The Nor’easter may have hit us hard here in Boston, but the FE team hasn’t slowed down. This week we listed a $5.98M education business that provides online courses in various fields of coding you may be interested in. We’re also featuring an apparel store with over 1000 unique designs. If you looking for more listings in SaaS and e-commerce, then you’ll find our listing page very useful.
For Trello users, the project management platform (recently acquired by Atlassian) announced new mobile offline capabilities. Whether you’re commuting to and from work, traveling or just have no access to the internet, you’ll be able to log into your Trello app on your phone and create boards for new projects, assign new members, add description, even take pictures and attach them to cards and so much more. All changes you make offline will be automatically updated once you’re connected online. If you get assigned to a new card or a comment is added, you’ll be notified immediately with updated boards and cards. Now you can work around the clock!
This week the team is spread out in various parts of the world. Valuation Director, Chris Hiller flew to the west coast to attend Saastr Annual and fortunately was able to meet up with some current SaaS clients and YEC members. Founder, Thomas Smale, is currently in Germany, where he will be speaking about SaaS growth opportunities at FemtoConf. Next week, Thomas will be participating in an AMA with Guy Mucklow of PCA Predict about exit planning that you can register for here. He is also scheduled to speak at DCxSGN in Saigon in two weekends, so if you’re in that neck of the woods, we can set up a meeting in our Saigon office. If you haven’t been able to meet up with Thomas or other traveling team members, let us know and we can coordinate for future events. If you’re an event organizer and are in search for speakers, let us know as well and in the meantime, check out our YouTube channel to see Thomas speaking at previous events.
Read on below for some news on new ChartMogul offerings for developers, online sales growth predictions for this year and Amazon’s new fulfillment centers.
Deal Highlights
Digital Products – Education Courses – $195K gross/mo
- Complete coding education ecosystem, including courses, hosting, certifications, and programming exercises
- 500K past and present coding students
- c.30% of students take two or more classes
- 4 full-time employees remaining post-sale
- High net margins of 83%
Yearly Net Profit: $1,958,000
Asking Price: $5,980,000
E-commerce – Clothing & Apparel – $21K gross/mo
- Three strong inter-related brands
- Four sales platforms limit concentration risk
- Low owner workload and drop shipped goods
- Over 1000 unique designs
- Strong net margins of 33%
Yearly Net Profit: $84K
Asking Price: $184K
In the News…
ChartMogul Offering More to Developers
ChartMogul came out this week with a couple of announcements for developers. Now, Python and Golang users will be able to easily integrate with the ChartMogul platform. The platform will be offering three different APIs, that will facilitate this integration and give users access to more of their data. These include an Import API that allows developers to push billing data from anywhere so that companies can analyze subscription revenue. The Enrichment API will allow developers to push customer metadata to ChartMogul for its segmentation features. Lastly, the Metrics API will allow developers to access SaaS metrics and analytics data to put in the insights section of ChartMogul.
ChartMogul has launched client libraries for Ruby, Node.js, PHP and now, Python and GO. The client libraries are fully open source, where you can see on GitHub for GO and Python. With each of these APIs, developers won’t have to worry about handling raw API requests and responses, be able to interact with ChartMogul by using the same naming conventions, save time, and access a fully updated library that reflects new functionality.
Online Sales to Grow 8% to 12% This Year
The National Retail Federation (NRF) has projected online sales growth between 8% and 12% for this year. In an economic forecast for 2017 report, the NRF believes that overall retail sales will increase 3.7% to 4.2%, at a much slower growth rate. This growth will be a main driver for retail industry growth, also building momentum from 2016.
NRF chief economists also made comments on the impact of recent politics, where “potential fiscal policy changes [on taxes and trade] could impact customers and the economy.” With a lot of impending changes coming this year, it’s important to stay ahead of the game and see how your business may be impacted.
Amazon Contributing to Job Market
Amazon plans on creating two new fulfillment centers in California, adding 2,000 new full time roles. Currently in California, Amazon employs 15,000 full time employees at their nine existing fulfillment centers.
Amazon has been building fulfillment centers in California for five years, including a program called Career Choice that Californian residents who work for Amazon can participate in to go back to school. The program funds up to 95% of tuition, regardless if their concentration is Amazon related or not. There have been over 9,000 Amazon employees that have participated in the program.
It’s clear that Amazon is making local efforts in the Golden State.