Do not index
Do not index
I developed a new tool in the micro private equity space this week. It’s called Dealflow and it’s available here.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people are starting to invest by acquiring SaaS businesses.
For many, SaaS yield better returns than real estate, stocks, etc in a relatively short period.
The platform I launched is a dealflow automation platform. You can build your own newsletter / Slack alerts for any type of acquisition by biz model, price, MRR, etc from multiple sources.
I launched this project with a fellow entrepreneur, Ryan Kulp. Ryan is well-known in the space and one of the entrepreneurs I respect the most. We met for lunch in Rome a few months ago and have been riffing on ideas ever since.
Also, people who approach buying a SaaS for the first time don’t know how to evaluate deals, conduct due diligence and grow the business once they acquire it. That’s why this SaaS has a companion course and private community. Ryan is the main instructor of the course, which I personally bought as soon as it was available.
➡️ Course: “How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies”. The course is taught by my partner, Ryan Kulp who has acquired 10s of successful startups. https://rubini.link/micrope
➡️ Private community: network, trade tips, and accelerate your deal flow with other alumni. https://rubini.link/rainmakers
To build the platform I used free resources, and my expertise in scraping. I used bulma.io for the front-end and PHP for the back-end.
Both Ryan and I strongly support transparency and openness by sharing our app and revenue metrics with everyone, so you can actually see how many users the app has, how much we are making ($) and the rundown of our expenses at any time by visiting this page.
Here are some app stats at the time of writing this:
– Almost 3k deals sorted;
– We source deals from 7 sources including Empire Flippers, Flippa, 1kProjects, Shopify Exchange and more
Traction
Because of the course and Ryan’s engaged twitter following we already got validation.
Further traction has been provided by our Product Hunt launch of the product. If you don’t know what Product Hunt is, you are missing out: it’s a product leaderboard, a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.
Product Hunt Launch
Prior to the launch, Ryan already had gathered all the material we needed for it to be at least good enough to get on the front page: logos, images, descriptions, etc.
Here is our page. On Product Hunt, there are two objectives: the first is reaching the front page, the second being in the top #5 products voted for that day. To do that, we needed upvotes! I did a few things
- Posted on my Facebook wall
- Posted in relevant Fb groups
- Asked friends to upvote wherever and whenever I could, especially at the beginning of the day
- Did awesome customer support in the chat over ~18 hours
- Both Ryan and I emailed our personal mailing lists about the launch
Of course, the best way to get upvotes is to have a great product so, that counts, too.
Here are our results:
- ~ 2,500 pageviews
- ~ 1,000 sessions
- ~100 users signed up (more than doubled our user base)
- 4 users decided to pay (upgrade their accounts)
Here is our chat software at a random time during the day:
Visits were mostly from US and Canada:
With over 200 upvotes, we made it into the top 5 products of the day. We actually were #4 product of the day. Because of that, I think that PH will now feature the product in their daily newsletter. Hopefully, that will bring another burst of traffic.
Since last time launching on Product Hunt with one of my other products, Angage, I was really happy that Digital Ocean was able to support all the incoming traffic with just one of their most basic servers, which is pretty much our only monthly expense at $5/m.
Thanks for reading,
Firma
