Lessons after acquiring a SaaS company, then doubling its value in 3 months

Over the last 5 years, I’ve built many products some of which have been successful in that they’ve reached millions of people, but as I got older, I wanted a product that would open up a new stream of income for me. After spending 3 months building yet another product/company from scratch that generated 0 dollars in revenue, I decided I needed to try something different. So one day I began browsing acquire.com as a way to kill time, but then I found a product that seemed too good to be true. After some back-and-forth negotiations and digging into the details to make sure everything was legit, I acquired the company 🎉

That product is Reminderbase, and three months after the acquisition it’s now worth double what I paid for it, so I wanted to share some of the key learnings from the entire experience.

Buy a product that has validation with room for improvement

A big reason the acquisition was so successful was that I immediately knew how to add value to the product. The product was highly rated and had hundreds of paying customers so I knew it solved a real durable problem people had. The issues with the product were mainly its poor infrastructure and lack of features to keep it ahead of the competition. My first order of business was migrating the app to something more modern that allowed us to respond to user feedback in hours instead of weeks. The second thing I did was modernize the UX and UI of the app to bring it in line with what customers expected from modern polished apps.

before

after

The truth is, these were low-hanging fruits that drastically increased our conversions and with our redesigned app with more features, the product became even more appealing to potential customers.

Wow your customers

The second big thing that we updated was our customer outreach and support. The product was essentially on cruise control before we acquired it and while the churn rate was high, it was also growing organically due to its high ratings on the app store. We did two major things that wowed our customers. The first was utilizing an AI support email tool to immediately respond to support emails which our users loved. This was especially true when our new app version had some bugs that impacted some legacy user flows.

The second thing we did was bug bashing and responding to issues immediately. We migrated to Expo for our new app which allowed us to use over-the-air updates. This means after a user complained about an issue, they would experience a magical moment where we would fix the bug, then email them to kill and re-open the app, and the bug was fixed.

The next thing we did for our users was identify the most requested features and we made sure we launched the new app version with a couple of them. I love canny.io for keeping track of requested features and I strongly believe anyone building a product or platform to consider using it as well.

Understand people don’t like change

No matter how careful you are, whenever you buy a product and change it, there are going to be people who prefer the old version. These people will sometimes demand the old product and threaten to leave a bad review otherwise. This happened to us and the only way to deal with it is to make the transition process as simple as possible while keeping the core experience the same. Another solution is to support both the old and new UI versions and default migrated users to the old app. I generally don’t recommend this as it doubles your tech debt. We decided to charge forward with an experience that adds more capabilities and is more attractive to new users who are willing to pay a higher price even if it leads to churn with our old users. Be courageous with your vision and be okay with some churn if it enables the long-term vision.

That’s all for now, I hope you’ve learned something! Will be sharing more as we continue to grow Reminderbase!

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