Featured Stories
Profitable from Day One : How a Bootstrapped SaaS Found a Successful Exit
“My key priority was securing a buyer capable of both shaping a long-term strategic vision for DropFunnels and seamlessly transitioning ownership. The team at FE International had already identified the perfect buyer within their extensive network, ensuring a perfect match for the company’s future growth. ”
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SaaStock APAC 2020, Apple cuts App Store commissions, YouTube Analytics now gives insights on traffic sources, Amazon launches Amazon Pharmacy, Twitter introduces “Fleets”
When should you start planning your exit strategy? How can you build a network of potential acquirers? In this session, Cameron Priest, Ex-CEO (Exited) at TradeGecko, and Thomas Smale, Founder at FE International will share best practices to get your company ready for a future exit. Join Thomas, Cameron, and tons of other speakers at SaaStock APAC 2020, on November 23-24th. Use coupon code: SMALE-20 for 20% off admission.
Alibaba and JD make record-breaking sales for Singles Day 2020, YouTube experiences worldwide outage, UK to make changes to intellectual property laws, and more
Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com hit sales totaling $115 billion following the annual Singles Day shopping event. The Chinese economy has shown steady improvement since seemingly controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, which could have improved sales. Typically, Singles Day falls on the 24 hour period of November 11th, but this year, promotions began as early as November 1st. Alibaba reported a whopping $74.1 billion in sales over the eleven-day period, whereas JD reported $40.97 billion in sales. While both companies nearly doubled the prior years’ sales, the record achievement was overshadowed by steep stock falls for both companies.
Funding Options for Buying an Online Business
Naturally, one of the primary objectives for buyers when pursuing the acquisition of an online business is to secure the best possible deal in respect of their funds available and risk appetite. Business sellers can in many cases be at odds with this as they seek to maximise the upfront cash consideration and overall price paid. As is quite common in the world of online business brokerage, buyer and seller expectations can often be aligned by creative financing methods such as holdbacks, earn-outs, and seller financing. As such it is important to have a good understanding of the funding options for buying an online business.
Shopify announces third quarter financial results, Microsoft Clarity has landed, Netflix raises prices, stock jumps nearly 5%, New article from FE up on Entrepreneur.com, SaaS Mag: Contify Review–A SaaS Spotlight
On Thursday morning, Shopify announced incredibly strong results for their third financial quarter ending September 30, 2020. The global e-commerce reported total revenue in the third quarter was $767.4 million, which is a 96% increase from the same quarter in 2019. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) was $74.4 million with growth accelerated to an impressive 47% year-over-year.
Selling a SaaS Business: Guillaume Moubeche on his first exit, Google sued by the Department of Justice, PayPal and Venmo will offer and accept cryptocurrency for online transactions, and E-commerce Mar-Tech firm Rokt raises $80 million
Back in 2018, Moubeche and a few friends started lempod, a LinkedIn lead generation platform, alongside their primary project lemlist, an email outreach platform. They bootstrapped lempire (the collective of lempod and lemlist) to an impressive $2.2 million in revenue but soon found that it was difficult to scale two rapidly growing and profitable businesses simultaneously. Recently, Moubeche and his team decided to sell lempod in a strategic attempt to focus on “their first baby,” lemlist. This was Moubeche’s first foray into the world of organizing and preparing a business for sale. In this article, Moubeche details the experience of preparing the sale of the business through FE International, how we helped him navigate the process, and what he learned along the way.
Google Analytics 4 has landed, Amazon Prime Day stats, and Stripe acquires startup Paystack
Earlier this year, Nathan Stitt bought MyClientSpot, a project, client, contractor, and time management SaaS. He has now written up a case study on his purchase, including his motivations for buying an up-and-running business, the role FE International played in the purchase, his initial worries, and the lessons he learned along the way. He will be giving updates on his progress with MyClientSpot over the coming months, so please bookmark his site if you are interested in learning more about the buyer’s journey.
Daniel Ni on Founding, Scaling and Exiting a Successful SaaS Business
Daniel Ni graduated from Yale in 2012 and went on to work as a high-frequency trader on Wall Street. Due to some health issues, Ni left Wall Street and moved back in with his parents. In his newfound wealth of spare time, he taught himself how to code. Shortly thereafter,
MyShopManager acquired by Performant Capital, Slack to allow messaging across organizations in 2021, WP Bakery WordPress vulnerability affects over 4 million websites, and more
FE International has the pleasure of announcing the successful sale of MyShopManager, a marketing automation platform for auto repair shops, to Performant Capital. FE International served as sole sell-side advisor on the acquisition of MyShopManager. With this acquisition and Performant Capital’s purchase of uNotifi, a cloud-based customer relationship management platform, they have formed Dealer Holdings, a SaaS provider of marketing automation software and services Jon Dickson, co-founder of MyShopManager, expressed, “I’m very proud of the entire team at MyShopManager for getting to this milestone and excited to see how they continue to grow in the coming years. FE International was very professional and organized throughout the process and matched us with Performant Capital, a suitor that not only met our terms but truly understood what was unique about our business and how our team’s culture set us apart.”
Lempod founder on his recent exit, Amazon announces long-awaited Prime Day Dates, Palantir and Asana make their debut on Wall Street, and more…
FE International had the pleasure of working with Guillaume Moubeche, founder of both lempod and lemlist. FE advised Moubeche on a successful exit for lempod, which he details in his blog post. If you’re an aspiring founder or even considering buying a business, there are some great insights in there from a very personal perspective – rarely seen with so many deals kept private post-sale.
