this is the story that we shall call: "How We Accidentally Created A "$100,000 Mini-SPAC".
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First a little background... what the hell is a SPAC?
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SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. Also known as a "Blank Check" company.
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Basically - it's when a legit person (like Chamath, or Bill Ackman) goes to the stock market and says: "Give me money, and I'll use that money to buy a great company". ​
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For example:
- 2017 - Chamath launched a SPAC called "IPO A"
- It raised $700M from investors, to go find a company to buy
- 2 years later, IPO A bought a 49% stake in Virgin Galactic, and the stock ticker changed from IPO A --> SPCE
- Investors who gave Chamath the "$700M blank check" have since tripled their money in the 3 years as the stock went from $10 to $30
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He's done ~4 more SPACs in 2020, and has registered every letter in the alphabet (IPO A, IPO B, IPO C etc..). I'm pretty sure he's making ~$100M a pop on these (the rich get richer!)
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I might do a deep dive about SPACs in a future email, but for now just know - it's a blank check given to someone to go buy a company.
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This is the story of how we accidentally created a micro SPAC...(a $100,000 blank check company)
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It all started with a Twitter DM from a guy named Andrew Gazdecki.​
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Andrew owns MicroAcquire, a website where you can go and buy small SaaS businesses.
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Basically, instead of starting a business from scratch - you can buy a business that's kinda-sorta-working and make it better.
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So anyways - Andrew says hey I got an idea. What if we just gifted one of these businesses to someone from your community.
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Me: what do you mean gifted. Like, give away a business? Oprah style?
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Him: yeah exactly. We have some micro companies for sale for like $5k, let's give one away.
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Me: *wheels turning*
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I agreed on the spot. It's a genius marketing move for him. I have a big community of entreprneurs. He wants to get the word out about his marketplace.
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This is way more buzzworthy than just running an ad about his site. Giving away a business!
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This is where things got interesting..
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I tweeted it out:
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*note the off the cuff tone, as if this was my unplanned idea when in reality we had already arranged it before hand. I learned a thing or two watching wrestling (back in the Stone Cold Steve Austin days).
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Immediately the tweet took off. 2 unexpected things happened:
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#1 - A bunch of people tweeted that they would chip in $5k too, just for the fun of the experiment.
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Within a day, we hit $100k. I never expected this. There was no promise of equity. This is just a wild experiment (aka kicks & giggles)
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#2 - And MicroAcquire got a huge surge of traffic.
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call me shaan kardashian baby
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Alright baby - now we had a $100k bankroll, and some pretty impressive operators that we could give the business to.
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Speaking of bankroll...this newsletter is brought to you by Mercury - modern banking built for e-commerce companies. They aren't just a sponsor, they are the bank I actually use for business.
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Unlike traditional banking, these guys have super easy to use interface, and integrate with Shopify, Amazon, Stripe etc..
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Just think about it - most banks sponsor old white guy golf tournaments. Mercury sponsors entrepreneurs like me so I can take time to tell these stories. As a founder, who would you rather roll with?
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Check out Mercury here. It's one of the startups I wish I had invested in early on.
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Anyways - back to our story.
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Over the weekend, I went through about 100 businesses on MicroAcquire.
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Now tbh - a lot of them are junk. Small side projects someone built, with no clear path to growing into something meaningful.
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But there were a handful of contenders.
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I liked 2 categories in particular:
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a) Shopify Apps - shopify is growing like crazy, and these tend to be sticky once someone installs it in their store.
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For example, This shopify app ($24k annual recurring revenue) that lets you schedule daily deals for your store.
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b) Virtual Assistants - there were a couple companies that were offering virtual assistants to companies that can't afford Executive Assistants, but still want help dealing with a bunch of admin work.
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​This company had ~$114k ARR and ~$25k profit last year and seemed like it could grow.
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I'm intentionally not telling you about the companies we liked (so you don't go bid against us), but will reveal that once a deal closes.
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Last step - who do we give the business to?
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Andrew went through hundreds of applications, and he short listed some contenders. We had the contenders do a little test ("how would you grow this business?")
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and then we picked a winner. Here's his original application: https://www.notion.so/Dan-s-Plan-for-SaaS-Success-cd8b51c557774206a104954e7a1fd8ee​
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You should look at this ^. It's better than 99.9% of job applications.
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Why Dan?
- I liked his video message, it was personal, and short.
- He built a landscaping company in high school (employing 12 of his school friends). I like people who have built "sweaty" blue collar companies early in life. Shows hustle.
- He's an engineer, has worked at Tesla, Rivian, etc.. Technical chops are an asset.
- He put his favorite frameworks at the top, which means he knows I have a framework fetish (did his homework)
- He found the sweet spot of "excited" without being "desperate"
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To recap:
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​1) From a random tweet, we raised a $100k Blank Check company to help a random hustler buy a business.
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2) We found Dan, the person we want to give the business to. ​
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He'll learn more from 1 year of buying/growing this business than he could ever learn in business school.
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​3) Dan will spend the next 60 days digging through MicroAcquire to find the right company to acquire.
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I'll have Dan write some guest-updates about the journey on this newsletter in the coming months.
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- shaan
