The Pomp Podcast - #658 Building Bootstrapped Businesses of Value w/ Andrew Gazdecki

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Andrew Gazdecki is the Founder of MicroAcquire. Former CEO & Founder of Bizness Apps and Altcoin (both acquired)   In this conversation, we discuss bootstrapped businesses, MicroAcquire, how it works, who it is for, and the state of tech media outlets.  ======================= Okcoin is one of the most popular licensed exchanges. Okcoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and Earn feature--you got to check out their brand new, beautifully designed app! And as of today, they also became the first US exchange to list NEAR. It’s easier than ever to sign up, buy and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on Okcoin with credit & debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So get started, and go to okcoin.com/pomp ======================= Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. Offering industry-leading security, insurance and uptime, Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. Open a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Andrew Gazdecki is the founder of MicroAcquire. He's the former CEO and founder of Business Apps and Altcoin, which were both acquired. In this conversation, we discuss bootstrap businesses, MicroAcquire, how it works, who it is for, and the state of tech media outlets. I really enjoyed this conversation with Andrew, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin.

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and you'll get $20 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. Go check them out. Gemini.com slash Pomp. The Winklevoss twins have been doing a fantastic job and I think you'll really enjoy the product. Gemini.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get in this episode with Andrew. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys

bang bang i've got andrew here with me thank you so much for doing this man i'm excited to be here pop all right let's jump right into uh your background you've got a very unique uh kind of story in terms of the way you've built businesses and then kind of your viewpoint today walk me through kind of where'd you grow up and how did you get into uh businesses and kind of wanting to be an entrepreneur how much uh what version you want you want the you want the 60-second, five-minute, or the two-hour movie version? Let's do the two-minute. Okay, so my background, I was born in Detroit, moved to San Clemente when I was five.

My dad actually passed away from cancer when I was six, so I grew up pretty poor in a very wealthy area, San Clemente. don't feel bad for me, by the way, my life is baller. Um, but, um, from a very young age, I, you know, as an entrepreneur, like you'll, if you speak with enough entrepreneurs, you'll see a pattern that, you know, when you grow up struggling, like money becomes, you know, really top of mind. So, um, I was always that kid hustling, um, just out of necessity, like entrepreneurship is trendy at school today. Um, but for me, it was a survival mechanism. It was something that I was drawn to just out of necessity.

And then, luckily, I really enjoyed it. So, I was creating eBay stores when I was like 16. I created this World of Warcraft affiliate website, which is kind of embarrassing to admit. I probably started maybe like 10 different businesses and then two significant ones. um but yeah just basically uh found my passion really really early in life with entrepreneurship and um i always say you know people some people on the week no offense to tennis players but um some people on the weekend like to play tennis i like to play startup um and that's uh it's kind of let me um where i am today i can i can add on to that would you like

you hear you know some other companies just you want to keep going okay so um really where my entrepreneurial like like career whatever you want to call it took off was um i started this company called phone freelancer in college it's basically like a job board for mobile developers to connect with businesses and this was like right when the iphone came out so i was in college um best place to probably launch a business like this and i i always say like um internet mobile blockchain are the three biggest paradigm shifts we'll ever see in technology and so i saw the iphone came out and i was like this is it and all my friends had on i couldn't afford one um but businesses were scrambling to figure out how to build mobile applications and a custom one would cost say

you know 50 000 plus and so on my job board i kept seeing this same functionality same feature requests and they were actually like luxury restaurants hotels uh we're paying for like loads of programs um ability to order food etc so i sold that business um for like 50 000 bucks or something like that um but factoring in broke college inflation it felt like 18 trillion billion trillion dollars um that that was the most meaningful exit ever that was like a whoa because um i had never had more than i never had a you know five figures in my bank account so that was the the reason i sold that business though was i saw a pattern of people asking for the same sort of mobile app to be developed and that led to a business i started

called business apps spelled b-i-z-n-e-s-s apps i couldn't afford the correct business domain spelling so i suppose it biz um everyone called it biz apps even my mom called it biz apps um to the point where we ended up having to buy the domain we ended up buying businessapps.com spelled correctly for a hundred thousand then we bought bizapps.com for another hundred thousand because it drove me crazy that my mom misspelled my company name. Um, so grew that company to about 10 million in recruiting revenue. We only raised about a hundred thousand dollars, um, and did kind of like the anti Silicon Valley thing. I said, I met with every VC in the Valley, uh, got a couple of term sheets or close to term sheets. Um, and just kind of said the business

was highly profitable. Like it was a rocket ship we grew from and I'm 21. And so it was like this weird experience. I have my previous work experience was like at Sears and like a movie theater. I got fired from a graphic design job. Um, so I was in the situation of this fast growing startup without any experience. Um, I'm not technical. I didn't have sales experience. I didn't have marketing experience. Um, but going back to, you know, what I said about my childhood you know i want frankly i wanted to be a millionaire like i want like i just you know that's you know probably a superficial goal but you know without growing up with means that that was my goal at the time it's it's shifted more now um usually that happens you kind of you know

uh you know once you kind of get some financial stability your goals change but um that that was like my shot i was like this is this is this is insane like we actually have a shot at like building a multi-million dollar business um and then the background story on that is um we grew it from zero we were on ink magazines 500 fastest growing companies two years in a row um we stopped sharing information with them because uh we saw some competitors basically copying our strategy and if you get on the ink 500 list you got to change your cell phone like legit because the iphone you know that feature the pump do you have that feature on the iphone where like it silences people you don't know it mine is a spam risk is what mine says now

or uh it will basically tell me uh some sort of alert that you definitely don't know who this person is yeah so that that wasn't available um when i was on the ink 500 list so my phone would just blow up and i had friends that were recruiters and they would have like they'd take a picture of like the Inc 500 list. And we were number 58, number 91, uh, back to back. And they would be like, my boss just told me to like, hit you up. So my whole team's in me, like calling you. And they did. Um, so, uh, long story short on that business, um, grew it for, I operated the business the ceo for uh eight nine years uh sold to esw capital uh great outcome super happy with it um you want details on that well when you were building it why did you not take any capital

and kind of why did you choose to continue to build it off the cash flows the way that you did So initially, so we went from zero to, let's call it 4 million in the first four years. And our customer payback period was 28 days. So meaning we didn't have, typically with venture-backed companies, when you acquire a customer, you'll have a customer payback period that's like 12 months. so you need that funding to support that customer acquisition cost we didn't so every time a customer signed up we immediately reinvested that money back in the business um it was just a beautiful business and then the actual business and just to give some background around what it did was it was essentially a no-code app builder so uh we made it extremely easy to build mobile

apps for iphones androids we were so early and we almost made a blackberry version i'm glad we didn't do that uh but um we had this inflection point where so selling to small businesses is super hard there's a saying where small businesses lack time aptitude and money which is like the perfect storm when selling to businesses they don't have time they don't have time to like learn, uh, you know, they're very, very hard to get ahold of. Um, so there was some dark times in the businesses where in the business where it was, it was just me running. Like I'm, I've always been a solo founder. I've never had co-founders. Um, and we were, I had some friends one. Um, so this was in college too. So one winter break,

we cold called restaurants for you know it's called eight weeks winter break didn't get a lot of traction grew to the grew the business to about 30 000 in annual career revenue and everyone's like oh this is like cold cold calling sucks by the way it's i recommend people go through it because it definitely you know burns that grit into you and that it used to rejection which is i think a key trade of entrepreneurs but we had this huge inflection point um where we started to get some coverage and um uh press every everyone from you know new york times business insider tech crunch venture b um because it was an interesting story college kids you know trying to help small businesses but i noticed um this guy in switzerland creating these apps for

these big Ramada hotels. And again, I'm, I'm probably 22 at this point. Um, and I just thought it was a rich guy making apps for his hotels. So I reached out to him and I was like, Hey, like you own these like huge hotels. That's bad-ass. Like, I just want to like talk to you and like say thank you. And, uh, this is where business apps changed. He, and I'm still friends with him today. His name's Raul. He runs a company called Venomat. And he explained to me that he was building apps on behalf of his customers. And so the first question I asked was, how the hell do we get you to sell more apps? And he explained, if you could white label the product, which means remove all branding of business apps so he can put his logo at his pricing so it is kind of like a

semi-custom mobile app solution um he would be able to sell a lot more and see um a higher margin on the sales uh and i remember literally googling white label i was like what what and then i was like okay um well this is going to cost us five thousand dollars to do it um will you do any paid like within 30 minutes and we didn't have any of the functionality built out so we built out a reseller um dashboard and then from there the business turned into mainly focusing on resellers so we partnered with probably every web agency in the world we're in like 40 different countries we We had 5,000 partners at our peak, a number of public companies, do-it-yourself website builders, legal, XYZ, any sort of company that sold to small businesses. We came to them with a solution that said, hey, you have small business customers.

We have a way for them to connect with their customers where they are, and that's on their mobile devices. And so we focused on the technology, which allowed us to avoid hiring a huge sales team. So to answer your question, we just, we truly just didn't need the capital. I operated the business with 2 million cash on hand pretty much for the entire time for rainy day. So we just didn't have a use, a clear use of the capital unless we wanted to move up market to enterprise, but things were going so well. And I was so young. I just, you know, like when a VC comes to you and they're like, Hey, here's like a big check. I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing here. Things seem to be going really well. So I hope that answers your question, but, um, I guess,

I guess the answer is, um, things, things were going well. And, um, I, I want, I wanted to, I didn't want to sign up for, you know, I felt I had a win in the bag and I didn't want to lose that by trying to swing Baker. If that makes sense. Why did you sell eventually? What was the thought process there oh man i was tired um so we um so i was on another podcast so we had over 100 employees um and with 10 million revenue that's really hard to do so we had a huge um outsourced team the entire engineering team was outsourced um we a decade ago you could hire sales reps for like 50k now it's like 250k ot so we benefited from kind of like the rise of tech because we we started the business in 2010 um a little after the um great recession um and it was

just a lot of management and it it's it gets very very tiring um i also felt i took the business as far as I could take it. And when you're offered an amount of cash that could, you know, secure your family's future, it's very hard to turn down. I had a fiduciary duty to my investors as well. And so then on that, I just was tired and got a great offer. And after eight years of running the business, I concluded, I'm not going to pass this down to my son, Julian. So it was time to sell. And so walk me through, after you did that, you went to start a couple of other businesses, kind of tinkered around a couple of different industries. You can talk a bit about that, but then ultimately what drew you to kind of this bootstrap market that you're building a

business in today? Yeah. So the first thing I did was I wrote down the customer that I wanted to serve which i think is really important for entrepreneurs so any entrepreneurs thinking about like what business is like forget the idea like focus on the customer and then fall in love with the problem second um so what i did was i again i love startups i love entrepreneurs like that's that's my game my pump if you had a baseball card i'd collect it man like you know i i'm a big fan of anyone you know chasing like their dreams and like carving their own path in the world like those are my people um so i wanted a business that served um you know the startup community and what i noticed was for smaller business specifically um i mean business apps are

probably a great example so um when i went to go sell business apps um we used an investment bank in uh 2016 uh their minimum fee was eight hundred thousand dollars and i remember telling them i was like, you guys have the best job in the world. Like I do all the work. You guys come in at the end, make the presentation and make some intros. Um, we, we did get some offers from them, but we ended up turning them down. Um, and then investment banks also have this thing called a tail. So basically any intro they make within a period, my tail was 24 months, I believe. So any intro they make. Even if it's just like an email that's not responded, they get that money. So I decided not to sell, keep pushing the business. I'm glad I did. But when you look at the lower end of the

market, and you look at the options that smaller startups have to sell, it's very limited. It's either a good approach which typically is you know maybe for you know the one percent of startups a lot of founders think that you know google kind of shows up to your door one day with a big check like dude you're getting acquired like it doesn't work like that uh unless you're growing like slack or something like that um the other options are working with investment banks and typically investment banks will only work with businesses that they believe they can sell for you know eight or excuse me, nine figures, high eight figures, nine figures. And then the lower end of the market is full of business brokers. So investment banks on the higher end typically charge three to

4%. Business brokers charge 15%. So if you're selling a business for, you know, let's call it like $5 million and you have a 15% fee to pay, I thought that was kind of ridiculous. And so I thought, what would happen if an entrepreneur kind of stepped in and really kind of put a twist on this where it's a marketplace that favors the founders, that puts the founders in control, that really supports them and empowers them to get the best possible deal without having to pay a massive fee and that was kind of the thesis behind microquire was you know it's an important problem it's a large and growing market the current um solutions in the market are extremely poor um tons of potential to expand a market um defensibility via network effects like

let's build a marketplace around this this could be really interesting um but the case in point um you know the optionality for startups today to sell is just it's kind of a shit show it's this it's this fragmented market you got you got brokers bankers you got m&a advisors you got m&a attorneys you have uh you know due diligence experts and so you know i just saw this huge opportunity to kind of consolidate that market and i've kind of touted this as like the zillow m&a like what is your startup worth like you'll get 10 different answers from 10 different people and we're going to bring data to that so we actually can like back it up like this is what your startup is really worth because that can change quarter

to quarter as you've probably seen over the past year with investing um so that was that was kind of the thesis of micro choir is you know um startups it's the the exit is such an important part of the founder journey there's books on fundraising there's books on how to grow a started. There's books on how to find ideas, but there's very limited information on what is due diligence? What are the proper legal steps in an acquisition? What are common deal structures? How to optimize your chances of getting acquired? How to prepare for an acquisition? None of that was written in the form or the perspective of a founder. It's more for a buyer. It's like, here's how you do due diligence as a buyer.

Here's how to find the best deals as a buyer. And so I just thought, hey, let's, you know, let's empower, let's empower entrepreneurs and, you know, help them achieve a potentially life-changing exit. Because just add on to that, it's super rewarding. We're paying for weddings. We're paying, we're helping people pay off debt. Like we're helping people like save, you know, potentially millions off their acquisitions. And, um, I find that really, really rewarding.

And that's, um, at this point in my career, that's, that's what motivates me is, um, just really helping people at scale. Talk a little bit about what you've actually built from a software perspective. So somebody comes in, what are they doing on the buyer side or the seller side with the platform? Sure. So if you're a founder, you can list your startup entirely for free. there's zero commissions there's zero fees and you can come in and we ask um questions that

buyers will need to know to be interested in learning more about your startup so that include like what's your tech stack who are your main competitors um trailing 12 months revenue trailing 12 months profit we also have the ability for you to connect stripe uh google analytics metrics uh barometrics profit well um just general you know revenue metrics uh to build you know more trust with buyers and then what my team does is we go in and we create a sim and what a sim is is basically like a pitch deck but in the reverse form of selling the business rather than trying to raise funds so we do we have a full team that and you could test me on this like create an account, make a fake startup and see how fast we actually get you up. So that's the,

so basically we built a more efficient way to sell a startup than what's currently available in my opinion. Um, and then on the buyer side, and let me, let me add a little bit more on this other side. So as a seller, your startup goes live, it's completely private. You have full control over who sees your information your website url any sort of documents you upload including your pnl your pitch deck whatever you want to include all of this is optional we don't require any we have suggestions and we give recommendations on best practices to get acquired but um all that is up to you and the way that works is you you know you're able to review people's linkedin profiles you can chat with them and then you grant them approval to your data room

which would contain your company name, your contact info, startup URL, and all your docs. On the buyer side, it's a lot more straightforward. You basically register as a buyer. You can look around the marketplace. You can see all the anonymous listings. We never list a startup's name within a listing. It's all anonymous.

So think of it as like a Ferrari shop. What's your favorite car, Paul? So you can make this fun for you. I mean, look, for me, I actually don't, I'm not into cars that much, right? My brothers love all kinds of different sports cars, everything from Ferraris on down. But I would say if I had to pick something with wheels, we're much more into motorcycles probably than anything. All right. So it's a motorcycle shop and it's got the best motorcycles. It's got, I'm going to make this even funner. It's got SAS motorcycles. It's got e-commerce motorcycles.

It's got crypto motorcycles, community motorcycles, and you can look at them completely free as a buyer if you register. But if you want to find out more information about that motorcycle, like the mileage, who is the previous owner, how do I get into a conversation with the owner of this motorcycle? I'm also a motorcycle fan too, by the way. That's the Detroit of me. I'm a, I'm a big, big, big car guy. That's my one, my one, my one vice. Um, but you pay for that access. So you would pay a simple, um, right now it's two 90 a year. We're going to be raising

that. Um, and then we verify your account. So we review your profile. We make sure, you know, you're a legitimate person. You're not just some random, like if, if we can't figure out who you truly are, we, we kick you out. Um, so that increases, um, you know, the quality of buyers that reach out to startups. And then again, as those buyers reach out to startups, um, the founders have full control over, um, who they approve and deny access to. So when you think about the platform itself, are there specific types of businesses? Maybe we can focus on that side first. What is the exact type of business you've used, uh, the word startup a few times. And so people who are listening to this, who run a business and they've been running

it for 10 years, are they a fit for the platform? Do you look at like time that somebody's been running the business? Do you look at it in terms of revenue or profitability and what makes the ideal customer to come on and actually try to use the platform to sell a business? That's a great question. So we focus on really what you're buying on MicroCars, you're buying product market fit. So you're buying a company, typically software companies that have some traction and that level of traction can be let's call it 50k a year all the way up to 10 million a year and we're going to be making efforts to expand up market because we believe you know our marketplace can service larger acquisitions they get more complex so we got

to build some tooling to uh really make those work but um yeah like if you got like a e-commerce company doing, you know, 20 to, you know, 20 K to 10 million, um, you're a perfect fit. Um, and the, the thought process behind that is, um, there's so many other marketplaces out there. And it just, when I looked around, it just felt like junk. Like we're basically, I don't want to buy like a starter blog. I don't want to buy an affiliate company. I want to buy a software company with happy customers good product uh the most typical scenario of acquisitions that i see are either they're just really good companies and they're fully bootstrapped owned by the founders these are companies that would never get featured in tech brunch um like the acquisition would never

get covered by publications but the founder walks away with like five million bucks it's amazing like those those are my heroes and like in bc land you get the job um but these people are walking away millionaires um so that's that's really our target market is um small software companies and then from a buyer perspective are you seeing private equity firms individuals large corporations oh my gosh private equity through the roof like i would say there's probably 2 000 plus private equity groups and there's obviously a range just like startups there's there's billion dollar funds multi-billion dollar funds and then there's in the middle and there's um emerging what i call micro p firms but tons like when i look through our user list and i just type

in capital uh p firms love to call themselves like capital whatever or ventures um what's another term they use you know what i mean so there's there's thousands in there we also have a lot of corp dev teams from public companies venture-backed companies i've also seen acquisitions from vc firms which is pretty interesting and then other bootstrap companies too just looking like if they find a good product with limited traction it's built by you know a really good team you know we've seen aqua hires as well so it's kind of a mixture of everything and then we do see a lot of individual buyers as well which is i think i think probably my favorite category because those are the people where you know that maybe they're a vp of sales at a company maybe

they're a vp market maybe they have like a lot of experience building startups but they don't have a good idea they're more of a scaler not a builder so most of the startups i might require are you know built by builders like the number one reason for selling on microquare is i've moved on to something else or you know i've taken this business as far as i can go and these individuals acquire these companies and they breathe in new energy new ideas and you know take that business farther than the original founder and sometimes i see some really good structures where you know they give the original founder like you know some equity so they can come along for the ride um but the the buyer group is shockingly um diverse and sometimes i i see some users sign

up that i'm like again going back to me as like a huge startup fan i'm like whoa that guy signed up like holy crap um but i don't email him like i did that bend a mac guy like hey can i talk to you're rich. It's a wide group. When you think about the actual transaction itself, so you're basically helping businesses present themselves for sale. You're helping to facilitate the evaluation of the businesses, the introduction to buyers, et cetera. How many of these businesses are the founders actually looking to walk away from and have somebody else run the business moving forward versus their founders actually want to sell their business, but they want to stay on and continue to uh to offer business another really good question that would be

highly determinant of the buyer so some buyers come in all cash say hey we'll take it off your hands 30 to 80 diligence does that sound good some founders like hell yeah like that's that that's a fantastic outcome um some p firms and buyers specifically like if it's uh another startup they're probably going to want the team to come on board for a period of time. So I'd say it's probably, you know, 50, 50 from just off the top of my head. But I know I'd actually say it's probably 70% basically all cash founder walks away within 90 days or maybe like a 90 days sort of like, you know, 50% cash upfront, 50% cash after 90 days just to make sure the transition goes um correctly and then they move to a consultancy

um uh post the 90 days just in case like a bug pops up or a customer with a weird uh unique you know payment plan or something like that they can go and get those questions answered um but then i also see you know teams thrilled to join other companies like i've seen teams like uh or i've also seen like mergers too or two companies that are very similar they you know buy the larger one buys the other one um to bring on the talent then also the customer list um so again uh not the most specific answer but it's it's kind of everything it's everything from full buyouts founder walks uh 51 where the founder stays and actually operates the business um aqua hires where the team then joins the acquiring company and kind of everything in

between when you think about uh kind of a success story is there one transaction that stands out to you uh either because of the people involved or just like hey this is the exact type of transaction that we want to occur on our platform yeah um i got i got two all i i can't say the name of the first one, but I'll share this first one. Cause it's it, this was, this was kind of like one of those moments in a business where you're like, this is, this is, this is fucking awesome. Can I swear on this by the way? Yeah, this is fucking awesome. So there was this kid in college who built this business to let's call it 400,000 in recurring revenue. It was a platform that helped other students pass engineering tests at google apple and he sold it for like a million bucks

and he sent he sent me this heartfelt email where he like made a down payment for his mom on a house and like paid off all his student loans and i just asked for like a review i was like can i like dude fuck yeah like like good for you dude like like that's life-changing shit um uh but a more significant transaction um uh push engage uh was a company that sold for seven figures to a p firm called awesome motive i don't know if if they would classify themselves as um a p firm but it's a group it's run by an individual name um said bulk guy and he focuses on he runs um wp beginner if you've heard of that website and he specifically looks to buy uh wordpress websites and i really like this story because i loved how um steed handled the transaction so um steed met with

the founder uh the business was doing millions in revenue is also profitable um had an loi loi out to him within three days and then they closed within less than 30 full cash and then the founder stayed on for 90 days and then now the founder has like a venture fund like i think that's badass and um he had and then this story i like a lot is because he previously tried selling the business with a broker and the broker um it's a well-named broker that people would probably recognize so i won't name them um they weren't able to sell the business and we were able to sell the business at, I believe a 30% markup from what the broker was trying to sell the business at. So that was another moment. And this, these are moments where it was just me running the

company, just me. Like I'm setting up the profiles. I'm writing the newsletters. I'm scheduling social media posts. I'm doing all these podcasts, like just for the love of the, for the love of the game and, um, this guy, um, it, I mean, it's just, it's, it's a crazy feeling when you're minting millionaires, like, and the only thing I get, I have probably five bottles of wine from people that, that seems to be the thing is I get, and I don't drink wine either. Um, so I have a bunch of wine. Um, if anyone wants to come over and drink it, um, from people that have helped sell their companies um but those those are i could i could i could share more but those those are the two that come to mind those uh those are great stories and also getting uh

getting wine it you don't have to drink it you can just collect it that's fine uh talk to me about uh bootstrappers the publication uh it seems like you have made tons of friends over at tech crunch through this process but kind of walk through uh walk through uh what is bootstrappers and where the idea to come from yeah so i'll start off with um nothing but love for tech crunch i'm i'm a very positive guy um but i grew up reading that publication it inspired me literally to be an entrepreneur um and now i just feel it's kind of turned into a vcpr agency where they just write about funding rounds that's their main focus um that was even my personal experience like pitching them microquire um they ghosted me multiple times like put time on my calendar um you know i i get

you know that stuff happens it's not a big deal um but it just kind of opened my eyes like man fuck if it's this hard for me to get like you know mainstream press it's gotta be really hard for other companies um so i'm i'm glad they didn't cover us because i think it really opened my eyes to you know what tech crunch was in 2012 2013 is this publication you wake up to every morning read about these startups building you know these awesome things and it wasn't hey we just raised 100 million dollars it was like we're just getting off the ground and it made you feel like you could really do it like you know like to back up a little bit um so business apps wasn't a unique idea uh there was other app builders in the market and i read about them on tech grunge literally

and most of the app builders at the time were focused on blogs and podcast rss feeds and stuff and i was like what if we did this for businesses so i literally credit them for like changing my life um so and i've written for tech grunge personally they covered my last company which was bootstrapped um like a dozen times um so i just had tons of love for them um but i felt there's just such a need to bring that sort of reporting back of like real company building stories um and again nothing nothing wrong with funding rounds i think a lot of people enjoy them that's why you know they're they're covered so often um but i want to make the publication that i want to read i want to hear about the entrepreneurs grinding it out avoiding venture

capital focusing on profitability um and so that's that's really what i'm doing so that's what bootstrappers is it's going to be the opposite of tech brunch um we're going to focus on entrepreneurs that are just saying no to the the bullshit silicon valley narrative that we've been fed as entrepreneurs like i say all the time to founders like you do not need to build a billion dollar company to be successful and also your chances of doing so are fucking very low like like very low like just build a company like like the part i don't understand about entrepreneurship today is this huge emphasis on you know building these unicorns and then if you're successful like what the fuck are you gonna do with all that money like you're gonna die with it like just

you know i'm in the camp of me personally you know we've raised money for micro choir i believe the market opportunity supports that and i feel i can help you know potentially hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs achieve a similar outcome i did at business apps um but i gotta win under my belt first so i can take these risks and so that's kind of my message to entrepreneurs is you know tune out the noise of tech grunge which is kind of like the people magazine of tech um and build something profitable and sell for a couple million and secure your financial future um so the publication yeah we're gonna write about like how'd you build the company like what struggles have you gone through like what where'd you get the idea we're not we're not just puking out stories

we're interviewing founders we're getting to know founders we have one founder uh true story one of our writers um lives around the corner from a founder that we're going to be covering and we're hiring a photographer to um head over to his house and or his office and take some cool photos so So it's just going to be a much higher quality, just basically the publication that I want to exist. And then I feel that a lot of other bootstrap founders need to exist. And I guess the main point I'll kind of leave it is tech media today really, really does feel like it's reserved for venture backed companies.

It is extremely hard to get covered if you're a bootstrap company. And so that's a problem we're looking to fix. And it ties in nicely to MicroQuire. So, you know, Stripe has IndieHackers, HubSpot has The Hustle, and MicroQuire is going to have Bootstrappers. And our main goal is to just help these companies get the, you know, recognition that I think they deserve. Do you think that this helps, uh, from a vertical integration of media, uh, sort of this marketing for a platform like this? Like, is there any sort of a strategic thought process that you put into of, uh, of how marketing is changing for businesses? Absolutely. I think every single startup should be thinking about how to create their own media. Like Louie, you pump, like you're a baller dude. Like you got like a huge ass audience. Like

I see your tweets. Like you tweet out, like if you just wrote like, Hey, Andrew Gazdeki, you'd have like 10,000 people like it. And there's no context. Like you have such a powerful audience. And that's the future of startups can't rely on gatekeepers anymore. Like you can't, like you got to look at like other ways to stand out because the way I view startup competition is, you know, you may have a list of five main competitors, but you're real,

you're really competing against people's attention and so if you understand that and you deliver like the whole marketing strategy of micro requires deliver a ton of value like as an example we sent out like 700 shirts like literally i think you probably saw that in your twitter feed where i just was retweeting everything and spammed everybody um just deliver a ton of value to your audience and it pays off um so that's our strategy at micro requires where you know we want to own our narrative you know we don't want someone else telling you know our narrative for us and quite frankly it's more powerful and i'm i'm still you know working on this like thesis or thought process as we go because it's kind of i didn't come out of the gates with like

here's the book like i got it down i know everything because i don't like i learn on the go i'm a really fast learner um but like the funny announcement is probably a great example i did pitch that um to a couple publications but um we made the decision to um just post on twitter ourselves we saw over 20 million impressions we saw we broke every single record in terms of new customer signups, um, new premium buyers, registered new startups, you know, listing their companies. And I think that's kind of the future of how startups, startups need to start thinking differently about how they get the word out about their startups. Cause every startup is just doing the same thing. They're just pitching the same blogs, pitching the same story, raise

some money, blah, blah, blah. Um, and you need to write your own new playbook. Like basically, um i believe we've gone through you know three three waves of you know startup building um the first wave was um let's call it in like 2010 uh invention so this is business apps i was in the right place right time i got super fucking lucky with that business i like i didn't know anything so i cannot take any credit of being like a genius like oh i know i was in the right place right time but i went for it um and the first version would never work today like it was complete garbage um but we got customers and we reinvested and built over time the second phase was when everyone was trying to figure out the best go-to-market models so you know you got aes you got sdrs now we got

account-based marketing um everyone was trying to figure that out together um in like 2014 so the winners in in 2010 were really just the first market um that's become less important and then so basically invention and then the second wave was who could build the best go-to market the fastest uh now we're entering this uh new phase that i consider the procter and gamble gamble gamble phase where brand is the most important aspect of your startup because it's it's the last defensible mode. Like funding is no longer a barrier. Building the technology is no longer a barrier. There's countless, but like just Google like how to build a sales team. Obviously, these are skill sets like you need to acquire as an entrepreneur and you should, and you should

learn up on them. But there's just so much information on these topics that you can't really have a competitive advantage by having more funding because more funding, bigger team actually can do the opposite you can move slower um kind of a rant i i hope that was helpful i think that it's fascinating when you start thinking about uh sometimes all you have to do is show people something's possible right you don't even necessarily have to um uh you don't even have to uh do it for them you don't even have to actually help them with anything if you can uh actually go ahead and show somebody something is possible, it drastically increases their willingness and their desire to pursue it, which I think is something that you're doing here with

the bootstrappers. Then on top of it, you also have the software that can help facilitate transactions, help buyers and sellers, et cetera. So I think it makes a ton of sense. When you zoom out, you look 20 years ahead. What do you hope this grows into from a micro acquire standpoint? We want to change the way businesses are bought and sold period. We want to make it so easy that you would be insane not to list your company on Microware. So part of that is consolidating the market. So we want to work with brokers. We want to work with investment bankers. We want to, you know, bring them business. We want to, we have, you know,

1300 plus startups listed on Microware. A lot of them could probably use some help and guidance on how to sell their business. So, you know, one route could be like we could hire our own kind of team of brokers but then you know it's much more scalable if we're able to bring in the entire startup community everyone involved in m&a transactions so that's going to be the m&a directory that we're going to be launching probably by the time you release this which is going to be fucking badass we got people from like goldman sachs um i hired a in-house um attorney which is kind of gangster i think it's

gangster. Um, so I got to turn, you know, on payroll. Uh, we hired a in-house, um, California business broker. And this is something that a lot of, um, people don't understand is to sell a business and to take a commission, you need to be a certified business broker, which is controlled by the, um, like, uh, what's called a real estate thing, thingamajig. Um, like you can't just go out and sell a company and take a commission that's straight illegal like jail time two weeks um if you don't believe me hit up uh uh 10 law firms um because i did and if you find one that uh has a different opinion let me know um so we hired an in-house business broker who's a badass he um used to manage he used to own his own business brokerage firm and he managed business brokers

So he's been leading up, um, the onboarding process of just hiring the best of the best of the, you know, he, he's, he's kind of, he has this quote where, you know, there's probably a thousand business brokers, only a hundred are really worth their salt. And so we're really looking to get the best of the best. And I think that's really important because when you're, when, when we start moving on market, so as we think, you know, where's this going to be in, did you say 20 years? Yeah. 20 years.

like when you think about how uh how far the business can go right 20 20 years okay i'm it's it's gonna be like a vr decentralized you've controlled by robots and and 20 20 years you're gonna have to put on like vr goggles and then we'll actually have the motorcycle stored you can go in uh no totally joking but um uh what was it what was i trying to say basically um yeah we just we we want to attack every problem that startups go through um when selling their company um i've been through it personally i know the problem i have i feel i have a true unique insight into how fucking hard it is to sell a startup even if it's a good startup like we you know we're able to attract offers we were able to work with an investment bank

a lot of startups don't have that um that luxury um so we're starting on the lower end of the market. But as we move up market, you know, right now we're kind of like no brokers, like blah, blah, blah. But you're really kind of leaving money on the table if you don't have a professional buyer involved. Like once we start to head up into the 20, 30, 40, $50 million acquisitions, you should hire like an M&A advisor or an investment bank. And a lot of these people will do it at a lower cost than what you currently see. Because another problem that we found out in the market is most investment banks and, um, brokerage, they spend half their time on sales and marketing. So we can basically say, Hey, like quit Goldman Sachs, just come work for us.

We'll give you tons of deal flow and you don't have to deal with the bullshit meetings where you debate about a stupid, like presentation for a week, which is actually real feedback from, like um one of the people that we're going to be onboarding but um so you know the future of microquire is you know we want to transform like you know the way i see basically this startup journey is you know we have product hunt for discovery um that's where you launch that's where you you know get discovered you know that's day one fuck yeah and then you know if you want to raise um capital you have angel list like naval and ablock who's the ceo they are doing phenomenal things um for startups looking for capital and just making it super easy like one click funding

that sort of stuff um we want to you know be the path for exits so discovery investing exits will be microcar that's kind of my vision i think you are well on your way to seeing that happen because It seems like you've got all the right people, one, paying attention to the right types of companies being listed and the buyers coming onto the platform. If you had to just, before we wrap up and do rapid fire questions, kind of give a pitch for those that want to either buy businesses or sell their business, what's the micro required? Well, for startups, this is for you. We're building this for you.

And we're not building this because we want to make a bunch of money or whatever. We're building this because we truly believe this needs to exist for the startup community. So it's completely free to list. Like you'll, you'll save money on fees. We can get you listed in 24 hours, three to six months and you'll sell for more. Like we just, we've built a better, it blows, it blows my mind. Like it really does. And we still have a long ways to go.

And then for buyers it's a motorcycle. shop with startups like just go in there if you like crypto companies e-commerce direct to consumers uh direct to consumer companies sas companies b2b sas low touch sas like we have literally everything in it it kind of blows my mind at the traction we've been able to receive and we'd love to help you sell and then if you do um give me a review send me a bottle of wine i love the pitch all right last three questions and you get to ask me one to finish up First one is what's the most important book that you've ever read? How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

It has a terrible title. It's not a book about how to get rich. So I've been very fortunate with the people that I've worked with at previous companies. Shout out to Christian Friedland. He started a company called Build.com. And he gave a presentation at Chico State before he invested in business apps. And he said two things. He said, read How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis and don't work at Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

I did both of those things and life worked out pretty well for me, I think. But the book is just this very honest story about what it's like and what it kind of takes to get rich. And it's not for everyone and it shouldn't be for everyone. Like there's a lot of sacrifices you have to make. The guy also was just very candid of some of his personal problems. It's just such a great read into the insight of someone like, what's it really like to be a millionaire?

That's basically what the book is about. And some key takeaways I took from that book was equity isn't the most important thing. It's the only thing that matters. And so that was a big driver of why I didn't raise money at business apps. So next question. Sleep schedule. I used to sleep five or six hours. now i sleep eight or nine and i sleep on the eight sleep thermoregulated bed and then like

literally track down mateo and alex like i have to invest in i saw i saw that tweet and i like i actually went to the website and i i think i'm gonna buy one like so nice what's your sleep schedule like what is it now and how has it changed over the years um so i'm i'm a i'm a big advocate of sleep if you don't sleep well you make bad decisions and you feel like shit and you need to take care of yourself as a startup founder like like what i signed up for micro choir is i'm gonna be building this company for a decade like if i'm sleeping four hours a night like i'm not gonna last i learned that from my first company um where i was working you know so much now i just focus on empowering my team delegating um so to answer your question sleep

schedule i have i'm basically on the east coast um my son i we put in bed around like seven i'm asleep by like nine and then i wake up at like five so i get um solid eight hours that is that's pretty good the uh how do you go to sleep at 9 p.m a lot of people struggle with this it's probably the number one thing people ask me about sleep how do you go to sleep earlier what do you do? Do you have like a routine or anything? Um, I take candidly, um, I take melatonin every night, um, which, which probably is bad for you. So I don't recommend it, but my thought process process around that is bad sleep. Cause I have a mind that's always just kind of working. And especially when you really start loving what you're doing, it's hard to turn that,

you know, turbo engine in your mind off. So I'll take like, you know, a small like melatonin thing and then get kind of drowsy. And then I put my phone in another room and this is a big tip for people who can't wake up early. Like it's just hard, put your phone in another room, like your kitchen and then turn your alarm, your alarm on super loud. So five and comes around, you got to get up and get up at the same time every day like have a routine that you stick to um but phone in the other room is a game because you got to get up and then my phone's downstairs like if i don't get to it in time my son's waking up um so i rush down and then it's right next to oh guess what my coffee machine so that's that's my morning routine that's pretty good one i like the uh no phone in

the bedroom i feel like that has a massive impact third question aliens are you a believer or a non-believer uh i i like that question i i i'm a believer i think statistically it's impossible that there's not something else out there like the like the universe is infinite and the mind can't comprehend infinite so when you factor in infinite and you say oh no it's not like yeah they're out there uh i just hope they're cool and it's not like some independent state shit or something like that i think that hopefully they will be cool that that's my hope as well what if what if what if they dropped in and they're like all startup experts they just start disrupting like everything that suck yeah you got to remember that uh i i think that as

threat uh risks rise so do defenses and so uh i tend to think that we'll be okay hopefully who knows for sure but hope well one question you have for me to uh to wrap us up uh what do you like to do for fun read go on walks with my wife and uh learn it kind of sounds weird but like if you give me like an afternoon of free time, like that's pretty much the three things that I'll do is either I'll go try to like learn something new. I'll just kind of chill out, uh, and read, whether it's, you know, uh, actually read on like a computer on a physical book or, uh,

listen to an audio book. Uh, and then I try every day to, uh, to go for a walk with my wife. So it's pretty much it. I literally do kind of the, the exact same thing. like every day, me and my wife, um, we'll walk our son up to, you know, restaurant. Um, but, uh, another question, um, cause I'm also an avid reader. Um, what's your favorite book? My favorite book. I don't think I have a favorite, like just one book. Uh, I always tell people the three most impactful books for me, uh, were rich dad, poor dad, uh, thinking girl, rich and the

richest man in Babylon. Uh, three books I read all around the same time when I was, uh, 20, 21 years old. And, uh, they definitely, um, you know, kind of changed the way that I thought about it. Uh, the second thing I would say is probably one of the more, uh, important books that I've read, uh, guns, germs, and steel, uh, Jared diamond. That's a great one. And then I would say that uh maybe like one of the more interesting ones that i think of often i read two books at the same time uh that are pretty good uh super forecasters and algorithms to live by and if you read those two books kind of together uh they tend to uh kind of change the way you think about like you know humans really suck at forecasting do it being disciplined etc and computers are

probably better, you know, both of those things than us. Oh, definitely. I got one more question for you. Who's, um, uh, I'm going to read all those books and then I'll, I'll, I'll send you like a learning just to share. I read it a lot. Um, I'm, I'm an avid, that's also just to add to my morning routine. Um, I wake up at five. Um, I usually will try to meditate a little bit. Um, and then i'll do a short workout nothing major 15 minutes i'm not trying to be a bodybuilder um and then i get to work um and i think that's very important because it clears your mind it gets you on the right pace it gives you energy um and then i read um so uh last question for you um who's your favorite entrepreneur right now and you can't say elon musk oh no it's definitely not

uh somebody like that um it's probably i don't think that you know and this is going to be probably uh inflammatory to some people like i don't i don't think it's anywhere near the same thing when you're running a tens of billions hundreds of billions of dollar company right obviously um yes you can be kind of innovative you can you know be hard charging all this kind stuff, but there's so much delegation that goes on. You're more of a significant leader. You're a manager. You have to have a different skill set to do that. The great entrepreneurs transition and acquire that skill set and continue to do it. Some of you would be like, oh, that's not an entrepreneur. You're a corporate executive. I think it's hard to argue that. I wouldn't go

that far, but I do think it's a different skill set. The people that I think are trying to do like the really, really hard stuff, uh, at the earliest stage, that to me is the, is the most fun. Um, as you can tell, I'm not going to pick just one, but I think that it's this idea of taking an idea and like the zero to one type, uh, action, not necessarily like the Peter Thiel, like, Oh, you've got to create something brand new, but whether it is a small business that literally like, Hey, I'm going to set up a restaurant or it is, you know, the next Google, facebook whatever uh i think that that like action of going from you know inaction and no inertia to like okay i got started that's the most fun time because that's the one that relies the most heavily

on the individual themselves because usually they don't have anything else it's just that right you talked about running micro acquire it was just you uh to me that's the kind of the most exciting fun time we are we uh if i come out to miami i'm gonna buy you dinner man because i think we have a lot in common i i kind of revert to the same question same answer where i got respect for entrepreneurs all anyone chasing their dreams hell yeah where can we send people to find out more about micro acquire or follow you on the internet uh you can follow me on twitter at a gazdecky if you can spell that i'm not gonna spell it for you i'm gonna send you an easter account or just, um, reach out to me at Andrew at microquery.com. I love connecting with

entrepreneurs. Um, I'm happy to share feedback questions on your business, um, help any way I can. Um, yeah, or just go to microquery.com, sign up, check it out. Um, we'd love your feedback. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I think people learned a lot. If anyone is trying to buy or sell a startup, please go to microquery.com and we'll definitely have to do this again in the future. Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Palm.