My bootstrapped indie startup has just been acquired for 5 figures. AMA!
1.5 years ago I made a macOS app because I was tired to remember the emoji name that I was looking for. GPT-3 just came in, so I used it to generate all possible keywords that people could imagine for every emoji out there.
The time goes by, it has hundreds of paying customers, but there's one thing that's missing: I lost my soul in it. Turns out, it's not a space I'm passionate to grow in the future. That made me think the other way.
Fast forward to last month. After dozens of low-quality potential buyers, I was lucky to find someone that's pretty fast to close the deal 🎉
I'm pretty stoked to be here to express my gratitude for this community, as it's so liberating to finally seal the deal and see the hard work pay off.
AMA!
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Oh nice congrats! And it's also a bit funny because in German "mumu" can be a slang word for the female genital...
How long did it take you from posting the offer to closing the deal?
Yeah, I noticed that from the first launch. People pointed out that the product name is funny. And not only in German but also in Nigeria.
Regarding time to acquisition – I don't remember when I posted the product, but roughly it's probably around 6 months.
An interesting bit for me is, I'm pretty sure if Acquire.com didn't improve their product in a significant way, my product will never get acquired. Every few months they launch new features and polish the little details. I'm not affiliated, but can't recommend them more if you want to jump into an acquisition process one day.
Congrats!!! Always heartening to see a fellow indie-hacker making a profitable exit.
Thank you, man... I still can't believe that it happened. But at the same time, I need to buckle up to continue the journey. Apparently, I'm just getting started :)
I wish you great success as well in whatever you're doing.
Congrats on the sale! Sounds like it was a wise move acknowledging your passion had gone.
You'll never believe that I already want to shut down the startup, just before the acquisition began. I didn't only lose my passion. After facing a bunch of low-quality potential buyers, I just want to give up and move on, shut it down.
But then one email changed everything.
So I saw there's a copy change of the email that made me confident to proceed with the potential acquisition talk. I didn't have any expectations whatsoever, but the rest is history.
Thanks anyway!
Awesome story and congrats! How did you go about the acquisition process? I'm vaguely familiar with microacquire (it seems it's now just called "acquire"). Is that where you listed your startup?
Absolutely. I listed it on Acquire.com.
So I don't think I have anything special with the acquisition process. If you have any specific questions, then ask away!
I think what helped a lot is the information that I give about the startup. I did it in such a way that the potential buyer could just sign an NDA to see all the details (including numbers) of my startup, then they just did the reseach by themselves. Turns out, people love a self-serve process. It saves everyone's time.
That said, it's a quick acquisition process. 1-2 weeks in total.
Congratulations @wilbertliu
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