They Got Acquired - Yup, it's a gold mine

June 11, 2024
​Read on web​

Many businesses have multiple lines of revenue or products.

What happens if you want to sell one, but hold onto the other?

That was the case for Will Critchlow and Duncan Morris, childhood friends who became business partners when they launched an SEO agency called Distilled in 2005.

By 2020, their team had grown to 50 people, and revenue was in the mid-7 figures.

The founders were eager to sell the agency once the right opportunity came along. But they wanted to keep a complementary software they’d built along they way, an A/B testing software for websites.

When they sold Distilled to Brainlabs, they spun off the SaaS and renamed it SearchPilot.

That approach complicated the deal, but made figuring out post-sale plans easier.

“It was really good that I had the next thing in SearchPilot at the point that I was selling my baby,” Critchlow told us. “I think if I’d sold the whole thing, had an earn-out and then stopped dead, I wouldn't have known what to do with myself on that next day.

Here’s how they scaled their SEO agency and landed the deal:

​This founder sold his SEO agency but retained ownership of his A/B testing SaaS​

📈 Our reports are a gold mine

Did you know we publish lots of free reports showcasing specific types of businesses that have sold?

Reports you can grab for free:

• ​9 Agency Deals​
• ​8 E-Commerce Deals​
• ​13 Newsletter Deals​
• ​53 Women Who Sold a Business​
• ​14 Companies That Sold With Contractors Only​
• ​5 SaaS Deals​
• ​5 Content Deals​

Plus, our M&A platform is basically our reports on steroids 💪

It lets you pick and choose deals similar to your business and create your own personalized reports. Pretty baller!

Behind the business

I've never considered myself an indie hacker.

But I've embraced that mentality over the last year as we've built our M&A platform — and I've really enjoyed it!

It's insane that we can build a platform of this scope with no-code tools.

And yet, I also find it kind of crazy that despite how many great tools we have available now, pulling this off still requires a labyrinth of software that's all interconnected.

🛠️ Our tool stack for the M&A platform includes...

• ​Airtable (houses the data)
• ​Softr (powers the platform)
• ​Make (runs our automations)
• ​Stripe (for payments)
• ​ConvertKit (onboarding via email)
• ​ClickUp (team task management)

We also use a bit of Zapier (legacy automations), WordPress (stories that live on our website), Google Forms (for Q&As), Loom (for onboarding), PROBACKUP (backing up AirTable), Feedly (to track deals) and more.

🙏 Shout out to Cole Fortman, who coached me through the no-code build. None of this would be possible without his brain.

Now that we're starting to add our first users and see the fruits of our labor, I'm realizing:

🤔 Working on this project has made me rethink what I want from my business.

I've always considered myself more of an operator; I'm good at arranging all the people and pieces so everyone can do their best work. I prefer to delegate most of the work to a team, so we can move faster together.

But getting deep into the weeds on this build has been so much fun. As a bonus, I'm intimately familiar with how the platform works and what's possible, which is helpful for plotting our future roadmap, fixing bugs, and most importantly, helping users find what they need.

💡 Conventional advice says that as you grow as an entrepreneur, you should work more on the business rather than in it.

But what if getting your hands dirty brings satisfaction and joy?

See you next time,

Lexi Grant
Founder & CEO
​They Got Acquired​

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P.S. We've published 220 stories about deals and how they happened!

If you've joined us recently, here are a few good ones you might have missed...

Media deal:
​How 2 laid-off journalists built a local news startup and sold to a national brand​​

SaaS deal:
​This letter-writing app, a 20-year side project with only $500/month cost, sold for millions​

Agency deal:
​He wasn’t looking to sell his podcast agency — until a buyer slid into his LinkedIn DMs​

E-commerce deal:
​After losing inventory to a fire, this young entrepreneur won 22 grants to fund her e-commerce business​
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