🗞 What's New: To get acquired, remove yourself

How can indie hackers make their products attractive to buyers?

• Build trust by offering full disclosure upfront, and remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business.
• If you're juggling parenting and indie hacking, bring your kid into the loop. Make business concepts fun to teach them to become founders.
• From $100 MRR to a $4K acquisition. Moniet Sawhney saw a gap in the market, used Reddit to create buzz, burned out, and then sold.

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by James Fleischmann

Kevin McArdle doesn't build products, he buys them. Kevin launched Big Band, a SaaS acquisition platform, and below, he's sharing what he looks for when acquiring a new company.

Rule of 40

For me, a company needs to be profitable in a long-term sustainable industry. I only buy from founders that I feel I can trust.

I like the "Rule of 40," which is growth rate percentage + margin percentage. If those numbers add up to 40, it's a pretty healthy business.

I also look at other things: Great product, great team, happy customers, good reviews, good tech without a lot of technical debt, and low churn.

Most businesses don't check every box, but I want them to check most of them.

Trust

I've been burned in the past when I ignored an uneasy feeling about the founder I was dealing with. Businesses take on the personalities of their founders, for better or worse.

As a founder, be honest. Do what you say you are going to do. Live up to commitments. Don't try to sugarcoat your numbers or metrics, and if you know there is something concerning about your business, just disclose it.

No business is perfect, and we're very likely to find those things out during the diligence process. If you try to hide something and we find it, trust is lost. If you disclose something early, trust is earned. It isn't complicated.

Remove yourself

One thing that is generally universal is that the founder should remove themselves as much as possible from the day-to-day operations of the business.

That way, it is easier to replace that person after acquisition.

Focus

Focus on what's important at each stage of the process:

• Early: Product-market fit, and getting to a point of survival.
• Middle: Building the team and processes to scale.
• Late: Extracting yourself from the day-to-day of the business.

Pro tips

• Reach out to companies like Big Band to get on their radars early. Building relationships isn't required, but it sure helps.

• If you are a founder with a business over two years old, conduct exit planning annually. It is not something that waits until someone is "ready" to sell their business.

Selling a business is one of the most important things you will ever do in your professional life. Educate yourself on the process, and make progress towards it every year until you do ultimately sell. Here's a workbook to get you started!

Discuss this story.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

📱 Best practices for Instagram ads.

💻 Midjourney Alpha is here.

🤝 Hire freelancers the easy way. Freelancer hiring for founders. #ad

🍪 The next step towards phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome.

🧵 Threads launches for half a billion more users in Europe.

🤖 Integrating AI tools into your marketing processes.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

from The Hustle newsletter

Parenting is hard, especially when you're also trying to build a business. Why not loop your kids in and teach them how to be founders themselves?

Trendster Ivy Xu is helping parents do just that. She's the founder of BETA Camp, a virtual cohort-based learning program that helps teens build startups.

Here are her top three tips for instilling entrepreneurship in kids.

Start 'em young

Make learning basic business concepts practical and fun:

• Encourage curiosity with tools like a question jar or vision board that make it fun for kids to explore things that interest them.

• Take field trips to local stores, factories, farms, etc., to show them how businesses operate.

• Shoot mock commercials for your kid's favorite toys, like this one.

Don't underestimate your kid

When Ivy entered the Silicon Valley workforce, she realized that she'd had the mindset at 16 to do the sort of work she was doing at 22, just not the proper guidance or opportunity.

During the pandemic, Ivy quarantined with her family, including her 15 year old sister Jane, an aspiring artist. Under big sis's guidance, Jane turned her passion for art into a graphic design side hustle, earning thousands of dollars within months by targeting small beauty brands on Instagram.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that your kids can't build something real, just because of age.

Get your kid a mentor

You might be the most skilled founder on the planet with heaps of wisdom to impart on your offspring, but let's face it...they're not going to want to listen to you.

This is where a mentor comes in. Here's what to look for:

• Your kid should see themselves in their mentor. For instance, the ideal mentor for a 16 year old girl with an interest in social media isn't a 50 year old CEO of a Fortune 500 company; it's a 20 year old influencer.

• They've got to listen. One of the primary functions of a good mentor is to be a sounding board for all the things kids can't talk to their parents, teachers, or friends about.

Subscribe to The Hustle newsletter for more.

💪 I built an AI startup in one weekend with no-code. Posted by Tom Wesolowski.

🚀 From a $5K MRR plateau to $20K MRR in five months. Posted by Sveta Bay.

😫 Five failed projects in eight years. Posted by Kazi Mohammed Erfan.

👀 How do you choose a tech stack? Posted by Upsilon.

💸 Fixing an $80 mistake with a $500 mistake. Posted by SolarFlare.

🛠 The best SaaS landing page builders. Posted by Mark Camilleri.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy._

by Moniet Sawhney

I had my first win as an indie hacker selling my project, Blocs, a suite of Notion widgets for habit building. It sold for $4K.

Here are my key takeaways!

The background

When I launched Blocs, there was a ton of buzz around Notion, and I was a big fan of the app. When I discovered Notion embeds, I saw an opportunity.

I strongly believe that founders should be aware of trendy scenes, and try to innovate there. Because of the hype, it's easier to market to people. I know that firsthand from my successful Reddit post that got 1.7K upvotes on r/Notion. This converted to thousands of early signups.

At that point, I didn't have a product at all!

The growth

SEO can be a great long-term strategy to acquire new customers. Before the sale, Blocs was getting 1K-2K visits from Google, and still ranks number one for the search "Notion habit widgets."

I did all my keyword research using Ahrefs, created relevant copywriting, and optimized HTML semantics. Ahrefs has a great course on the fundamentals of SEO, which I referenced and learned from.

The mistakes

1. Executing slow: I should have executed the idea faster. I created a lot of buzz around Blocs, which later died out because I took too long to execute the idea. Make sure to master your tech stack so you know how to execute quickly.
2. Burning out: I was trying to grind too hard, and was sacrificing social interaction for long periods of time to get the project done. Definitely don't do this! Pace yourself.
3. Continual growth and marketing: Towards the end, I started experimenting with Spaces and TikTok, and realized that I really missed out on the potential of social media to expand my revenue. I got almost 1K views on TikTok in just one day! If I'd spent a whole month, that would've definitely resulted a bunch of conversions. Keep pushing your product out there in different ways.

Discuss this story.

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to James Fleischmann, Darko, Kristin Egan, and Moniet Sawhney for contributing posts. —Channing