Framework
Buy an engineer-led SaaS with an SBA loan and fix the pricing
Sam's money trick: find an engineering-led software company (built by the person who coded it) where pricing is likely wrong. Buy at ~1x revenue, financing with a small business loan at only 10% down, so a $100K business costs $10K out of pocket.
“Find a business that's engineering-led. So someone who made the software, built it. And you could buy these companies for as cheap as $10,000 or all the way up to a billion. I mean, it doesn't matter. But you could buy— there's all these— Quiet Life Brokerage, who sponsored this, is one of them. You could find these widgets or whatever. You can buy them for 1x revenue. And if it's too expensive for you, you can put a small business loan. You could put only 10% down. So you could buy a $100,000 business for $10,000. And if it's engineering-led, the likelihood that the pricing is wrong is high.”
Steal thisBuy an engineer-built SaaS at 1x revenue with 10% down via an SBA loan, then fix the underpricing.
Story
7 full-price offers in 10 days via Quiet Light Brokerage
Using broker Joe Valley (Quiet Light Brokerage) and clean books from his CPA background, Anderson listed his business and got 7 full-price-or-higher offers within about a week to 10 days.
“we put the business on and, uh, within, I want to say a week or 10 days, there were 7 offers. Full price or higher offers, which was just like mind-blowing to have that too. So that was a super nerve-wracking process and also an exciting process.”
Steal thisKeep your books clean from day one; buyers pay fast for businesses with no accounting messes to untangle.
Idea
Buy a tiny business with little money down
Sam and Shaan champion micro-acquisitions as the fastest path to a successful business: buy an already-profitable $100K-$500K company with very little money down by financing it through loans, referencing Quiet Light Brokerage and Ryan Kulp's course.
“I think that a lot of people will be surprised at how you can build a really cool company by acquiring a very small business this, and they're— they'd be shocked at how they can finance it. So you can finance it by getting a loan, by getting a bunch of stuff.”
Steal thisAcquire a small profitable business with a loan and little money down instead of starting from zero.
Number
How much deal sizes grew: $225K average in 2013 to $2M in 2018
Joe Valley of Quiet Light Brokerage describes how the online business market matured. The average size of the deals he personally closed jumped roughly 10x in five years.
$2M
Average deal size · USD
“You know, in 2013 when I closed 23 transactions myself, it was about $225,000 on average. In 2018, my average size was about $2 million.”
Story
Ramon climbed from a $200K exit to $400K to a $9M sale
Valley recounts how Ramon Van Meer (the soap-opera blog founder) didn't start with the $9M sale. He sold a $200K business first, then a $400K one, learning each time before hitting the big exit.
“He actually sold a $200,000 business first, right? And learned from that and built another. And the next one that he sold through Quiet Light was $400,000. Right. And then hit the motherlode and jumped up to, to $9 million. So I don't want anyone to think, oh my gosh, that's amazing. I'll never get to that. People start where they start and they just keep going forward and fighting and ramping and succeeding.”
Tactic
Browse website marketplaces to find proven, undervalued niches
Ramon scans website brokerages like Quiet Light and Flippa to read P&Ls and summaries, treating them like a real estate broker. A $100K Flippa listing for a soap site validated demand, so he built his own from scratch instead of buying.
“in that same period when I was building those fan pages, I saw a listing on Flippa about soap operas and read the summary and I thought, this is interesting. And, you know, but the price was way too high, was $100,000. So I said, okay, let's just, you know, see and just build it from scratch ourselves, right?”
Steal thisMine website marketplaces for proven niches and P&Ls; if a listing is too pricey, build the same thing yourself.