MRR.Ventures is a group of startup operators who acquire, hold and grow SaaS projects smaller than $20k per month in MRR.
🥁 The big news 🥁
There were a few issues that popped up which dragged out the formal closing, but were able to work through them and get the accounts transferred over earlier this week.
What we had hoped would be a 30 day due diligence period turned into 90, and many lessons learned. Based on some twitter threads, expecting to close in a short time frame (and then taking 3x that long) seems to be the norm.
The "prep" work needed to get to this point included:
Spinning up a NewCo
Completing all legals (cost about $3k all in)
Deal with an overhang / contingent liability (could have been a deal killer, but we found a way to work through it)
ACCOUNT TRANSFER PROCESS
Interestingly, almost all accounts were trivial to update: change name, billing details, credit card on file and email addresses.
Webflow and Stripe were the only two major exceptions. Webflow has this handy "feature" to help prevent bad guys from conducting account take overs... but it's hard when you have approval to then take over someone's account.
MAJOR WORK THEMES: Instrument & Deep Dive
Instrument/ make sure GA and mix panel are both collecting the rjght data
Competitive analysis, who else is out there
Legacy analysis (compare last archive.org snapshots against GA to see what performed)
The support backlog had been neglected a bit over the last few months - not good.
Next time, we should put a clause in the LOI to cover “run the business like you normally would”, and possibly fix all outstanding bugs prior to handing over. Eg a deficiency report of zero.
I expect churn to go up as these customers were neglected 😞
OPPORTUNITIES:
The exciting thing about any new business is that it's full of opportunity, and (to use a catch phrase), "hasn't been screwed up yet".
Going into this, we saw there was some obvious low hanging fruit we wanted to tackle. We were hopeful for (but didn't expect) we might uncover more opportunities once we got into it.
As it turns out, the lowest hanging fruit to pluck happened to be billing terms on all of our upstream tools/SaaS subscriptions. When migrating over the tools, we switched over the billing and cut our SaaS costs by 18% across the board.
A great win to start the week off!
How you can help
Do you know anyone that publishes a newsletter? I would be supremely grateful for introductions to regular authors to gather feedback on their workflow.
Reply back to this email (mrrv@mrr.ventures) and let us know! 🙏
