Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - Making Monday work with Quickbooks for $800k - Acquisitions Anonymous 274

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

In an episode of Acquisitions Anonymous, Mills, Michael and Heather examine a Florida-based SaaS business that integrates monday.com and QuickBooks, holding a 99% market share in its niche. The business, valued at $810,000 with $200,000 in profit on $250,000 revenue, operates at 90% profit margins and requires less than 40 hours per month to manage. Despite its strong financials and dominant position, concerns include the reliance on third-party platforms and the risk of obsolescence if monday.com or QuickBooks creates a similar integration.Check out the listing here: https://app.acquire.com/startup/L2KJxpMxgvdnONfExbQN5S0QDBD2/9x0igNI64pVtmYE44wcB?source=popularsAcquire.com is the online marketplace to buy and sell startups.Join 200k+ entrepreneurs closing life-changing deals. Buy and sell startups in as little as 30 days, supported by the best advisors and tech.Thanks to our 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]

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I'm Mills Snell, one of your co-host, me and Heather and Michael Girdley, have a lot of fun with this episode today. It kind of came out of nowhere. We did not expect it, but it took an interesting term. We did some sleuthing and figured out which company this was. It was a company for sale on Acquire.com. And it was an app on Monday.com's website that integrates Monday.com and QuickBooks. Pretty decent price, pretty decent amount of. of revenue and free cash flow. And we kind of did some poking and prodding and figured out who it was and exactly more about what they were doing and where the hunter lives and all kinds of stuff. But we had a lot of fun because this actually morphed and we talked in a good bit of detail about who buys a business like this and where does its value lie?

And is it really durable and can it go away overnight? There's a lot of instances that we look at where maybe you have customer concentration or you have regulatory risk or something that seems like the business could just go away overnight, but we haven't really looked at a ton in the marketplace and kind of software as a service, B2B services. So this one was super interesting. We had way more fun than I anticipated in the first two minutes of the episode. We really took a deep dive. So hope you enjoy and big thanks to our sponsors this week. Thanks for joining us. 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 to acquire a business. So it's created by Walker Dival, 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 tune 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 talking 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. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous.

I usually am mid-laugh about something, and Michael's hitting a record. And I'm like, okay, button it up, buttoned up, and then I just have to laugh even harder. But on that note, welcome back to the podcast. We have a fun Acquire.com deal for us today. Heather, Michael, how you doing? Doing great. It is raining like cats and dogs in California. So we don't, we can't drive.

We don't know what to do. So just hunker down. Just hunker down. Yeah. That's what we say in the South is hunker down. I don't know if you say that in California. We'll try that. We'll try anything.

Sure. It's like when it gets below 50 degrees in SoCal and you guys are like claiming frostbite danger and stuff. It's pretty much the same thing. Only people have their surfboards and kayaks out now. And frostbite. All right. I'll read this deal here. It's pretty fun.

It's from Acquire.com. And it is a small business, which is, good because we do big stuff and then we do some small ones too. So it is a SaaS startup located in Florida, so minus one point there. QuickBooks integration with 99% market share growing MRR in less than 40 hours invested per month, asking price of $810,000, and it's multiple selling for 4.3 times profit or 3.3 times revenue. So the evaluation for Acquire.com is based on the following key.

The factors. The company's profitability over the last year is approximately $200,000. Its monthly recurring revenue is consistently increasing. It holds a unique position in the market as a monopoly because of Monday apps marketplaces contracts with its app providers, in this case, us. Additionally, if the purchaser fully utilizes SBA financing at the current interest rates, the acquisition would be profitable from day one at a price of $810,000. Considering these factors and the valuation multiple is currently applied to acquire, we have determined that a required valuation is 3.6, four times revenue and roughly four times EBDA. A generous requirement giving the product takes less than 40 hours of total time investment per month.

It's very interesting. Acquired tells you why it should be priced that much, but not what it does. So we'll get there, hopefully. Twirling 12 months revenue is $250,000. They made $190,000, and monthly revenue is $27,000 for a monthly profit of $24,000. Heather, are you excited this business appears to run at 90% profit margins? I like the margins. And it is very small, which is some people really like. And in SaaS, it might be okay.

I'm okay so far. I'm warm. All right. Company overview. Our B2B SaaS offering. So I think I know what this does. So we'll see if it gets confirmed here when I read this out. Our B2B SaaS offering provides an essential tool for businesses using both Monday.com and QuickBooks.

Okay, do we all know what QuickBooks is? It's online accounting software? Yep. And I use Monday and QuickBooks. So this is like for me. Oh my gosh. You know like learn on both sides of this thing. So Monday.com is a task management software, a task tracking.

Do you guys use something like that in Mills or now? I use Monday.com actually. Oh, really? I've used that and air table and some other like build your own kind of smart spreadsheets. But we use Monday.com for like internal database. I like Monday. Good ad for Monday. Monday should be on.

It works really well. It's great for the stuff that's like all the little flotsam and jetsam of a business where it's just like, hey, we need a track. Did anybody like feed the cat today? Yes, check. Okay, good. All right, back to the description. This integration streamlines financial and operational processes

by merging QuickBooks accounting capabilities with Monday.com's project management platform. Functionality and value. The integration automates repetitive tasks significantly reducing manual data entry in time spent on financial management and ensures data accuracy by synchronizing information between Monday.com and QuickBooks preventing discrepancies. It facilitates detailed invoice and customer data

management directly within Monday.com, enhanced by real-time syncing and customizable dashboards. We've achieved dominance in the Monday Apps marketplace, owning 99% of the market share. So it appears that Monday apps has a marketplace. And I've never heard of their app. Obviously, you hear of like,

you know, Square or Shopify or, you know, all the others, but I didn't know that Monday.com had an app store, and this is why. It's because it's these guys. Evidently, it's an apps, it's not an app store. It's an app store. App store. Okay, we've demonstrated a 190% increase in revenue last year with a consistently growing MRR, once they were recurring revenue. We've generated close to 200,000 profits last year requiring less than 40 hours per month in total time investment so about 25% of the owner's time our target audience are owners of both software seeking to integrate the monday dot com and cookbooks our churn rate is less than 7.2% it has been consistently decreasing over time we are pleased

to have currently achieved an all-time low in churn uh quickbooks integration for monday dot com presents a practical solution for businesses looking to consolidate their financial and project management tools it's financial success market dominance growth potential blah blah blah for souse Yeah, and then they do a 14-day free trial, high conversion rate, all that kind of stuff. And then they list here the opportunities both for growth and the technology that they use. It appears to be JavaScript-based, all running on Heroku, so pretty straightforward stuff. And, you know, basically have some ideas to make it convert better. Go back to that pricing, though.

This is interesting. And you're more of a SaaS guy. $95 a month or $570 per year. Yep. So we got to talk about this pricing strategy because that basically tells you they're forcing everybody into the one year. But how long have they had that pricing strategy? And they don't have terrible churn right now.

But if they let's say they rolled out that pricing strategy in like November. It was a Thanksgiving special. Come next November, all the churn is going to hit. If, right, if there is going to be any. Yeah. And they've been around, they started December 2020. So as of this recording, it's February 2024. So we're coming on, they've just finished year three of this business.

But it seems like a reasonable price given the cash flow that they've already got, right? True. All right, well, let's start with the stuff we like because usually this is where I jump right in and then I talk about, okay, here's the problem with this business. And then Bill's like, shut up, you're rooting the radio. So go ahead. Well, first of all, do we know what this business? business does, it appears to synchronize Monday.com and QuickBooks automatically for you. If you're using Monday.com for tracking invoices or customers or whatever, instead of

copying and pacing them from QuickBooks, you have this sinks between the two. Pulls it out of QuickBooks, puts it into Monday and vice versa. That's the way I'm reading it. Is that what you guys have? Yeah. And literally, I want to buy this. I want to subscribe now because I need this. So that makes me excited right there. There's going to be more businesses like mine that are using both to Mills to your point that didn't know there was an app store where we could have these integration. So I kind of like it already just from that perspective. I found whenever we first started using Monday that they didn't have a lot of like APIs. And I had to make one with Zapier between Airtable.com and Monday.com.

So I wonder, I wonder how robust the connection is, you know, that this service provides maybe more so I'm not really that techie, but I just would be worried that they could, they could be providing something that Monday.com could easily say, hey, look, we notice that we're leaving a lot of, you know, functionality off the table and we need to, we need to be able to do this in-house versus using a third party. I just don't know, I don't know enough to actually say whether or not that's happening. So you'd have to really get to know, a buyer would have to really research the Monday app marketplace and what the other experiences have been like. It can have been around very long.

You know, probably none of the apps have been around very long. So that's a really good point is how, what's the longevity of this marketplace? Yeah. And that's, well, that's, that was the negative I was saving until later. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, dang it. We stole your negative. Let's get into it then.

We're going to build from here. So, I mean, that's the, danger here. If you buy this, you have to worry about how the task tracking app ecosystem works, right? There's a handful of platforms that are all kind of competing for. You have everything from, you know, Asana to Trello to Monday.com to like everything in between. And the danger is the first time one of those platforms decides that it is going to professionalize and include this sort of integration with QuickBooks, which has 100, effectively 100% market chair in small business accounting,

the first moment that one of those platforms and that fragmented market decides that it becomes strategic for them or a way for them to get an advantage versus the other platforms and builds this integration into it, that is when Monday and all those other guys will respond competitively to add it to their platform, and they will push this totally out of business. It'll become an integrated feature.

That is the challenge with this business, and you have to figure out if you're going to pay whatever four times earnings, four times cash flow for this, how likely is it that Monday.com does not eventually just build this into their platform? In the next four years. I don't know. Right, because you're paying four times, right? You have to, this has to survive or grow beyond four years for you to even break even. So, it's a very good point.

Yeah. Right. It's hard to see the future past a year, really, in some of these, you know, software platforms and marketplaces. Correct. So that would be my very first question to the seller when I looked at this business. And look, this may be a fantastic deal, right?

Four times. It's nice and small relative to some of the other stuff we looked at. But my very first question to the seller is like, how do I know QuickBooks? Neither QuickBooks nor Monday are going to build in this feature and get rid of us. And the answer really can't be, oh, they have an app store and they just want us to do this. No, the answer has to be, here is a strategic reason.

why Monday will never build this in, right? There could be a licensing issue. It could be a liability issue. But it needs to be some reason that you know that the platform is not going to expand running out of business. And it's the first question I'd ask the seller. Like, why isn't Monday going to build this? In this scenario, it's not like you can go talk to the stakeholders, you know, and say,

hey, Monday.com, just quick question, you know, like, can you, can you, you know, give me any assurances that this isn't going to be, you know, integrated away or in-house away, like, it doesn't exist. You won't get that assurance. You just have to go in blind as far as them telling you. And it's not because Monday.com wouldn't tell you or that you can't talk to the right person. It is most times literally because the executives at Monday do not know if they're going to build this or not. Like they're waiting to see what the data looks like. They just, they couldn't tell you what the blob, right? The amoeba. that is Monday.com of, you know, hundreds of people and public traded, I think, at this point,

because of hundreds and millions of dollars of ARR, like, they can't tell you if they're going to do it or not, because they haven't even thought about it. They haven't even started that process. So at best, you'd get a guess from somebody that's like an executive, but even then, like, predicting what they're going to think two years from now is impossible. Right. And so it says it's got, you could get an SBA loan, but, you know, an SBA loan is a 10-year loan. And as we're talking, you really don't even know what four years in the future is going to look like. And you have no diversification here. You are a one-trick pony. You know, your entire cash flow depends on this integration and this marketplace with Monday, breakbooks. That's pretty scary to put

debt on, personally, I think. You know, a default would, the default rate feels like it could be pretty, you know, potentially high here, for the probability of default, I should say. Look, so we've gone straight to the pooping part of the episode, but let's go to the things I like about this deal. Like, here's the thing I like the most about this deal. It is historically incredibly difficult to build reasonably sized SaaS businesses with $95 a month, like, price points. Like, it is just, it is very difficult because once you start competing with everybody else to go acquire customers, either by spending big money on SEO, paid placement in search, or Facebook ads or whatever it's going to be, influencer marketing,

like you are going to spend most of your first year's revenue at a $95 a month price point just acquiring your customer. So it becomes incredibly difficult to grow because all of your cash is getting eaten up by customer acquisition costs. They have gotten out of that problem with this, which is genius to me,

which is building it in the app store of the Monday.com platform. So Monday is doing all of the work for you. right? They're your distribution. Absolutely. Like, same thing is building a consultancy around Salesforce. Same thing is building your business around Amazon FBA. Like, you make a partnership with them where they become your customer acquisition channel.

And I think that's beautiful here. Like, I think it's super smart what these guys have done. And it's part of the case and point for building businesses around these big platforms and taking advantage of the opportunity they give you. So, Michael, I'll lead with this. I have neither made money nor lost money investing in SaaS. I love the fact that they have plus or minus 500 customers. That seems like a very low amount for a business like this.

Yeah. Like they're not geographically limited. They're not limited based on the size of business or the industry. It's like Bill and I just did an episode the other day about dental. You know, like it's hyperfocused. This is as broad as Monday.com and QuickBooks, which is a big part of the market would be applicable. 500 customers seems like not that many in a good way.

In a good way. I think it's also worth asking why do they only have 500 customers? They've been around for three years. I mean, we just, Heather, just like, you're just for like, where do I buy this? Well, that may be an answer for why they don't have very many customers. But you know what? I'm already thinking through,

is it worth $570? Or, you know, or could we just keep doing it the way we are? And I think maybe that's it. Like, of all the Monday users, only some percentage of them, use something that this would be, you know, worth it. You know, a lot of times it's like you said,

it's who fed the cat. It doesn't need to go into QuickBooks. You know, it could be that it's not really appealing to every Monday user. It's only maybe appealing to 20% of Monday users. And yeah, you're in the marketplace, but again, a lot of the users don't even know about the marketplace either. So I think there's probably growth potential here, but maybe you're sort of limited because, like you said,

the good side is your customer acquisition costs, is much lower because you're in the marketplace. But on the other hand, maybe you can't get as creative about reaching that 20% of the Monday, you know, subscribers. It may kind of limit you a little bit, too. I think the nature of what the customer is doing probably influences this a lot. Like, I would not, we don't use QuickBooks, but I would not pay for an integration on something that I might only do 100 times a year, twice a week.

You know, if you're a big ticket item type business, if you're just, just doing, you know, Monday.com for project management and, and quickbooks for your bookkeeping and you do like something where your average order value is $10,000 and you only do a couple a month. Like, it doesn't make sense to do the integration. But if you have a ton of volume, you know, 2,000 instances a month that you need an integration around, you would pay $95 in a heartbeat, you know, because that's the equivalent of a part-time employee or something. And so I would wonder, and they probably don't have a ton of data, but I would wonder, like, who are the typical in-users?

Is it, you know, is it all chiropractors and they just don't know it? Or what actually is it made up of? It does seem like it's a pretty narrow use case, right? So you take the universe of small businesses, then you say, okay, are you on QuickBooks? And are you keeping your QuickBooks actively updated? Okay, that's a smaller universe. Okay, are you on QuickBooks and do you also use Monday?

Okay, yes, smaller universe. then are you somebody who's on Monday and is actively using it to like run your whole business? Okay, yes. And then is that business really tied to have you decided to run all of your accounting processes inside of Monday's project management workflow platform? And, you know, like one of my businesses is on Monday. They're not on QuickBooks, however. They're on NutSuite. So they wouldn't be a candidate here.

But I think to your point, Mills, then once you narrow it down through all of those filters I just listed there, there's not that many companies out there. And that may be why there's only 500 of these who will see value in spending $570 a year for this integration tool. 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. Yeah, it actually seems a little pricey to me. You know, when I think about my own business,

I think, if it was a lot cheaper, I would probably want this just because it would take one headache out for me. But yes, you need to have a lot of transaction volume to make $95 a month or $570 a year kind of worth it. So yeah, I think it's a really small universe. And we always say, why is this person selling it? They're obviously not spending a lot of time on it, or at least that's what it says here. It's way less than 40 hours a week. probably the kind of person that has developed other apps and, you know, kind of does this regularly.

That's okay. That's a good reason to sell, I guess. It's just, I don't like the idea of leverage here. And I don't, I don't think I'd feel confident enough to pay four years worth of profit for this business the way it stands now. So anyway,

since I brought positive Gurdley today, let me tell you something else. I really like about this business. Yeah. We're challenging you. We're being the negative. so you can bring you. You guys in your negativity

is not going to bring me down today. You can feel my sunshine. All right. So the thing I love about this business, we shook our heads at the $95 a month versus $570 per year, right? So basically they are giving you a 55% discount for paying in advance for the year.

And like, I love that, right? And basically one of the problems with SaaS is you have all these capital, expenditures at the front. You got to do your software. You got to acquire your customers. You got to get them supported. And then they start paying you. So then you have to recoup all that through basically like monthly charges, right? So in effect, you're becoming a lender to your, to your customer, right, especially if they're just charging up per month because you have to take all those expenses at the beginning and then you hope you get a paid back over time, which is like

some lending risk, right? Your customer can turn, they can quit, they can go out of business, anything can happen. They could beat me. All those things could be terrible for you. So one way to fix that is you incentivize your customer to pay you up front. And in this case, that is precisely what they're doing and saying, okay, well, just pay us for a year. We'll give you a 55% discount. You're going to give us $570 now. And we're going to put all that money in our bank account. And our cash flow conversion, our cash cycle becomes much better because we're getting paid up front and then delivering the SaaS over time, as opposed to hoping they keep paying you $95 per month. So at first blush, you're like, well, that sucks. They're given a

55% discount, but if you look at their bank account, it does not suck. It's actually fantastic because the cash starts to build up because they're getting paid ahead of time and fixes one of these big problems with SaaS, which is, when do I get paid? Well, someday. And raise your hand if you've ever made the mistake of paying the annual fee and then realizing that you really didn't use it. Yeah. Do you think I wonder how many people in our audience are like, all four of our listeners are definitely doing that. Just kidding.

We actually have 14 listeners, a lot more than four. All right. One thing that I really like about this listing, because I think this is largely, you know, written by the seller in my experience with Acquire.com. I love that the seller is kind of solving the equation for you to say, how did I come up with the price? I came up with the price

that I think you could afford to pay. And then the multiple just is the multiple. It's like I did the math, and I think based on current interest rates, you could afford to pay me this. And I think you should pay me this. That tells me, you know, maybe it's an oversimplification

and maybe they don't really know what the market is, but it tells me that they're pragmatic and you could go to them and say, yes, Mr. or Ms. Seller, that's exactly right, except that I have to rely on this business continuing to perform for the next four years

in order to make those payments and I want you to help me defer some of that risk. Put your money where your mouth is. And I wonder if there's like a little bit of a hint of their pragmatism. Yeah, good point. Yeah. Well, there's also, I think, a testament here

to the evolution of Acquire, right? Like they've gotten some pushback from buyers where like a lot of sellers would go treat Acquire.com as like a lottery ticket sometimes and just like put up something with a oh yeah, if some idiot wants to pay me this, I'll take it, but otherwise like I'm just wasting everybody's time. And I think Acquire

has done a great job of doing a couple things. One of them is what we see here at the top of this, which is like, hey, we're going to help justify this price because a lot of these small deals, like they're not getting help from brokers, anybody to help understand what the market should do here. And then secondarily like crafting it in a way that

both the seller and the buyer can understand how to think about it and like, you know, keeping it from being that just like off the radar kind of waste your time prices. So I love, I love that. This is very reasonably priced for what it is. And, you know, I think a good service that they're doing there in terms of reacting to the feedback they got. So kudos to them. I think if I got, if I got more info on this, the first place I would go is when did you adopt

this pricing strategy? Because there's something about it to me that just doesn't. doesn't pass the sniff test. Like, is there some game theory going on where they're like, right? Hey, look, we juiced a bunch of revenue. We pulled a lot of revenue into the present in order to be able to show kind of a pop in numbers. And maybe it wasn't in January of 2024.

But I just, I would want to see like the, you know, revenue chart, you know, of cumulative revenue and an overlay of like some notes about their pricing strategy and when they started. I don't know. Have they charged $95 a month and $570 a year the entire time? Probably not. People always play with their pricing strategy. That would be the first thing I would go look at. Yeah. And I mean, whenever you're prepaying for something, anything in the small business, but let's just say the $570 here, the proper accrual accounting is often not done. So the EBITDA that you look at sometimes is like cash basis, but that's not what you should be doing here, you should be deferring the revenue over the period of time that you're providing

the service. That's always an interesting point for me on anything that involves prepaid in small business. It's always a sign to me that by the time we get the Q of EBA back, the EBDA is probably going to change. Probably not what they're showing us the first time around because it's complicated bookkeeping and often not being done correctly. I'm wondering, like, does something like this even get a Q of E? You know, Bill sold the business on Acquire.com, his text your wedding guest app. And he, I mean, he's, it was smaller, but, you know, from listing to close, I think it was 30 days or maybe 28 days or something. I mean, when they're smaller, I think some of those details, it's like, ah, we'll figure it out later.

This is probably big enough that they at least have, you know, some more due diligence going on than just looking at, you know, payment history and, you know, doing some due diligence on the code behind this, but this is probably a little bit bigger than just a 30-day to close kind of scenario, but these can move really, really quickly. Yeah, if they get an SBA loan, they definitely won't close in 30 days. But to your point, they also, even with an SBA loan, they might not get a Q of E. And that's kind of an interesting, that's kind of an interesting discussion is, you know, SBA lenders don't require quality of earnings, almost never.

They're way more concerned about tax returns, and that's because of the way the SBA rules read. it's not necessarily the smartest thing, if you ask me. I think the lenders should be more focused on Q of E, but they aren't and they don't require them. So there's a lot of, you know, it leaves it to the buyers to decide whether it's worth the money, which is nice to have the option. But sometimes they also kind of need the guidance of someone else to say maybe this is a time, regardless of size, that you do need that. Or maybe here's another one that's larger that you don't because it's a little bit simpler. It's not always easy for a buyer, especially a first-time buyer, to know whether they're in a situation where it's okay to forego a Q of E, I guess. They have 86 buyers and active discussions according to aqua.com's list.

That's funny, real. Man, like, for this stuff that's too small for, like, business brokers to really get involved, like, Acquire.com, especially has been amazing. I know they're doing bigger stuff too, but, like, it's so cool that Bill can, like, list his small, like, we can, and SaaS project and like sell it. And like same thing with these guys. Like they might have just built this for their business because they needed Monday.com and QuickBooks integration. They're like, you know what we'll do.

Like we'll pay our folks to put it on the app store and then suddenly you look up and they've made like, well, if they sell it for $810,000, they've made close to a million dollars with all the profit they've gotten so far plus the asking price. Okay, I think I found it. Oh.

Oh, the actual app? Yeah, so on Monday.com's app marketplace, So this is the app marketplace, but I went down to finance, and integration for QuickBooks is the editor's choice, which we didn't really talk about this. Feature, being featured by the app marketplace is probably, you know, a really big deal. It's got, I see what they're saying about why they are, you know, claiming, you know, kind of 99%, you know, this is just on the finance page, but all these others have like less than 1,000 downloads, less than 500 downloads, most of them.

This one is almost 3,000 downloads. And editor's choice, it's rated. It's like one of the only ones with reviews. And if it lets me click through, it's been real slow. It has a 14-day free trial. So I think this is probably the same one. This is it, yeah. By platform pioneers.

So the functionality is, you know, you can quickly create invoices, look at all your sales data. It looks like it's also a CRM, you know, integration in some way because you're creating customers and mainly around invoicing, it looks like. So, okay, so this is pretty fun. So there it says who platform pioneers is.

Yeah. Who needs to record two episodes today? We're like doing some sleuthing here. Just deep dive, deep dive on this one. All right. So then, okay, so in the app store, it says it's done by, platform pioneers, which by the way, if you're on audio, this website doesn't work. Some of the

images are broken and stuff, but it talks about what the actual software does. And the company itself is a software company based in beautiful Clearwater, Florida, are incredible team members and strong commitment to practical results, set us apart from others in our growing industry. and then they basically they do Monday Apps Marketplace with the integration for QuickBooks and that's the whole thing but here they list their values.

So they only have the one. They only have one thing and then there's no people's names but they do have an address here so I will search the Google for their address and we can see who's possibly here. Oh, it's at a UPS store. their mailing address is at a UPS store.

So there's a lot of people there. So the next thing you could go, which we don't have time to do it here. You can actually go look up who is Platform Pioneers LLC in the Florida stuff, and then you can start to figure out who the names are of the people behind it,

and then you can Google them. So that is the next step. If you did want to sleuth to find out more about your buyer, you can do that. And I'm not sure what the Secretary of State or the Florida corporation lookup is, but I believe Florida is one of the ones

that is the most is the most basically liberal in terms of publishing people's personal information. So that's a good thing. So Platform Pioneers, okay, here I found it here on the Florida website. And yeah, Platform Pioneers, Inc. They're reinstated, and the guys registered agent is Stephen C. Coleman. So, yeah, you can go take a...

Here, it looks like they let their LLC laps and had to put it back in. So Stephen C. Coleman looks like our guy, so I could Google him. And yeah, that's him. Oh, here's his house. Yeah, so he lives here. He just bought it. Or he sold it because he made so much money from this software. He's moving to that out of Clearwater.

Sorry, Florida. It's too easy. It's too easy. Yes, that's why I know about that. All right. Hopefully that was entertaining. But that's how you can start to research your seller and understand some of their motivation

and what's going on. So are we buying it? I would, I mean, look, if you're the right buyer who wants to do something in this size, you like software, you're potentially a user of it, you could maybe pay cash for it as opposed to having to go down the SBA route, it would be worth a phone call.

I mean, I think it's, if I could understand why Monday.com is not going to run you out of business, I think there's something to be discussed here. Unless they can give me a good answer, I'm maybe not interested. But it's a good business and a fair price if they give you good answer. We've come across, you know, people before who are aggregating, you know, Shopify apps and things like that. So, you know, there's groups out there who would have, you know, the wherewithal to easily fold this in.

But it does kind of bring up an interesting point. if this were on Shopify, if it was doing something very similar on Shopify, one, it probably already would have transacted. And two, I think there would be a lot more competition. And so what does it look like to, if you have kind of a cohort of companies on one platform, you probably have some comfort level and familiarity with Shopify.

Do you say, hey, we'll take a gamble over here at Monday.com and try something new? You know, it's kind of interesting to think about the different dynamics, underlying dynamics, especially if you're the 800-pound gorilla in one person's app store with one app. I mean, a lot of those, I mean, if you look up some of the kind of more famous roll-ups of those platform plugins, like Shopify ecosystem, not doing very well. Well, it was kind of like the Amazon consolidators, where if you establish that as your thesis and you can kind of only do that one thing, you have to look busy.

And you can't let a lot of transactions go by. and you're like, yeah, we didn't really love, I think we looked at one that was like a back, a back lufa, you know, on Amazon. And it's like, you can't let those go by if you say, and you plant a flag in the ground and say, we're going to consolidate these. And then your investors are like,

why don't you buy the back lufa? Yeah. Well, it's just the idea you're talking about, like just being attached to the app store or a winning platform like that, Salesforce or Shopify or whatever, it doesn't make it a good business. And like, it could be a good business

or a bad business. it's just in the app store. Just like, you know, there's some FBA businesses that are great businesses, like, you know, Bill does some stuff. But then there's people that are selling Lufus, right? And it's just like, that's not a good business to be in on Amazon. So, you know, that's where I think a lot of those aggregators. You know what I've never looked at that I think would be really, really fun to look at is like

some cell phone game developer or cell phone game owner. Because those, I'm thinking about the role of that like editors pick, you know, and you think about these folks who have developed a game and it may be, you know, is somewhere in the ranking of cell phone games. And then all of a sudden it goes to like editors pick. And it just goes through the moon and probably breaks, you know, and their servers aren't able to handle it and stuff. I would love to look at.

And I think a lot of them have kind of gotten, you know, aggregated away or you get these really big developers who roll out a lot of things. But I would love to see one of those. If any listeners come across any, please send them our way because I think they'll be I've never peaked under the hood of a cell phone game. We looked at rolling up video games, like logging the tooth video games once, and like we went in an approach to people about it. And like you'd see these games that like they're totally dying.

There's nothing on it. And then you'd look at their financials and they're just vomiting cash. Like unbelievable. Just like a game with like a thousand regular players. And they're like, yeah. So we want to sell it for $5 million. You're like, well, how are you justifying that? They're like, well, it generates $800,000 a year and free.

cash flow. I'm like, there's 10,000 people playing this. Like, how does that work? Like, it's just like bizarre, bizarre levels of economics. And so there are some actually like aggregators who have gone around and started to buy up gaming studios and turn them into public entities. So a lot of them have done exceptionally well.

To some extent, just by like getting the entrepreneurial founders to be a little bit more businesslike, that was the whole, that's the whole pieces. I think that would be cool to look at. I'm just thinking about the role of, you know, where you stand in a marketplace. Because in a way, you have a little bit of let, like, we haven't really talked about it, but you have a little bit of leverage, right, with Monday.com if you are the 800 pound gorilla.

They also could make your leverage go away in an instant. But if you're providing value to their customer base and opening up, you know, they're more and more entrenched with Monday.com because you're there. But I would not like, I don't think I would ever, like, sleep very well if that's where I sit in the value chain, you know, is they like me for today, but will they like me tomorrow? You never know. All right. Well, dude, this is a good deal.

I like the way this is presented. Gitos. dot quire.com for a good look at listing here. So, all right, do we click? Are we stopping now? Yep. I'm going to hit stop. I was just going to outro us a little bit.

Michael, if you're ready to go, see you later. Me and other will close it down. I got stuff to do. I'm wearing a jacket. Yeah. Michael's on his way out. He's like, you know, suited up, ready to go. Well, until next time, Michael, it's good to be with you. Bye, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Really enjoyed this episode. See you next time.