Acquire.com - Where Startups Get Sold

Company & Team Introduction

Acquire.com is a marketplace connecting buyers with entrepreneurs looking to sell their mainly bootstrapped startups. Thousands of startups have been sold on the platform since its inception in 2020. Acquire was founded by serial entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki after he experienced the difficulty selling a first startup first hand with his first company Bizness Apps, which helps small and medium-sized businesses build no-code mobile apps. Gazdecki founded Bizness Apps while attending college at CSU Chico in 2010, he grew the company to 10M ARR and sold the company to private equity firm 3Think in 2018 for north of 20M dollars. Acquire is headquartered in San Mateo, California and their team has steadily grown to ~45 employees.

Product Overview

Acquire provides customers with a two-sided marketplace to help customers buy and sell startups and a suite of tools to simplify and streamline the online business selling process. Typical business models found on the platform are SaaS, Marketplaces, Shopify apps, E-commerce, etc. The company has also released multiple products to help entrepreneurs sell their businesses including a company valuation calculator, listing optimizations, automated NDAs, extensive metrics, startup financing, free and secure escrow, and a letter of intent and asset purchase agreement builder. The company also has a media publication bootstrappers.com that covers bootstrapped startups not appreciated by the traditional startup/venture industry.

Total Addressable Market

Acquire is tackling a massive and fragmented market. It is hard to find exact figures on the size of the bootstrapped M&A market, but the opportunity size is well into the billions of dollars. Originally Acquire focused on smaller, profitable internet businesses but has steadily moved upmarket to help larger startups with 20M + of ARR to get acquired, further expanding their reach and addressable market of companies within the startup ecosystem.

Business Model & The Numbers

Acquire utilizes a SaaS + closing fee model where they can efficiently extract value from both sides of their marketplace. The company takes a 4% closing fee for entrepreneurs selling their startups. For buyers, there is a freemium where all startups for sale are free for public viewing but in order to contact listings, get more information, and use their suite of buying tools users must pay an annual fee of $390 to view startups with up to $250,000 in revenue and $780 to view startups listings of all size. This subscription fee helps to create a marketplace of serious buyers, reducing spam and lowball offers for sellers. Over 500M in closed deals have been facilitated through Acquire’s marketplace. The last recorded financials for Acquire were in August 2022, the company had 2.175M in ARR.

Traction

Acquire has experienced explosive growth since its launch in 2020. The company already has over 200,000 users on their platform and they have built a large, passionate user base and social following, further fuelling the company’s network effects. Upwards of 300 new startups are listed every month and 90 deals were closed in June alone for a total monthly volume of 35M. Over 1000 startups have already been sold through the acquire platform!

Competitors

Competition in the startup acquisition marketplace is weak. Acquire.com is mainly facing competition from Flippa.com and Microns.io. Here is some diligence on each:

Flippa was founded in 2009 by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz. There are over 5000 new startups listed each day, and over 5M in startups are sold each month through the platform. Flippa has over 175k registered users on their marketplace, features a wide range of startups in different price ranges, and in 2022 they helped over 12k startups get acquired. Flippa uses a scaled take rate ranging from 10%-3% depending on the size of the startup, plus other listing fees.

Microns is a much newer startup, founded in 2021 by Ilya Novohatskyi and is headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine. The company is focused on micro-scale startups from as low as $400 all the way up to $300K in revenue, much smaller businesses than Flippa or Acquire. In June the company reached $3300 in MRR = ~40K ARR. The company also utilizes their Microns newsletter to distribute new listings to clients. Microns.io charges buyers an annual subscription fee of $299.

Funding

Acquire has incredibly strong financial backing ranging from tier 1 venture firms to legendary angel investors. The company most recently raised a round in 2021 from Lightspeed Ventures, Shrug Capital, and Interplay. The company also raised an extensive angel round with a laundry list of the top angel investors in the world including Naval Ravikant, Austin Rief, Immad Akhund, Dharmesh Shah, Sam Parr, Shaan Puri, and Geoff Lewis.