Episode 14: Andrew Pierno of XO Capital
on How to Leverage the Opportunity in Micro SaaS Investments
On this episode
Shiv Narayanan interviews Andrew Pierno, Co-Founder at XO Capital.
Andrew and Shiv discuss XO Capital’s highly-targeted investments into small, PLG, single-purpose SaaS companies, and how their thesis contrasts with typical VC attitudes.
Learn about why micro-investing presents a blue ocean opportunity, how Andrew’s technical capabilities inform the ways XO Capital creates value, and how XO is able to scale companies profitably with limited resources.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.
Key Takeaways
- XO Capital’s investment thesis - 1.58
- The value in micro-investments that many firms overlook - 2.59
- How a company in the XO Capital portfolio increased MRR by 1300% - 7.25
- How they operationalize value creation with a small team - 9.17
- Prioritizing growth initiatives with limited resources - 13.32
- How this approach creates blue ocean opportunities - 16.47
- 3 indicators of success XO Capital looks for in potential investments - 20.11
- How XO Capital are valuing the SaaS businesses they invest in - 23.39
- Their new ‘flip fund’ - and why it’s so different to their investment approach to date - 26.26
- Andrew’s recommended resources on micro-investing - 32.41
Resources
Click to view transcript
Episode Transcript
Shiv: Alright Andrew, welcome to the show, how's it going?
Andrew: Good, glad to be here. How are you, Shiv?
Shiv: Good, excited to have you on. So why don't we start by giving the audience an intro about XO Capital and your role, and we'll take it from there.
Andrew: Sure, so XO Capital, we started about three years ago. We buy really small - and by small I mean actually very, very small SaaS companies. We've bought 10, we've sold five, and we currently operate five. And yeah, we just raised our first little fund. The first 10 acquisitions were all bootstrapped. We're still kind of a bootstrap company, and we're just looking to deploy the cash we just raised from our first little fundless sponsor.
Shiv: And how big was the initial fund?
Andrew: Half a million we raised. Yeah, so it won't be our biggest acquisition and we're just gonna buy one company with this. So. The fund is quite small.
Shiv: Got it. And when you say up until the first 10 acquisitions are bootstrap, that means that you and the co-founders have been buying these companies out of your own personal capital?
Andrew: Correct, yeah, it's me and two others, a gentleman named Henry and Danny, and it's just the three of us and our cash.
Shiv: And what's the thinking behind this? Obviously, there's been an increase in M&A in general, but even down market, you see platforms like acquire.com where people are buying and selling smaller businesses, but just walk us through the thesis here of investing in these - I would say, more immature - businesses that haven't really figured out everything yet, but you're still seeing value in that. So help us understand where you see the value there.
Andrew: So maybe I can start out with a history lesson. I was at a venture-backed company. We raised about eight million bucks. We spent a little bit more than that and it went to zero. This idea that we spent many millions of dollars investing into a product in a business that didn't meet venture criteria to then go get a series ABCD, et cetera, that doesn't mean that we created $0 worth of value. We had a kick-ass product. We had customers, right? There was revenue. And the value of that business ultimately went to zero because there wasn't really, at that time a marketplace, and who's buying these businesses that have, you know, sub a million of revenue. A lot of these bigger companies can't even do diligence for that little amount, right? So again, there's this gap between, okay, we raised a bunch of money, awesome team, great product, some customers, and yet the value at the end of that five-year journey was - the market valued that at zero, and I don't think that that's true. So, you know, I got my ass kicked on that one, right? I wasn't a co-founder there. I was - I was a hired guy, but I was - I was CTO and there for a long time. And that sucked. And so I thought, okay, maybe there's a better way to do this. I bet there's a bunch of other companies out there that have also gone on this trajectory, right? They raised a bunch of venture.
I mean, we're looking at one today. They raised 4 million of venture. They built an awesome product. The business is growing. It's small, but it's growing. It's just not growing at a rate that is acceptable to get an extra round of venture. And that's okay. Not every business is going to, it's a great big funnel, right? You've got seed, then you've got A, B, C, D, so whatever. And there's a bunch of fall off on each of those steps. And there's a ton of value at each of those things that are at each of those steps where there's some fallout.
And we think there's plenty of value to be captured there. So there's that kind of distressed venture thesis. And then the other thesis is sort of just like, go and acquire right now. There's plenty of indie hackers out there that have small businesses that do five, $10,000 a month. And there's really nobody going out and just aggregating all of those.
Most of the time - the biggest two reasons we see founders wanting to sell are, one, they're tired, or two, sort of on the distressed venture path. You know, they want to be on that venture track. They thought the current vehicle was their vehicle to do so. Turns out it is not. And they want another kind of big swing. And they want to move on from their past project. But for us, especially with our own cash - man, growing 3% month over month, we'll just wait two years. Business will double. That's a great, meaningful - it's a meaningful scenario for us with only three partners. And you know, from those modest kind of numbers, you know, obviously you can play with the upside and yeah, what about it? What if you get six or 10% month over month? Yes. Awesome. Absolutely awesome. But if we can just do 3% month over month, have it double in two years. That's a great little business for us.
Shiv: Totally. I mean, I want to touch on a few things that you mentioned - on the first side, on the VC model being a little bit broken. I think that's totally true. And we've had a bunch of guests on touch on this topic as well, where venture is putting money into these companies and expecting them to reach a certain level when sometimes a business is incapable of hitting that hundred million or billion dollar valuation, but they've raised rounds as - and they need to now behave in that way. And so that leads to burning way more capital than potentially they should be, trying to hit growth targets that just aren't realistic and maybe spending way too much on an acquisition or growth than a business logically would if they were focused on profitability. So totally understand that, and over time, especially with the way markets are going, more assets reach this distress state and I get the need to have a capital partner like you that can come in and relieve them of that asset. So I think that's great.
And then on the second side, on this point about buying these smaller entities that are profitable, that are growing modestly, I think there's a bigger need for focus on companies like that because even though they're kind of unsexy businesses, there's a ton of value there in operating them and being the person that's actually bringing in positive EBITDA every single month and then having a healthy business.
Andrew: So let me just say how unsexy these things are that we're buying or how tiny they are. Our very first acquisition ever, it was making $500 in recurring revenue, which the bar at that time was so low for us, for me in particular, I - as somebody who's technical, it's not my inability to copy somebody else's features, right? Feature for feature, you show me something, I can copy that in a relatively short period of time. It's not that, it's… It's getting a few customers in a validated use case that was so important to me. And so that business we bought for $23,000. So it was making 500 bucks a month. We bought it for 23 grand. That business today, just this month is going to do $7,000 recurring revenue. And the thing takes screenshots of other websites, right? It's - I don't mean to, you know, minimize its use, but it's, it's a single-purpose developer tool that does one thing, fine, at scale, right? We do a couple million screenshots a month for people and the thing just chugs along. So there's a - the point that I'm trying to make is that, you know, $500 of recurring revenue isn't meaningful, right? Other than it's a signal that there's something of interest there. But stacking a few of these that then grow over three years to $7,000 in recurring revenue, that starts to be meaningful for us - again, from like a bootstrap scale, like we're starting, we started this thing quite small, quite unambitiously, I might add.
Shiv: When you're buying companies of that size, right? Like $500 a month is basically nothing on an annual basis. So I'm assuming that the founding team is all that's there in place. So for you to take over a business like that, talk about how you're operationalizing and making sure that that business is actually improving because you're gonna have to maintain a certain level of service or product to actually retain that revenue as well, right?
Andrew: Yeah, so we have at the beginning, the first - that very first acquisition was, you know, is do these partners work together? Well, that answer ended up being no, right? That the initial group that I put together like didn't work out. And we've been solid now with Danny and Henry for a couple of years. But at the beginning, it was different people and that didn't work out. We bought them out, etc. It was me doing most of those things, right? I bought that thing and rewrote it from scratch myself. Like that was not something we'd sign up for doing today, but that was, again for that first one, fine because I had that use case validated, which again, given my blind spots as a software engineer was really important to me. Now, however, we have some shared services because again, these acquisitions are quite small. Our biggest one is doing a little over $20,000 in recurring - even still at 20 grand a month, that's still not that much headroom to go and hire dedicated, particularly U.S.-based talent. So we rely on shared services still, which I have mixed feelings about. But where it does work well is on customer service. So shared customer service - there's one customer service desk for all five of our portfolio companies. It all comes in through the right domain, the screenshot ones go through going through that, but it's all one person taking care of everything and sort of triaging and then assigning tasks to our small development team, which is sort of our second area of shared services. So, we have three full-time software developers outside of myself, and they sort of rotate between projects on a monthly basis. And where we've gotten really lucky, if I'm honest, is that, you know, on a few of these products that we've bought, some require more maintenance than others. More upkeep, shit breaks, whatever. For a few of them - I'm not a passive income type of guy. I just don't think that really exists in any meaningful way, at least not for me. Just like there's always gonna be a lottery winner, but it's probably not gonna be you. That's sort of how I think about that.
Shiv: Yeah.
Andrew: But we do have - for a couple of these products, they are relatively low touch. And the reason I think they're low touch is because when you're buying on the very small level, this is not the distressed venture thesis. This is the single purpose, kind of single-use, does one thing well type of use case. If you buy it and that use case is sort of built out, the product surface area isn't infinite. Whereas with some enterprise SaaS, right? There's always gonna be an incremental feature that a new huge customer comes in and says, we needed to integrate with our weird CRM or whatever that is. But if the tool takes screenshots, that surface area of that product is, you know, only so wide. And once it's complete, you know, the product is complete. There isn't that much engineering work left on it. And so - and that is on our shared services model. The biggest cost is -
Shiv: Is the product and development side.
Andrew: Yes. And so when we don't have to invest that much on the product side - I mean, of course, we - we try to build new features, keep up with the market. Maybe, maybe we could try this? Great, but it's all sort of - it's all sort of like icing on top of the cake. We already have the product. It's, it's feature complete. It does - it fulfills the promise to that customer and that sort of just grows. Not - I wouldn't say organically - like we're doing growth plays for all of these things, mostly through content, but we can focus on that versus focusing on engineering.
Shiv: How big is your team right now?
Andrew: Three full-time engineers and then three partners. Only one of us is actually full-time. Danny is full-time.
Shiv: Got it. And how do you manage - and I get the model and how you're explaining that, but I guess the more of these entities that you acquire, it's like, you know, it's like a common saying, whether you're doing a small project or a big project, it takes the same amount of time in some ways, because you kind of got to give it all of you, right? So the more of these entities that you have, you kind of have constant competing priorities. And so how are you prioritizing between these entities, even with the shared services model?
Andrew: So we stack rank first for the most recent one. So the first three months of any new acquisition, we try not to do multiple at the same time. That's going to be the focus, the newest one. And then once that's sort of on some kind of incremental feature path, then we can sort of stack rank by size, right? What is most important to the portfolio? And then of course there's little things like, oh, here's a growth experiment that we've been wanting to try, et cetera. But generally speaking, yeah, it's whatever we've bought most recently and then whatever's the biggest. But I will say something, I get the reason why everybody goes bigger in this business. Why does everybody try and buy bigger? It's because being able to hire dedicated staff to an individual portfolio company is like a huge blessing, right? That's a miracle. That's amazing. We don't have that luxury. Not yet anyways.
Shiv: Right.
Andrew: And so the more that we can buy these products that are in the single purpose realm, product led growth and nearly complete as a single promise to the customer, it is not true to say that each one of these is the same amount of work. Screenshot was not that much work after we rebuilt the platform, which took me, I don't know, like three weeks. Now, when we bought a sort of less, like, a not product-led growth, more of like a sales - a sales-led growth company - like we bought a YC company. They were doing enterprise - like it was, it was just pure enterprise sales. The details don't really matter other than operationally. It was like very enterprise sales, right? So a small number of customers, extremely high touch. Operationally, that was very, very difficult, because it took all of Danny's time to handhold these bigger customers, even though the revenue numbers weren't that big yet. And so at some point, we decided to let go of WorkCloud and just focus on product-led growth companies. So, now sort of our buy box - outside of the fund we just raised - is product-led growth, single purpose, and then, you know, kind of secondarily when appropriate, we'll look at like a distressed venture deal.
Shiv: Right.
Andrew: Sometimes knowing full well that it might be a sales-led thing. And we might be okay with that, but we tend to default now to product-led growth.
Shiv: Yeah, it's almost like the PLG plus single-purpose tool filters make it easier on the operational side after the fact because you can't have the full-time employees in every situation and that lets you buy smaller companies. And we've had PE investors that invest down market, but obviously never this down market. But one of the things that they've shared is that the more down market you go, the less competition there is. And so by having this process, you've kind of created a bit of a blue ocean where investors aren't focused and you're one of the only players going after these kinds of companies.
Andrew: Generally speaking, when it comes down to it, right, you list something on acquire.com. We've been on both sides of this. You get maybe 50 people that are kind of tire kickers looking at it. After a couple weeks, that goes down to maybe three. What I'm trying to say is, generally speaking, when it comes time to write an LOI or when it comes down to writing a check, there's, generally speaking, nobody else in the room with us.
We're - yeah, it is somewhat blue ocean. I mean, there's definitely - we're competing sometimes against individuals, but really when it push comes to shove, it hasn't really come down to a competitive process for us, for any of our acquisitions to date.
Shiv: Do you find that that's more because not enough people are focused on those kinds of assets or just capital in terms of people allocating capital to this area of the market, there just isn't capital chasing companies as small?
Andrew: Well, I mean, the second you just bring in the word capital, that's already more than like, you know, seven figures in my mind, right? And so like, who is the buyer here, other than weird companies like XO, like ours, of which there are not that many to begin with, and most of them are bigger. You're talking about competing against individuals and then very occasionally other software companies almost like a mini kind of strategic - obviously, not at a strategic valuation, but the company sees it as a bolt-on or they could do something there to sort of like a hub and spoke thing. Their main product would be like the mothership and then there'd be this little bolt-on thing would be like a little satellite that complements the business in some way. But yeah, I mean, there's just not dollars going out specifically to chase this part of the market, which is I think a unique advantage. I mean, it's not to say it's not a pain in the ass to actually do functionally, but yeah, I mean, there's no dollars being deployed in any meaningful way just to come after these like, oh, we wanna go scoop up all products that are doing under 20,000 of recurring revenue. But I think that that's the opportunity.
Shiv: Right. Yeah, we haven't met all that many firms that are organized or institutionalized in some ways to go after these kinds of assets. The only one that really comes to mind is Tiny by Andrew Wilkinson. But outside of that, haven't really seen that many folks going after it. And I guess if you're competing against individuals and there aren't that many of them, it's like them having to write a personal check from their personal accounts. And that gets real very quickly the further you get along the process.
Andrew: But even Andrew Wilkinson, who's, you know, was part of the - he's been a major influence on my thinking and how I approach this. I think Tiny's at a billion assets under management, maybe a little less now, the market's kind of pulled back a bit, they're public. But they're big, I mean, they're not going after these things either. They're going after bigger stuff from us.
Shiv: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, now that they have the cloud and the deal flow, they're almost looking at slightly, or much larger deals than what you're talking about here. So that makes sense. But when you're in diligence, how are you validating if an asset is worth buying? Like what are metrics that you're looking at? What does that process look like?
Andrew: So all of our diligence - you'll probably laugh at this, it's all sub 30 days. Like from, ‘hey, we like this business,’ to like, ‘here's the check, transaction complete’ - sub-30 days for all 10 of them. So each one of the three of us - Henry does financials, I do tech and Danny does sales. And we all kind of do, you know, product and some of the more common things, but we're looking for if it's a product-led growth type company with like a single purpose, just like a single purpose application. We're looking for one channel. So what's the channel that has gotten them the current customer account to date? Is that something we can take over? Right? Is that like - for example, we've gotten bitten by this before where the founders had a strong LinkedIn presence and that was driving a lot of the - that was driving a lot of the traffic. But as you know, unless you really get in the weeds, it's hard to say that the traffic from Google was actually coming from LinkedIn, which was actually coming from the founders personal LinkedIn accounts, which is going to get turned off the second you buy this business. So, again, just getting into whatever one channel is working. And even if that's paid ads, that's cool. But we'll dig in there and say, okay, great, we can double down on paid ads or improve them or something like that. So one channel that's working, some number of customers. So we very rarely buy things with zero revenue.
Shiv: Yep.
Andrew: We've danced with it in the past. I mean, sometimes it's like these things are five or ten grand and it's just like a little snack to chew on and we might just experiment with something or, you know, want like a toy, so to speak. But generally speaking, the second piece after one channel is some number of customers. Obviously, the more the better - a lot of these tools that we're buying are, again, not enterprise six-figure deals. So it's like 100 plus customers is great - at like 10 bucks a month, that's, that's solid, right? That's, that's some kind of customer diversity We're hoping for low customer concentration, as is everyone, but we will - we'll definitely say no to deals where you know one or two customers make up 75% of their revenue, especially if they've only - the company's only been around for eight months, right? What is that? What does that actually mean? Yeah, and then -
Shiv: Right. Way too much risk there, yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: The third piece is just on the tech side. Like what are we actually buying? I mostly - the way I think about like the tech diligence as the tech guy is not, like, what is the quality of this code and stuff like that so much as, is - can I make this thing work with our team given our kind of current constraints? So we definitely filter deals based on the tech stack. Right. Because our developers and our development team and myself personally, we only know so many different technology stacks. So that can be a filtering criteria for us. Unless of course, like with our most recent acquisition, it had a contractor that built the initial platform and was happy to continue working with us. And so we pay him hourly to, you know, maintain the - and do incremental feature development on the - the thing we just bought. So yeah, customers, channel, and then tech.
Shiv: What about things like churn, especially on the lower end of the market, product-led, like 90-day retention, and just there's higher volume, but people churn in less than a year, and now you don't have the customer base that you kind of started off with. How heavily do you bet that side of the business?
Andrew: We're looking at it. It's - so this is a - Danny hates when I say this cause he's like an actual sales person and like is really thoughtful about these things. And I'm just a tech guy. So when I say this, like, you know, it is naive but it's also true. Like companies that like are growing tend to keep growing. Right. And companies that are like, where the churn is like outweighing or outpacing the growth, it's very hard for us historically to turn those things around.
So we're absolutely looking at LTV and retention and stuff like that. You have to take numbers like LTV with a little bit of a grain of salt. The business is under two years old and the founders have never done any pricing experiments. Like what is LTV really telling you other than like, okay, here's some kind of steady state. But yeah, I mean, having a high - I would take like lower growth over high churn any day, right? Getting like retention metrics up is so, so hard. I mean, that is like really serious product-level work. And we frankly just do not have the time or the bandwidth to do something like that. And so...
Shiv: So that's a bit of like a Goldilocks zone, right? Where you're buying smaller companies, but they have to have churn figured out and churn is usually figured out over time. So you kind of have to have this perfect storm of things come together. Is that not true?
Andrew: So there are certain products that have some… I don't know, let's call it baseline level of churn. So we own a cold email tool. That industry and, and that - those tools in that market segment tend to have higher churn from what we can tell. So there's some kind of, I don't - I don't know what you call it, like structural churn numbers that we're looking at. And there's some benchmarks that you can look up. You know, you again have to kind of take those with a grain of salt. But we're not looking for churn to be solved. Again, I think that, you know, when you have only a couple customers, and the business has only been around for like less than a year, you know, it's really hard to say. But again, we have a portfolio with a bunch of numbers that we're comfortable with. And so we benchmark their current churn with the rest of the portfolio and see if it's something we can manage. Or we look at it and say, like, you know, here's why people are churning. There's like all these bugs or there's something obvious, some obvious levers we could pull to reduce churn. We're comfortable with that.
Shiv: How are you valuing these businesses? Like is it a multiple of revenue? Are you looking at profitability? Like what's the framework there?
Andrew: Multiple of revenue.
Shiv: Well, and is it - I've seen some articles that you read and it's like 2 to 3X type of on the revenue side.
Andrew: Yeah, two is great, three is like, three's a maybe for us. Yeah.
Shiv: Three's maybe, I got it. Okay, in terms of structuring the deal, like are you paying most of this upfront or are you financing it?
Andrew: Relatively low seller financing, if any. We don't have - there's only one portfolio company now that has any kind of debt on it. And it's 200 grand of seller financing on like an $800,000 purchase price. So, relatively, no, relatively small debt and no outside debt, just some seller financing with a zero interest if we can get it.
Shiv: It might be a little harder right now, but yeah, I hear you. Okay, and then you mentioned you raised the new funds. I think maybe that'll be the last series of questions. Help me understand - with the $500,000, you said instead of buying multiple smaller assets, you want to go after one larger asset. So what's the thinking there?
Andrew: So I tried to raise like a proper fund during the heyday of 2021, 2022. I was talking to all the same people that were putting dollars in these YC companies at just bonkers valuations, right? But for some reason, when it came to our little portfolio, they were like, ‘Oh man, like a 3X on this whole thing? I don't know if we can go for that.’ I'm like, ‘Okay, guys, whatever.’ So I failed to raise capital, just like a discretionary fund for - we were going to just sell shares of our current portfolio and say like, okay, we value the business today at X and it's not going to be a fund really. It's just like, here's one C Corp that has the whole portfolio in it and go raise into that. And that didn't work. But part of the feedback from that process was, ‘I don't want my capital tied up for, you know, 10 plus years. That's hard for me.’
And so we came up with this concept that was basically the number one objection. And so we came up with this concept of a flip fund. We don't generally buy these things to try and flip them or sell them in any kind of time horizon. The ones with our own cash, it's definitely just been opportunistic. And again, some of these, I think we'll hold for a very long time. They've already cashflowed much more than we paid for them. Like there's no real reason to sell them. But for the flip fund, the structure that worked that I think that I thought I could go raise against was we're going to hold for 12 to 24 months. We're going to try and double the business, and then we're going to sell it. And that pitch was really easy to understand for my audience, or the people that I had access to, or have access to, and we were able to raise half a million in a couple weeks, and that's it. So it's not really a fund, it's more of a fundless sponsor model, but it is discretionary, and we'll go, we'll go just buy one company with that.
Shiv: And within the 12 to 24 months, what's the priority of things that you're working? Are you trying to clean up the business, make it more profitable, or change the product a bit? What's the focus there?
Andrew: So it's hard to say without having a target identified. We're looking at a deal right now that is a legacy thing that could use a bunch of cleanup and be brought at least to 2010 and then ultimately to 2023. It looks that old. And that I would kind of frame as like, okay, this deal has a packaging problem, right? So for the next 12 to 24 months, I'm working on packaging this and updating this to be like a modern kind of pure SaaS offering, there's some service elements there. So that would be kind of the dance if we bought that product. But on like the complete other side, right, we're looking at another deal that is sort of distressed venture - raised a bunch of money, running out, ran out, they want to return money to investors and we'll buy it for, you know, two or three X revenue and that has a - that already has a growth rate that they have some growth plays, let's say content is the channel that's working for them or SEO. And so it would be about reinvesting in that.
Shiv: Mm-hmm. And over time, generating more value. Okay, that makes sense in terms of the timeline is - it feels condensed. So I guess the question is like when you find these targets, you have to find one where you feel like you can create enough value that flipping it in 12, 24 months is enough, right, because normally PE firms or hold periods are at least three years or usually five is like the average. So how do you find an asset where you can flip it around in that quick of a time period?
Andrew: Well, we'll see if we can. There's a great possibility that we'll come away in like the end of the year and we'll look around and say, we can't find a target. You guys want your money back. I'm perfectly happy giving the money back if we don't find - I don't want to buy something just to buy something if I don't see a good play or a good opportunity or it's not something - you know, it's not - if it's not a deal that we would do with our own cash, it's not a deal that we're going to do with these investors. The time horizon is condensed.
One of the rules that we're thinking about bending on is, actually more of a sales-led product is actually I think a little bit easier to double in that short of a time horizon. For example if we're buying like a pet care, like a back office software for like the pet care industry. Like, I don't know, mobile dog washers. I - Can get a list of all of those, literally every single one registered in the United States and put it on a spreadsheet and go try and get like a yes or no from all of them, right? And if that business has 10 customers today, I can go get - I have some confidence that I can get to 20 just because it's so clear how you would target and go after those businesses. And so that might be one approach that we're viewing the Flip Fund - one lens through which we're viewing the opportunities for the Flip Fund. But as you well know, I have no idea what's going to come on the market in the next two months. No idea.
Shiv: Right. Yeah, I think the fact that you're open to not investing in something if you don't find the right target, I think is the right approach. And you might find one that does meet all the criteria and then it makes sense. So I think that's encouraging. So with that said, I think that's a good place to stop. But before we take off, just what are some places where people can go to learn about XO and this type of an investment philosophy and learn more about you guys?
Andrew: So we write a weekly blog. You can go to xo.capital. And I do a little podcast there, just going over our thoughts or growth experiments. We're super transparent with our numbers, so every month we release all of our numbers and all the stuff that worked and all the stuff that didn't work. So we sort of air our dirty laundry on the blog. And then I'm still posting on Twitter, or X, which I have not gotten used to saying. I'm @andrewpierno, which we can link to.
Those are the two main places. And LinkedIn, of course.
Shiv: Awesome. And last question, are there any resources if somebody's listening and they're like, I'd like to get into this type of micro-investing approach or building a portfolio of these businesses? What is a book or resource you'd recommend that they look into or read into?
Andrew: So that was the original purpose of the blog, is to just say like, okay, we're doing this from scratch, follow along, here's all the lessons, we're not hiding anything, we're not gatekeeping anything, there's no course to go buy, it's just like, hopefully pure value on the blog. And not to say that we may not do, we won't do a course in the future or something like that, but to date we just haven't. So that's what I'd recommend if they wanna set up what we have.
Shiv: Yeah, there's some good content in there. Some of the articles we researched is - you have an article on negotiating a micro-SaaS acquisition. So worth checking out. So we'll put that in the show notes as well. Awesome, well, Andrew, thanks for doing this and appreciate you sharing your wisdom with the audience. Thanks for being here. Yeah.
Andrew: Awesome. Thanks so much, Shiv. Thanks for having me.
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What You Need to Know About Marketing in Portcos
Why marketing is a function no portco or investor can afford to ignore, and what you need to know about portco marketing in the current environment.

Ep.12: Justin Johnson of Camber Partners
Maximizing Returns on a PLG Approach Using Data & AI
Why product led growth is such a popular approach among PE investors, and how Camber is leveraging AI to identify growth opportunities in PLG companies.

Ep.13: Krista Morgan of Stage Fund
How Companies Can Rebound By Refocusing on Profitability
The challenges many companies experience in high-pressure VC models, and how Stage’s alternative investment approach offers a solution for founders and investors.
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