They Got Acquired - Napkin math

March 24, 2023
​Read on web​

“You couldn’t get more cliched than this,” Charlie Lieu said. “Brent and I had lunch, and we sketched [AirTerra] out on a napkin.”

Lieu and Brent Beabout had both worked at Amazon, and graduated from MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program, a dual-degree program where graduates earn both an MBA and an engineering degree.

Nearly 15 years later, in 2020, Lieu reached out to Beabout to try to recruit him to serve as the COO for a startup she was advising. “When we had lunch to catch up, he said, ‘Honestly, I want to talk to you about starting my own company,'” Lieu said.

The idea relied on the founders' deep expertise in logistics. They would combine shipments from multiple companies, allowing small and midsize e-commerce companies that couldn’t fill a whole truck on their own to share costs, shipping packages more cheaply. They called it AirTerra.

They brought on four more colleagues as co-founders, and each chipped in some cash to buy shares of the company, between $500 to a few thousand dollars, Lieu said, while Beabout put in about $20,000. In total, they bootstrapped the company with about $30,000 in startup costs.

Then, not even a year later, American Eagle reached out about an acquisition. Here's the story:

​How AirTerra went from an idea on a napkin to a sale to a retail giant in 10 months​

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Behind the business

Once you've exited — or are ready for a change — how do you pick your next project to work on?

Here's how I thought about that when looking for my next idea, a search that ended with They Got Acquired.

After leaving The Penny Hoarder & selling The Write Life, I searched for what to build next.

I was looking to check these boxes:

✅ Fit for my skills

My background is in content operations, so I wanted to lean into that.

I was tempted by other ideas, but realized that building on what I'd done for the last decade was my shortcut to success.

Except, it needed to feel *new* somehow...

✅ Learn something new

I get to learn about a new topic area: selling a business. And the data piece is new for me, too.

This helps keep it exciting.

✅ Revenue potential

One mistake I've made in the past is growing in a B2C niche where the audience didn't have money to spend.

For example: writers. I loved serving the writing community, but it was a tough audience to monetize.

I thought about this a lot before starting They Got Acquired. We're monetizing by helping two different audiences: founders and businesses that want to reach them.

✅ Optimize for low stress

This was really the most important piece for me: my new business needed to fit in with my life. It couldn't suck up all my energy, because I wanted to reserve plenty for my family and myself.

One way to keep stress low for a content company?

Focus on evergreen content, rather than news-based content where your value is in being first to share.

All of our content can be created in advance, so we're not stressed about deadlines.

Of course, there are other kinds of stress! But keeping things evergreen helps.

If you had a framework like this when exploring for your next idea, I'm curious, what was on it? What were your priorities?

See you next time,

Lexi Grant
Founder & CEO
​They Got Acquired​
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🙌 How we can help

Here's what we offer for founders looking to sell in the next year:

- Help choosing an advisor or broker you can trust

- M&A coaching if you have a potential buyer or want to approach buyers on your own

- A sounding board (free call) if you're not sure where to start

- Reports full of case studies and data about other founders who sold

- Posts covering the basics of how to sell your business​

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