I really enjoy behind the scenes looks into small app businesses and not so small. I read blogs and listen to podcasts about individuals running their businesses as best they can. I enjoy the candor, the struggles, and the triumphs. I take away knowledge from the discussions and encouragement from their experiences.

This series is my attempt to contribute one of those stories. With this post I am going to start at the beginning and over the next few posts get you caught up with where I am today.

The Spark

I had been listening to startup podcasts and reading blogs and following along a lot of founders journeys. I wanted to try it but getting an app shipped and finding customers was daunting. Am I working on the right problem can I find customers, how long am I going to spend finding out if this is what I want to do?

​Rob Walling has wrote an article and talked about the stair step approach to bootstrapping.

This method made a lot of sense to me and let me kind of find out if this was what I even wanted to do. If only there was away to get a head start.

Towards the end of October 2021, I was listening to an episode of My First Million. the guest Ramon Van Meer, was talking about buying businesses rather than building them. That’s when it dawned on me. I should buy an app.

​Microaquire.com was growing, and there was starting to be a decent selection of apps on the marketplace. I’d been interested in the Shopify platform for a while I had even started building a few apps myself but I never shipped any of them. Buying something that already existed, something with users and revenue, felt like a different path worth exploring.

I started planning my acquisition and outlining what my goals were, budget and timeframe.

The Plan

You can spend as much as you want on MicroAcquire. I had to get honest with myself about how much I was willing to spend, or more accurately, how much I was willing to lose.

Since this is my first acquisition I wanted to start small but with enough Monthly Recurring Revenue(MRR) to be interesting. I am not in a place to lose $500k if I mess this up.

After discussing the plan with my wife, we landed on a ceiling of $50k for the right app, though I really wanted to spend closer to $15k. I also wanted to complete the purchase before June 2022. I wanted to close the deal before the summer so I could spend those months getting my hands dirty with the code and operations. The goal was to be comfortable enough to really push on growth in the fall when my kids went back to school.

The Goals

Setting goals is hard when you have no idea what you are doing. I kept it simple: Learn and Don’t lose my investment.

Learning

You don’t know what you don’t know. But I knew I didn’t know a lot.

My thinking was the best way to learn is to dive into it. I spent the next three months building Shopify apps, mostly small experiments, just to understand the platform better. I read everything I could about acquisitions and due diligence. Learning as a goal meant I needed to figure out what I didn’t know. There was plenty.

Don’t Lose

This one was more practical. Find a good app that I could grow. I wanted something established. An app that had been around for at least 12 months, with a real revenue history and solid reviews.

Basically, find an app where I’d have to make significant errors to drive it to zero.

The Business

In February, I signed the documents and Trinity River Software was born. A basic LLC—nothing fancy. I could have done it online for a little less, but I went with a local CPA. The cost was pretty close, and now I have someone I can ask questions when I inevitably need to.

I had a few apps I was watching on MicroAcquire by this point. The rest of February and March went to getting accounts set up and funded, making sure I was actually ready to move when the right opportunity showed up.

That’s where I’ll stop for now. In the next post, I’ll go into the details of the acquisition itself—what I looked at, what I missed, and how the final decision came together.