My First Acquisition
In October 2019, I purchased Ryan Kulp’s course about acquiring existing businesses to grow, instead of building one from scratch.
Ever since I wanted to try that. I had a few projects built from scratch under my belt, but they were not making any money, so I wanted to work with something that does.
In all these 5 years, I’ve been looking here and there for such a business, but they were either outside my price range or no a good match (not interesting to me or using a foreign tech stack).
Regarding the price range, it was not the price, but more so the lack of balls that stopped me. Getting into debt is scary, even if it is somewhat calculated. I understand that to make money you need to make a few risks, but I guess those were the risks I was not willing to take at the time.
July 2024, one of my favorite Developer who blogs, Michael Lynch posted that he is selling Is It Keto.
🚨🚨🚨
I knew, this is my chance.
For a product that made $1,793.20 in the last 12 months through ads and affiliate links, he was asking $1k… 🤯
I opened up the application form and answered all questions honestly, including the fact that I just wanted to work (even if for a small bit) with one of my favorite developers. I offered to pay $2k.
Michael reached out to me a few days later saying that he picked me 🥳 I couldn’t believe it.
And so, we have started the process.
As far as business purchases go, I know that this was an easy one. Michael did most of the work. He:
- sent over the contract
- initiated the Escrow.com transaction
- went through the altogether process
I only had to wire the money to Escrow.com. That was it. I didn’t have to do all the due diligence stuff, since I trusted the seller.
The only hiccup in this process was Escrow.com. I haven’t dealt with them before, so did Michael. And I sincerely hope that in the future I won’t have to deal with them in the future.
Escrow have slowed done the process tremendously, from what should have been a week’s worth of work to almost a month. Gazzilion verification related questions both for the buyer and the seller. Slow Customer Support replies, etc.
Thankfully in a few weeks the transaction has been approved and the business transfer was started.
Again, props to Michael for doing all the heavy lifting. He promptly transferred all the repos to my Github account, inititated the domain transfer, sent over all the Social Account transfers. I only had to not fuck up. Which I mostly did not, I think.
Deploying this site (that was built with Gridsome, which I am familiar with) to Vercel was a breeze.
The last pieces to this puzzle are getting re-approved by Google Adsense to start advertising on the site and updating all the Amazon affiliate links. Hopefully that goes smoothly, as well 🤞.
Next, I am planning to port this site to django, which shouldn’t take much time due to the lack of complexity on the current version. I am also planning to add authentication so that users can save their favorite foods and automating the addition of products to the list.
Once that is done, I hope to come up with a viable strategy to earn income from this site, so that I can rely less on Google Ads, which I am not a huge fan of.
That’s it. It was an exciting process and project for me. As they say you always remember your first. Regardless of how the future looks like regarding this project I am extremely happy with how everything went, and 99% of the credit for that definitely goes to Michael.
If you have any suggestions or ideas for Is It Keto, definitely shoot me an email, would love to discuss.