Andrew Gazdecki (03:22):
So that led me to start businesses very early. Like eBay stores. I had a World of Warcraft website, affiliate thing. It’s embarrassing to admit. I used to do this thing where I’d start a new business every summer, knowing it would fail just so I could learn. Like how do I make a website? How do I set up Google ads? How do I make a Photoshop design and all that stuff? And then I guess my entrepreneurial career kind of took off, however you want to define success. I launched a job board called Fund Freelancer. Basically connected mobile developers or specifically iPhone developers, because Android wasn’t out. I saw the iPhone come out in college and I was like, “That’s next. This is the next internet.” And so, I jumped on it.
Andrew Gazdecki (04:08):
And I started seeing people post jobs for really simple apps, lots of commonality in terms of the functionality. So I thought, “Okay, there are these do it yourself, website builders. Why isn’t there a do it yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?” Because these people are paying like 50 grand, and what if I made a template and… So sold that job board for I think it was 50 to 100 grand, I can’t remember. But it definitely felt like a trillion, billion, gazillion dollars. That was in college at the time. I went to CSU Chico State, Harvard of the west. Are you familiar with Chico State?
Robert Leonard (04:48):
No, I wasn’t until I researched your background.
Andrew Gazdecki (04:51):
Yeah, Chico State is a straight party school, graduated with a 2.07, so. I had this system down of how to pass classes without attending, without studying. I’d make friends with the teachers. If anyone from Chico State listens to this, they’ll probably be like, “Ah dude, that kid.”
Robert Leonard (05:08):
It’s almost like if you put that much effort into the actual work, you would have passed, but instead, you just put in the effort into not having to put the work in.
Andrew Gazdecki (05:15):
I had a system. So day one, I’d walk up to the teacher, I’d tell him how excited I was about the class, just so they knew me. So if I ever needed a favor, they’d remember me as the nice kid that came up the first day. And true story, one summer I was working on PhoneFreelancer and started to actually make money, I was making like I don’t know, let’s call 5k a month or something like that. And I was taking a referral commission off of the jobs that I was sending to developers. And I just stopped going to my summer school class and I straight had an F, and I explained this to the professor and he actually gave me a C in class. So I passed.
Robert Leonard (06:01):
That was really cool. Was it an entrepreneurship class?
Andrew Gazdecki (06:05):
No. But a funnier story on that. So I sold PhoneFreelancer and that was really the seed funding for a company called Bizness Apps, spelled B-I-Z-N-E-S-S Apps and I can’t afford the correct spelling. But the name of the company, actually… I actually haven’t told this on a podcast. Like, “Why’d you call it Bizness Apps? Why can’t you think of something cooler?” The initial go-to-market strategy was Cold Call Businesses. So I felt it’d be easier if, “Hey, this is Andrew from Bizness Apps.” So you immediately know what it is, but we ended up scrapping that strategy and we ended up buying Business Apps correctly spelled as a domain, which I don’t recommend spending money on domains like that.
Robert Leonard (06:47):
How much did you spend on that domain?
Andrew Gazdecki (06:48):
That was $100,000. And then I bought bizapps.com because my mom and everyone I knew called my company “Bizapps” and it drove me crazy. And so I had to have in the reins. So I bought that one, it’s like $75,000. But anyways, Bizness Apps, it started off with really humble beginnings, my goal was to just not get a job. I had this goal where I was going to start 12 companies and really figure out which one’s successful. Because I would read a lot about angel investing and what the rule of thumb was. You need to invest in at least 12 different companies for you to get a return on your portfolio. So I thought, “Okay, why don’t I just flip that, but do it with company building. So, okay. Bizness Apps. It’s going to be like an agency, I’ll be able to make these apps really cheap for businesses and I’ll make 60, 80K and I won’t have to get a job. And I can keep making new things, stuff like that.”
Andrew Gazdecki (07:48):
But Bizness Apps exploded, literally a rocket ship that, I even wrote a book about it just to share this story before I forget. Because I was so young, I was straight out of college. But tying back to your question on entrepreneurship. I went a fifth year at Chico State specifically to buy more time. So I took out more student loans, I applied for [inaudible 00:08:14] of classes. I would troll the teachers a little bit too. All my teachers loved me just because they knew what I was doing. They knew I wasn’t going to get a job. They knew I was an entrepreneur because I was heavily involved in the entrepreneurship program. I won fourth, third, second, and first place in the entrepreneurship competition at Chico State out every year. Because I kept applying with new businesses and I kept… Bizness Apps eventually got first, PhoneFreelancer got second.
Robert Leonard (08:47):
You got second with Bizness Apps once, right?
Andrew Gazdecki (08:50):
No. So you can only apply with the same company once, but PhoneFreelancer got second place, and then Bizness Apps was like a mic drop moment. So everyone presents and you have a deck, usually. And then I came with a very brief deck and more of a product demo. And I said, “Okay…” And this is when the iPhone first came out. So Android is still figuring out their app store. Blackberry is… we almost made a Blackberry version, we were that early. So I do have to admit my success with Bizness Apps. I totally contribute it to the right place, right time, huge market, obvious solution to an obvious problem. The product-market fit was just unbelievable. But yeah. So I go and I present and I’m all right, “I’m just going to make an app for this competition.” And I pre-filled in some information, and then I said, “I’m going to send out a push note,” and then I demoed it.
Andrew Gazdecki (09:50):
And then the teachers were just like, “What? Wait, so you just built an iPhone app just now?” I was like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “Here, I’ll just change it up.” And I change the screen and everything. “Here, I just updated it to show your face.” And then I’ll send out a push note. And I had my phone up and they were like… And the feedback was funny. It was like they were dumbfounded. Because we had, I think 30,000 in recurring revenue at that point. And that was just me hustling, just basically signing up every bar, restaurant, pretty much every small business in Chico. And then the most meaningful part of that. So we got first place and I won 100 bucks, which now they give out 10,000 or something like that. So I feel I really helped bring attention to Chico State’s entrepreneurship program.
Andrew Gazdecki (10:41):
So there’s a lot of great entrepreneurs at Chico State, but they didn’t have the resources like Stanford or some of the other universities. So that’s been awesome to see. I was like the, [inaudible 00:10:53] guy, their first case study. Anyways, so a teacher that I was in his class where I wasn’t coming and he knew this… Because I’d come in and say, “Hey, I’m just working on my business. I’m going to fail all of your classes.” And he’s was like, “That’s great. I’ll give you an A, if I legally could. You’re actually practicing entrepreneurship.” But he introduced me to an individual named Christian [Friedman 00:11:15] who became my initial angel investor. He invested like 50, 100K, I can’t remember. And he was my mentor. I still talk to him today, he makes fun of me. He says I looked like [Tyler 00:11:26] Lopez because I used to wear glasses and I got LASIK, and I like to read books.
Andrew Gazdecki (11:31):
So it’s like the double whammy of, “Oh gosh man, this guy.” But he’s just an amazing individual, incredibly smart. And so yeah, Bizness Apps basically we went from zero to four million in three years. Eventually grew it to 10 million annual recurring revenue, exited at 29. Sold to ESW capital, which is a private equity firm. It’s a $10 billion fund. We were on Inc. Magazine’s fastest-growing companies list two years in a row. And this was before the iPhone had that… Do you get spam calls and you just ignore them? Yeah. So when you’re on the Inc. 500 list, your phone explodes, it breaks you can’t… I’m talking 50 plus calls a day. And this is before the iPhone had the silence unknown caller feature. So I would change my number in advance, the second time in advance. I had to change my number twice. And I’d have friends that would send me pictures of, “Hey, my boss told me to reach out to every company on the list, and here you are, I’m going to call you.”
Andrew Gazdecki (12:33):
So that was a huge achievement. And I never thought I’d reached something like that, especially at such a young age. And again, that really, I think, ties towards market timing where I just found a massive market, with a massive need. And our go-to-market strategy was, we scrapped selling to businesses directly, and we moved towards a white label reseller model. So we started partnering with thousands of web agencies all across the world because they had customers that were small businesses because they were either managing the marketing or they made their website. And so instead of building out a gigantic sales team to push our product, we partnered with public companies, legal, whatever. Any company or organization or agency that had existing relationships with small business owners, we provided a white label solution so they could take…
Andrew Gazdecki (13:28):
Imagine a no-code platform, and it says, Robert on it. And it’s got all your branding on it. You can set your own pricing and you have a semi-custom app solution. And so that’s what we enabled agencies to do, because their other option was to hire more developers in-house, which is expensive and if they didn’t have projects come in, they’re just sitting idle. So we solved a clear pain, not just for SMBs who are just scrambling, “How do we connect with our customers where they are on their mobile devices?” But also agencies who were looking to deliver a solution that…so it was a product-market fit like I’ve never felt in my entire life. And it was a fantastic ride.
Robert Leonard (14:14):
Why were you even enrolled in school? School is not cheap. So why where are you even spending any money to go to college?
Andrew Gazdecki (14:20):
I wanted to party.
Robert Leonard (14:22):
Couldn’t you party without being enrolled?
Andrew Gazdecki (14:26):
Yeah, but I guess put another way. I didn’t have a clear plan. So actually when I went into Chico State, I originally thought I would go into something like real estate. I would start my own real estate firm or something like this. And this is in ’06. And so the bubble burst and I’m like, “Okay, that’s not going to work now.” I’m thinking, “Okay, who else makes a lot of money? The lawyers. I’m going to start my own law firm.” And then I get my grades back and I’m like, “Okay, that’s not going to work.” So I went to just really figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I had an idea, but not a perfect picture of it. But I always say, “Go to college because you learn way more outside of the classroom than you do inside the classroom.”
Andrew Gazdecki (15:08):
I met my wife there, met all my best friends there. Two of the people I work with, I met at Chico State and it was a perfect incubator for Bizness Apps. So I’m all about the no college movement, but I think it’s also one-sided when it’s compared just for the financial outcome. Like, “Don’t go to college. Go and do something.” College is a great time to figure out who you are, what do you want to be? Being able to meet friends, learn social skills. And I think that’s what Chico State does best at is, you’re social, you make friends. Half of my friends are executive sales leaders and executive marketing leaders. Some have started billion-dollar companies, shout out to Chris [Rudy 00:15:55] [inaudible 00:15:55] Doso. He’s a Chico State alum.
Andrew Gazdecki (15:58):
So I guess we just learn people skills. So I don’t know. I guess I didn’t put much thought into it. My mom was like, “Go.” But yeah, I had to take out student loans and all that stuff. But given my dad had passed away and my mom… there was something where we got student loans really cheap. So I benefited a little bit from that. Single mom, blah blah blah, I don’t know how it works, but I had a good time.
Robert Leonard (16:27):
I want to go back to how much money you spent on domains because that blows my mind. Because I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than $60 on a domain. And so I want to talk about what you think about getting that perfect domain. And I think you said you wouldn’t do it again. So talk to us a little bit about what you think about spending a lot of money on domains today.
Andrew Gazdecki (16:45):
Good question. It depends on where you are. I think it’s dumb unless you’ve really proven out your business. You can always start with a dot io. You can start with a dot net. I don’t recommend a dot net. But dot co, or something like that. And then as you grow, then you can buy the actual domain, and that’s what happened with Bizness Apps. And we bought BusinessApps.com with the correct spelling, B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S apps.com, almost just like a defensive move for our brand. So someone else just didn’t launch some confusing company named the same and then… Because people would go to the website and be like, takes me into a buy the domain page. So I don’t recommend it. It’s a waste of money, spend that money on something else.
Robert Leonard (17:34):
Tell us a bit about your current company, which is Microacquire, and what your goal is with that business. That’s actually how I found you. I didn’t know about all these other businesses that you had until I started researching for this episode. So I want to talk quite a bit about Microacquire and learn more about it from you.
Andrew Gazdecki (17:52):
So Microacquire started out as a simple idea of just helping entrepreneurs get acquired without any fees or commissions, and without involving any middlemen, so no brokers that typically take a 10 to 15% commission. And really just giving an alternative option for founders looking to sell their companies. Today Microacquire has morphed into probably one of the largest acquisition marketplaces in the world, if not the largest. Over the last 90 days, we’ve done over 40 million acquisitions. Total revenue on the marketplace is over a billion. It’s turned into a beast of a company. And what’s crazy about it as well… So again, just to summarize what we do is, we help startups get acquired much more efficiently than the current options in the market today. I call it a startup cannon. You list and basically, the caliber of buyers are just very serious in terms of transacting.
Andrew Gazdecki (18:58):
So it’s like not a marketplace full of random people looking for blogs, it’s private equity firms, it’s Corp Dev teams at public companies. It’s other venture-backed startups, it’s bootstrap startups acquiring other bootstrap startups. So it’s a true acquisition marketplace. It’s not a buy-an-online-business thing. You’re buying a real company with real valuable IP or paying customers and revenue. So it’s a curated marketplace, we review every listing. So if you’re a founder listening to this and you wanted to list on Microacquire, you just need to create a profile, fill in the basic information. Then my team takes that information and basically creates a SIM, which is a short presentation, basically geared towards buyers. What is the revenue looking like? What is growth looking like? What is the tech stack? Where are the competitors? And what is the founder’s involvement?
Andrew Gazdecki (19:55):
What is the founder’s LinkedIn profile? So they can do all their due diligence. So we just basically make it really efficient. And this happens within two hours. So we can literally get you [inaudible 00:20:07], maybe not two hours, but four or five, six. And yeah, so we’re doing hundreds of acquisitions. And I think what’s really rewarding about it is our sole purpose is to just help entrepreneurs succeed. And I think I really fell in love with this company… Because I ran it for free for 10 months, it was a side project. I just thought, “This is awesome. It’s to help entrepreneurs get acquired. This is bad.”
Robert Leonard (20:35):
Did you have that struggle when you sold your company? Is that what gave you the idea? Did you pay a huge broker fee or something like that?
Andrew Gazdecki (20:42):
Yeah, but I didn’t pay him. So I went out to sell Bizness Apps in 2014 when I was 26. Worked with an investment bank. Guess what their minimum fee was?
Robert Leonard (20:57):
250,000.
Andrew Gazdecki (20:58):
A little bit more.
Robert Leonard (21:00):
500,000.
Andrew Gazdecki (21:01):
800,000. So they took a four to 5% cut. And I remember telling them, “You guys have the sickest job in the world. I do all the work and I come in here and you make some intros.” And credit to them, they did get us some offers. We had an offer at 30 million, 20 million, on secondary, meaning 20 million would go to me. Other 10 would go into the company for an enterprise role play. We did get a soft offer from a couple of other companies. You could probably guess them, like do it yourself, website XYZ. But I wasn’t ready to sell it at the time, I thought I was.
Andrew Gazdecki (21:40):
I wanted to push for a larger exit and so I kept running the business. I actually moved it out of San Francisco, down to San Diego to retool the culture and then focus on profitability. And we still ran the business at break-even, but with a lot of profit in the bank. And yeah, so that was the idea where I thought if there was a marketplace for me… I didn’t even know brokers existed, I thought it was just investments banks and above. But brokers essentially work on the lower end of the market. And that end of the market is really, really over-served and almost taken advantage of in a sense. Where again, 15% to sell a $2 million business is ridiculous, it’s like a small seed round. So I thought, “Okay, that’s silly, and let’s remove that.” And it’s been pretty awesome to see the response from other entrepreneurs. And it’s been even more awesome seeing the model actually works, where hundreds of companies are getting acquired. And again, we see an acquisition probably every day.
Robert Leonard (22:44):
Does it have to be a software company to list on the platform?
Andrew Gazdecki (22:48):
Currently, yeah. I’m a big fan of a beachhead strategy or a bowling pin strategy. Beachhead is basically, you want to really be narrow and focus on your initial launch. So right now we’re initially launched specifically to focused on SaaS only. So that was our beachhead, SaaS. Because that was my background, that’s what I knew. And the bowling ball business area is, there are two adjacent pins that really make sense to go after once you feel you’ve made some ground in your current market. So now we’ve expanded to e-commerce, crypto companies, newsletters, marketplaces, even some agencies. We’re going to be adding some more categories, also Shopify SaaS obligations. But for now, yeah. The blanket statement is basically, startups generating some form of revenue and have traction.
Robert Leonard (23:45):
You mentioned this, but one of my favorite things about Microacquire is the quality, I guess you could say that of everybody involved, but more so the company is being sold. Because I used to look… I forget if it was on Shopify or if it was another platform. But I’ve seen other platforms like this that you could buy things, but it was just the quality of the businesses that you could buy was horrible. I was like, “This listing is horrible. This “founder side hustler” has no idea what they’re talking about in this description.” So when I went on Microacquire, I was like, “This quality is just to a whole nother level.” And I really liked that.
Andrew Gazdecki (24:16):
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I look at every listing. And I always joke around, I say, “Some people like to play tennis on the weekend, I liked to play start-ups.” I love start-ups. I’ll get nervous when I meet a founder of a big company. I’m like, “Oh my gosh. You started…” If I met the founder of Calendly or something like that, I’d be like, “Dude, can you sign my shirt or something like that?” I’m just this… akin to sports. But yeah. So I look at every startup and I feel I have an understanding… And I’ve worked with my team on a process, so we have some criteria. But I still look at every startup and I say, “Yeah, that looks good. No, that does not. I guess, no.” And I think giving just, almost like an ESPN analysis of, “I think that’s a good player. That’s not a good player.” I do that with startups when we post.
Robert Leonard (25:08):
It’s funny, you mentioned that you do this for fun. And I know you talk on Twitter a lot about how you have to have fun with what you’re doing. And I had this realization last week or two weeks ago, I have a lot of stuff going on and I’m sure you do, everybody does. But usually, when I did have free time, I’d almost always ride my dirt bike. That’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. And so I never really had free time, because if I had free time, I’d go ride. But then I broke my leg racing, and so I can’t ride right now. And so I had a weekend where I literally had no meetings, I had no travel, I couldn’t ride my dirt bike, I had nothing literally two days in a row. And I’m like, “What do I even want to do?” And the only thing I felt like doing was working on my business. I’m a lot of people go play video games or whatever. And I just want to stay at home and work on my business. That’s all I want to do for fun.
Andrew Gazdecki (25:58):
The thing with that is, it’s not work. You’re having fun. I always say, “You want to get to a place where working on your start-up is like your favorite video game or playing your favorite sport.” So when you get 30 minutes, you’re rushing up and you’re like, “Hey, I got an idea.” And it gets you excited. And I think that’s so important for two reasons. One is, if it’s not fun, you will get burnt out. Don’t go into building a startup if your intention is to make a bunch of money, because it’s just so… You can make money in ways that are much less stressful, way lower risk. Not everyone should be an entrepreneur, you really need to enjoy it. And then the second part is, if you don’t enjoy it and you go into it, you’re going to be competing against someone who does, and they’re going to kick your ass. Because they’re going to put in the extra 20, 30%.
Andrew Gazdecki (26:52):
And you can just do the math where basically if you only worked eight hours a day, but you’re competing against someone who loves it, and they’re just going all in and they’re working 14 hour days. I don’t know the math in my head, but they’re producing… And again, not all time spent on work equals the same amount of results, but they’re doing 40% more output than you are. And their output is probably better because it’s coming from passion rather than just, “Hey, I got to do this, this sucks.” They’re doing little things and they’re always thinking, and they’re always trying to think bigger.
Andrew Gazdecki (27:28):
So that’s just how you win in life is, I think people who… If you find a passion, find a calling, find a purpose. And again, you spend your whole life working. If you’re blessed and you found a way to make money doing something that you love, you won. You don’t need to be venture-backed or you don’t need to be bootstrapped. You can be a public company, but if you love it, you won. That’s some rules I live by. Just happiness over everything. Do whatever you want, but if your work gets you up in the morning and gets you stoked, you’ve checkmated life.
Robert Leonard (28:04):
What happens if you have three of those projects lined up that you want to work on? They all make you feel the same way, they all have the same potential upside. And you talked about your Beachhead strategy, you really got to focus on one thing. So how do you focus on that one thing? How do you pick which one to go with?
Andrew Gazdecki (28:19):
I don’t know if I have a good answer to that, but if I was just… You were asking me that, I’d say, “Focus is key.” It’s okay to dabble and run small experiments and see which one picks up traction. But I think what you’ll find is you’ll naturally gravitate towards one. Again, I ran Microacquire for free with no business model, I had no idea how to make money. People would say, “Why don’t you take commissions of listings,” but you need to be a certified California business broker and go through all those compliance stuff to take commissions. We’ve since hired a team in-house to allow us to do those things. But I launched a business with full intentions of, “I don’t care if I don’t make any money, I don’t care. I just want to help entrepreneurs.” And that’s where I started to. I started off with… When I was thinking of my third startup, we don’t need to backtrack on this, but after Bizness Apps, I started a blockchain trading company.
Robert Leonard (29:18):
You didn’t have it very long, just a year or two?
Andrew Gazdecki (29:22):
Yeah. It was a soft landing situation. But final point on Microacquire is, the first thing I did before even thinking of the idea was, I wrote down the customer I wanted to serve. Because after going through two different startups, I knew how important it was to love the customer you serve. And I wrote down startups and entrepreneurs, and then started looking around the market at solutions or problems that they’re facing, and notice no one was really addressing or innovating in acquisitions or exits. And Microacquire was micro born.
Robert Leonard (29:57):
Talk to us a bit about your business model today. Because you have one and it’s doing well, so I want to learn a little bit more about that.
Andrew Gazdecki (30:03):
So it’s really simple. We just charge buyers, we call it Microacquire premium, where buyers pay an annual subscription to contact sellers. So when you go in the marketplace, every listing is private, no company information is shown, meaning the company, name, how to contact the seller, any PNL or metrics that they’ve uploaded. All that is completely private and stored in a private data room. And then to contact the founders, you have to subscribe to Microacquire premium, we review and approve your account to make sure you’re not some random person when you seem like a somewhat credible buyer. So we also not only approve every listing, we approve every buyer as well to keep the marketplace very, very high quality. It’s like a club where basically you got to show us your ID to get in and stuff like that. That was a terrible analogy.
Andrew Gazdecki (30:57):
My team literally, they’re always telling me, I have the worst analogy. Another analogy I’ll say about Microacquire, which is also a bad one. It’s like a Ferrari dealership where basically you can look at the cars, but if you’re like, “Hey, I want to buy that car. Who’s the seller? I have questions about the mileage and how has the engine been maintained? What happened with this chip?” You have to pay for that access. And then you send a request to the seller, the seller receives it, and then they can review the buyer’s LinkedIn profile, send chats back and forth, have them sign an NDA if they choose. And then they grant them access into their data room. So that’s our business model now. We’re at about 900,000 in recurring revenue, we’ll probably hit a million this month. And then we’re going to start moving into… We’re releasing an M&A directory where, as we start to work with these larger businesses, we’re going to start working with brokers.
Andrew Gazdecki (31:54):
We’re going to start working with investment bankers. We’re going to start working with M&A advisors and accountants and attorneys and wealth managers, due diligence experts, really consolidating the whole M&A marketplace. Kind of like Zillow for M&A, where we address everything from valuations to [asgrow 00:32:12], to advisory, to financing. So you can basically… We want to make it extremely easy for founders to get acquired. And it’s really important to note, we’re building this for founders, we’re not building this for buyers. Buyers are a huge part of this, but buyers will jump through… What was that one ninja warrior show?
Robert Leonard (32:34):
I don’t know. I think it’s called Ninja Warriors.
Andrew Gazdecki (32:37):
Yeah, it’s ninja warriors. But yeah, buyers would go through a ninja warrior course to get to the best deals. And so we want to basically empower founders to have an edge at the table with buyers because with a lot of buyers, it’s Tuesday for them, but for the founder, it’s the most life-changing event ever. So we want to empower them, educate them. And so the thought behind the advisory directory is, some founders have these businesses where maybe they could use some help from a broker, or maybe they can use some help from an investment banker, or maybe they just need some guidance in terms of how to legally close the acquisition properly. And so we’ll have a full directory of fully vetted individuals that can do that but at a much lower rate. So they’ll help increase the value of your startup. And then you pay less because typically these individuals spend half their time on sales and marketing, just like any other business.
Andrew Gazdecki (33:32):
And we have thousands of startups that we can drive business to, and then allow them to drive down the price because they’re not having to basically spend money on sales and marketing like they currently do. So think of Upwork or Yelp, with ratings and reviews. You can hire these people, have an agreement in place on the scope of work and all that fun stuff, so. I actually got a note today, it was released. It’s not alive today, but we finished it today, we’re going to polish it up over the next week and it should be out. It’ll be out probably by the time, I don’t know how fast you put out these podcasts, but it’ll be out probably by the time you release this.
Robert Leonard (34:09):
Another thing you’re doing, and it’s been interesting to follow on Twitter is this debate with TechCrunch, I guess you could say. And this idea of how much news coverage VC-backed companies get versus bootstrap companies. Talk to us a bit about what you’re doing to help provide coverage to bootstrap companies and why it’s even needed.
Andrew Gazdecki (34:30):
Yeah. I think Bootstrap companies are a very underserved and under-recognized segment of the startup ecosystem, plain and simple.
Robert Leonard (34:42):
Why is that?
Andrew Gazdecki (34:43):
I don’t know. Like for reference, business [inaudible 00:34:46] with Bootstrap, but we were covered in tons of major media. We were in TechCrunch like 12 times, we were in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Venture B, we were everywhere. And I think there’s just been a shift in media towards just this fundraising cycle that I just called out. I just said, “Hey, this is getting old guys.” Because I’ve previously written for TechCrunch, I’ve been reading their blog for the past decade. Nothing but love for them, I just started providing them some feedback and others seem to agree. So with that, I didn’t get a response back. And instead of continuing to itching at bland, I just said, “Hey, I’ll just do it myself, because I want to read these stories.” And that’s what we’re doing.
Andrew Gazdecki (35:30):
And what we want to do is we want to motivate and inspire and really show entrepreneurs what’s possible. When you read an article about a company raising 200 million that doesn’t do anything for a lot of entrepreneurs. It’s like an article related to Tom Brady throws a 99-yard touchdown. It’s like, “I can’t do that.” Maybe that’s not the best analogy again. But if I’m just starting out as an entrepreneur, that doesn’t help me. I want to learn, how did you get started? How hard was it? Stuff I can relate to. My intention with TechCrunch was just to bring awareness like, “Hey guys, it’s getting a little old.” And then it just blew up. I saw over at this point 10 million impressions, 4,000 likes, 500 retweets.
Andrew Gazdecki (36:19):
My inbox has been exploding with like, “Yeah, we agree.” And it bums me out in a way because it’s almost like there are these gatekeepers in the small Silicon Valley bubble, where people are too afraid to speak up like, “Oh, don’t talk back to TechCrunch, they may not cover you again.” But it’s like that. If you have an opinion, this is entrepreneurship, speak your mind. That might sound a little aggressive, but I’m a competitive person. And when I think that I see something that is unfair to others in the market, I speak my mind. And then if change doesn’t happen that way I take action and do something about it. So I’ve launched a publication, Bootstrappers, we’re no TechCrunch. We don’t have a decade of experience, but we’re taking a real shot.
Andrew Gazdecki (37:07):
I hired four writers. I have a terrific head of content. We have about over 200 startups in the queue. So we’re starting to realize, “Okay, there’s a lot of interest here.” And we’re just looking to inspire, motivate, and show entrepreneurs what’s possible outside of… Basically, bring attention and recognition to entrepreneurs taking an alternative path than the typical VC route. So basically just writing the blog that I think this sort of opinion deserves, and I think there’s a lot of people that would agree with that.
Robert Leonard (37:43):
You mentioned that you didn’t have a business model or monetization strategy for Microacquire for 10 months. So you might not have one yet for Bootstrapper, but what is your plan? How do you plan to monetize it?
Andrew Gazdecki (37:55):
None. I don’t and I won’t, it’s completely free. It’s literally my gift to the startup community. It sounds kind of cheesy but, I just want entrepreneurs to win. If you’re venture-backed, bootstrapped, if you’re public, if you’re on Mars, whatever you’re doing, I just want you to win. I want all entrepreneurs to win. And so when it’s all said and done with Microacquire, I just want to be known as someone who really helped push entrepreneurs forward in terms of shining a light on alternative ways to build companies. I bootstrapped business to a fantastic exit, that wasn’t celebrated, but I’m pretty happy with it. But you read about these dumb acquihires. And then what happens there is the title should read… most funding rounds should read, “Hey, founder sells 30% of his company to XYZ firm.”
Andrew Gazdecki (38:52):
And it’s celebrated. It’s like celebrating the cost of a wedding. And then in terms of acquihires and stuff getting covered, that’s literally, “Hey, startup didn’t work out, they all got jobs.” And it’s all celebrated. And again, I guess it should be celebrated in a way, I don’t want that to be taken out of context. But I think what that does is it just creates this weird stigma in Silicon Valley where founders begin to feel building a billion-dollar business, getting acquired by this huge company is how you succeed as an entrepreneur, and that’s not the truth. And that’s not the reality for 99% of entrepreneurs. And yeah, just hoping to shed some light and just inspire entrepreneurs. That again, you don’t have to go down that path, there’s another path.
Robert Leonard (39:41):
For those who don’t know, what is that an acquihire?
Andrew Gazdecki (39:44):
That would be when a company acquires a company for the team. So you have a stellar team typically it’s when things aren’t working out, not all the time, sometimes they’ll use IP. But usually, they completely scrapped IP, so whatever you’re working on… Like a recent acquisition on Microacquire, literally, was company raised 12 million, acquihire by LinkedIn sold by IP for 250,000. So they basically all got jobs and it was like a COVID situation. I felt really empathetic to the founder. So I talked to him and I tried to give him like, “Dude some things you just can’t control.” That’s another piece of advice I would give randomly is, write down all the things you can control and then write down the things you can’t control, and throw away the second list, and just focus on things you can control. But that’s an acquihire. They basically joined a larger company and then whatever they were working on, it’s usually thrown away.
Robert Leonard (40:43):
I had mentioned that I found you from Microacquire, but one of the reasons why I stuck around to really follow you is because of your philosophy, that not every business has to be a billion-dollar company. And I’ve talked about that for a long time and I’ve felt it myself for even longer. And I’ve talked about it on this podcast, because I think people, if you go into a business and you feel pressure to have to build it to a billion-dollar business in order to be successful, sometimes you might make decisions that aren’t in the best interest of the business and you actually end up failing because of that. Where I believe instead if you realize that if a one to $10 million business is still massively successful and can change your life, you can make different decisions and you don’t have to worry about trying to get to a billion dollars. And I think you have a higher chance of success.
Andrew Gazdecki (41:24):
I would completely agree with that. I always say, go down the path of these three businesses, start something small first for experience and to learn. Trust me, the amount that you can learn by just launching something as simple as a cash-flowing agency or a blog is enormous. And maybe it doesn’t take off, maybe it does but you’ll learn a ton. And then business number two, I recommend starting a Bootstrap SaaS for an e-commerce company, something that you can sell to make you financially secure. And then on your third company, that’s your chance. You’re financially secure, change your market, disrupt something huge. Dude, go reinvent the airplane, whatever your thing is. That’s my philosophy, and I’m on company number three and that’s what I’m currently doing. I’m trying to essentially disrupt investment banking, and ideally, help mint tens of thousands of millionaires through Microacquire.
Robert Leonard (42:21):
I’m only one person, but you’ve said multiple times that you want to inspire people, and I can say that you’ve inspired me. Specifically with one example is, I started going on the platform, and I started seeing these micro SaaS companies that were selling and it’s not life-changing money, but it’s these small micro SaaS companies that are like you said, it fits into that number one or number two company you mentioned. And I’m like, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to program. I’ve always wanted to learn how to code, but I’ve never had really… One. I never had time. And two, I never really had an incentive to do it, I just wanted to do it.” Now because of this, I’m inspired to start my own micro SaaS eventually at some point. And so it’s encouraged me and inspired me to learn to code so that I can eventually list the company on here if I don’t buy one on here first.
Andrew Gazdecki (43:04):
Yeah. And I hear that all the time and I love it. It’s almost an insurance policy. So if you build something and it doesn’t really take off, but you get it to 10, 20,000 in revenue, people will buy that fast, because they’ll see it as an opportunity to scale it. But you learned, and you recouped all your costs. Because there are so many stories of founders building companies and spending money and not recouping it or just getting over it, and then letting it die on its own. And so those aren’t the ideal companies that… Actually now, those are up there with my favorite, but that would be a good conversation around the two sides of Microacquire. There’s one’s looking for million-dollar businesses and tons looking for those smaller funner opportunities. And then it’s a win for the founders as well because they get to celebrate, they got acquired. That’s an accomplishment, who cares if it’s 10K, 20K, 50K, 100K, or 10 million, you sold the business. Congrats, man. Put that on your resume. So yeah, man, I totally agree with you.
Robert Leonard (44:15):
You’ve chosen to build Microacquire in public. What does it mean to build in public? And why did you decide to go down that route?
Andrew Gazdecki (44:23):
Honestly, one day I was like, “Hey, here’s my revenue.” That was it. There was no strategy, there was no thought. I don’t overthink things. Did you see the Bootstrappers’ launch…
Robert Leonard (44:33):
Oh, yes.
Andrew Gazdecki (44:33):
… on Tuesday? You want to know how that went down?
Robert Leonard (44:36):
I saw a million people free tweeted. I saw your feed filled with tons of people talking about it.
Andrew Gazdecki (44:42):
Day before the launch, I had a one-on-one with my head of content and we were supposed to launch on September the 7th, but I’d meant to write September 2nd in the tweet, and I was like, “Oh, well, you guys got more time now.” And then I had a meeting with [Chris 00:45:00], who’s an absolutely incredibly talented storyteller. I said, “The blog looks great. We have eight articles, we have 10 in the queue, let’s just launch this thing.” And I called my VP of engineering, we re-hooked the domain, bootstrappers.com, quickly created a page on product [inaudible 00:45:18] and that’s where we launched it. Literally 7:00 PM, I was like, “This looks good, and let’s go. Let’s lunch it tomorrow.”
Robert Leonard (45:24):
And so are you a person that’s not necessarily focused on perfection? You’re more worried about progress than perfection? Because for me I’m such a perfectionist and I know it’s a flaw that I have, but I get in my way, of my own self because I would just want everything to be perfect before I release it.
Andrew Gazdecki (45:40):
Well, I think you learn more when you ship quicker. We had good feedback on…it looked weird on some browsers, we already fixed that. Feedback on the stories. But I always say, “Good today is better than perfect tomorrow.” I live by that. And so that was an opportunity for me to also show the team, I don’t just say it, I’m serious. Let’s launch it, let’s go. I think speed of execution is what wins markets. So when you check Microacquire in 90 days, I’ll promise you it’ll be a completely different company. We’ve got some big things in the pipeline that I’m extremely excited about. And it’s all a team effort, I can’t really take credit for much of it at this point because I have an amazing team.
Andrew Gazdecki (46:23):
We added like 100 or actually like 1000 horsepower to the company over the last few months. And we’re having a ton of fun, which is the most important metric that we track. We don’t really track it, we just laugh. We had a debate about, is a hot dog a sandwich, yesterday. Is cereal soup? So that’s another thing I always recommend to founders is, have fun with your team. Figure out what motivates them, make it enjoyable. And that’s how you can really, really do something really, really special with a great group of people. And then have a great time, too.
Robert Leonard (46:53):
Before we give a handoff to where people can find you. I like to wrap up the show by letting the guests ask me a question. So what question do you have for me?
Andrew Gazdecki (47:03):
What do you like to do for fun?
Robert Leonard (47:04):
Race motocross and work on my businesses.
Andrew Gazdecki (47:05):
That’s always my first interview question. People are always surprised. When I hire, I look for motivation, attitude, and skillset, in that order. If I don’t feel you’re motivated, I don’t feel you have a good attitude, I just can’t vibe with you, laugh with you, it won’t work on either side. So I usually like to dive in and get to know you as a person, rather than how good you are at podcasting or how good you are at marking, or whatever your skillset may be. So motocross, I dig that, I’d hire you.
Robert Leonard (47:39):
A lot of times skills can be taught. Those first two things that you talk about motivation, and you can’t teach that.
Andrew Gazdecki (47:44):
Can’t teach that.
Robert Leonard (47:45):
And then just, whether you enjoy talking to somebody, you obviously can’t teach that. So it’s like…
Andrew Gazdecki (47:50):
Dude, Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Tom Brady, what made them great was their motivation. They obviously had the skillset, but without motivation, there are countless examples of athletes with the same level of skill set and athletic ability without the motivation. The motivation is what makes people great, in my opinion. You can learn everything. And that’s really the number one skill of any entrepreneur is being able to teach yourself anything.
Robert Leonard (48:15):
If you’re motivated enough, you can learn the skills, so I totally understand and agree. I know people are going to enjoy this conversation, they’re going to want to check out what you’re doing. Where’s the best place to find you?
Andrew Gazdecki (48:25):
Probably Twitter. As you can probably see, I’m pretty active. I’m either calling out…
Robert Leonard (48:31):
TechCrunch?
Andrew Gazdecki (48:32):
I’m going to stop doing that just because I made my point. But follow me if you want to hear about stuff about how to build companies and how to have fun with your team, learn about other companies bootstrapping their way to success, that’s kind of my jam. And then check out Microacquire. If you’re looking to buy or sell a business, there might be something for you there.
Robert Leonard (48:57):
I will put links to all those different resources in the show notes for you guys to go check out, and maybe you’ll see one of my little micro SaaS companies on Microacquire someday. Or maybe on a future episode, I’ll be telling you guys a story about how I bought a company from the Microacquire marketplace, so. All right guys, go check out Andrew. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me.
Andrew Gazdecki (49:15):
My pleasure, man. Dude, thanks so much for having me on this, I really enjoyed the conversation.
Robert Leonard (49:19):
All right guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.
Outro (49:26):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision consultant a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.
