MI Rewind: You Don't Have to Go Big w/ Andrew Gazdecki

26:57So now we've expanded to e-commerce, crypto companies, newsletters, marketplaces, even some agencies. We're going to be adding some more categories, lots of Shopify, SaaS applications. But for now, yeah, the blanket statement is basically startups generating some form of revenue and have traction. You mentioned this, but one of my favorite things about MicroAcquire is the quality, I guess you could say of everybody involved, but more so the companies being sold. Because I've used to look, I forget if it was on Shopify or if it was another platform, but I've seen other platforms kind of like this, that you could buy things, but it was just the quality of the businesses that you could buy was horrible.

27:37I was like, this listing is horrible. This quote unquote founder, side hustler has no idea what they're talking about in this description. And so when I went on Microquire, I was like, this quality is just to a whole nother level. And I really like that. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I look at every listing and I always joke around. I say like some people like to play tennis on the weekend. I like to play start. I love startups. I'll get nervous when I meet a founder of a big company. I'm like, oh my gosh, you started... If I met the founder of Calendly or something like that, I'd be like, dude, can you sign my shirt or something like that?

28:12I'm just akin to sports. But yeah, so I look at every startup and I feel I have an understanding. And I've worked with my team on a process, so we have some criteria. But I still look at every startup and I say, yeah, that looks good. No, that does not. Yes, no. And I think given just almost like an ESPN analysis of like, I think that's a good player. That's not a good player. I kind of do that with startups when we post. It's funny you mentioned that you do this for fun. And I know you talk about on Twitter a lot about how you have to have fun with what you're doing. And I had this realization like last week or two weeks ago, I have a lot of stuff going on.

28:56I'm sure you do. A lot. Everybody does. Right. But usually when I did have free time, I'd almost always ride my dirt bike. That's like one of my favorite things to do in the world. And so I never really had free time because if I had free time, I'd go ride. But then I broke my leg racing. And so I can't ride right now. And so I had a weekend where I literally had no meetings. I had no travel. I couldn't ride my dirt bike. I had nothing like literally two days in a row. And I'm like, what do I even want to do? And the only thing I felt like doing was working on my business. I'm like, a lot of people go play video games or whatever.

29:27And I was like, I just want to sit home and work on my business. That's like all I want to do for fun. The thing with that is it's not work. You know, you're having fun. Like I always kind of say like, you know, you want to get to a place where working on your startup is like your favorite video game or playing your favorite sport. Or like when you get like 30 minutes, you're rushing up and you're like, Hey, I got like an idea and it gets you excited. And I think that's so important for two reasons. One is if it's not fun, you will get burnt out. Like don't go into building a startup if your intention is to make a bunch of money, because it's just so you can make money in ways that are much less stressful, way lower risk.

30:10not everyone should be an entrepreneur. You really need to enjoy it. And then the second part is, if you don't enjoy it and you go into it, you're going to be competing against someone who does, and they're going to kick your ass because they're going to put in the extra 20, 30%. And you can just do the math. We're basically, if you only work eight hours a day, but you're competing against someone who loves it and they're just going all in and they're working like 14 hour days. I don't know the math in my head, but like they're literally, they're producing. And again, not all time spent on work equals the same amount of results, but they're doing 40 % more output than you are.

30:49So, and their output is probably better because coming from passion rather than just like, Hey, I got to do this. This sucks. Like, you know, they're doing little things and they're always thinking and they're always like trying to think bigger. So that's just how you win in life. I think people who, if you find a passion, find a calling, find a purpose, and again, you spend your whole life working. If you're blessed and you found a way to make money doing something that you love, you won. You don't need to be venture-backed. You can be bootstrapped. You can be a public company, but if you love it, you won.

31:28That's some roles I live by is just happiness over everything. Do whatever you want, but if your work gets you up in the morning and gets you stoked, you've checkmated life. What happens if you have three of those projects lined up that you want to work on? They all make you feel the same way. They all have the same potential upside. And you talk about your beachhead strategy, you really got to focus on one thing. So how do you focus on that one thing? How do you pick which one to go with? I don't know if I have a good answer for that. But I mean, if you were asking me that, I'd say focus is key.

32:01It's okay to dabble and run small experiments and see which one picks up traction. But I think what you'll find is you'll naturally sort of gravitate towards one. Again, I ran Microcar for free with no business model. I had no idea how to make money. People would say, why don't you take commissions off listings? But you need to be like a certified California business broker and go through all this compliance stuff, take commissions. We've since hired a team in-house to allow us to do those things. But I launched a business with full intentions of, I don't care if I don't make any money. I don't care.

32:39I just want to help entrepreneurs. And that's where I started too. I started off with when I was thinking of my third startup. We don't need to backtrack on this, but after business apps, I started a blockchain trading company. You didn't have it very long, right? Just like a year or two? Yeah. It was kind of like a soft landing situation. But final point on MicroQuire is, the first thing I did before even thinking of the idea was I wrote down the customer I wanted to serve. Because after going through two different startups, I knew how important it was to love the customer you serve. So I wrote down startups and entrepreneurs and then started looking around the market at solutions or problems that they were facing.

33:21And I noticed no one was really addressing or innovating in acquisitions or exits. And Microquire was micro-born. Talk to us a bit about your business model today, because you have one and it's doing well. So I want to learn a little bit more about that. So it's really simple. We just charge buyers. We call it Microquire Premium, where buyers pay an annual subscription to contact sellers. So when you go in the marketplace, every listing is private, no company information is shown, meaning the company name, how to contact the seller, any P &L or metrics that they've uploaded. All that is completely private and stored in a private data room.

34:04And then to contact the founders, you have to subscribe to MicroPrior Premium. We review and approve your account to make sure you're not some random person and you seem like a somewhat credible buyer. So we also not only approve every listing, we approve every buyer as well to keep the marketplace very, very high quality. It's kind of like a club where basically you got to show us your ID to get in and stuff like that. That's a terrible analogy. My team literally is, they always tell me like I have the worst analogy. Another analogy I'll say about MicroQuart, which is also a bad one, it's like a Ferrari dealership where basically you can look at the cars, but if you're like, hey, I want to buy that car.

34:47Who's the seller? I have questions about the mileage. How has the engine been maintained? What happened with this chip? You have to pay for that access. And then you send a request to the seller. Seller receives it and then they can review the buyer's LinkedIn profile, send chats back and forth, have them sign an NDA if they choose. And then they grant them access into their data room. So that's our business model now. We're at about 900 ,000 in your current revenue, probably hit a million this month. And then we're going to start moving into, we're releasing an M &A directory where as we start to work with these larger businesses, we're going to start working with brokers.

35:28We're going to start working with investment bankers. We're going to start working with M &A advisors and accountants and attorneys and wealth managers and due diligence experts, really consolidating the whole M &A marketplace. kind of like Zillow from M &A, where we address everything from valuations to escrow to advisory to financing. So you can basically, we want to make it extremely easy for founders to get acquired. And it's really important to know, we're building this for founders. We're not building this for buyers. Buyers are a huge part of this, but buyers will jump through. What's that one, like Ninja Warrior show?

36:08I don't know. I think it's called Ninja Warriors. Yeah, maybe it's Ninja Warrior. But yeah, buyers will go through a Ninja Warrior course to get to the best deals. And so we want to basically empower founders to have an edge at the table with buyers. Because with a lot of buyers, it's Tuesday for them. But for the founder, it's the most life-changing event ever. So we want to empower them, educate them. And so the thought behind the advisory directory is some founders have these businesses where maybe they could use some help from a broker, or maybe they can use some help from an investment banker, or maybe they just need some guidance in terms of how to legally close the acquisition properly.

36:49And so we'll have a full directory of fully vetted individuals that can do that, but at a much lower rate. So they'll help increase the value of your startup. and then you pay less because typically these individuals spend half their time on sales and marketing, just like any other business. And we have thousands of startups that we can drive business to and then allow them to drive down the price because they're not having to basically spend money on sales and marketing like they currently do. So think of like Upwork or like Yelp with like ratings and reviews. You can hire these people, have an agreement in place on scope of work and all that fun stuff.

37:27So I actually got a note today it was released. It's not live today, but we finished it today. We're going to polish it up over the next week and she'll be out. It'll be out probably by the time. I don't know how fast you put out these podcasts, but it'll be out probably by the time you release this. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, Well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

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41:07All right, back to the show. Another thing you're doing, and it's been interesting to follow on Twitter, is this debate with TechCrunch, I guess you could say, and this idea of how much news coverage VC-backed companies get versus bootstrap companies. Talk to us a bit about what you're doing to help provide coverage to bootstrap companies and why it's even needed. Yeah. I think bootstrap companies are a very underserved and under-recognized segment of the startup ecosystem. Plain and simple. Why is that? I don't know. For reference, Business House with Bootstrap, but we were covered in tons of major media.

41:51We were in TechCrunch like 12 times. We were in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Venture Beat. We were everywhere. And I think there's just been a shift in media towards just this fundraising cycle that I just kind of called out. I just said, hey, this is getting a little guys because I've previously written for TechCrunch. I've been reading that blog for the past decade. Nothing but love for them. I just started providing them some feedback and others seem to agree. So with that, I didn't get a response back. And instead of continuing to like complain, I just said, hey, I'll just do it myself because I want to read these stories.

42:28And that's what we're doing. And what we want to do is we want to motivate and inspire and really show entrepreneurs what's possible. When you read an article about like a company rated in 200 million, that doesn't do anything for a lot of entrepreneurs. it's like an article related to like tom brady throws like a 99 yard touchdown it's like i can't do that maybe that's not the best analogy again but like if i'm just starting out as an entrepreneur that doesn't help me i want to learn like how did you get started like how hard is it like what was the like you know stuff i can relate to my intention with tech crunch was just to bring awareness like hey guys it's getting a little old and then it just kind of blew up like i saw over at this point, 10 million impressions, like 4 ,000 likes, like 500 retweets.

43:19My inbox has been exploding with like, yeah, we agree. And it bums me out in a way because it's almost like there's these gatekeepers in the small Silicon Valley bubble where people are too afraid to speak up. Like, oh, don't talk back to TechCrunch. They may not cover you again. But it's like that. If you have an opinion, this is entrepreneurship. Speak your mind. Like, you know, that might sound a little aggressive, but I'm a competitive person. And, you know, when I think that I see something that is unfair to others in the market, I speak my mind. And then if change doesn't happen that way, I take action and do something about it.

43:59So I've launched a publication, Bootstrappers. You know, we're no tech crunch. We don't have like a decade of experience, but we're taking a real shot. I hired four writers. I have a terrific head of content. We have about over 200 startups in the queue. So we're starting to realize like, okay, there's a lot of interest here. And we're just looking to inspire, motivate, and show entrepreneurs what's possible outside of basically bring attention and recognition to entrepreneurs taking an alternative path than the typical VC route. So basically just writing the blog that I think the startup community deserves.

44:40And I think there's a lot of people that would agree with that. Robert Leonard You mentioned that you didn't have a business model or monetization strategy for MicroAcquire for 10 months. So you might not have one yet for Bootstrapper, but what is your plan? How do you plan to monetize it? Robert Leonard None. I don't and I won't. It's completely free. It's literally a gift to the startup community. me. This sounds kind of cheesy, but I just want entrepreneurs to win. If you're venture-backed, bootstrapped, if you're public, if you're on Mars, whatever you're doing, I just want you to win. I want all entrepreneurs to win.

45:17And so when it's all said and done with MicroQuire, I just want to be known as someone who really helped push entrepreneurs forward in terms of shining light on alternative ways to build companies. I bootstrapped business to a fantastic exit. That wasn't celebrated, but I'm pretty happy with it. But you read about these dumb acquihires. And then what happens there is the title should read... Most funding rounds should read, hey, founder sells 30 % of his company to XYZ firm. And it's celebrated. It's like celebrating the cost of a wedding. And then in terms of, you know, acquihires and stuff getting covered, that's literally like, hey, startup didn't work out.

46:03They all got jobs and it's all celebrated. And again, I guess it should be celebrated in a way. I don't want that to be taken out of context. But I think what that does is it just creates this like weird stigma in Silicon Valley where founders begin to feel like building a billion dollar business, like getting acquired by like this huge company is how you succeed as an entrepreneur. And that's not the truth. And that's not the reality for 99 % of entrepreneurs. And yeah, just hoping to shed some light and just inspire entrepreneurs that, again, you don't have to go down that path. There's another path.

46:41Robert Leonard For those who don't know, what is an acqui-hire? Robert Leonard That would be when a company acquires a company for the team. So you have a stellar team. Typically, it's when the company things aren't working out. Not all the time. Sometimes they'll use IP, but usually they completely scrap IP. So whatever you're working on, like a recent acquisition on Microquire, it literally was company raised 12 million, acquired by LinkedIn, sold by IP for 250 ,000. So they basically all got jobs. And it was like a COVID situation. I felt really empathetic to the founder. So I talked to him and I tried to give him like, dude, some things you just can't control.

47:25That's another piece of advice I would give randomly is write down all the things you can control and then write down the things you can't control and throw away the second list and just focus on things you can control. But that's an acquirer. They basically joined a larger company and then whatever they were working on gets usually thrown away. I mentioned that I found you from MicroQuire, but one of the reasons why I stuck around to really follow you is because of your philosophy that not every business has to be a billion-dollar company. And I've talked about that for a long time, and I've felt it myself for even longer.

47:57And I've talked about it on this podcast because I think people, if you go into a business and you feel pressure to have to build it to a billion-dollar business in order to be successful, sometimes you might make decisions that aren't in the best interest of the business, and you actually end up failing because of that. Where I believe instead, if you realize that a $1 to$10 million business is still massively successful and can change your life, you can make different decisions. You don't have to worry about trying to get you a billion dollars. And I think you have a higher chance of success.

48:24I would completely agree with that. I always say, go down the path of these three businesses. Start something small first for experience and to learn. Trust me, the amount that you can learn by just launching something simple as cash flowing agency or a blog is enormous. Maybe it doesn't take off, maybe it does, but you'll learn a ton. And then business number two, I recommend starting a bootstrap SaaS or e-commerce company, something that you can sell to make you financially secure. And then on your third company, that's your chance. You're financially secure, change the market, disrupt something huge.

49:03Dude, go reinvent the airplane, whatever your thing is. That's my philosophy. And I'm on company number three, and that's what I'm currently doing. I'm trying to essentially disrupt investment banking and ideally help mint tens of thousands of millionaires through MicroQuire. I'm only one person, but you've said multiple times that you want to inspire people. And I can say that you've inspired me. Specifically with one example is, I started going on the platform. I started seeing these micro SaaS companies that were selling. And it's not life-changing money, but it's these small micro SaaS companies that are, like you said, it fit into that number one or number two company you mentioned.

49:42And I'm like, I've always wanted to learn how to program. I've always wanted to learn how to code, but I've never had really... One, I never had time. And two, I never really had an incentive to do it. I just wanted to do it. Now, because of this, I'm inspired to start my own micro SaaS eventually at some point. And so it's kind of encouraged me and inspired me to learn to code so that I can eventually list the company on here if I don't buy one on here first. Yeah. And I hear that all the time and I love it. It's almost like insurance policy. So if you build something and it doesn't really take off, but you get it to like 10, 20 ,000 in revenue, Google buy that like fast, you know, because they'll see it as, you know, an opportunity to scale it, but you learned and you recouped all your costs.

50:26Like, you know, you didn't, because there's so many stories of founders, like building companies and, you know, spending money and not recouping it or just getting over it and then letting it die on its own. And so, you know, Those aren't the ideal companies that... Actually, no, those are up there with my favorite, but that would be a good conversation around the two sides of MicroQuara. There's ones looking for million-dollar businesses and tons looking for those smaller, funner opportunities. And then it's a win for the founder as well, because they get to celebrate, they get acquired. That's an accomplishment.

51:02Who cares if it's 10K, 20K, 50K, 100K, or 10 million? Like you sold a business. Congrats, man. Put that on your resume. So yeah, man, totally agree with you. You've chosen to build MicroAcquire in public. What does it mean to build in public? And why did you decide to go down that route? Honestly, one day I was like, hey, here's my revenue. That was it. There was no strategy. There was no thought. I don't overthink things. Did you see the bootstrappers launch on Tuesday? You want to know how that went down? I saw a million people retweeted. I saw your feed filled with tons of people talking about it.

51:42Day before the launch, I had a one-on-one with my head of content. And we were supposed to launch on September 7th, but I meant to write September 2nd in the tweet. And I was like, oh, well, you guys got more time now. And then I had a meeting with Chris, who's an absolutely incredibly talented storyteller. I said, the blog looks great. We have eight articles. We have 10 in the queue. Let's just launch this thing. And I called my VP of engineering. We rehooked the domain, bootstrappers.com, quickly created a page on product hunt. And that's how we launched it. Literally 7 PM, I was like, this looks good.

52:22Let's go. Let's launch it tomorrow. And so are you a person that's not necessarily focused on perfection? You're more worried about progress than perfection. Because for me, I'm such a perfectionist and I know it's a flaw that I have, but I get in my way of my own self because I would just want everything to be perfect before I release it. Well, I think you learn more when you ship quicker. We had good feedback on like, it looked weird on some browsers. We already fixed that. Feedback on the stories. But I always say, good today is better than perfect tomorrow. I live by that. And so that was an opportunity for me to also show the team, I don't just say it, I'm serious, let's launch it, let's go.

53:03Yeah, I think speed of execution is what wins markets. So when you check MicroQuire in 90 days, it'll be, I'll promise you, it'll be a completely different company. We got some big things in the pipeline that I'm extremely excited about. And it's all a team effort. I can't really take credit for much of it at this point, because I have an amazing team. We added like a hundred, or actually like a thousand horsepower to company over the last few months. And we're having a ton of fun, which is the most important metric that we track. We don't really track it. We just laugh. We had a debate about, is a hot dog a sandwich yesterday?

53:38Is cereal soup? So that's another thing I always recommend to founders is have fun with your team. Figure out what motivates them, make it enjoyable. And that's how you can really, really do something really, really special with a great group of people and then have a great time too. Preston Pyshko Before we give a handoff to where people can find you, I like to wrap up the show by letting the guest ask me a question. So what question do you have for me? What do you like to do for fun? Preston Pyshko Race motocross. Work on my businesses. That's always my first interview question. People are always surprised.

54:11I always, when I hire, I look for motivation, attitude, and skillset in that order. If I don't feel you're motivated, I don't feel you have a good attitude, I just can't vibe with you, laugh with you, it won't work on either side. So I usually like to dive in and get to know you as a person rather than how good you are at podcasting or how good you are at marketing or whatever your skillset may be. So motocross, I dig that. I'd hire you. A lot of times skills can be taught, right? Those first two things that you talk about, motivation, you can't teach that. Can't teach that. And just whether you enjoy talking to somebody, you obviously can't teach that.

54:49So it's like... Dude, Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Tom Brady, what made them great was their motivation. They obviously had the skillset, but without motivation, there's countless examples of athletes with the same level of skillset and athletic ability without the motivation. Motivation is what makes people great, in my opinion. You can learn everything. And that's really the number one skill of any entrepreneur is being able to teach yourself anything. If you're motivated enough, you can learn the skills, right? So I totally understand. and agree. I know people are going to enjoy this conversation.

55:22You're going to want to check out what you're doing. Where's the best place to find you? Probably Twitter. As you can probably see, I'm pretty active. I'm either calling out... TechCrunch. I'm going to stop doing that just because I made my point, but follow me if you want to hear about stuff about how to build companies, how to have fun with your team, learn about other companies, bootstrapping their way to success. That's kind of my jam. And then check out MicroQuire. If you're looking to build or excuse me, buy or sell a business, there might be something for you there. I will put links to all those different resources in the show notes for you guys to go check out.

56:02And maybe you'll see one of my little micro SaaS companies on MicroQuire someday, or maybe on a future episode, I'll be telling you guys a story about how I bought a company from the MicroQuire marketplace. So all right, guys, go check out Andrew. Andrew, Drew, thanks so much for joining me. My pleasure, man. Dude, thanks so much for having me on this. I really enjoyed the conversation. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing. I'll see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network.

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