Many founders spend years optimizing for growth without ever engaging seriously with how, or whether, their business would be acquired. In this episode of The Breakout CEO, Andrew Gazdecki brings clarity to that gap by grounding the exit conversation in execution rather than aspiration.
After bootstrapping and selling his first company, Andrew experienced firsthand how slow, opaque, and distracting the acquisition process can be. Terms were unfamiliar, buyers were hard to identify, and progress was easy to stall while still trying to operate the business. That frustration became the catalyst for what is now Acquire.com.
What began as a simple marketplace to help small side projects sell has evolved into a platform facilitating roughly three acquisitions per day across SaaS, ecommerce, mobile apps, newsletters, and other online businesses. Andrew’s core point throughout the conversation is consistent: most exits fail to materialize not because the business lacks value, but because founders underestimate how much structure and preparation buyers actually require.
Andrew is direct about a reality many founders overlook. Only a small percentage of startups have an obvious strategic acquirer who will proactively reach out. In his experience, the vast majority of founders must find buyers, attract their attention, and manage a process that otherwise stretches on for years.
From my perspective, this reframes exit less as a future transaction and more as an operational system. Acquire.com is designed around standardizing what buyers expect to see and helping founders meet those expectations early enough for momentum to matter. The goal is not to change buyer behavior, but to remove avoidable friction from the process founders must run.
One of the first failure points Andrew sees is mispricing. When founders anchor valuation to personal goals instead of market behavior, buyers disengage before conversations begin.
Acquire.com works with founders to set pricing based on comparable transactions and buyer demand. Andrew is clear that if pricing is too high, feedback disappears. The practical implication is straightforward: valuation is not just about proceeds. It determines whether a process moves at all.
Andrew contrasts his own two-and-a-half-year exit with the timelines Acquire.com now targets. When a business is properly prepared, he describes a typical path of roughly 90 days from listing to close, divided across buyer discovery, agreement on terms, and closing.
That speed comes from fundamentals: clean financials, a complete data room, and founders who understand the questions buyers will ask. In my experience, the same principle holds across scaling decisions. Uncertainty, not complexity, is what slows execution.
A recurring pattern Andrew describes is who buyers actually are. Many are first-time entrepreneurs coming from marketing, sales, or operational roles inside larger companies. They are not buying to rediscover product-market fit. They are buying businesses that already work.
This creates a natural handoff. Builders often lose interest once optimization and scale become the work. Buyers, by contrast, are energized by those exact activities. Transactions succeed when both sides are clear about where they create value and what they want to spend their time doing.
One of Andrew’s most formative breakout moments came well before Acquire.com, while building his first company, Business Apps.
At the time, he was selling mobile apps one customer at a time through direct outreach, with limited traction. The inflection point came from a European customer who was already building apps for his own clients. That customer explained that if he could resell the product under his own brand, he could sell far more apps.
The shift from direct sales to a white-labeled reseller model changed the trajectory of the business. Revenue accelerated rapidly, and the company eventually powered tens of thousands of mobile apps worldwide. Andrew is explicit that without that pivot, the business likely would not have worked.
From my perspective, the takeaway is not about white labeling specifically. It is about recognizing when leverage replaces effort and having the discipline to pivot toward it.
Andrew applies the same execution-first mindset to building teams. His approach is to personally do each role before hiring for it, so expectations and standards are clear.
At Acquire.com, this has resulted in a relatively small team spanning advisory, marketing, engineering, and support while still facilitating a high volume of transactions. Each role is grounded in firsthand understanding of what success requires, rather than abstract job descriptions.
Andrew does not describe his exit as an endpoint. Instead, it sharpened his understanding of how poorly the traditional acquisition process serves founders who are still running their businesses.
Acquire.com exists to address that gap by providing structure, transparency, and support throughout the sale process. The platform’s growth, including transactions ranging from quick two-week closes to multi-month, bank-financed international deals, reflects steady demand for that kind of execution support.
What stands out in Andrew’s experience is not a single tactic, but a pattern. Exits rarely fail because of one bad decision. They stall because founders wait too long to engage with how buyers think and what a real process demands.
Even if selling is years away, designing the business to be buyer-ready forces clarity into pricing, operations, and decision-making today. That clarity compounds, regardless of when an exit ultimately occurs.
Listen to the show for the all the details.
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Andrew Gazdecki is the CEO of Acquire.com and a four-time founder. After bootstrapping and selling his own software company, he built Acquire.com to help founders buy and sell online businesses with greater speed and transparency. The platform supports transactions across SaaS, ecommerce, mobile apps, newsletters, and other digital business models.
LinkedIn: Andrew Gazdecki
Website: https://acquire.com/
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Jeff Holman is a CEO advisor, legal strategist, and founder of Intellectual Strategies. With years of experience guiding leaders through complex business and legal challenges, Jeff equips CEOs to scale with confidence by blending legal expertise with strategic foresight. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Intellectual Strategies provides innovative legal solutions for CEOs and founders through its fractional legal team model. By offering proactive, integrated legal support at predictable costs, the firm helps leaders protect their businesses, manage risk, and focus on growth with confidence.
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The Breakout CEO podcast brings you inside the pivotal moments of scaling leaders. Each week, host Jeff Holman spotlights breakout stories of scaling CEOs—showing how resilience, insight, and strategy create pivotal inflection points and lasting growth.
Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform:
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Want to be a guest—or know a scaling CEO with a breakout story to share? Apply directly at go.intellectualstrategies.com.
Summary
00:00 – Introduction and background on Andrew Gazdecki
01:50 – Bootstrapping and selling Business Apps
03:00 – Scale and scope of Acquire.com transactions
06:00 – Founder confusion during first exit
08:20 – Why most startups lack obvious buyers
10:50 – How Acquire structures faster exits
12:30 – Typical deal timelines and variability
15:10 – Buyer profiles and post-acquisition value creation
17:30 – Hiring philosophy and founder-led execution
18:25 – Breakout pivot through distribution and resellers
23:20 – Acquire.com's recent growth and profitability
26:45 – Brand-building and marketplace flywheel
27:45 – Advice on endurance and founder mindset
Full Transcript
Jeff Holman (00:01.484)
Welcome back everybody. I'm Jeff Holman with the Breakout CEO Podcast. Very excited today to have Andrew Gazzdecki with me. He won't know this, but I think it was, I don't know when you started your, it used to be called Microacquire. And one time you were like, hey, anybody want t-shirts? I printed out a bunch of t-shirts. Send me your mailing address. I'll send you a t-shirt. I probably should have worn that. Now that I think about that, I should have put that on, but that might be, you know, outdated advertising now. So Andrew, it's good to have you here.
Andrew Gazdecki (00:30.035)
Right on. What's up, Jeff? That's cool. Is it a Microquire shirt?
Jeff Holman (00:31.585)
You
It's a micro acquire shirt. Yeah, that was you. did a name change a while ago. It's been some time, right? Since since you, since you changed that, wasn't it? Micro acquire.
Andrew Gazdecki (00:42.783)
It was, was. Hang on to that shirt though, might be worth a lot of money one day. You never know. But yeah, we rebranded about two years ago, two and a half.
Jeff Holman (00:47.278)
All right.
Yeah. anyway, so I've, I've followed you for a while. I'm you're, you're out in the Bay area, right? Yep. And, I think you do Utah, Utah area. So Salt Lake city. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Next time you're out, let me know. go, you know, hit the slopes or something, but, it's great to have you on the podcast. you've done several things. I was really excited when, you you've always, you have actually responded to my.
Andrew Gazdecki (00:58.143)
Sam and Tao, where are you based? Utah, nice. I love Utah.
Jeff Holman (01:18.828)
chats a number of times over the years that we've been connected. So I wasn't surprised, but I was really happy that you responded and agreed to be a guest on the show.
Andrew Gazdecki (01:27.719)
Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for the invite.
Jeff Holman (01:30.082)
Yeah. So, I want to give everybody a little bit of a, some history kind of building up to where you're at right now, because you've, you've done several things. You've, you've shared that. think I've probably listened to a few podcasts that you've been on where you've shared some of that history, but maybe give us the high level overview of what led you to the current company acquire.
Andrew Gazdecki (01:50.655)
Sure. so I've an entrepreneur pretty much my whole life. started my first quote unquote business in like middle school, selling baseball cards and Pokemon cards. so just fell in love with entrepreneurship at an early age. In college, I started a company called business apps. We made mobile app development, easier for small businesses. We trapped that company to about a 10 million in revenue and then sold that to a private equity firm. And.
Just going through the process, being confused the whole time, trying to figure out what all the terms mean, LOI, APA, SPA, escrow. I just thought there could be a easier way to help founders get acquired. And that leads me to core.com where we help founders get acquired.
Jeff Holman (02:38.348)
Yeah. And you've been doing this. I should have looked at your LinkedIn. It's been four or five years, hasn't it? Since, since you started that.
Andrew Gazdecki (02:44.894)
It's been like a thousand years in the startup land. But for regular years, it's been about five years.
Jeff Holman (02:51.128)
Five years, yeah. And how many companies have you helped get sold or bought through that platform so far?
Andrew Gazdecki (03:00.094)
We do about three every day, so we're up to like 3,000 at this point.
Jeff Holman (03:04.589)
Oh wow, that's awesome. I went in and I said, hey, give me a little intro for Andrew for my podcast. It didn't do a great job. I think it said that you hadn't done that many. Oh, you know what actually came up with $500 million in online business deals. Is that a good number?
Andrew Gazdecki (03:21.158)
Yeah, I like that number. Yeah, it was at the AI chatbot we have.
Jeff Holman (03:22.999)
You
No, no, no, I just got onto chat GPT and texted or typed something in and said, hey, give me a little bit of background. So.
Andrew Gazdecki (03:35.921)
AI's not there yet. We still got jobs.
Jeff Holman (03:38.895)
Yeah, no, it's not there. It's not there. Well, so that's awesome. It's really been a platform. I've watched it. I've gotten on it a few times and I've looked at it. I looked at some of the companies, you know, initially I thought, oh, this is going be awesome for these small startups that just get going and, you know, maybe want a quick win or something like that. But you really have a diversity of companies on there, different sizes, different industries. I think I've seen some, I don't know if I've seen like a pizza shop on there, but I've seen some that have been in surprising industries from what I
from what I would have expected for, know, kind of an online fledgling platform selling businesses.
Andrew Gazdecki (04:14.302)
Yeah, I get to see some cool stuff. Maybe from our context for the listeners, we help predominantly SaaS businesses sell, but then also e-commerce and mobile apps. We've expanded to newsletters, crypto businesses. We like to say it's for any online business. no physical businesses, no pizza shops or laundromats or anything like that. But yeah, I I saw a business the other day that was big in a few hundred thousand year in Brazil where you could pay someone to come to your firm.
Jeff Holman (04:32.374)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (04:43.32)
funeral and say some words that you pick. I thought that was fascinating. We helped a SaaS business sell for about 2 million bucks and the founder was 83 years old. I thought that was pretty cool. And then we recently did a transaction with a Japanese company for about 12 million dollars. And that was a wild acquisition with big bank financing and like the KPMG of Japan.
Jeff Holman (04:48.14)
Really?
Jeff Holman (04:57.846)
Wow.
Jeff Holman (05:10.891)
Really?
Andrew Gazdecki (05:11.57)
Yeah, one of my teammates got to fly out to Tokyo and do the closing and stuff like that. So, so kind of wild is what I'm getting at. Like I started the business to just help like small side projects sell, but we've expanded into a few other categories and you know, definitely larger businesses as well. So it's been a fun ride.
Jeff Holman (05:28.694)
Yeah. And the thing that I love about it is you, not only have you been through the experience yourself, you're now making that experience accessible to other people. You know, they get to experience some of the successes that you've experienced by selling your own business. Going back into that, give me a flavor for what it was like when you, cause you said you bootstrapped to about $10 million, that business apps. What was the experience like for you going through the sales process? Was it, you know, this is awesome. Was it terrible? Was it both?
You know, we hear a lot of stories about people who go through that and it's just the hardest thing, but once they're done, they're happy they're done and then they're sad they've sold. Like, how did that work out for you?
Andrew Gazdecki (06:05.266)
Yeah.
Yeah, for me, it was, it was a long process. I had previously tried selling the business when I was about, 25, 26. I had some pretty decent offers. one was from a company called web.com another, endurance international. and just kind of blew those deals. didn't manage them correctly. I kind of thought acquisitions was this weird, standoff where you're like, I'm for sale, but not really. And that like makes the valuation go up.
and then I had no idea what private equity was, meaning what they look at in businesses, mainly financials, profitability, that sort of stuff. so I just thought it was really confusing and I didn't know how to really attract buyers either what they were looking for. and I just wish there was a place where we put all the buyers in one spot and you could essentially have an auction process for your business. and so that's what, what acquire tries to address is just making the sale process much more transparent and easier.
and faster than what you typically get by just emailing businesses and saying, we'd be a perfect fit and trying to work that out. Only meeting with buyers that are interested in moving on acquisitions.
Jeff Holman (07:18.156)
Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think your experience early on the difficulty selling or understanding the process, did you have people around you that you could turn to or was this like true bootstrapped, you've got your own business but not necessarily the network of people? Like what was it that caused that experience to happen the way it did?
Andrew Gazdecki (07:37.793)
you know, I probably could have had some better mentors. I had great mentors for business apps, but no one specifically in the and a space. So I, sure if I had like a really good and a advisor or something like that, maybe the process I ran would have been different. but I think there's just a lot of founders and shoes that I was wearing where, know, they're bootstrapping their business. built something great. maybe the buyer isn't obvious where it's not going to be the next Google. It's not going to be Apple that's buying the business.
Maybe it's XYZ private equity shop, or maybe it's even John Smith who works at Stripe or something like that. Finding those buyers is just really, really difficult. So there's always acquisitions where the buyer is really obvious, meaning it's a strategic acquisition. They reach out to the head of CorpDev and it's a match made in heaven. But that only applies to around 1 % of startups and the other 99 % of startups have to go through this awkward dating process that usually takes years to find a buyer.
Jeff Holman (08:19.33)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Gazdecki (08:35.262)
And so that was kind of the problem I went through where the buyer for business apps wasn't really obvious. I eventually found a buyer luckily, but it did take about two and a half years to do it. And I think that's just way too long.
Jeff Holman (08:37.805)
you
Jeff Holman (08:46.645)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot, a lot of time and energy spent on the buying process while you're trying to run the business, right?
Andrew Gazdecki (08:52.594)
Yeah, true. Absolutely.
Jeff Holman (08:55.925)
Yeah. Well, so as you, as you got into this, like some people, they do their business and then they get out and they're like, I'm going to go invest now. I'm not going to start another business. Like I've been down that road. What is it about you that prompted you to do this? Is it really just, I want to help people or do you love the grind or, know, it's just who you are. What's, what's the,
Andrew Gazdecki (09:17.854)
Bad investor, I'm a terrible investor. No, just kidding. I love building businesses. I think it's exciting. Like you mentioned investing, I think that's super boring where you just kind of look at a screen all day and make some picks. I like doing support, I like marketing, I love thinking of business models, stuff like that. I think I was just always drawn to building businesses and one thing I could add, Jeff, did lose you there for a sec? No, you're back.
Jeff Holman (09:47.095)
Just a second, I think, but I'm here.
Andrew Gazdecki (09:49.161)
Cool. one thing I would just add is, when I started micro acquired now acquire, I didn't mean for it to really become a big business. I started as a side project, so I thought it'd be cool. I just made a marketplace where people could freely buy and sell. There's no business model. And then after I launched it, it just became apparent that this really solved the need in the market. And there was a lot of founders that had businesses ranging from a handful of thousand dollars to millions of dollars looking to sell.
Jeff Holman (09:58.328)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Gazdecki (10:18.94)
That's kind of when I switched from, this is just something fun I made to, I think there's a real business here. So to answer your question, just love building businesses.
Jeff Holman (10:28.043)
Yeah, yeah, that's cool. And a lot of people are benefiting from it. mean, what would you estimate is the difference between the process that you're now facilitating for people to acquire versus the process you went through? What are some of the highlights there? People go through and have you laid out the process? I know early on you were talking about getting advisors in place and doing kind of simplifying templating, but what's it look like now?
Andrew Gazdecki (10:46.355)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (10:52.84)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (10:56.508)
Yeah. So when we first launched, it was just a marketplace. You create a listing, you're kind of on your own, but now what we'll do is we'll work with founders. We'll give our opinion on what their business could potentially sell for, which is critical because if you price too high, you're not going to get interested buyers. How to prepare, how to put together a P and L. We'll do recasting of financials. We'll help assemble the data room, just making sure that they have everything that we know based on all the acquisitions that we've seen that
buyers are going to need this information to make an offer on the business. Then we're going to prepare the founder too. We're going to talk to them about questions that they should expect, how to run certain meetings, how to really get the most out of this process, how to create a competitive process so they get multiple offers. And then when the offers come in, we'll give them our opinion on the offer, whether it's a good offer, it's a fair offer, a great offer. We'll do everything from start to finish to help them.
Uh, successfully get acquired, even working with a third party escrow company to make sure that the transaction is safe and secure. So the other side of what I went through was basically I'm on my own. I'm figuring it out as I go, uh, reaching out to buyers, hoping I don't mess up these meetings. What really happens in an M and a meeting? Uh, like what should we focus on? How do I get them interested? We make sure that founders have support every single step of the way.
Jeff Holman (11:57.581)
Hmm.
Jeff Holman (12:18.721)
That's fantastic. I can only imagine it makes the process easier, less stressful or more stress free and probably a lot faster than what you went through. What are the typical close times for people who going through this once they find that right buyer?
Andrew Gazdecki (12:34.492)
Yeah. When they find the right buyer, it depends. We like to say 90 days from start to finish. So from first day live in the market, from there it'd be say 30 days to find the buyer, 30 days to agree on terms and 30 days to close, 90 days total. Some buyers can close as fast as 30 days. Some are longer if there's bank financing involved, like the acquisition in Japan that was about five and a half months.
And then the acquisition with the 83 year old founder, that was about two weeks because the buyer was super experienced, knew exactly what he was looking for. So there's some variability like that, but generally pretty quick.
Jeff Holman (13:05.44)
wow.
Jeff Holman (13:14.157)
I have to ask the 83 year old seller, is this a serial entrepreneur? Is this someone who just jumped in and saw an app they wanted to build? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Andrew Gazdecki (13:24.272)
Yeah, kind of. He actually bought the apps. They were Atlassian apps, so third party apps in their app store. And he bought them for like 200K, four years prior to selling. It was pretty cool because it's like a good outcome for him. And this was his final farewell to business, so to speak. But he was happy for sure.
Jeff Holman (13:31.414)
Okay.
Jeff Holman (13:42.604)
Yeah.
That's fantastic. I was talking with my dad who's 76 this year, just like last month. And he's a real estate developer, very invested in his business. And my brothers are running parts of it now. And I'm like, dad, is this where you want to be in five years? Like, what's your trajectory? And I just picture him saying, know, Jeff, I'm going to wait two more years, then I'm going to buy an app, and then I'm going to sell it four years later. I'm not sure that's his path, but.
Andrew Gazdecki (14:01.938)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (14:09.638)
we see it all the time. We see buyers do really, really well in acquire where some are rolling up different, SaaS app summer, buying one application, going all in on it, growing it, coming back. had someone recently buy a newsletter for like a hundred K and then came back and sold it with us for 800 K about six months later. Yeah. Six months later.
Jeff Holman (14:28.139)
Really? Are these experienced people who are either experienced buyers or are these people who are like you that you went through one business and you're like, I'm gonna start another. Like what's the typical profile for people? I'm just curious.
Andrew Gazdecki (14:41.766)
Yeah, I mean a lot of the buyers that we work with are what we call first time entrepreneurs, meaning they have a role at a tech company where they're really skilled in marketing or sales. And a lot of the businesses that we work at, we're gone with acquire, they're lacking go to market in some area. So they see a bunch of opportunity where they're an expert in this specific area of growing the business. And so they buy the business, they go all in and find some quick growth levers to focus on.
usually do pretty well.
Jeff Holman (15:12.427)
Yeah. Well, then it sounds like you bring them, because I have to talk with my clients. like, hey, I would love to help first time entrepreneurs act like second time entrepreneurs. Because then you know what questions to ask. You know what's down the road. And it sounds like you're providing that expertise to help them be more like a second time or a serial entrepreneur instead of that first time entrepreneur that has to go through all the mistakes themselves.
Andrew Gazdecki (15:27.421)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (15:35.037)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the biggest benefit to buying a business is you get to skip over the first year or two or even longer where you're trying to figure out product market fit, who's your customer, what's the positioning, what's the branding, building the product. You just skip over all that and start right at the point where you're focusing on marketing, getting more customers, making your existing customers happier, improving operations of the business. So I think it's ideal for entrepreneurs that maybe aren't as creative or that's not their expertise.
Kind like the builder and scaler. You have the builder entrepreneur who loves tinkering and figuring out creative new solutions to existing problems. Then a lot of them kind of get stuck at the point where it's time to really build a business, hire a team, stuff like that. They just don't want to do it. And we hear that all the time in acquire where they built something extremely valuable, profitable. It's a great business, but it's not what they love doing. And then they sell it to someone that loves all the stuff that they think is boring and they don't want to focus on.
Jeff Holman (16:08.258)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman (16:30.892)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (16:35.55)
So it's kind of a win-win.
Jeff Holman (16:35.745)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Perfect sense. I bet we're attracting some CEO audience members right now who saying, hmm, maybe I need to look at another business. Maybe I need to tack something on, buy something and add it.
Andrew Gazdecki (16:49.32)
There's a thousand businesses on acquire, literally over a thousand.
Jeff Holman (16:52.781)
That's fantastic. Well, I want to have a little bit of time here to talk to you about your journey in your business and get into maybe one of your own breakout moments where, because, know, as successful as a lot of people are, there's always these moments where you're looking at your business and you're saying, you know, this isn't going quite like I planned, or maybe in your case, this is not the hobby I thought it was. And maybe the breakout moment was just a natural progression of the market demand. I don't know. I'd love to hear.
Andrew Gazdecki (17:15.88)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman (17:21.901)
kind of the, if you don't mind, how you built up the team around you and kind of what situations that led to leading up to some type of breakout moment.
Andrew Gazdecki (17:33.951)
Yeah, I can give you a good one at, at business as, but to answer your question, uh, I'm a big believer that you should do every role before you hire for it. So when I first launched microquire, I literally was doing everything. did everything from support operations to reviewing every business that goes on the marketplace and newsletter product development, all the marketing, uh, taking sales calls, like living on live chat. Um, and then when it came time to delegate and hire, I was able to find people that I was able to.
to specifically train and knew what success looked like in that role. Every role that I've hired for where I haven't done that, hasn't performed as well. So that could be a small tip for listeners. in terms of a breakout moment, there was a few, at acquire, but one in just my career in general, was back at business apps. had just started the company.
Jeff Holman (18:06.061)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman (18:14.285)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (18:26.302)
I was cold calling small businesses to try and sell mobile apps. I remember calling restaurants like, what's your mobile app strategy? They're like, app, like appetizer. Like, what are you talking about? It just wasn't going well. And I kind of sat there like, how am I going to grow this business? Like one app at a time, this is going to take a lot of cold calling. Uh, and then I had a customer in Switzerland. I was building mobile apps for these beautiful Ramada hotels in like Germany. I'm like 21 at the time. I'm like, Oh, let's.
Jeff Holman (18:36.054)
You
Jeff Holman (18:53.313)
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Gazdecki (18:55.646)
Reach out to this guy, I've getting a call in with a millionaire. He obviously owns hotels. And I set up a call with him and my only question was, how do I get you to build more apps? He explained to me that he was building the mobile apps on behalf of his restaurant clients and his hotel clients. And he owned a marketing and branding agency all across Europe. And the moral of the story there is to not be afraid, excuse me, not be afraid to pivot the business and listen to your customers.
Jeff Holman (19:16.556)
Hmm.
Andrew Gazdecki (19:23.856)
And what he told me was if he could put his own branding on the product, meaning if we could white label the product, allow him to sell mobile apps as if they were under his branding and his technology, he'd be able to sell way more mobile apps. And since that change, we were able to completely change the trajectory of the business.
Jeff Holman (19:43.447)
So you were doing, you were building one offs for people and then you decided to talk to this guy, you were able to essentially white label this for him. Is that right?
Andrew Gazdecki (19:52.249)
Exactly. We switched from a direct sales model, selling one app at a time to essentially selling 10 to 20 to a hundred plus apps at a time. So we went from like a one-on-one sales to distributing the software and creating this global reseller network. We ended up powering about 50,000 mobile apps worldwide.
Jeff Holman (20:14.439)
wow. How did you know to find this guy? was this just serendipity? You read about him or you'd known him or somebody said, hey, you really ought talk to this guy. What's the connection there?
Andrew Gazdecki (20:24.286)
So he was, yeah, so he was using the platform. We had been featured in a couple of press articles and he had read those and started using the platform. And it was so hard to use back then that I have no idea how he figured it out. Uh, but I just wanted to talk to him as someone who actually from start to finish, created his own app and published it. And they were for these really cool spots in Europe. And if, if I hadn't made that call, I don't think that company would have worked. Yeah.
Jeff Holman (20:52.009)
really? Were there other team members involved or was it, what did your team look like at the time?
Andrew Gazdecki (20:58.75)
We were like three dudes in a small like 400 square foot office. There was some remote engineers, but we were tiny.
Jeff Holman (21:05.484)
yeah.
Did this opportunity allow you to grow? Was it just revenue and you kept the team the same or did you have to expand the team at the same time?
Andrew Gazdecki (21:17.48)
Well, after that, everything changed. we, if you look at the revenue graph, we just completely exploded. went from essentially zero revenue to let's call it like three or $4 million in 12 months. Cause again, instead of selling an app $30 a month at a time, we were selling these reseller packages for one, two, three, four, 5,000 a month. So it completely changed our trajectory. So we had to hire, move to an office in the Bay area, specifically Millbrae.
Jeff Holman (21:29.1)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman (21:33.282)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (21:48.03)
And again, I don't think the company would have worked if we hadn't changed the business model away from direct sales to a resale sales.
Jeff Holman (21:57.526)
Yeah, and this changed his business too, right? He was able to go out and do a lot more of this and sell more of these.
Andrew Gazdecki (22:03.678)
Yes. Yeah. So he ended up building several hundred mobile apps with us. And what he would do is charge his clients to design the apps, get them live in the app store and host them on our platform. So we would charge him say $20 a month for mobile app and he was charging his clients a hundred dollars.
Jeff Holman (22:21.002)
Okay, so he ended up being the direct to consumer version of what you were doing before, sounds like. Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (22:27.462)
Yeah, because he had the existing relationships with small businesses.
Jeff Holman (22:32.206)
I was just listening to, wow, it's a book on tape. I forget the name of Scaling by Ben Hardy. don't remember. It's something about scaling. they tell the story about somebody who did something similar, right? They're talking about creating impossible goals so that you rethink your strategy. If you're out there doing direct sales, in fact, it was a story about an app, somebody building an app and selling an app to people. And they're like, I have to cold call for every.
sale that I make, you know, and then they thought, well, how do I get into some type of strategic partner who's reselling it for me and leveraging it? So sounds like a similar experience. Have you seen some of those same things at, at acquire? I know you mentioned if I, I'm not mistaken, you mentioned recently on LinkedIn that you were hitting some profitability metrics that were favorable, right? And so.
Andrew Gazdecki (23:05.896)
Yeah.
Yeah, 100%.
Andrew Gazdecki (23:23.518)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're having a breakout year. Actually we've grown about 50%. We've grown profitability by about 60%. We're going to end the year about 2 million in net profit. So pretty proud of that. And that's a huge shout out to the whole team. Yeah, it's been quite the year for sure. We're pretty small. We're about 15 people and about four would be on engineering.
Jeff Holman (23:37.207)
Awesome.
Jeff Holman (23:44.652)
What does your team look like there now?
Andrew Gazdecki (23:53.055)
Five on advisory, two on marketing, and the rest on support.
Jeff Holman (23:59.544)
Very cool. Are you doing anything different this time around than what you did last time? Aside from just being smarter, more experienced, maybe more mature or whatever, what are you doing differently this time around?
Andrew Gazdecki (24:08.67)
I think we're just really hitting our stride in terms of the guidance that we provide to clients. We've expanded to other categories. So for a while we were predominantly only SaaS and we've been focusing a lot on e-commerce and mobile apps and newsletters and other online business categories. So that's really fuel growth as well. But we help businesses sell. We don't try to get too creative with it. And it's been a good year.
Jeff Holman (24:21.197)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Holman (24:38.209)
process. That's cool. Is there anything in your personal life that carries over into the business? I know some people bring their personalities, just their personality everywhere. Other people, have their business personality. Sometimes things from personal life just carry over into the business. Is that true for you?
Andrew Gazdecki (24:58.91)
you know, I consider myself, you know, kind of a weird and fun guy. I always like to describe our culture as a little weird and fun. like we give out these awards every quarter. It's a banana. So you get a banana award for like the top advisor, top. Engineered. If you get three bananas, we'll buy you a plane ticket to anywhere in the world for a vacation.
Jeff Holman (25:18.589)
and these are real bananas? Classic bananas.
Andrew Gazdecki (25:21.722)
No, they're like little plastic trophy ones. Yeah, you can have them off Amazon. So we do like fun. There's like four other little, you know, quirks that we do like that. So maybe that.
Jeff Holman (25:26.7)
Yeah.
Jeff Holman (25:33.667)
That's funny. There was a company I was at, did sharks. I didn't start this, somebody before me started it, but I got there and like, yeah, we do our shark drawings every month. I'm like, what is a shark drawing? Well, every, you know, I was in charge of intellectual property portfolio and stuff. And so every time somebody would come up with a new invention disclosure or something, they would get a shark and then they'd be put in the drawing. And if your shark was drawn, you got some gift or something. But it was really interesting because as I walked around, I saw these.
Andrew Gazdecki (25:55.089)
Nice.
I like it.
Jeff Holman (26:01.566)
know, sharks all over people's cubicles and desks before I knew what they were. And I'm like, why does everybody have sharks or the bananas prominently displayed in by your team when they win those?
Andrew Gazdecki (26:05.288)
Uh-huh.
Andrew Gazdecki (26:11.986)
They actually are. Yeah, like you go on Zoom with some team members, you can see all the bananas in the background. But I think it's important to have fun at work and just, you know, make fun memories. People always talk about it, share it with their friends and family because it's kind of funny. It's not very serious and lighthearted. And I think those are good attributes to work environment.
Jeff Holman (26:32.172)
What do you think is the, I don't know if it's a team thing or a financial modeling thing or something else. Like what's, what's the kind of the magic behind your strategy right now? Is it just being in the right place at the right time, having something somebody wants or is there more to it?
Andrew Gazdecki (26:47.57)
for acquire, think it's been relentless focus on brand building for five plus years. lots of social marketing, lots of podcasts like this. have our own podcast. and that translates to a lot of activity on the marketplace. But I think the most important thing is, successful acquisitions when founders sell, they love to tell other founders that are looking to sell. And that creates kind like a flywheel effect. So I think it's.
Jeff Holman (27:14.478)
Yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (27:15.454)
It's really just our ability to do what we set out to do.
Jeff Holman (27:20.43)
Doing good work, I guess, huh? Key. That's fantastic. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you sharing both about your business and about your breakout moments. Is there some advice that you would leave for people that might be behind you a little ways in the same journey or a similar journey? Or maybe some of your sellers who are aspiring to create something like Acquire and then sell it on your platform. What would you say to them as they're in their journey?
Andrew Gazdecki (27:22.778)
A little bit, yeah.
Andrew Gazdecki (27:49.983)
I would say just keep going. I think entrepreneurship is this journey that's just guaranteed to get hard and every startup founder and entrepreneur goes through tough times, things that just kind of suck. And I think the ones that win and are successful just find a way to keep going and win from there.
Jeff Holman (28:08.514)
Yeah, I talked with David Sluss yesterday. He's another guest that'll be on the show and he's a professor leading at scale, I think is what it was called, some chaired professor at a university in Essex or in Paris, Essex University, I can't remember it all. Anyway, business university in Paris, France, and that was his message was proactive patience, being able to outlast the change, outlast the...
the bumps in the road. Do you have a... Oh.
Andrew Gazdecki (28:39.698)
Yeah, I think, I think one last thing I'll add to that is, you know, for entrepreneurship, you're almost like begging for hard times and for that patience to be tested. And should I give up? Is this working? Like, I think it's important to take a step back and kind of ask yourself, like, is this surprising? Like when things aren't working or like me at business apps where how am going to figure out the business model? Like those moments are literally guaranteed when you build a business. And so I think when you're in them to just recognize that.
uncover every rock and kind of focus on just putting one foot in front of the other and keep going.
Jeff Holman (29:14.767)
I love that you say ask what was the question again? Is this a surprise? Is this surprising this happened? Is that what you?
Andrew Gazdecki (29:20.144)
Yeah, it's surprise. It's like running a marathon and in the middle of it you get tired and you're like, should I stop running? And it's like, well, dude, you like started running a marathon. Like, of course you're going to get tired. But to finish the marathon, you kind of have to push through those, those hard moments.
Jeff Holman (29:34.946)
Yeah, are you a runner by the way?
Andrew Gazdecki (29:36.766)
I'm not I can I can run a little bit. I do you know once or twice a week, but not enough
Jeff Holman (29:43.091)
that's a runner, you're consistent.
Andrew Gazdecki (29:45.639)
I'm talking like four or six laps around the track by my house. Enough to check the box.
Jeff Holman (29:51.142)
I still say that. Yep. Check the box. You're a runner in my book. So that's fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show today. This is really insightful. And I'm sure some of our audience is going to say, in addition to what I learned from Andrew, I want to go get on the platform and maybe buy a business or sell a business over there. So it's another resource. So, well, thank you so much. And thanks to our audience for listening this week.
Andrew Gazdecki (29:54.619)
Alright, hey!
Andrew Gazdecki (30:11.952)
Alright.
Jeff Holman (30:18.924)
Really appreciate having you all here and we'll see you again next week.
Andrew Gazdecki (30:22.782)
Thanks for having me on.
Jeff Holman (30:25.869)
Awesome. Well, that's, yeah, that's really cool. I love hearing about the business that you've run and I've, really have watched.
Andrew Gazdecki (30:27.048)
That was great.
