Selling his own startup was painful, so he built an 8 figure M&A marketplace

Ever tried to sell a startup? Then you know the drill: years to find a buyer, weeks of due diligence, endless legal wrangling, and don't even get me started on those broker fees…

But what if there was a way to skip all that headache?

That's exactly what Andrew Gazdecki set out to build with Acquire.com. After selling three businesses himself and experiencing the pain firsthand, he decided enough was enough.

Here's how Andrew turned his own M&A frustrations into a game-changing platform for entrepreneurs everywhere.

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hey there, I'm Andrew Gazdecki, founder and CEO of Acquire.com.

I run one of the fastest-growing startup acquisition marketplaces in the world. We bring founders and buyers together with world-class M&A advisory and tools to close multimillion-dollar deals.

Our flagship product is the marketplace. We vet listings, prep founders, and qualify buyers so they spend more time on acquisition talks and less on dead ends. As a result, founders sell at a price and terms that meet their goals and to a better match for their business. Buyers get high-quality deal flow, curated listings, and expert support to evaluate listings and make offers.

Sellers are mostly profitable SaaS founders (though we list other industries too). They pay a listing fee while live on the marketplace and a closing fee if and when they sell. With skin in the game, sellers are motivated to get acquired. 

Buyers are a diverse mix, including private equity, portfolio entrepreneurs, and first-time acquirers and pay an annually recurring fee to contact founders and view their full listings. 

To date, we've helped over a thousand founders exit, with a combined acquisition volume of over $500m.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I started Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire) in 2020. I'd just sold my third business and was as frustrated by the complexity of the acquisition process as I was with my first exit. I kept thinking, why is this process so hard? Why did it take so long? Why was it so expensive?

For example, my first big exit was in 2017 with Bizness Apps, a mobile app builder that made launching a mobile app easy and affordable for small businesses. I'd spent a decade making mobile apps accessible for people without coding skills or the money for a developer. 

When I sold the business, I was surprised by how difficult the acquisition process was. The years it took to find a buyer, the weeks of due diligence, the endless legal wrangling, the costly intermediaries. Here was another needlessly expensive and complex process holding people back from realizing their ambitions.

At the really high end, M&A brokers and investment banks usually step in to help founders manage the process. But they charge a fortune. And without an eight-figure-plus valuation, you're not on their radar. So, you lose out on the professional guidance and buyer network that helps you maximize your exit.

As a regular in the startup community, I began asking entrepreneurs about their exit experiences. Everyone complained of the same things. My M&A experience was limited to four exits, but I broke the process down into stages, starting with connecting founders and buyers. 

With a basic marketplace set up, I was amazed at how many people just wanted an easier way to meet buyers and sellers. At that point, I knew I was onto something, so I assembled the best team I could find and started developing advanced tools to close acquisitions on-platform like legal document builders, metrics connections, escrow integrations, and a valuation tool.

But that was just the start. Multimillion-dollar businesses are complex and can be challenging to buy and sell without professional guidance. Founders didn't always know what was required to engage buyers in acquisition talks while buyers occasionally struggled to evaluate businesses efficiently. This means the better prepared are usually those with the upper hand in negotiations.

I decided to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into an in-house M&A team to help customers succeed across complex areas like recasting financials, due diligence, legal, financing, negotiations, marketing, and lots more. Advice I wished I had when selling my previous businesses. And now, four years after launch, we're just getting started.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product.

My experience of M&A was that it was, generally, a little more favorable to buyers and M&A intermediaries. They seemed to know the process best, and many of the available resources on acquisitions were pretty jargon-heavy and not geared towards helping everyday founders. 

The first step was to identify distinct stages of the acquisition process and then build a marketplace simplifying them. The more complexity I could remove, the easier it would be for startups to get acquired. That started with connecting buyers and sellers without M&A advisors, investment bankers, and other third parties and their associated costs. 

Acquire.com's MVP, as it were, was a simple marketplace where a seller could list their business and sell it for free. Buyers, however, would pay an annual fee to access these listings since I'd personally vet each one to ensure it was a quality business. While momentum built, I began educating the market on a better way to buy and sell businesses.

In 2020, I raised around $13 million from the startup community to begin working on phase two of Acquire.com: helping buyers and sellers get to an offer faster. That meant things like funds verification, expanded profiles, and upgrading the chat experience on the platform.

Next was to tackle the legal aspects of acquisitions, namely the drafting, signing, and sharing of acquisition documents like letters of intent (LOIs) and asset purchase agreements (APAs). Most of the acquisition process could be wrapped up with these documents. 

We later added mutual non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and an integration through Escrow.com so you can now complete an acquisition end-to-end on Acquire.com. For this, we needed our own in-house counsel to help draft standard legal wordings and a partnership with Escrow.com to integrate its API for a seamless customer experience.

Our biggest investment recently has been in helping our customers succeed with our in-house M&A advisory. We built the tools and simplified the process, and now you also have the guidance from our customer success and M&A teams to help you get Acquire'd.

The M&A team prepares you to exit, optimizes your listing, and markets your startup to over 500k buyers. They can also help you stack-rank buyers and offers and coach you on strategic pricing and creative deal structures that achieve your goals. On the buyer side, we help with everything from obtaining financing to matching you with the best startups.

Since launch, what growth channels have been most effective for you?

Organic social media and word-of-mouth have been the key drivers of our growth since the beginning.

When I first started, I took the (then) untraditional route of building in public. I was already cultivating a founder-heavy audience on Twitter and thought this would be a great opportunity to allow my followers to ride along. 

By the time we'd built our MVP, I'd grown my organic audience considerably. That combined with our free founder service (selling) helped us grab the #1 Product of the Day for our Product Hunt launch. We then kept the ball rolling with: 

• Creative, fun go-to-market strategies like using Russ Hanneman and swag giveaways
• Launching new tools every six months early on to keep our product innovative
• Providing free access to our strongest content and resources
• Key partnerships with other founder-focused brands and communities
• Continually celebrating our customer wins and sharing their stories

Not all of the actions we've taken were deliberate. The Russ Hanneman videos started with me having some fun and wanting to make my team laugh. It stuck and became something we were known for that ultimately drew a lot of engagement. (I may have run that play a few too many times as Chris is no longer on Cameo! 😅)

We've run tests in paid social (FB, IG, LI, TW), display, and sponsorships (newsletters and podcasts), but we only consistently invest in Google paid search because of its impact and transactional nature.

None of what we're doing is groundbreaking – it's more about our story. I've lived through the same painful reality of trying to sell a business more than once, so I know my audience well. It was honestly a labor of love when I started because I truly enjoyed helping other founders achieve life-changing exits. If you talk to the early founders that sold on the platform, they'll tell you that it seemed like I was doing everything and that's because I was! From managing the entire listing process to providing any additional guidance to help them reach their goal.

Did you ever have an "oh shit" moment where you thought it wouldn't work?

I expected our "oh shit" moment to be when we started charging sellers a closing fee. Thankfully, it never happened because we'd proven our value with the technology and M&A advisory we'd built into the platform. People had been expecting to pay something for years. 

One of our biggest missteps was probably the M&A advisor directory. We'd assembled a fantastic team of business brokers and investment bankers to help founders needing the extra assistance. They could browse the directory and hire an expert for things like valuations or legal help, and we'd take a cut of their fees for the introduction. 

But over time, we realized the quality of business brokers available was low, and it wasn't an area in which we wanted to be first. Many would ghost founders, ask for really high upfront fees, and to our surprise, the success rate of their acquisitions was incredibly low. 

So we pivoted to offering guidance in-house. After investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a stellar M&A team, we saw a huge uptick in close rates and far more satisfied founders. 

Can you break down the keys to this business model for us? What makes it work? And What do outsiders typically not understand about your industry?

Today, our operations consist of curating listings, qualifying buyers, and helping buyers and sellers navigate the acquisitions process. Our M&A advisory teams work with sellers to optimize their listings, prepare acquisition documents and recasts, and provide resources they'll need during the process. Meanwhile, our product team is working on even better matching algorithms for buyer recommendations. 

On the marketing side, we invest a lot into education and awareness. We've developed an acquisition course called Acquire Academy, written hundreds of blog articles on acquisitions and entrepreneurship, and are developing our help center to cover all customer questions. 

Our goal is to become the world's number one startup acquisition marketplace. Many have tried and failed to disrupt M&A because of its complexity and countless (often competing) stakeholders. We've managed to overcome these obstacles by trying to be good first and great later, disrupting the acquisition process in stages and making iterative progress. 

We still have a long way to go, but we're excited to have made such a big impact on the startup community and for helping thousands of founders get acquired.

What platform/tools are absolutely crucial for your business?

Slack and Zoom keep our remote team connected, aligned, and making bad jokes together. 

Figma allows collaboration between product, design, and marketing. We use it to create memorable UX and to iterate and give feedback on what's working and what isn't.

ClickUp helps all departments manage tasks and priorities, which has kept everyone accountable for their goals and deadlines and fosters cross-department collaboration.

Loom has made sharing ideas and feedback asynchronously a dream – it's so much more engaging watching someone take you through an idea visually than to read about it alone.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

My top startup sales & marketing books...

Sales books:

1. To sell is human
2. Sales acceleration formula
3. Predictable revenue
4. Challenger sale
5. Sell the way you buy

Marketing books:

1. Play bigger
2. Obviously awesome
3. Tuned in
4. Made to stick
5. 1-page marketing plan

Where do you see untapped opportunity in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

If someone were to build a one-click due diligence automation tool, or if we could build it ourselves, it would overcome the most challenging aspect in most acquisitions. 

I'm not sure how it would work in practice. Due diligence varies from acquisition to acquisition, but invariably involves a buyer sending a founder hundreds of questions about their business before acquiring it. The buyer's goal is to verify the startup is legitimate and the founder's claims genuine by evaluating seller evidence (for example, financial accounts, HR records, etc.).

Due diligence alone can take weeks on larger acquisitions and there's usually at least one issue the founder has to resolve before the deal closes. But if there was a way to auto-verify the key aspects of a business without the need for endless spreadsheets and document cross-referencing, it could mean closing in hours, not days.

Perhaps on a more realistic note, I'd love to work with more entrepreneurship communities and the businesses enabling entrepreneurship. Acquire.com sits at the end of the entrepreneurship cycle, just before a founder hops off one profitable idea before starting another. And I'd love to help more founders make and finance that jump whether it's into a new venture or early retirement.

What are some strong opinions you have about leadership, and how do you actually put those into practice in your company?

I believe to lead a company you need to understand people and what motivates them. For some people a job is just a job, and that's okay, and the more you do to remove obstacles to doing that job, the happier they will be. I'm a pretty good judge of character and usually hire more for attitude than aptitude, since you can train the latter but not the former. 

And that's how you get employees on your side, by trusting in their abilities and supporting them to do great things. Before you know it, you've fostered superstars who'll take you to the next level. I've always wanted to create a work environment that I'd enjoy working in, which is a place where you're respected and trusted to do your job in a culture of positivity and support. 

Communication and recognition are everything at Acquire.com. We meet several times a week as a team, and every quarter the remote team gets together to socialize and align on objectives. Everyone gets a shout out and a reward for a job well done. We've been able to make so much progress because our teams believe in changing entrepreneurs' lives with every exit.

Where can we go to learn more?

Website: acquire.com

Twitter: twitter.com/acquiredotcom

Instagram: instagram.com/acquiredotcom

Blog: blog.acquire.com

Email: andrew@acquire.com