Ep 339: The Journey Of Buying A Saas Business Online To Replace Your Income with Matthew Tse

How many businesses do you need to look at before you land on one to actually buy, and how long does it actually take to buy a business? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Business podcast.

Today I'm speaking with Matthew Tse, who was a career software engineer in Big Tech and Quantitative Finance. And he decided he wanted a freer and fulfilling life and eventually stumbled his way into acquiring ImprovMX.com, which he's now running and growing. And in this pod, we talk about why he moved into trying to make money online or through a business.

We talk about his story of trying to start up and failing, why he wanted to get out of the rat race, and how he decided to pivot from start-ups to an acquisition. We talked about what he sucks at in business, what he's good at. It was a very real, raw conversation. And then we talked about his journey and how many businesses he looked at. And before he actually bought the one he did, how many deals did he do, and so on?

And he also shares a little bit about how that journey helped sculpt what sort of business model and the price range that was right for him. And he shares his experience on how that happened, why you should not be just feeling like you know everything straight away coming into the acquisition, and how you're going to learn and narrow down your focus to decrease your search and look at fewer businesses, but businesses are to be better for you.

We talk about mindset, which I talk about a lot, but we talk about how that's the fuel to get you across the line to an acquisition. We talk about his two major pieces of advice that he would give to friends. Number one is don't buy a small business, and he recommends a certain price range for his friends. If these friends are going to buy a business, which we share in the pod, we also talk about how he's actually growing this business through retention and then growth strategies as well.

There's so much value in this podcast episode. Of course, we talk about buying a business. If you haven't got my due diligence framework, it's free. It saves people millions of dollars, makes people millions of dollars.

You can go away and get that at buyingonlinebusiness.com for free resources. Also, if you're looking at buying a high six to seven, eight-figure business and you don't know where to start, reach out. I'm a buyer-side advisor. I help people acquire these businesses, pretty much take all the work off your hands.

But now let's dive into the pod. Enjoy.

Matthew, welcome to the pod.

Thank you for your time.

Yeah, I'm so excited to ask a million questions, but first of all, congratulations on your acquisition.

Hey, Jaryd. Good to see you.

Thank you. This has been one of the coolest things I've done in my life.

That's amazing. So first up, why buy a business? Why buy a software business? What led you to this?

Yeah. So the first thing is I realized that I can't really work in a company anymore. I just hate the idea of working for somebody and coming into a schedule and making someone else richer. Like, I just couldn't do it anymore after doing it for about 10 years in the software space.

I work for good companies like Big Tech, Quant Finance, et cetera. But just the concept, I became allergic to over time, I feel like I'd rather be poor than continue doing this. So business seemed kind of attractive because not only would I not be poor, but hopefully I'd make some good money from it.

And also, I can just fully set my schedule. And the big thing was that I realized that there are things called lifestyle indie hacker businesses, and the business you run does not need to be like a VC-backed venture rocket ship.

Can kind of run something at your own pace. That idea came to me. I just really wanted to do it. And as to why buying a business as opposed to starting one. I tried to start a few, they failed, and then I decided to buy one. That's all.

That's the same with me. Try to start a few and then fail as well. What do you try?

At first, I made this like a tax estimation, a little web app to help people estimate the taxes they owe, and it was kind of cool, but the path to monetization was just so far that it wasn't really worth investing anymore.

And then I tried to make an AI-powered receipt scanner. I want to like track their business expenses, and the product was actually kind of cool, but it's just so hard to bootstrap trusts and initial users.

No one wants to trust a brand new product, and I am not good at generating hype and trust from nothing. I'm really bad at that. I can get into why buying ImprovMix was good because of my weakness there.

Yeah, I think it is hard to start a business and really get it going without like a bit of money behind you as well, and also minimal stress. Like most people who start businesses, I would say, are starting them so they can have a better lifestyle and start with very little to nothing. So there's like a lot riding on it. And whilst that can be a good thing, it can also come through, just like how hard it is to get it started with minimal resources.

Yeah. And even with resources, I found it hard to get started. Like, I have the resources to acquire a company, right? So obviously I have resources, but it was not obvious that I could funnel that into the business that I'm starting.

Like, what do I do? Just pay for massive Google ads, and then no, still nobody wants it. So I couldn't even, even with money, I couldn't, I couldn't pay money to get people to use my product. That's how bad.

And that's how hard it is to start a business, think, especially like a SaaS business where, you know, the, the, this is not geo locationally bound. You're competing with everybody around the world.

Whereas, like, if you're trying to mow someone's lawn, the value's immediate there and you're not competing with every lawnmower in the United States. So yeah, I found it really difficult to start something from scratch. So that's what led me to this path.

Also, finding product market fit for the industry of somebody who's already trying to save money on taxes is probably not going to be the one that's like forcing money to.

Yeah, also, I mean, I was thinking of some sort of advertising data money type scheme to make money from it. Yeah, you're right. That's a difficult first market to enter.

I've, tried to be a travel blogger, and everybody's a travel blogger and became a travel blogger. Instagram just blew that up, and it wasn't a lot of money in space at all. And so what's, how did you conclude buying something? Like how did, how did that evolve for you instead of starting? You tried to, like I tried to as well.

Yeah. So the idea of buying something came to me from a My First Million podcast. And basically they described their one. Yeah, they described their one friend, Ramon Vanier, who bought a dog ramp e-commerce for like $200,000 and scaled it to like millions in revenue.

And I was like, That's not that much money. I could buy something like that. Could do something like that. And the idea of buying revenue and reputation and everything, and then growing that sounded so much more appealing to me because that was the hard part, right? Getting that initial snowball.

Then I feel like I felt like I had an initial snowball, like a good start that I could have the taste to iterate and prove it and grow it. That was my hypothesis. So even though I can't build something from scratch, I felt like my skills in working and starting with big tech companies, even though I might not be able to build something from scratch, I feel like I can scale something by just iteratively improving and checking the results, and using my judgment there.

And just the last bit there is that I want to use every... I want to play entrepreneurship in an easy mode. Any advantage I have, I need to use it. And I have capital. I don't need to start from nothing. So buying a business is using capital to kind of accelerate my growth. So was just using another version of leverage.

Yeah, I agree. Totally agree. It's just you're such a good case, but I've been mentioning this forever for years. To try to you don't need to know how to start a business to buy a business and be successful. A lot of people and some brokers have even said, You know, if you haven't started a business, maybe you shouldn't be buying a business.

Yeah, it's just not true. And it's an absolute shame because somebody can get to like, you know, this, you know, in the startup rate is like 90 % of startups fail, somebody can get to like eighth business and throw in the towel, and then just go, I'm just going to stick with this nine to five that just kills their soul, right?

Like, it's just, it's not the right thing to say to everybody. And then not everybody should be buying a business either. But yeah, I'll say that, yeah, I agree with that, but I agree in general, because for me, that's the case that I couldn't really start one, but I could buy one and be successful there. But I think buying one is almost just as hard as starting one.

The reason why I work for myself is simply that I have particular skill sets means that I'm better qualified to scale one than I was to start working from scratch. But I don't think it's necessarily easier.

I think it's just my particular entrepreneurship, like starting skill levels, was better suited to that. Yeah, but it was hard too.

It is hard. It'd be silly to just say, yeah, just buy a business and be easy. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it, right? Like, how many businesses did you even look at, and do you do? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And where were you looking? Like what's, yeah. Where were you looking for these?

Over a thousand. Over a thousand.

I looked everywhere.

Did you do cold outreach? You like, did you like go like this? Started to, yeah. I think that's a pretty tough job, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. So really, I mean, you asked the question, where did I look? But I think the bigger question is kind of like, I can tell someone, look everywhere. But I think the bigger thing is actually more of figuring out where your entrepreneurship profile matches with what type of business and getting clarity on that over time. That's where the progress needs to happen because there are deals all over the place.

And just by getting access to more deals, it does not necessarily mean you'll find the right business. It really is just getting more clarity about yourself, such that a deal that comes in through any one of the given channels, you'll be more certain about it. That's how I feel.

So yeah, I looked everywhere. I looked at Quora.com. I looked at ByteLite brokerage. I looked at Flippa. I looked at Start Doing Outreach. I registered for a bunch of those private brokerages like ETH International, just like everywhere I could, I know finding an improv mix from quiet.

Cool. Awesome. Yeah, that's great. They'll be happy to hear that we're talking about this on the pod. So I'm so glad that you mentioned how, for you, it sounds like it was for you, that you don't just need more businesses to find, and you don't even find a lot of businesses.

But you said specifically, through doing, through looking at a lot of businesses, you worked out what type of business you wanted to buy, which is exactly, put that in layman's terms, is like you worked out what business model.

Exactly.

And the type of business was going to suit you, which allowed you to narrow your search criteria down and not look for a lot of businesses, but you started to only look for that. Those few types of businesses would have decreased the number of places you needed to look and helped you hone in on finding that right business model.

The reason I say this is super important for people to know what business model, what size business, by what business, and then what business model to buy, is because then you start to do due diligence on those businesses and understand that small piece of the market, right? Like that one, that one business model at that particular price range, you start to know the valuation.

And this is where people get really frustrated when they're buying their first businesses. It's like, I don't know what it's worth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. Because, like, of course, you're not going to know unless you just put yourself in the game and then just narrow it down and get really specific. And then really well.

Then once you've looked at, say, 10 businesses in that business model in the price range you're looking at, you're going to start to know what's a fair valuation based on what's in that market.

Exactly. So I'll say more that when I started the journey, I thought the process was like my goal is to buy a business, right? A to B, let's buy a business. And I thought the way to get there was to start expanding my deal flow, get more deal flow, and also expand what I'm willing to buy, right?

That's kind of advice in the physical structure space that like, if you're willing to be geographically unbounded and open your ideas to whatever, then you'll get close to buying a business. Think that was wrong in my case. I think that it was not expanding was actually the opposite because expanding just meant like I started looking at this buysale.com and started looking at here's like a brick and mortar widget factory that I could buy in upstate New York. And I was like, I don't know, nothing's working. Maybe I'll go look at this deal. Right. And I started doing stuff like that.

That was a losing direction. I was not getting close to buying something because, at the end of the day, the market's efficient. So you're not going to find an amazing deal. You're going to find an amazing deal for you, but not an amazing deal in general.

Because if there's a deal that's underpriced, then immediately there will be 10 buyers, and then the seller is going to raise it to a market price. You're never going to find an amazing deal. The deal that you find is just what synergy do you have that makes this deal better for you than for anybody else?

That's the most important thing to basically, buy a business that will actually give you a positive ROI and the lifestyle that you want. And so that's the opposite. It's not branching out and being like, I'll go buy a factory. It's branching in and thinking, are you the best factory owner in the world? And therefore, you can buy a crap factory and make it amazing. If you're not, then the factory is not the right choice for you. Yeah. So that's what I wanted to add to that.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I wouldn't say people should go too far one way, for example, just because they know how to, you know, fix a toilet doesn't mean they should be buying a plumbing business, you know.

Right. Right. And also, just if they're to be frustrated in the sense that I'm looking at a bunch of different types of businesses, I'm just going to focus on one that I think I know that I'm going to be good at.

You might know that you're going to be good at it yet as well. For example, I've gotten into so many different roles as well that I'm like, I didn't think I would like this as much as I actually do like it. And I didn't think I'd be as good as I actually am in this role. So it's a happy medium, right? Like you said, you've got to have confidence that you can do well in it. Why would you buy it if you didn't? But don't go too far. It's like, you need to be this expert.

Yeah, I see what you're saying, too. It's a bit of a balance of both bits of advice, but I think at the core of it, though, there needs to be a fundamental, What am I good at? And that doesn't need to mean I'm good at plumbing.

It could mean I'm good at a local brick-and-mortar business, and other people are not willing to do that because other people are only buying SaaS, e-commerce, scalable remote things. And therefore, I have a bit of an edge there. Right?

Right, fundamental narrow down into one specific business type, but not necessarily like only plumbing. Could be. Like that's what I mean.

Yeah, we're definitely on the same page there. And so when we started talking, you mentioned you'd listened to the podcast episode that I did with Andrew Piano, 212, guys. Now, did you listen to this before you decided to go on your business model and to go down the SaaS, or did you find it afterwards?

It's a long journey. Yeah, it's a blur and a long journey. I obviously work in software. The natural thing to do once I started was to look for SaaS. I built a few SaaS and they failed, as I mentioned. And then when I was looking to acquire a business, that's funny. At first, I was like, okay, let's look for SaaS.

And then when I realized that all the deals that I was finding were not really a good match and they sucked, I started branching back out to let me look at factories and everything. And then, as I looked at all those and started to kind of clarify what my entrepreneurship profile was, I narrowed it back over to SaaS again.

So it's like back and forth. And Andrew Pierno, I think I listened to that at the very beginning of my business search because there are a ton of people posting about buying plumbing businesses, but there are actually very few people buying SaaS's in like these five, in a sub-5-million range.

So Andrew Pierno was like, basically the only guy writing about this at the time. Found like one or two other sort of like SaaS acquisition podcasts that I just one episode of, even the whole podcast, just one episode was a guy who bought a SaaS.

And yeah, so I found Andrew Pirno, and then I basically found every single podcast he showed up on and watched them all. And you did one of them. So that's why I watched it.

I need to, like, I'm buying a SaaS, right? So I need to consume all the content to try to like, try to like get ahead of these landmines before I step on them. It's going to cut your learning code down significantly by learning as much as you can.

Thank you.

Improv MX. I still? Yep. I'm back. Sorry about that.

You're back. You're back. You're back. Now you're back. Yeah.

I was just saying that, yeah, by listening to as much as you can about the business model that you're trying to purchase, it's going to cut your learning curve down significantly.

Yes. Yes. There were a lot of things during the acquisition that I did naturally, like ways I negotiate or things I asked for that I look back, like I'm surprised that I had so much experience when I had zero experience, but it's just from watching all these different things that I've, like, yeah, that's obvious. I should do this. Cause I read this article about how this other guy messed up and let me just not.

Yeah, you're just great, great preparation. So, Improv MX, what is Improv MX? And I guess I wanted to ask why, why did this one land for you compared to others? Yeah. And why did you go through and acquire it compared to others?

Yeah. Yeah. So Improvmx is a niche, boring, but cool, email forwarding SaaS. So basically, if you buy like JarydCross.com and you want to get emails to Jaryd at JarydCross.com, you need to forward those emails.

They don't just magically come to you. A lot of the domain registrars, like Bob Flair, GoDaddy, might offer free forwarding, but it's pretty limited, and you don't get any advanced features. If you can't send it back, you can't send emails back from your domain.

So Improblem X just solves that problem and does it really well. So we offer email forwarding APIs for people who want to program. We offer special routing rules, as many as you want. And if you really care about email forwarding, if you really care about your email for your custom domain, you would pay money for us to do this.

That's what the product is. And as you're saying it. Yeah, go ahead.

I needed you years ago, like some, some, some email, some inboxes, you can be set up with Gmail and different things, and you can try and pair them and, and, and for them, but that's pop three and that I'm at. Yeah. Yeah. It's just so annoying.

Yeah, all that stuff is fucking-

Yeah, it is. Is. I mean, setting up with us, you do have to do some DNS setup as well, but we do handle a lot more of it. And also, we make advanced functionality capabilities. Like if you need special routing rules, like if the subject contains this, then go to this inbox or a different one, then you can't do that with just Cloudflare free routing. So that's what the product is.

And to answer your second question on why Improv of Mex was perfect for me as a business, the two things I realized as an entrepreneur from looking at a thousand different businesses, A, I realized that I'm crap at growing something from scratch. I'm crap at growing something. So, like, I want something that has a distribution engine on easy mode as much as possible.

So, ideally, it would be a product with a great reputation, years of good customers, inbound organic growth through SEO and word of mouth, and ChatGPT. And that's exactly what PromX is. There are no outbound enterprise sales calls.

There are no ads. It's all just like we rank number one for email forwarding, and ghpT also ranks us number one. We were like number two or three, but after I acquired it, I improved it and got us number one.

And that's just like all our growth. So that's amazing, right? I just don't need to learn how to do enterprise sales. People are literally coming in every week saying, Hey, I want an enterprise plan. Take my money. And I'm like, here's how much it's going to be, yes or no. And that's, that is growth on easy mode.

Right. And I need that because I suck at growth. Now I'm like a lot better because I've been doing it for half a year, and I think I'm significantly better at it. If I were to buy a SaaS that was flat or declining, I would need to turn ar that which has been hard. I don't know if I could have been able to do that at the time. And so I don't think I should have bought a SaaS like that. So that's one that I realized. You want to chime in?

I just want to add to that. You start a... There are so many ways I can go with this, but what a lot of people don't realize when you have a business, it's not the business and the system itself that makes the money. It's the audience, and the trust of the audience has in the business and brings in the money, and is the sales engine.

So you don't just start a business; if you want to start a business and make money, you build an audience, and then you ask them what they need, and the product and the service will then fit. That's how you find product market fit.

When you buy a business, you're buying an audience. You're buying a sales channel where there's trust that you're providing a service to an audience that is already looking for that, and they know exactly where to get it.

So that's the, like you said, that's the growth on easy mode is cause you're buying, you're buying an audience. You're buying something in the marketplace that's providing that people are screaming for and found this, found this business.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, key. That's a key thing because people, people like, just want to buy businesses. You know, it just makes money. Yeah, that's great. But what you're actually buying is you're buying the audience.

Yes. I'm not buying. The code is just like whatever, know, especially with AI can rewrite anything from scratch. Very specifically, what I was buying with ImprovMex was I was buying a SEO and GPT-ranked business, along with several hundred Trustpilot reviews and a lot of random people posting about it online.

That thing that I bought, that reputation that in the internet that has history. I bought that, and that means that on any given day, some new person looking for custom email forwarding will search, and they'll come across ImprovMX, and they will trust it.

That's what I bought. And it's amazing. I love that I bought that. I think I honestly, I think I underpaid for the value of it because I bought it and it was ranked two or three for SEO, and then relatively easily got into rank number one, and buying a number one-ranked thing is quite good to buy.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so you had some other things that you wanted to share as well. That was just one. Yeah, the second one.

Yeah, I have a second, I'll-

Yeah, so there are just two main things about my entrepreneurship profile. One was that I'm bad at sales, and I had to buy something on Easy Mode, which I explained. The second big realization I came to over time of looking at all these different businesses is, you know, that's one of my weaknesses, but what's my strength?

And my strength is that I'm like just a really good software engineer. So like I've been working in reliability software engineering for the last decade at like Google and quant funds, all these different places. And so a technically complex SaaS that isn't just a web app in a database.

Problem X is a giant pipeline of email forwarding that deals with domain reputation and all these protocols like GOP, IVAP, which were written in the 1990s, and people still need to interact with it now. And that's like complicated, right? Like I think.

If you're non-technical, you don't want to touch this with 10 10-foot pole. And even if you're technical, it's still a pretty beastly thing you're acquiring. Given that my background is in site reliability engineering, this stuff is easy to me. Like this stuff is stuff I do while I'm sleeping. So it scared off a lot of people, but this is actually fun for me. Like, I came in and I just started like taking the Rube Goldberg machine that was what the prior founders built, and I had kind of like operationalized it.

And that was fun because I, that's like what I'm really good at and what I've been doing for the last decade. So, I just like, for fun, I will improve the operational efficiency of the code. And so I don't need to hire like a million a year SRE to take over this. I just do it for like free fun.

So that's the second thing that I found, a very technically complex SaaS that makes this SaaS not like super, super, super hot, the deal, because if you look at just like the organic growth, like everyone should want to buy this, but a lot of people can't because it's too technically complex. And that's where my perfect match comes in, because that's my strength.

So basically, basically, you know, the deal came through and I like put in an offer within 30 minutes of reading, like the minute the deal came on the market, I had an offer 30 minutes later. And then I just went 1000 % into buying this. And even after all of that, I still think I underpaid.

Yeah, wow, that's really cool. Even with that much excitement to buy it, you know, you would have paid maybe more because you would just…

I did pay more. I paid more, and I beat out the other buyers. And even at that price, I think I underpaid more. And this is because that's what's in it. Know that's what's in it. Yes.

Yeah, that's amazing.

That's right. And you've done the preparation work, like you said, you looked at a thousand businesses. So by the time you know, you know what you're looking for, as soon as that hits the market, you're going to make it yours, which is what you did before I asked my next question, just a quick one, a thousand businesses, like a lot of businesses you looked at, what was the timeframe that it took?

Because yeah, I'm just curious. Cause a lot, know just before you answer, people listening, don't put a timeframe on how long your journey should be or how long something should take. You shouldn't be measuring time. You should be measuring inputs because time for this is an inaccurate unit of measurement. A lot of people default to, like, I'm going to give myself X amount of months to find and buy a business. But what was the timeframe for you?

Yeah. Relatively short in the grand scheme of things, but it felt very long. Cause it was. Yeah. And I looked at a thousand, and like during that time, I'm not like writing code, selling subscriptions.

I'm just like clicking links and looking at things, and my savings are draining, whatever. Like, I didn't feel like progress, and a lot of times it felt very demoralizing, and I didn't know if I would ever buy something, but relatively short.

I think a lot of businesses.

Basically, it depends on how you want to count it because once I quit my job, I did start looking at some businesses, but I was more trying to build my own thing at that time. So let's not really count that. Let's say I spent half a year building my own things.

They all failed. And then after I got really dejected from that, I started really seriously looking at buying something. So let's count it there. And then from that point until I bought Improv Max was about six months, which is stored in the grand scheme of things extremely short. How many businesses did you look at?

And it would feel long with two failures in that timeframe and buying a business that's a lot crammed into us into a short period of time, I would say, with two failed startups and buying a business. There are a lot of them.

It's two failed startups in six months. And then I stopped trying to build something.

Yeah. Year of a year of like just trying to get, yeah. Yeah. No, we're on the same page there for sure. So what's in those six months of your acquisition journey, what are maybe two, one to three of the top things that you would share with somebody if your friends came to you and said, Matt, I'm going to buy a business. Do I, what would you, what would you advise me and share with me before I get started?

Exactly.

The number one thing is kind of related to the two things I mentioned earlier, which is that this is a journey, not about finding businesses, but it's a journey about finding yourself. I know it sounds really woo-woo, but it was true for me. It was honestly really true for me that I could open my funnel.

If I could have a magic wand that opened my funnel into every single on and off-market business in the world and like was able to filter all of them, that would not have gotten me any closer to a business because there's finding the right business that is more valuable to you than to other people.

Also, you need to do the work to realize why that's a match for you, which will give you the confidence to actually go through, put the money down, and sign the contract. Signing that contract and putting that money down it's like getting married. You have all these jitters, and you get really, really scared, and you need internal work before you're able to do that.

So even if you had access to all the deals in the world, like you didn't do the internal work to actually give you the confidence to go through and buy a thing. So that's my number one advice. So this is an internal journey more, I think, more so than an external one, to be honest. That's how I, that's one big advice.

Well, while you bring up the other, you're coming up with the other ones, or you may already know them before you articulate them. The engine that gets you across the finish line is mindset.

And it's like you said, you need to have done some internal work to be able to get you there. And that's the fuel. That's what gets you across the line. And that's why I have a big portion of my courses is around mindset.

And before you start learning anything about how to find businesses and do your deal, are the practices and principles you need to take in to make sure you can stay the course and stay the journey? Because if you don't end up sticking with it, you may not find yourself, and you can end up just getting lost completely.

So, yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that. It's the most important part, I would say, of trying to achieve anything is having the mental fortitude to withstand the challenges that are going to be thrown at you along the way. Cause like you said, it's not an easy journey. It's not, it's not just let's just go by business.

That's what I thought it was. You know the Dunning-Kruger effect? Really, at the beginning, I thought, okay, I launched these two things, they failed, forget it. I have time. This weekend, I'm going to look at several hundred businesses, and I'll pick five, and I'll put an offer on all five of them, and I'll have a business by next week. That's what I thought.

Just a numbers game, right? Just a numbers game lot of think that. I think a lot of people think that. It's really not true. It's really, really, really not true. Yeah. I took this time to think about what my numbers two and three are.

Number two bit of advice is I've heard this before, and I think it's true. Like, through listening to a lot of podcasts, I've heard this, and I think it's true that a lot of people start this and think I'm going to buy something really cheap and small just as a starter. And then maybe later I'll buy something more expensive, and because I don't want to

I think that's wrong, actually. I think that…

I 100 % agree with this.

Okay. Yeah. I think that the bigger the business, the easier it is to run and the easier it is to grow, and the easier it is to do everything, except that it costs more money. But you'll spend the same amount of time growing a $50,000 business as you will spend growing a million-dollar business, except you're going to get much better returns than a million-dollar business.

So yeah, at the beginning, I looked at like sub 200K businesses and not a single one of them was worth buying, not for what I was looking at, right? Because I needed to somewhat replace my salary, like at least get in the ballpark of that, and anything at that point.

Like, all the effort I put in is going to like, give me an extra thousand dollars a year or something. And I would not have the motivation to do that.

I'm so glad you mentioned this because I would say 80 % of people that come to me, they go, I just want to dip my toe in the water and they want to experiment with something you shouldn't just be experimenting with. It should be something that you're going to do wholeheartedly.

So I typically talk about a $5,000 business compared to a $50,000 business, that a $5,000 business has 10 times more risk, and it's going to typically cost 10 times more work. Yeah. And it's going to make 10 times less amount of money.

Yeah. And you look at a, you look at $50,000 business to a $500,000 business. It's a general statement, but you look at a $200,000 business compared to a $2 million business. It's the same thing. And it's so much easier to buy a larger business.

You've got less. You've got less risk, thing typical general statement, but it's making more money. So you've got more resources to reinvest into that.

Yeah, I would actually say if a friend came to me and said they wanted to buy a business, and let's say they have a nice job in tech or something as a PM or a programmer, I would probably tell them to save money until you can make enough that you can buy something with cash outright or borrow from friends and family or get an SBA loan such that you'd buy something in the seven figure range, like a million dollars. I would literally tell my friends if they were to ask me how they do this? I'll tell you, save money until you buy something larger because it's just a much easier path.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I worked this out the hard way. Started with smaller businesses. It's You don't need it. If you want to buy a $2 million business, you don't need $2 million. You need like 300, 200 to 400K. Know, because you…

If you're, if you're, if you're going to good job and say it's in tech, or you're just a smart operator, and people trust that you can.

Execute.

People are going to give you, know, somebody might have a hundred grand, say 150 grand, and they might go to one other person or two other people and get and raise 50k from each and have an extra hundred K.

They can get them across the line. And then you can get the rest from the bank. It's, I'm not like in Australia, Australians don't love to use finance, right? People like to like pay down their debt, and they don't like to use debt to get ahead.

This is why I love Americans, because Americans grow at a crazy rate. After all, you guys are just fine with that, and you know how to use good debt right, and that people those people that I've helped the most use good debt and just kill it, absolutely kill it, so we're very much on the same page. You've learned so much through your journey in just a short period of time.

Yeah, short period of time. Very short period of time. Yeah, because acquiring something was all that journey. And then once I bought it, now it's a similar amount of learning for growing a business, which we haven't even talked about at all yet. But there's an equal amount of learning from that that I've had in the last six.

Yeah.

And you're going to have the challenges there. But the thing is, like you like in life, we have a lot of challenges in business. We have challenges, but you've got resources now to be able to afford to hire people to do certain things and grow it, marketing, whatnot.

So what is, what is next for ImprovMX?You, you're looking to just reinvest into it? And if so, how, like, what are you, what are your thoughts?

Yeah. So, the first three months, we're just getting a handle on things. So, figuring out all the ins and outs of the product, fixing a lot of the tech debt that will allow the business to grow, and also putting in a lot of like bar rails and processes that allow me to scale it from a labor perspective.

I don't want to have to write every single new feature for it, but there was none of that because it was all just the prior founder who was doing everything.

And so I needed to have a pull request process and start adding unit tests and things like that. And that took a while, but now I've got like two, three-ish junior devs who are like committing code all the time.

And like just this last week, we released like three new features, actually, after like six months of zero features, we just released three at once because all the like groundwork was kind of laid and they all kind of converged together. And now, like we've actually got some feature velocity coming in.

And that feels really good. And like, people don't even know about the features yet because I haven't sent an email blast, but I think that will kick up our revenue a bit. The first kink was when I moved us from SEO rank two to three to SEO rank one.

I saw the revenue growth kink. And then I hope these new features will kick it again in the second. So basically, the idea is like, just craft this product to be the very best email forwarding product there is. And just that maximum of if you build it, it will come.

I think it's actually kind of true, even though it's like a false statement, like it's kind of true for this product, and I want to lean in that direction. So, just building new features and making our customer service and the customer experience just top-notch is what I'm focusing on. Because that's fun and it's working. Maybe in the future I might look into enterprise outbound calls.

I don't actually feel like SEO ads would help right now because we're already ranked number one. Like, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure what they'll buy me. Maybe I could buy my way into, like real estate agency email forwarding and someone who's looking specifically for that.

They'll likely find us. I'm not sure yet, but I know that building new features and making a product better will improve retention and growth. So I'm doing that right now.

Awesome.

Yeah, so that's kind of what I'm working on, just making the product better from a growth perspective. And I guess on a meta level, I'm also working on like labor, basically hiring the right people and investing in them so that they can contribute well.

Because again, I don't want to do everything. So making my teammates more productive is also another big thing. As a quick example, I just launched an AI chatbot that is trained on all of our guides and internal documentation.

And it answers a lot of customer support questions fully by itself. Freaking amazing. And so now my customer support people don't need to answer all the dumb questions. They can answer the more complicated ones, and when they have free time, they can improve our documentation so that the bot will get even smarter. So I'm doing stuff like that.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. That's definitely in your wheelhouse. I think, I think you're right around the SEO. You've you're managing it. It looks like you know how to manage it. Uh, and once it does drop below one, then you can reinvest into it. Um, in terms of paid ads, free coaching, definitely, I believe that even if you just do some remarketing, so follow people around the web, it wouldn't have to be a lot of money. It'd be, you know, maybe a hundred bucks or 200 bucks.

What is that? What does that mean? Remarketing. What's remarketing?

Marketing is basically where people have found you, and they've gone away. Like they've landed on your page, you pixel them and tag them. Google tag, Metapixel, and then you follow them around the internet on Facebook, Instagram. You can do it and try to pull them back.

It's just, you don't have to pull them back. It's just an association that people know that your brand is there, and they might see your ad two or three times and not do anything. But on the fourth time, they might. So, because the audience is a warm audience, right?

They've already been on your page or have been looking for that solution. They might go away and do competitive research and forget about you, or not just take action. Then, a little bit of extra money is put into your business in front of them again, being a warm, almost hot lead. Typically, remarketing is the best result in any paid advertising.

So the one caveat there is that people are really cagey about their emails because it's very private and sensitive. So we have this reputation of being like utmost integrity for privacy, such that we don't even use Pixel and Google ads. We actually use Plausible, which is a non-cookie-based tracker.

And so we kind of plastered it in the front, which is like, listen, we will not read your emails. We will not sell your data. We don't even track you when you visit the website, except with anonymized plausible tracking, which is kind of like the whole standard for anonymized tracking. So I'm not sure if at this time I'm willing to take us one level down on the trust scale to try to do remarketing. That's the thought.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's totally cool. That could, you know, it could get you more customers than that, doing that, then maybe remarketing. So who knows? Yeah.

So it's something to think about. For now, I don't want to play with that integrated area.

Yeah. Email marketing is huge. Once, if they're on your list and you give them some freebies, I'm not sure how you would do it, but there would be a way that, you know, email marketing is a great engine for a business, and you could just educate them on emails, safety, and stuff like that.

But I won't turn this into a coaching call. I just want to say congrats on your success and the business you purchased. Look forward to seeing where it's at in five, 10 years' time.

Thanks so much for your time coming in.

Me too. Thanks for having me, and thanks for putting out past content because you helped me get to where I am now.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

And I will put a link to ImprovMX and your LinkedIn for anybody who wants to get in contact with Matt. So thanks again, Matt, everybody listening.

Thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.

Thanks, guys, bye.