The Role of a SaaS Acquisition Marketplace - with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder and CEO Acquire

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, I am joined by Andrew Gazdecki, the founder and CEO of acquire.com, and the former's chief revenue officer at SPIF. We'll be covering three primary topics with Andrew today. First, the catalyst for founding acquire.com. Second, the trends in B2B SaaS startup and acquisitions environment. And third, the top lessons that Andrew has learned from observing so much MA activity on acquire.com. So with that, Andrew, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics Measure Up podcast?

**Andrew Gazdecki** (1:17)
Yeah, definitely. Well, Ray, thanks so much for having me as a guest. I definitely appreciate it. Name is Andrew Gazdecki. I am the CEO and founder of acquire.com. Previously, before Acquire, I bootstrapped a SaaS company in college to about 10 million in your current revenue. I sold that to a private equity company when I was 29 Going through that process kind of opened my eyes to just how difficult it is to get Acquire from meeting the buyer to going through due diligence to the legal work that's involved. And so I thought there could be an interesting opportunity to essentially improve that whole process for startup founders. So that's why I built acquire.com. And what we do is we're at the largest startup acquisition marketplace, and we focus predominantly on Bootstrap SaaS. So things SaaS companies that are traditionally too small for investment banks or are unattractive to traditional advisors, we help those companies get acquired better than any company in the world.

**Ray Rike** (2:16)
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**Andrew Gazdecki** (3:17)
Yeah, 100%. I think we're going to see even more of that because with AI entrepreneurship, is almost being democratized to where you don't need to be an engineer. It's easier than ever to build a startup. So I think we're going to see more and more solo bootstrap startups being created.

**Ray Rike** (3:34)
Well, I want to go back and you talked about the catalyst having been a former founder entrepreneur that sold your company. I'm sure that was a big part of the catalyst for foundingacquire.com since 2020 when you founded it. How's that vision or your belief of where the company is going? How has it changed?

**Andrew Gazdecki** (3:53)
Yeah, good question. When we first launched, it was just a marketplace where you can list your business and it was very basic, very hands-off, self-serve. We did a number of acquisitions with that model, but over the years, we realized through feedback, mainly just how important advisory and handholding can be for entrepreneurs because, again, when you sell a business, it's super, super confusing. It's often stressful and there's moments where an entire deal can fall apart because both sides just can't seem to agree on something. So we built out a full internal advisory component to the business where we can help even larger startups get acquired.

**Ray Rike** (4:29)
Interesting. Well, tell me about where that start and where it ends. So do you even help companies prepare their internal data, their financials, everything, even to get ready to list their company?

**Andrew Gazdecki** (4:40)
Yeah. We'll put together, we call it a confidential information memorandum. The acronym for that is SIM. It's basically a fancy word for pitch deck for buyers to review on a company. We'll help recast financials. We'll set up the entire listing. We'll reach out to buyers on their behalf. We'll help with negotiation. So pretty much end to end, any part of the acquisition journey that we can help with, we will because we're aligned as well as a company. We're paid when the business is successfully acquired. So we're on the same team essentially with entrepreneurs that we work with, where if they're successful, then we're successful as well.