Lift Off
Phase I of my HoldCo is now complete.
A few weeks ago on August 5th, my HoldCo was complete. I had just closed the 3rd and final acquisition that would make up my portfolio of tiny businesses for the foreseeable future.
It all started with an Instagram Reel, in April 2023, from yet another influencer selling access to a community. Stuck in the same delusion that plagues most aspiring entrepreneurs, I thought I had to start a business from scratch. This Reel shattered my reality. Buying an existing business that already makes money. Genius! How did I not think of this before?
Fast forward to now, I own 3 Shopify apps and 1 digital product. The last 15 months have been a rollercoaster, to say the least. Business was something I had been eager to get into for awhile. I just didn’t know what business to get into. None of my startup ideas seemed big enough to justify throwing months of my life down the drain, all while juggling a full time job. Deep down I also knew I would never follow through on something that needed to find its first customers. I had bought an Airbnb course (dodged that bullet) and a phone repair & flipping course. You get the idea. Buying an existing, profitable business though, just made sense in a way that these other paths didn’t.
I sold my beloved Supra and pulled money out of retirement using the IRS’ ROBS provisions. If this was going to be my first real attempt at entrepreneurship, I needed a big war chest. I dove head first into podcast after podcast, blog after blog and tweet after tweet. Did I want to get away from software completely and go buy a dry cleaning business? Or should I leverage my software background and stay in tech? This was an incredibly hard question to answer during my search.
After one of my first potential deals fell through in November of last year, I actually inquired about a local dry cleaning business. Ultimately, I went the digital route to maximize flexibility and not be tied to any physical location. Could I have hired someone to run the day-to-day of a traditional business? Sure. But I also wasn’t confident enough to bet the house with an SBA loan or ask investors for their money on my first deal. It had to be with my own cash.
After buying Cabana, a digital tool for web designers, the fog started to disperse. B2B SaaS was the way to go. Then came TryOnify, a Shopify app that allows merchants to offer Try Before You Buy payment plans. Finally, Extra Verification and In-store Reserver, 2 more Shopify apps that I wasn’t even planning to buy so quickly after TryOnify.
It’s taken awhile for me to get comfortable posting online. Only now do I feel like I’m at a place where I can offer significant value to people. This blog will be a place for long form thoughts. Twitter for short form. And we’ll see if I can keep up on the others…. Shout out to Andrew Pierno (XO Capital), Ryan Kulp (Fork Equity) and Dom Wells (Onfolio) for giving me all the game needed to pursue micro SaaS and post about it online.
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