to the episode.

It's interesting because there has been kind of institutionalization of these type of content portfolios around more protected IP, like song catalogs, right? plenty of artists will say, hey, I'm kind of at a point where I don't care about the long tale of royalties and income stream. I just want to sell for a lump sum today and then somebody else can own those income rights in perpetuity. But then you have these crazy instances where, you know, a song will be put in a modern day movie that's 30 or 40 years old and has kind of fallen out of favor. And then it gets this huge pop. It gets a huge hit. But to your point, Bill, it's actually protected. You can change a few things. in a song, but it's still protected.

Right. And people want to know that the song is by Taylor Swift or Ben Crosby in your example or whatever. You know, with artwork, it's much harder. Loud has kind of take this to what is AI to do this business? And that's what would really scare me. So like, on one hand, I think where I am on this is I like this business. This category scares the crap out of me because it's so competitive. And like, they've got 10,000 designs.

First of all, like, you're already, it's more designs than you can hold in your head. Right. Like, that is so many designs. And you, like, AI generated art is coming for this category so hard and fast, like, number one. So it is not like a big leap to imagine a keyword search in real time being piped into Mid Journey or Dolly 3 to generate the T-shirt in real time between the time that you press enter in the search box and it got displayed on your screen. So, I mean, you can see how very, very quickly the only thing that is defensible is IP, right? And this, like, where people, where mid journey is not allowed to generate the shirt with your character on it, right? Or it gets taken down.

So, like, I would be wondering. So what will happen is, well, I think increase the decay even faster, right? Because right now, if you have a hit, right, a human being has to see, has to notice the hit, has to hire a graphic designer, has to come up with something that is. Good, right, and upload it to Amazon. In the future, you can have a crawler looking at keyword data, and as soon as they see you start selling, they can spin up 27 different designs in Mid Journey and pipe them into the merch by Amazon API and see if any of them sell. And by the way, this is actually possible right now.

I didn't just make that up. Like, there's an API for merch by Amazon. So it would not be hard to consume keyword data, pipe it into MidGernie in an automated way, and when you have capacity for 100,000 designs, they're only using 10,000, like throw 90,000 designs at the wall to try to eat everybody else's lunch, and then every month decommissioned the 40,000 that don't work

and take 40,000 new shots. I mean, like, I think that's where this marketplace is going, and that is very scary to me. I think people can't, like, the optimist goes, that's awesome. If I could figure out how to do that technology before anybody else, let's freaking go, right? I've got 100,000 design.

capacity, I'll go eat everybody else's lunch. But like, I don't like running from the Mongols permanently. You know, like while they nip at my heels, that scared me. Well, and that sounds like a really good business. And you know what happens when something like a really good business opportunity comes along? Amazon does it. Like, it's just a matter of time until they build this software and they're competing with you. You know, like they've done all of these brands specifically by Amazon. And then you tell them, hey, you just have to drop a product manager and five programmers on this and build our own internal engine that does fulfilled by Amazon designs and will crush

all of our, all of our outside vendors. Like, they're definitely going to do that. Like, that's the only thing you have to worry about. Amazon didn't get big by being friendly to small partners. They got it by making them make just enough money to survive on subsistence living and then move on from there. And like, it's, they ain't going to change. They didn't get big.

And they didn't get big any other way. But, Bill, to your point, isn't any business that's relying on graphic design or some of their revenue or some of their moat, whatever it may be, aren't they all sort of vulnerable now because of a? Yeah. Yeah. So, like, let me be clear, too. It's not that I don't like this business at, you know, at all. Like, I think if you buy this business, what you need to see. it as is a launching point to do what I described, right? That it's got tons of capacity and,

like, you're going to be a merch by Amazon, AI generated, like we're going after this opportunity and we're going to make a ton of money, right? If you see this as $116,000 a year of passive income, you're going to get smoked over time. You might make $116,000 at first year, you know, but the people who do the strategy I described are coming for you. So I think you got to just go into this with excitement about taking the market. Yeah. Well, I think there's two things about that. One, if you could be the person that can program the AI engine to go start doing that right now and compete with these guys, why do you need to buy this?

And then, you know, like over time, you're going to be building better designs. It's going to grow. And then I think that the second question is like, like, don't plan on being a permanent owner of this. just picking up nickels in front of a steamroller, and your job is to pick up the nickels and then give it to somebody else or sell it to somebody else at the top before the steamroller shows up.

So anyway, those are my two rants about this, because I'm going full rant today for some reason on the podcast. That's how I would look at this, as Mills said, as a head start. Like what I would do is look at this business and go, if I see, because remember, part is part of it is AI generating the art. The other part of it is, as IP protecting, the art that works

and then defending it against all the other people. If this business has really good systems for IP protecting and defending, and then you think you can plug in a really good content generation engine, then it starts to get more interesting. If this business does not have any IP protection

or any IP enforcement to it and they just sort of have this long tail of designs that are slowly decaying, then I think it's less interesting. I think the purchase price, too, the multiple tells you about kind of the no man's land that it's in. They're obviously not anticipating a lot of growth. They know that it's maybe already had a run up or it's in a plateau if they've been

able to do something even slightly sustainable. But you've got to think as a buyer, if you're kind of inverting this multiple to say, okay, on an after-tax basis, I need this business to keep doing what it's doing at a bare minimum them for three, four years. That's a really big ask. I don't think that's really plausible based on the amount of care and feeding the IP portfolio would take and the amount of attrition and churn there probably is on the back end.

And so you almost, I think this business has a hard time transacting because it is, it's probably not that sustainable and durable. And it also doesn't have all the groundwork laid for it to be the growth. catalyst that Bill's describing. I agree. I wanted to say I learned a lot from you, Bill, just now about IP enforcement. And it brought something to mind that I learned about. It wouldn't really apply to a business. I don't think of this size. But there's an insurance product out there to insure trade secrets as opposed to trade marks. And what I learned about that is that apparently a lot of businesses, because it's so hard to enforce, because of everything you just

said, they're going with insurance on trade secrets rather than, and then registering, you know, trademarks and whatnot. So I think that's kind of telling, you know, that it's gotten so hard, even though it is your intellectual property. It's the enforcement side in many cases that if you can't afford to enforce it or you don't have a process to do it, it's not worth anything. Our internet buddy and overall internet Twitter curmudgeon, Moulson Hart has a whole business around IP production,

where he does it for sellers getting ripped off by these Chinese companies that Amazon does nothing to police whatsoever. And he goes and sues him on behalf of these companies. And it's a pretty cool model, but man, it's so sad that it has to happen that way, right? And I guess it's for the right person too. Like, he loves, like, suing people.

I hate it. I can't deal with the conflict. But, you know, he's like, yeah, I'm going to get in there and fight and win. And I'm like, why? Like, seems like a lot of work. But anyway, it's a huge industry. Maybe we see if we can find an IP production.

in business at some point in the future for sale. It is a huge industry and it is the moat for a lot of businesses. Like if you can't do that in this business, you are dead. You know, like you can't have a business because all of the vultures will come eat all of your margin over time. You can't stay ahead of the Mongol hordes long enough. You know, you need some way to fend them off. So it's like weird where a business on the surface looks like it's a t-shirt business

or a, you know, a grab design business. But actually it's an intellectual property business. business, you know, an actual property patenting and enforcement business behind the scenes. I love, I love businesses like that that aren't what they seem on the surface. And the nature of IP law, just in theory, is that if you aren't, if you don't have a track record of protecting your intellectual property and then, you know, five years later, you go, oh, wow, this one really hurt. I want to go after this person.

It's much less defensible. You have to show and provide, you know, substantive evidence to say, look, we have a track record of protecting this thing, not just protecting it when it's convenient. Or like Heather said, you just punt and say, maybe we can ensure our way out of potential losses. I mean, I think this is interesting. I think there probably will be big winners in this space. I think there will be a lot of roadkill in this space, too. So if you buy this business, you got to make sure that you set it up and expect to be one of the winners

and you have what you think is real alpha, right? real processes that is going to, you have to plan to road kill other people. That's kind of what I'm saying. Like a lot of people are going to get road killed. So you've got to have a plan to be the steamroller if you buy this business. And if you do, I think you can do great.

But if you don't, you're going to be the roadkill. To me, that smells like it'll be a strategic buyer or somebody with inside information that does this. Like Joe Searcher is definitely not the right or whatever the female equivalent of Joe Jane. Justine searcher is not going to be the right buyer for this. Like there's going to be some strategic buyer that that's the only way it happens, right? Somebody with a strategic AI insight, like you're talking about a bill or somebody that's already in the space and knows how to monetize this better than anybody else can. But other than that, it's one of us chumps. It's tough to see it

happening. And maybe this is the note to end on, but mad respect for this person, right? Because they were probably a stay-at-home mom or dad and they're like, well, you know, I need to do something on the side, they spend $10,000 a year on graphic design, and they turn it into $126,000. Like, it's, that's phenomenal. That's like the modern American dream in a lot of ways is, you know, while my kids are napping, you know, I spun up this business and it's been wildly more successful than I ever imagined. And then Quietlight told me that I might be able to get some more money for it.

You know, here's actually another, we were saying that Mills, and a lot of times sort of the mom and pop business like that, and they actually don't start on Merch by. Amazon, they start on Etsy, or they start on T-Spring or start these other kind of print-on-demand sites. And I wonder if that is a growth lever for this business. Like, if you've got designs that are working on merch by Amazon to take them to these other platforms, right, to not do any more work and see if you can capture the same keywords in other places. That's a cool deal. Yeah, that's a fun. I like that. For the right buyer, I think it's a great one. And, man, it's interesting to definitely talk about. So, and I look forward to having the girdly, uh,

But so the thing I took away from this is when I have the Gurdly merge store, I need to make sure the word Girdley is trademarked. So nobody can read me. Have you not trademarked Gurdley already? I probably should. You better do it before this episode comes out. Somebody's going to squat on it. Oh, hilarious.

But you have to, right? Like, I'm not a lawyer, but I think you do have to, like, just it being your name is not a defense. Correct. Right? Yeah. I mean, I can keep using my name because the trademark law protects that. But yeah, if somebody wanted to come out with a Girdley brand clothing line, or Girdley brand like gift cart line that would specialize in certain restaurants,

like, you know, I'm in trouble. I'm in serious trouble. All right. Good one. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. And we will see you on the next episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.