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cover of episode This SaaS Does $200M in Transactions—Should You Buy It?

This SaaS Does $200M in Transactions—Should You Buy It?

2025/4/1
logo of podcast Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating

Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating

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Bill D'Alessandro
H
Heather Anderson
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Travis Jamison
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Bill D'Alessandro: 我认为这家公司对Stripe的依赖性过高,如果Stripe推出自己的支付处理功能,这家公司将面临巨大的风险。此外,该公司每年都在衰退,这使得它不适合长期贷款。 我认为这家公司的估值过低,这可能是因为它缺乏护城河,并且依赖于一个特定的垂直行业。如果该行业出现变化,或者竞争对手推出类似的产品,这家公司将面临挑战。 我们需要仔细分析该公司的净流失率,以预测其未来的发展趋势。即使该公司每年都在流失客户,但只要能够持续获得新客户,并且客户的平均生命周期较长,那么该公司仍然具有投资价值。 收购者需要进行全面的技术尽职调查,以评估代码库的技术债务和复杂性。如果技术债务过高,那么收购者将需要投入大量资金来进行维护和升级。 我认为卖家出售公司的原因可能有很多,例如倦怠、对未来发展缺乏信心,或者达到了财务目标。我们需要了解卖家的真实意图,才能做出正确的投资决策。 总的来说,我认为这家公司存在一定的风险,但也存在一定的投资机会。收购者需要仔细权衡利弊,才能做出正确的决策。 Heather Anderson: 这家SaaS公司是一个基于Stripe构建的垂直行业特定SaaS计费软件,EBITDA为200万美元,营收为240万美元,估值3.4倍EBITDA,约700万美元。 SBA预资格认证并没有实际意义,只是一个营销工具,不能作为贷款的保证。 这家公司可能服务于某个垂直行业,并有针对性地开发功能,但这个领域很容易出现同质化竞争,需要找到一个垂直领域并建立差异化优势。 这家公司客户粘性强,但流失率较高,需要关注净流失率来预测公司未来的发展趋势。 如果公司正在衰退,可能无法获得SBA贷款,需要考虑其他融资方式,例如卖方融资或收益分成。 Travis Jamison: 我投资了大约15个小型企业,我对投资领域持开放态度,喜欢那些难以被淘汰的企业,包括蓝领行业和软件公司等。 我认为这家公司可能是一个针对小型企业的开票软件,它使用Stripe处理支付,本质上是Stripe的一个包装器,简化了客户的使用流程。 这家公司估值低可能是因为它只是Stripe的一个包装器,缺乏护城河。 Capital Pad 审核标准之一是:这家公司能否用10万美元和一个网站重建?如果可以,那么这家公司的估值可能过高。 收购现有公司比从零开始创业更容易获得债务融资。 Capital Pad是一个平台,连接小型企业收购交易的投资者和寻求资金的企业。我们对交易进行严格筛选,只选择高质量的交易。我们宁愿少做一些高质量的交易,也不愿多做一些低质量的交易。

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You could see this being specifically for something like that, where if that platform decided to add their own payment processing, well, this business is effectively dead. If it's declining every year, you're kind of expecting that's what's going to happen. This is not something you'd want to put a 10-year loan on. I'm probably ripping out Stripe and going to a lower cost payment processor is probably too much work, but negotiating with Stripe can be very low-hanging.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. This is the internet's number one podcast on buying, selling, and operating small businesses. I am one of your hosts, Bill D'Alessandro, and today I am with Heather Anderson and my friend Travis Jamison from Capital Pad. And we break down a

A industry vertical specific SaaS software. It's a SaaS billing software, we think, built on top of Stripe that has two million dollars of EBITDA on two point four million dollars of revenue. And the broker has it priced at three point four times EBITDA. So about seven million dollars.

So very attractively priced for SaaS. There's some reasons for that, which we get into in the episode. We also talk with Travis a little bit about allocation strategies when investing in small businesses, kind of whether portfolio effect makes sense or going all in on a smaller number of deals. Always love having Travis on. He provides such a great perspective. And if you're into SaaS, you will like this one. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this episode of Acquisitions and Office.

Okay, so everyone knows that one of the first levers you want to pull in an acquisition is updating their technology, updating their systems that might still be running on a spreadsheet or even on pen and paper. But tech is complicated. There's a lot of solutions out there. So choosing the right cloud platform, the right CRM, the right telephony, compliance, cybersecurity, not to mention implementing all that stuff, that's a job in itself.

And I want to tell you about this week's sponsor, which is Nick Akers and Enzo Technologies. So Nick actually knows about all this firsthand. He is a former searcher himself and bought Enzo Technologies, which is an IT firm for small businesses.

So Nick has seen the tech challenges that searchers face when acquiring businesses. He's seen them up close firsthand because he is a searcher. Now his team at Enzo regularly works with searchers on acquisitions, offers a complimentary IT audit of your target so you can make a plan for what you're going to do on day one. Nick takes a personal interest in all of their searcher clients and draws on his own experience in the search phase.

And his business, Enzo, actually dates back to 1989, even before he acquired it. So the company has deep expertise for managing the tech for hundreds and hundreds of small businesses over decades. So if this sounds like something that would be helpful to you, check out EnzoTechnologies.com, I-N-Z-O Technologies.com. Or you can just email Nick directly, Nick at EnzoTechnologies.com.

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. It is springtime in Charlotte and I presume in California too, right, Heather? Yeah, I think we just skipped right over to summer though. Like we usually do. It's hot. Isn't it always spring in California? Isn't that the selling point? That's how it works. Of course it works.

And so welcoming today, my friend Travis Jamison to the pod. Travis of Capital Pad. If you're a regular listener, you have heard him a couple times before. An expert in buying and selling and investing in small businesses. So Travis is our guest commentator today. Travis, for people who don't know who you are, can you give a little summary? Thanks, Bill. Serial entrepreneur, turned investor, and now I'm in love with investing in S&B deals.

How many SMB deals would you say you've invested in? Probably about 15, something like that. I don't know exactly. I need to look. But yeah, somewhere around there. More or less 15. A basket of small business acquisitions. And what, like, is it all e-commerce? Is it all SaaS? Like, what do you focus on? I'm very agnostic with this. I like things that are hard to kill. And so this leads me a lot to the blue collar space, you know, the quote unquote boring businesses.

A lot of those, you know, dry cleaners, HVAC, all the normal things, but also been in due diligence companies, e-commerce, software, really just agnostic about it. Just if it's a good business, I think it'll add to the portfolio. I'm happy to do it, especially if it rounds out my whole portfolio, kind of avoiding the concentration risk.

So you want something in every industry, things that are hard to kill in different ways so that no one meteor can take you out. I want to own a small piece of 30 different diverse small businesses that are like cash flowing, profitable, not like venture based stuff, just solid businesses. I think that's the most bulletproof portfolio I can think of. And you're halfway there. It sounds like on my way.

All right. Well, I'm going to ask you about Capital Pad a little bit later in the pod. But before we do that, we have an interesting deal today. It's a little bit more esoteric than the ones we typically see, which is fun. So I can put it on the screen if, Heather, you would like to tell us about it. All right. I will do that. So it's from Quiet Light. The headline is SBA Pre-Qualified.

12-year-old SAS payment platform, 186,000 MRR, owner works minimal hours, revenue 2.4-ish million, income 2,069,000, multiple 3.38, asking price is $7 million.

This well-established fintech SaaS helps small business easily manage and accept recurrent payments online through Stripe, focusing on non-technical users who need simple payment solutions. Founded in 2013, the platform serves approximately 3,600 paying customers, primarily small and micro businesses, with a 23% free-to-paid conversion rate.

The business generates a steady monthly recurring revenue of $186,522 with an average revenue per user of $50 and a lifetime value of $1,850.

The platform process is... Hang on, just pause there. So the average visitor or the average user pays 50 bucks, but their lifetime value is 1850 bucks? It's a long time. Which implies they stick around for 37 months on average. It's very sticky. Very interesting. The platform processes about 200 million in transaction volume annually. Excuse me, I'm about to sneeze.

It distinguishes itself from competitors through exceptional ease of use, personalized customer support, and flexible payment options that accommodate unique business needs. While Stripe and Vertical SaaS solutions have become competitors, this company maintains an edge with its intuitive interface and customizable features.

The current monthly churn rate is 2.6% monthly, which improved following a 2021 price increase. That's a lot of detail. The business operates efficiently with minimal owner involvement.

one full-time support staff member and one part-time support contractor. It's solid technical foundation features a modern Ruby on rails stack deployed on Heroku. I hope I'm saying this right with excellent test coverage. Customer acquisition has primarily been organic through word of mouth with minimal marketing expenditures. Several growth opportunities exist for new ownership, including a moderate pricing increase that could generate an additional 23,500 in monthly revenue. Uh,

What do you guys think? Interesting. So Heather, you did admirably pronouncing all those acronyms and specific industry terms.

I was trying really hard. Travis, what do you think this business does? I feel like it has to be some payment processor for something kind of niche, it feels like. Like maybe a special cart for a certain type of customer or something. I'm just kind of guessing.

It could be as simple as sort of like an invoicing platform because what kind of tips me off is it says that Stripe and Vertical SaaS have become competitors. Like Stripe has recently launched their billing product, which sort of makes it easy to set up recurring billing and invoicing and stuff to your clients through Stripe. I mean, it's still not super easy, but it's easier than just Stripe.

having to make an API call every month to Stripe. So it's possible this is like invoicing software for small businesses, maybe, you know, a Pilates studio. We're going to monthly recurring bill you your membership for $49 a month,

you know, or whatever it might be and what they're doing. So this, to be clear, this business does not process the payments. They use Stripe to process the payments. They are functionally a wrapper around Stripe's payment processing infrastructure to make it easy for their customers to use their business customers being small and micro businesses per the listing. Um,

So their small and micro business customers are using this platform to build their customers. So this is a B2B SaaS. Yeah, I kind of I'm leaning forward towards the like the niche thing because it says specifically non-technical users. So I think what did you say? Yoga Studio, Pilates Studio, something like that. You could absolutely see that being a really good use case for it. Yeah.

Why is it so cheap? You got 85% margins at a 3.3 X multiple. I think it's because of what you just said, Bill, it's a wrapper around another product. So it's, it's sort of,

Yeah, I would think there's not a ton of mode on this. And it does say at the end, while the business has experienced some decline due to market changes, its core value prop remains strong for non-technical businesses seeking straightforward recurring payment solutions.

I have another idea immediately. So a lot of these, not to hunker down the fitness studio thing, but let's say it is a fitness studio. They use a very specific kind of like studio management platform. You could see this being specifically for something like that, where if that platform decide to add their own payment processing, well, this business is effectively dead.

And so that could be like an add on to a platform that doesn't offer built in payment processing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why you can't pay up because it goes for a SaaS like this. I mean, you're looking at what, 8x, 10x multiple. I don't know exactly, but like it would be it'd be quite large. But if it's completely fragile like that, then you obviously can't pay up for it. So that would make more sense. Yeah. I mean, this is this is a SaaS margin for you, right? This is two point four million in revenue, two million in net income.

That's incredible margins. It's very sticky, right? As we established earlier, 37 month average retention, it's thrown off $186,000 a month in revenue and it's sticky. And the monthly churn rate is 2.6%. So that may seem low, except if you run that out, that means in a year, you're going to lose about 30% of your customers, right? 2.6% a month times 12, right?

You're going to lose 30% of your customers every year. Now, that being said, this business has been around since 2013 and has presumably been replacing customers that they're losing. Otherwise, it would be gone at this point. So I would zoom in immediately on kind of net churn, ads minus churn, churn customers, and churn customers but also churn dollars and try to project where the business is going based on net churn. I kind of like businesses like this a little bit. I think...

frequently people um overestimate how quickly the business will disappear and if it's like

or let's say if the people on this call were using something like this and something better came out well we would probably replace it in about a month right but if you're a non-technical user like that's a that's a huge headache that's not worth the time for a lot of things you can see why this might be so sticky with a crowd like that how this could take a decade to die out even if it's being replaced by something better yeah i mean even if you're

If you're halving every year, I mean, yeah, the first year or two hurt, right? But there's a long tail over time. But should you put debt on something like that? If that's what we're assuming, we're assuming there's something wrong because of the valuation. And this is one of those listings where I wish the broker would just address the elephant in the room somehow, give us a clue as to why they priced it this way. But assuming that's right, and they did lead with SBA pre-approved,

If it's declining every year, you're kind of expecting that's what's going to happen. This is not something you'd want to put a 10-year loan on. Yes, that would make me nervous. Heather, can you get debt for a business that is declining at all? Is it table stakes? Pretty tough. I mean, no. Pretty much every bank is going to see a declining trend. And unless it is leveled out for at least one year, they're not going to want to lend. Right.

It's like trying to catch the falling knife. No one wants to do that. So if it's truly declining, you really can't get a loan. So that brings another question. Is it really SBA pre-qualified? Did someone actually look at two or three years of numbers and say they could lend on it? Because if they were all declining, they probably wouldn't have said that.

Heather, can you give me the definition for SBA pre-qualified that I see on all these listings? This is a loaded question. It doesn't mean anything, actually. It is a marketing tool that brokers like to use. They usually go to a salesperson, their favorite salesperson at a particular bank.

and show them their SIM or even just a draft of their SIM, the salesperson at the bank has a sales relationship with that broker and is unlikely to push back or ask any questions or do anything really. They're certainly not going to put it through an internal credit process at their bank. So it means really nothing. And I have definitely taken loans for clients to the bank that said they pre-qualified it in the SIM and had that bank decline that loan. Yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah, it does not mean anything. Because only the salesperson saw it. No actual underwriter saw anything. No. And think about that. Practically speaking, a bank does not have staff to look at deals that don't have buyers and structures and anything else to them. You know, if they're just looking at a sell side SIM, there's really nothing to analyze. Right.

I mean, really, right? They're saying like, is this a gambling business? Is it drugs and alcohol? Like, is it disqualified? Like, what another way to say this is as not SBA pre-disqualified. Yeah. Let's change it to that term. Yeah. Not disqualified. Yeah.

I do, Travis. I think you're right that this is something vertical specific because in the last paragraph, again, it says growth opportunities include a moderate pricing increase, expanded marketing efforts, and the development of vertical specific features. So they must have some niche that uses this for recurring billing. I don't know if it's life coaches or yoga studios or whatever, but some niche feels like this serves their need well. Yeah.

I have a friend who has a similar-esque product. It doesn't do payment processing, but it handles accounting for basically like a yoga studio type of software in the background. And his entire business is built on finding the emails of those people and just massive outreach campaigns and solving their problems that way. It's the entire business right there.

is because it's the sas is roughly a commodity it's the lead generation that is the business and if if every one of these yoga studios says i don't know like powered by whatever platform like i don't know that's pretty easy to scrape you can probably find those email lists around you can hire some people on upwork to do all the hard work for you for a couple hundred bucks and you get like every user that exists and just kind of go through them and you think you think that this makes this less defensible or more defensible um

Neither. Why sell now? They've owned it for 12 years and it's $2 million of cash flow. They're only selling it for a little over three years worth of cash flow. I don't imagine this seller to be, you know, retirement age. I could be wrong, but this kind of product started in 2013. I wouldn't think so.

So that would be my biggest concern is to understand why this is being sold now. Burnout, you know, no desire to take the next step. You know, it could be that, yeah, like the seller sees this as a melting iceberg and maybe that's fine. I mean, you can still sell a melting iceberg, maybe not with debt. You know, maybe that's why they've priced it reasonably. It could just be they want to move on with their life. They've been doing it for, you know, over 10 years. Minimal hours worked. That's true. Yeah.

That's true. Yeah. So you'd want to understand like not only why is this person selling, but what really goes into running this business? Like, is it a sales job that they don't want to do anymore? Like you're thinking maybe. I actually think it might be a software development job. So yeah.

Owner worked minimal hours, functionally no overhead in the business. And I, you know, specific call outs of its solid technical foundation on a modern Ruby on Rails stack deployed on Heroku with excellent test coverage. Only a developer would write that. The owner said that. Yes. The owner said that and the broker put it in there. Right. So I think this is a kind of.

If you let this person walk, which of course you're going to have to, you probably, you need to have a plan for maintaining this software, which means you're going to need to do some sort of technical due diligence on the code base to understand how much technical debt is there. How convoluted is it? Is it, you know, running on, it says a modern Ruby on Rails stack, but you'd want to verify that. You want to verify it doesn't need a whole bunch of libraries running.

updated that it's not running on Stripe's old API, et cetera, et cetera. Because you could be stuck paying off technical debt here, or maybe not. Maybe it's very up to date. A lot of times when the owner is a software dev, that's the thing he's doing, not the marketing, which is actually what they say here in the listing. I can see another reason for selling like

You know, they're clearing two mil a year here. If they've been doing that for, what is it, since found in 2013, a decade of something like that, maybe they see the writing on the wall for this business declining. They know it's going to take some extra work. You've been making a couple mil a year for a long time. Maybe you just don't care enough to do it. Yeah. Maybe you would like a $7 million check, right? Yeah.

And maybe that puts you over a number where you can retire at 40 or whatever. And the person just says, I feel like I'm there. That would be fine with you or you don't want to retire at 40? I don't know. I just wonder what you do if you retire at 40. It just seems like a –

This is what you do. You start a blog in the fire space and then you blog about retiring early. And then you work just as much as you did in your job. Pretending to be retired. Yes. Okay. I got it. Sounds like you might know someone. There's an entire space of these people. Yes. Yes. So,

I mean, on the face of it, this is interesting, right? It's a SaaS of meaningful size. It's got $2 million of net income. It's very sticky. It's probably harder and harder to acquire new customers, but you have 3,600 existing customers, I think it said, who are going to stick around for a while.

Maybe you can raise price on them. Maybe you can't. I would think you'd have to go into this with a view on how we acquire more customers, right? Or create a moat. So all, I mean, this is a very commoditizable space. Like this is, you know, you sit around and think about SaaS ideas and people come up with recurring billing platforms on top of Stripe like 10 days a week.

So you've got to have a thesis here about how you're going to target a vertical, protect that vertical, and be different enough that a generic solution doesn't work in your vertical.

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And we're proud to call Walker and Chelsea, the lab's director, longtime friends of the podcast. They're passionate about helping entrepreneurs like you take the next big step. So don't wait to make your business ownership dream a reality. Visit acquisitionlab.com today to learn more and schedule your free consultation. And when you do, be sure to tell them the Acquisitions Anonymous podcast sent you. Personally, if I was looking for something like this, I think this is totally worth taking a deeper look at.

Hands down. It's interesting for sure. Yeah. If I was a SaaS acquisition entrepreneur or potentially serial acquisition entrepreneur who had a background in software, this is potentially very interesting. The price may not work as is. Maybe it does. You know, it's hard to say without seeing the melting ice cube metrics. But there is, I would think, a price where this deal gets done. Would you guys agree? Yeah. I assume so. Yeah. Yeah.

Personally, I would like the buyer to be somewhat technical. I feel like it's a little bit harder. I mean, you can do it. You can just hire a bunch of devs, but I feel like if you don't really understand it, people get in trouble a little bit more. Yes, I agree. And you get kind of stuck in the weeds. You can't add new features. There are bugs that you can't squash. You end up going around and around on software maintenance, not growth.

There are plenty of traps in buying SaaS. You'd have to be, I don't think this business holds traps that are unique to it, right? There's kind of all of the standard SaaS traps about technical debt and bug fix and all that stuff. But to me, the melting ice cube is the big question here. Here's an interesting opportunity. I'm in a fund actually that acquired probably something that rhymes with whatever this business is. And

The entire thesis that's worked out really well is you buy it and you're doing, you know, a couple hundred million a year worth of Stripe transactions. I think this one's probably a few hundred million higher. And you just go to Stripe and say, let's negotiate like a kickback. And Stripe gives you a kickback. And so just like that, you know, you've increased your revenue 30, 40 percent with like zero cost associated with it. And it seems like a reasonable amount of people don't

take advantage of this or aren't even aware of it. It was kind of wild to me how easily it worked. That is a good call. So not only, I probably ripping out Stripe and go into a lower cost payment processor is probably too much work. But negotiating with Stripe is, can be very low hanging fruit here. Either, either the fee or the kickbacks, you know, this one just did the, just got a kickback.

Like at the end of the year, based on process transaction volume? Something like that. Just a percentage. I mean, I think they just do so much that, you know, they get a few points of

the total transaction volume, which ends up being very meaningful. And you have this, this little one here is doing what? 200 million a year. Yeah. So that's, that's meaningful. Yeah. So your, your standard Stripe fee, I mean, I will round to 3%. So that means Stripe is banking $6 million a year on this SAS's transaction volume. They'll give you a mil. They might. And that would make your multiple pencil really nicely.

Right. And or maybe they take your rate from two point nine, which is Stripe's rack rate down to two point two. Or maybe they give you a quick kickback or whatever. But negotiate. This is your regular reminder to renegotiate your payment processing always, no matter what business you're in.

I have a sneakily good rate in Stripe with my SEO company because I used the account at one time when I had the SaaS company like AMZTracker. And we were doing just like huge, huge volumes of transactions. And so they gave me a great rate. And when we sold the company, the buyers just wanted to transfer all of the subscriptions to their own new Stripe account. It was like crazy.

It was in a new country or something like that. So we got to keep the old one. And I just started running the SEO stuff through it. And they let us keep like this grandfathered in amazing rate that I've never seen again. So just keep using it. All right. Anything else you guys want to mention on this one? I could be really interesting as long as the ice cubes not melting too fast. Yeah, I think for the right person, like definitely worth a look. And be careful about your financing, because if it's declining, you're probably not SBA prequalified, like it says.

Yeah, it seems unlikely that, I mean, this is, they want 7 million bucks for this thing. That would be a $5 million SBA loan, kind of max SBA level plus 2 million of equity. I don't think it gets done at that price anyway. Again, without knowing how, if it's not really, if it's declining 2% a year, that's way different than 20% a year, right? But I would just be nervous. You're going to probably need some sort of seller financing slash earn out structure on this thing, I would think.

I wonder what it would look like to recreate this from scratch, to be a competitor. That would be interesting also. Well, that comes down to, does this business have some sort of distribution moat or name in the space or whatever it might be? But you also got to say, in today's world of AI and vibe coding, if someone did knock this off and price it at half the price, would this seriously impact you or not?

Like one of the things that we look at for deals on Capital Pad, like we say no to most deals. And one of them is like, can this company be recreated with 100 grand and a website? And in this case right here, it sounds like marketing is going to be vitally important due to the like the churn and the decreasing. If you have to do it anyway, like maybe just start fresh with 100K worth of website and code base.

And then do the same thing without having to pay the seven million bucks up front. Maybe it's not that easy, but maybe it is. Well, maybe it's easier than seven million bucks. Seven million bucks is pretty hard. You could spend maybe two in marketing and blanket the space. And again, the owner of this is declaring works basically zero. And there's like one customer support person and they're

Yeah, they're crushing it with that. So it could be worth thinking about. Interesting. It's just, it's definitely not the searcher way. Like I commented on this on Twitter and some of the people pushing back were like, yeah, you could do that, but

Then you're starting fresh. Like, where are you going to get that capital? Like the the searcher path is pretty well established that you maybe you'll pay more for it. But then you actually have something immediately instead of like trying to scrounge something from nothing. So it depends on the person. And yes, maybe this declining, but generally with search, you can put some debt on it, which is ironic that you can lever up to buy something immediately.

For five times the price than it would cost to start it, which you can't lever up startup capital at all. Startup capital is the hardest to get. So that's a very good point. It's much easier to get the debt this way. Yeah. And I mean, that's like sort of the fundamental core of acquisition through entrepreneurship, right? Is that startup capital is hard. Debt capital is, well, not easy. It's easier, right? So, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur. Instead of starting something, I'll just buy something. And it's almost like I...

I need startup capital, but in order to use debt, I must buy something. So I guess I'll buy something because that's the only way I can get startup capital. Yeah, I think the two things that distinguish it, one, the access to the debt capital and the two is like the personalities. Like, you know, searchers are entrepreneurs, but they're not necessarily zero to one entrepreneurs. They're one to 100 entrepreneurs. That's a really long path. But that very first part, some people just don't have that.

And nor should they like find, you know, play to your strengths. And so it totally makes sense. Yeah. Yep. All right. So Travis, you have a lot of opinions. You're why you qualified to have them. Tell us a little bit about Capital Pad. If people want to invest in small business deals with you, they can do that with you, right? Like they don't have to source their own deals. They can. So Capital Pad was born because,

like kind of organically. So I was just investing in these deals myself. I realized like these deals have some like the best risk adjusted returns on the planet, in my personal opinion. And so it was surely some friends started asking, like, I want to co-invest with you on this. I'm going to do that. And so eventually we just decided, let's make a platform about this to let other accredited investors only invest in these deals. And on the flip side, it's actually also helping the searchers and the independent sponsors, uh,

raise money for the deal. So instead of them having to cold email, like, you know, a couple hundred different random investors begging for intros, they can just place their deal on there. We curate them to only allow, you know, it's a very small percentage of deals that we actually release. But if it passes all our tests, then we release it and all the investors can pool all their capital into one check.

And invest there. And if it's big independent sponsors, we'll let the funds and the family offices get a free peek. They don't need to go through us. So I think I'm allowed to say this. I don't want to run afoul of any of your regulatory statements, but I am unaffiliated with Capital Pad.

I invested in one of the deals on Capital Pad. I found the process really easy. It was pretty cool. You know, you could brag. I think there were 10 or 15 deals on there. You know, I could kind of click through, see which ones I liked, request a call with the sponsor, with the searcher, the person who was buying it. All the terms were right there. The searchers were like posting updates about like, hey, like our debt financing is on track, like our closing date is this day.

There was like a call where every all prospective investors could join. It was pretty cool. I mean, it was super professional was my experience. I mean, that was the goal. I essentially went through all like the pains that I was having investing these deals because it's not easy to invest in the space. It's pretty messy. And so we decided to like fix all of these problems into one simplified platform. And so far, it seems to be working pretty well.

I think we're getting really good feedback on stuff. We're also really open to feedback. You know, all the time we're asking users like, hey, what would you like to see? Just yesterday we got some really good feedback on something to include in the platform. And so now we will. So they won't have to search and ask these questions for more information. Like the idea is just to make it like a seamless process so you can just go and within, you know,

Within five minutes, you should know if this is something you want to go deeper into or not. And then within an hour, you should know I want to invest in this or not for most people. Some people want to hop on a call. It's cool. But the idea is to really like streamline it. So again, for credit investors.

For accredited investors only. It's like a two-sided marketplace, right? Like you have investors, and which I assume have come from your extensive Rolodex over years and now word of mouth. And, you know, you've got people who are looking to allocate to small business deals. And then it sounds like you're pretty selective as to what deals you even let on the platform.

Crazy selective. We actually just sent out an email to our users this weekend because we're getting a lot of questions like, when's the next deal? Like, there's a ton of M&A deals in the space. Like, why aren't they on CapitalPad? And we gave the reason of like, because we're curating...

the crap out of these things. Like at first, we want to make it an open marketplace. And then when the first week we're like, no, this is a terrible idea. Like it has to be really highly curated. Because some like a fair amount of the people on the platform investing, they're really sophisticated, and they get this stuff. Others, they don't have much experience here. Like they're sophisticated business people, they understand finance, but they haven't done these deals. And so if we can just make it easier to like, curate it so that they get to see the things that we like,

It makes the whole process way easier. And so we gave like in that email, we gave a list of like 10 different things that we look at. It's just an easy no. So we're going to take like the Berkshire Hathaway approach of just like too hard pile. No, no. We're just like sitting and waiting for like the fat pitches or like the no brainer investments.

Yeah. So you'd rather have fewer higher quality deals. Yeah, that was the way. And there's no right or wrong way. That's just our way. It like fits best with our personality. I don't want to be active just for the sake of being active. I think it like lowers the overall platform, lowers the quality. And of course, we'll like, I think we'll lower the return. Some people might say it's better to take more swings. And I would say like, well, you want to diversify, but I don't want to diversify too much into things I don't understand or don't really feel comfortable with.

Yeah, fair enough. You don't want to, you know, you're not if you're not going to write 200 checks, you don't want to blindly diversify. Yeah, yeah. And you know, that kind of works in the venture space, like the Angelus Access Fund, maybe like the 500 startups thing, like, maybe that worked in this space. I don't, I don't feel as comfortable with that. And you don't have the deal flow. There are millions of startups, there are not as many, there are 1000s of these like SMB M&A deals. So you got to be more selective.

Yep. Agree. Cool. Well, Travis, thanks for being on, man. It was wonderful to have you.

Enjoyed your commentary. This was a good episode. If you guys like this episode or you're into SaaS, hop on our website, acquanon.com, and you can check out every single SaaS deal we've ever done, filtered by tag or construction or whatever you're into. We're pushing 400 episodes now, so if you're into it, we've probably covered it. For example, we're going to do a nudist resort on this podcast in the next couple episodes.

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