324: Tim Schumacher - The Bootstrapper's Mindset

Arvid Kahl
Today I'm talking to Tim Schumacher, the man who almost bought my business. We'll be talking about private equity, what it takes to build a really good, sellable bootstrap business, what funding options exist, and what AI is going to do to the industry. This episode is sponsored by Acquire.com. more on that later. Now, here's Tim.

Tim, it is really, really nice to meet you again. We have a history between the both of us, and it's been quite a pleasure to watch your journey over the last decade or so. It's been quite a while for you. You co founded this amazing domain marketplace, and there's IO, too, the business behind Apple. And you were involved with Ecosia, and you were running SaaS Group and so many more online businesses.

You know what I wonder? Do you ever feel the desire to start your own small, solopreneur SaaS business again just for the raw joy of building? Well, funny that you asked that. And by the way, I mean, this is a podcast, but for those who are looking at the video, I think our t shirt shirts say it all. You're wearing a t shirt that says building in public, and I'm wearing a t shirt saying r ARR.

Tim Schumacher
And I think that's the difference between people. There are people who are really great between zero and one, and I think you're one of those people, like really great. Build an mvp. Build something from scratch. And I've been there early.

I've been a coder for the first ten years, kind of between 14 and 24, maybe, but I discovered over the last decade, I would say that I'm really good between one and ten or one and 100, but not from zero to one. It's a very different skillset. And that's why I started SaaS group, because they are tech businesses who are already at one or two or something, but needs to be taken to the next level. And I still started something. I also started climate fund, which is essentially, we also build that from scratch.

But to be honest, I couldn't imagine sitting down and coding a project, really, and getting it to the very, very initial phase. It's like, that's just not me. That's funny. Yeah. There was a talk at Microconf just in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago about the different kinds of motivation between people.

Arvid Kahl
And some people really have this long term vision. They really want to build something massive. They want to build something that impacts a lot of people. And then some people just want to tinker on their little projects. That's what they want to do.

It's nice to see that we both have similar trajectories but very different ways of doing it. I really like that. And both is needed for society to thrive, for entrepreneurial societies. You need both of those people. You need the builders and the scalers.

And you kind of. You accumulate these people, you gather them up. Right? That's what SAS group does. How has SAS group been doing?

When we talked for the last time, like we talked face to face was actually in Berlin when I was still living there. It must have been like 2019, like early 2019. It was right before corona or a year before. So it must be five years, uh, when we first met Mat. Yet it's so long ago.

It's crazy. So many things have happened along those, those lines. We were back. We can talk about this story kind of later if you want to, but I want to see where has SAS group gone from those days when we were still chatting to today, like, what has happened over the last five years for you? A lot has happened.

Tim Schumacher
I mean, back then we were just getting started. I like, we were interested in your company. I think we can transparently say that. We even put in a bid. You and your wife, you build an awesome business and we were very interested in that.

Put in a bid and it probably would have been our second or third business. So very, very early now we have 20 with 20 SaaS businesses. We're at 60 million ar. We've been all along the way, we've been acquiring businesses between one and 10 million in array, always with the goal to taking it to the next level, keeping what's made the businesses great until then, but inject the things which were missing. That's our playbook.

And of course, it sometimes works really, really well. And we scale businesses five x over. Revenues went up from my one business, for example, from 2 million to 10 million within two years. But we've also other businesses where it didn't work, where the revenue was totally flat. And we did a lot of good things, but it just didn't move the needle.

But overall, I think the model has been working and SAS Group is now, yeah, 60 million ar, 300 people across 30 different countries. Fully remote company, very entrepreneurial, very, very operationally driven. We're not financially people, we're operators and we like to build. That's awesome. And I looked into your portfolio because I wanted to see what was going on there.

Arvid Kahl
And I was kind of almost shocked in a very good way to see so many businesses that I have used in the past. I was just looking at like tower as a tool that I regularly use pre render was a tool that I used back in 2014 and 15 or something like I've been, I've been with these tools for a long while and like reward for tool like that. There's, there's so many really, really interesting tools that are very developer centric in many ways too, in the portfolio. How intentional is that? Like how intentional is your portfolio allocation there?

Tim Schumacher
So we're kind of in between. We're opportunistic when good deals come up, but also we know what we know and what we don't know. And probably the two topics which we know best are developer tools and online marketing tools. Developer tools in particular. The background of my co founder.

My background is a bit more in online marketing, though. That's what I gravitate to. Your business would have been an odd one out because we don't know much about education, but we know a bit about marketplaces. As you mentioned, I founded Seago.com, the domain marketplace. So some of the dynamics of marketplaces, when you have in your case, teachers, students on the other side and the SaaS tool in between, I like that logic a lot, but it would have been a bit more opportunistic.

Developer tools are certainly one of our sweet spots. Yeah, that makes sense. And it usually makes sense to go with what you really understand. Right. You know what, as a developer myself building my own new company on the side, or I guess as a main thing right now, it really depends on how much time I spend any given week.

Arvid Kahl
I do use a lot of developer tools, but my usage of them has changed over the last couple of weeks or a couple of months. Even with the advent of LLMs and AI and all these little tools that all of a sudden make certain tasks that were just regular work, make them non work, you just give a command and it happens. Do you see this affecting both your portfolio companies and companies in the field in general? Is AI something that you keep an eye on as a PE? Absolutely.

Tim Schumacher
I mean, that's probably the biggest shift since the advent of the Internet. For better or worse, I think we've seen some areas where services are made redundant, where we're worried that it could change things. We have other services which suddenly become so much more valuable because we can, we can inject AI into existing business models and they're suddenly ten x more valuable because they're not, for example, providing information, but they're interpreting information and suddenly they can replace entire departments. And so probably the people who are using them should be more worried than us, but of course we're making a big push of, of ejecting AI in all parts of the company, whether it's efficiency gains, whether it's your business models, whether it's used as a funnel. So for example, writing our own custom GPTs for the GPT store, I think we should do more.

We're still a very small team that does it. Plus of course a lot of the developers in the group who do it as a side thing, but we probably should double down on it even more. But as always, it's like so many things to do. Yeah, and everything changes like every four days. That's the other problem there.

Arvid Kahl
I do wonder though, and we talked about this earlier, there is platform risk in AI, right? There is. Particularly if you use OpenAI API systems or if you use the anthropic stuff, Claude and whatnot. The moment you work on somebody else's platform, that is a risk for businesses and for a company that wants to have a diverse portfolio, them all depending on the same platform is probably not the best idea. How do you deal with that?

Tim Schumacher
Well, tricky. I mean, one thing is using different tools on the other side, I think it's a risk we have to assume in certain areas. There's no way, I mean, it's a bit like getting traffic. Well, you depend on Google, it's like, okay, what's there to do is you just make sure that you don't screw it up and you don't do any blackhead SEO tactics which can get you banned. And you do it, you play by the rules.

But yeah, that's a tricky business. I mean, that brings us, of course to the question of the power of the big tech companies in society and also how Europe is handling it versus the US versus Asia. That's probably a separate topic, but yeah, that's. Of course, I think every entrepreneur is rightfully worried about this because we're all dependent on big tech, and we've seen lots of cases where companies have been wiped out overnight, whether it's through regulation or through some change of some big tech company. Yeah, you're right, there are so many threats and you can't monitor them all.

You can monitor them more. We can do certain, and I think, and that maybe brings us also to one of the main topics of the podcast and on the exit question, as a portfolio company, if one of our companies goes bust, well, that would be great, but we live on. As a founder, you usually have all your eggs in one basket, you have your net worth, big chunk. Usually that one company and we know that that makes founders nervous. They might have worked four, five, six years on a business.

They've created something with millions of revenues, but not taking a lot out very often. And then it's like, okay, if that thing goes bust, that's tragic. Yeah, that's over relying on external technologies that then implode your business. Not a smart choice, but something like you said, that you really don't have much of a choice of anymore because everybody else is also doing it right. There's this kind of hurt mentality of everything needs AI that if you don't use it, your customers might go to the guy who promises something newfangled, even though it's just a chat GPT wrapper inside of their business.

Arvid Kahl
That's a risk. Let's talk exit. I like this idea. I like the idea of going a little bit into the meat of what acquisitions are all about, because a lot of listeners to this show are founders, either entrepreneurs just starting out, or people on a journey to hopefully a million, 10 million in ARR. Wouldn't that be great for everybody here?

Let's talk about the. I would like to hear the markers that you look for, like the success markers or the indicators of future success in a SaaS business, because that's what I always wondered about. What does an acquirer think makes a business acquirable? Do you have a list of these? You probably have an internal playbook to go through, and obviously that's probably secret, but do you have something that you would give founders as kind of an indicator of what they should aspire to?

Tim Schumacher
Sure. Yeah, of course. At the end of the day, I think everybody looks for profitable growth at the end of the day. So are you able to acquire customers at a decent price? So kind of the CAC to LTV ratio, are those customers staying so churn, but also upsell downgrades developments?

Looking at the cohorts, looking at how happy our clients at the end of the day and then that all resulting in the overall MRR graph. So all of that is not rocket science, but I think we're all looking for making clients happy, providing some service which is valuable to some people. It doesn't have to be everyone. Usually, if you please everyone, you please nobody. But you need to have a defined target.

For example, git tower earlier. That's a very typical business we would look at. It's a super niche topic. It's a graphical interface for git, loved by a lot of developers, but it's also a very small group. It's also a small company, but it's a real love brand and that would be a typical one we'd look at, because it's people who are very sticky, they stay with the product sometimes for ten years.

It's also a small ticket. So the price of this product is like €69 or dollars a year. So people don't really worry about it's not a big price tag, and then they stay for a long time and also usually propagates virally into an organization. Once one developer is using it, the next one is using it. And so we look at a lot of those metrics, and at the end of the day, all those metrics will tell us, are people out there very happy users of this product?

And if there are, chances are that that is a good product. Of course, if we then later do a due diligence, we look at anything else, we look at how is the organization set up, the company properly documented, who we are employing, and freelancers and those sorts of things. Is legal stuff proper? Is there some marketing setup so tech tech, dd on quality of code documentation, we look at all of those things, but in the end, probably revenue and revenue oriented metrics give us the best idea of customer happiness. I love this perspective.

Arvid Kahl
Like, do people love it? Well, yeah, if they love it, it will show in the numbers. That's quite obvious. That makes perfect sense to me. It sounds like you're looking very much at niche products or niche business.

Would you ever go for a company that has higher aspirations, that doesn't want to be just, and I mean this in the best sense of the word, the git graphical client of choice. But like the client for all databases everywhere, for example, would you go for these bigger aspirational things or would you want to keep it in some kind of lane, some kind of niche? We have some businesses which have the potential. Now, the downside of businesses which play in a very broad field is that they also have a lot more competition. I'll give you a practical example.

Tim Schumacher
In our portfolio we have a CRM called Pipeline. Pipeline CRM. It's a great CRM, low price, especially for small and medium enterprises doing a great job. But the CRM market is huge. There are hundreds of CRMs competing.

It's a tough market and probably tougher than we expected. And so yes, the company can have bigger aspirations, but there is always a big difference between aspirations and reality, and that's harder to grasp at this view. We have some companies where from a nimble beginning, we still have the feeling they can become something bigger. Another example, an example for this would be scraperapi. Scraperapi.com dot.

We loved it because it's basically it providing scraping with an API. So it's basically, it's a developer approach to scraping, very similar to what striped it for payment. And the company was also quite small when we bought it. But we really like the super development developer focused approach. And there we have the feeling that can grow into something bigger because getting data, access to data and, yeah, packaging data in a way that people use it and the Internet is full of data, but it has to be delivered some form.

That's a broader mission and one where we can grow the company in two. But also the broader you get, the higher the competition. And we're not venture capital companies where we expect companies to be funded with tens or even hundreds of millions over the course of their lifetime to then become unicorns. No, we're actually, we're big. We are actually, we like the term bootstrapper mindset.

And a bootstrapper mindset is kind of profitable growth. You only invest what you make, but that of course also limits growth a little bit. But we feel it's just a very healthy DNA of every company. Yeah, that sounds like, yeah, instead of going for the unicorn kind of hockey stick exit and all the complexity that comes with that, you really just want sustainable, revenue focused growth. That sounds like a very approachable thing.

Arvid Kahl
I think this also attracts the right people, both in the sense of the businesses that you can get to acquire, because there's alignment there and I guess in the employees that you hire to work on these things. That's really cool. I would like to know your hiring strategy. Really, again, you don't have to disclose everything, but when we sold our business, not to you, unfortunately, almost we always sold to you. We were using a technology that most people in the company we sold to didn't understand.

We had elixir as our base framework. It wasn't PHP, it wasn't Ruby. That stuff that people would have known, it was something more niche. Would you acquire a company that has some kind of esoteric or obscure technology and then hire for that? Or would that be a deterrent for you?

Tim Schumacher
Well, it might be a little minus on our checklist, but we would still acquire the company if everything else is right. Because you don't always hire those people.

It's not a big problem. Sure, we love it if there's some standard stack. We also always have a best practice toolset, but that's more for the SAS tools we use. For example, I don't know. We would always use a snap for Ux research.

And so we have a stack of things which we always use for everything. But when it comes to the actual programming languages of the tool itself, we're pretty flexible and then we just hire the right people. That's cool. That is, I think a great opportunity for people who are kind of more in these esoteric fields as developers to get into a bigger portfolio of interesting things and to get the synergy effects between different tools, which is really good. Cool.

Arvid Kahl
And also it's I guess good news kind of for people who have chosen a weird stack to start with because you know, that's, that's the problem. If you that, and you mentioned this earlier, all your eggs are in this basket and you're not going to refactor all of your code base just to make it sellable, right? So you have to, well, the question maybe I should ask you, what do you do to make your business more sellable even, or maybe it has an esoteric situation, or maybe not, but what are the things that you expect in a business that comes to you or that you find that, depending what should they have? Ready to even continue the conversation? First of all, revenue growth is probably profitable.

Tim Schumacher
Revenue growth is the strongest proponent of all. Then you can look over a lot of other things. But sure, there are a lot of housekeeping things. You could sum them up under the term due diligence readiness. As a founder, you get a DD list, you find them on the web.

It's like what do acquirers look for? And then you go through the list and it starts with HR. I don't know, do the freelancers have IP assignments, do have people proper employment and freelancer contracts and sign non compete. So very, very basic stuff which you can just do a little housekeeping. And then it goes into tech.

Is like, are the licenses proper, properly used?

Is the code documented, is the code quality modern? All of that. And you can work on all of those things. And interestingly, all those things are stuff which you should do anyway on your path to growth because the larger you get, the more you will have to make sure that all of those things are happening anyway. Yeah, you have to keep your house in order to be able to eventually put a for sale sign in front of it.

Arvid Kahl
Nobody wants to buy derelict house. That makes perfect sense. And I think the important part is to start early. I've always been trying to tell people, keep your account separate from the start. Don't have your financials mired with your personal financials.

And your business, and don't log in with your personal email, those kind of things. You can start on day one effectively if you don't want to do it right. Okay, so let's talk about the process. So people do the due diligence with you. How long does it usually last?

Do you have with you guys in particular? How long do you usually take to look into somebody's stuff? Let me actually start a bit earlier, because it a lot depends on the time before. So we have founders that come to us basically ready with all the materials. Everything is done.

Tim Schumacher
They've made up their mind. They might even have a broker, for better or worse. And then that's where we start. Like, we have a founder call. We like the business.

We quickly lay an loi. That can be like two or three weeks, and then we go into Didi. And to answer the question, then that's probably four to six weeks, depending on the size of the business. From Loi to close, we're pretty fast. But the bigger question is the time before.

And I'd be also curious, kind of you're thinking there, when you made up your mind, do you want to sell? When do you want to sell to whom? What is the price? And that period can be years or at least months. And that's why I interrupted, is because it sometimes overlaps with the deep process.

We sometimes see founders who were even not ready in their state of mind when they come to us. Others are totally ready. But a lot is like, those processes overlap, and also those housekeeping things overlap. They don't have their house in order. We've had processes where this whole thing has taken almost a year.

Crazy case. And I think it was very healthy for the founder to get out and just, yeah. Also focus life and for other things, because it was a very painful process. Great company, painful process. But we have other cases where this process takes four weeks.

So it really depends a lot on founder readiness and on. Yeah. Already also is your household. Yeah. Okay.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I guess every business has its own story, right? Every founder has their own background, and then everything that comes of that also is unique. I get that. But four to six weeks, plus however many years the founder needs, that makes sense to me. Okay, that's pretty fast.

That sounds like a, you know exactly what you're looking for. I guess after 20 properties, you have it down, right? You have figured out what you need, and you also, you just want to keep going. And that's my next question here, really is, like, what happens after that? Like, how do you treat the businesses that you acquire, like what, what happens to, I guess, the founder's baby?

That's my own perspective, you know, as a founder, having soul, like, what happens to the thing that you give up? That's a great way to put it. That's how we see it's like, it's your baby. You've born it. Yeah.

Tim Schumacher
You've educated it and grown up, and now it's your parting ways. And so, first of all, I think our intention, and so far has also always worked. Our intention is always to keep your baby and to grow it further. So we keep the name, which to me also, as a founder, was always super emotional. For example, I'm still super glad that Cedar.com is still Cedar.com, which is a name I started the company almost 25 years ago.

But also the other things that the business isn't completely screwed up and that it's really kind of a more managed growth. So what we actually do is, during due diligence, we develop a plan together with the founder. This is where we want to take your business over the next three to five years. And sure, we can deviate from this business over time, but we want to have a general understanding. Every business is very different.

So we have some businesses where they have a too high cost structure and we preserve the company and everything, but we're like, hey, we have to streamline the company. A few people have to go, here's why we're adding some people in other fields, potentially. And we want the founders and the team to understand why we're doing those changes. And I can guarantee you, like in 100% of the case, the company was better off afterwards, because also you develop a certain blindness. As a founder of, you have your view, and it's great to have an outsider looking at any business.

The same for us. When we did a financing round, it was great to get challenged by outsiders who looked at your business for the first time. To develop that plan together on where we're taking this is the most important thing. There are other cases where the businesses are super bootstrapped. There's like, we've had businesses where it's just the founder and maybe one employee, and we're like, we have to get five people into this business as quickly as possible, because this business, the bus factor in this business is just incredibly high.

And that makes us nervous. And so there's the other way around. So sometimes we can even repurpose people from other businesses. But it's just, we want to have that hypothesis of where we want to take it? Or is it.

Is it product led growth marketing? Are those the levers, the pricing? Is it sales? Is it internationalization? Every business is different, but that's kind of what's fun for us, but also what makes us unique.

I think in a way that because we see so many businesses, we can usually pinpoint to what a business needs the next step of growth. And that can, together with the founder, execute. That's cool. That's awesome. First off, I love that you're working with the founder.

Arvid Kahl
Like, so many, you know, so many people who acquire, want the thing and then keep it for themselves. But like, you know, the founder is the source of wisdom for the business, right? Like, they know. They know things that they don't even know they know, right. This is the kind of tacit knowledge that they have.

They. They might just be able to make a choice that you don't understand why they made it, but it's the right one. So that is really cool. Do you usually keep the founders on? Is that, is that contingent on the exit?

Tim Schumacher
No, it's not contingent. So for us, it's important to do what is right for the founder, because we can't, like, we don't want to force anyone. There's. That's also part of that decision making process prior to a sale is for the founder, does he or she want to stay on board or leave? Or.

Sometimes there's one founder leaving, the other one staying. Sometimes they're, okay, I'm going to do this for another year, but not that. So we have all sorts of things. I think we can work with everything. Sure.

It has an impact on price. We've had cases where the founder is like, I burned out. Here are the keys. I'm out in four weeks. That doesn't really help the price.

We instant pair, but you can't do an earn out. And of course it's a different case. But then we've other cases where the founder is like, this is my plan. I'm going to execute that together with you. I'm going to put half of my, half of my proceeds from the sale into that earnout.

Well, that founder is really putting his money in his mouth is. And then of course, we're able to pay more. We can do everything and everything in between, and everything is fine. I think it's just important to be honest and be like, hey, what's my life goal? How does it fit into this?

And also, be frank, not every founder should stay. We have had cases where the founder was the real bottleneck, where other people took over and they were just a lot more organized. And the founders are great in this 0.1 or maybe zero to 0.5, but afterwards they were out in their comfort zone and we could bring other people in who could manage the business much better than the founder. Not every founder is a great leader in the long run, and every case is a bit different. Was there ever a situation where you went into Didi and you started talking to the founder and you noticed, oh, no, we could never do this.

Arvid Kahl
Like, we could not find the right people to do this, or they're doing it so weirdly that it wouldn't fit into our portfolio. Yeah, we have that, we have that. The cultural fit is important. So we have had deals where, like, after talking to the founders or even working with them for. For a little bit through the DD, were like, this isn't going to work.

Tim Schumacher
It's like they're just probably all good people, but they just don't fit into SAS group and how we view things. And it would be a constant battle. And then my strong opinion is you should rather abandon any acquisition if there is no cultural fit. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
Because it's also not fair to the founder. So you don't want to pressure them. No, no. Both sides aren't happy. I think that was one of the reasons why we were attracted to your business, even if the topic was a little bit odd.

Tim Schumacher
I think as people, you're great. There was an instant fit. That's true. On the cultural side, and I think very often that's more important than everything else, because you can pin the business and you can move things around as long as founders and investors see eye to eye. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
And talking about investors, that's one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, because over the last couple of weeks, we had on Twitter and me personally, several conversations around, like, early stage non venture, but still significant investment in bootstrap companies. Let's just say this, right? So I have a deal with the people at the comm company fund. So I'm now both, like, in the fund as a business, and I'm an investor in the, in the fund itself, which is kind of weird, but investing in myself, that's what they always say. Right?

So. But that is kind of. It's not VC money, it's not. It's not an investment that expects, like, the hyper growth kind of stuff. So that's my personal situation.

And I see a lot of founders out there looking for similar things, looking for some kind of angel funding, maybe or funding that is bootstrapper compatible. Two questions. First off, what do you think about this kind of stuff? And two, how does this affect if you were looking into acquiring a business that has potentially this kind of funding already? Because funding makes stuff harder, right?

Like bootstrapping is great, you know exactly what's in the bank account. But if there is some other party involved, like how do you think about this as a potential acquisition target? Yeah, no, I mean, it can make the exit process harder. We had cases where the founders were like, hey, yeah, they want to exit. There were maybe one or two other investors who wanted to exit, but there was one investor with enough shares who was able to block it and it didn't happen.

Tim Schumacher
So you have to align, you have to align the stakes much more, which is a different skill set. And so to your story, calm. For example, this type of angel like long term money, I love it. I love that model. It's great.

I think the market really needs that because there's a real void between what no money is angel money. But then also we see money on the other side because the VC state VC money, don't get me wrong, is very much needed. I mean, I. Oh, for sure. As one project, I run a VC myself, which is maybe a bit ironic, but it's in climate tech, which is my other passion.

And there we need huge amounts of money to decarbonize our economy. This is not software. A lot of those things are huge facilities. You need hundreds of millions. It's a very different field.

VC's are very much needed. We need even more money. In particular in Europe, us is, is, especially with the IRA under Biden, is a lot better off in this field. But we need a lot more money in this. You can't bootstrap your company.

It just doesn't work in SAS. It's a different thing. You can bootstrap a company. It's a very conscious choice. Also conscious choice.

What you are as a founder is like, what's your appetite for risk? For example, as a founder, what is your appetite for hypergrowth, for also dealing with VC's as stakeholders. And they're really, those vehicles like calm, they play a really important role and I think it's great. So also, to your question, if we look into a business and there's one of those knowledgeable investors in there, it would be positive for us because they also, they don't mind an exit. I think it's great.

It's more problematic if there are VC's in there where it's not aligned with the founders, and then it often creates a conflict. Sometimes the conflict is good because it gives them the motivation to then sell. But also we've seen that motivation to destroy companies, and at the end, nobody ended up getting any money. So classic prisoners dilemma. That is bad.

But calm would be a good example. And I think there should be more out there doing this type of financing. Yeah, I would wish for that too. There are a lot of founders out there who could use it. And if it is a green flag for you guys, then why would it not be a good idea to at least consider it?

Arvid Kahl
Right? That's always the thing with these kind of things. You never have to do it, but it's good to think about. Wow. Well, if this was not a glowing endorsement of bootstrapping, I don't know what that is.

Really, really cool. And I love this because you guys have bootstrapper mindset applied internally and you want to see it externally. I think you're very much in alignment with what I believe and with probably what every single listener and viewer of this show believes. Like that we can do it ourselves with a little help from our friends, but they are actually our friends. That's the idea.

It's a community driven effort. That's so cool, man. Where can people find out more about you personally and SAS group? Where can people pitch their businesses? That's kind of.

That's the question. For real? Yeah. So Sasktot group, first of all, my email also very simple. Tim at Sastar group, you can also ping me on LinkedIn also with that email.

Tim Schumacher
Those are basically the main menus. Used to be a bit more on X when it was still Twitter, but not much more. So LinkedIn or email is pretty much the best way to. Cool. I'll be putting that in the show notes.

Arvid Kahl
And yeah, isn't it sad? We used to chat on Twitter back in the day, and now we don't. People are leaving the ship. But hey, I'm still there. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me this conversation.

I think it was just a nice view from the other side. All of us founders, we always want to know what's going on. It's nice for you to share what a successful SaaS accumulator portfolio looks like and what you expect and what you want. Thank you so much for having me chat with me. Really, really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks, Ari. And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com. imagine this.

You're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder, right? Problem is, you're not growing for whatever reason. Maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or apply in lack of interest. You don't know.

You just feel stuck in your business, with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road. Six months down the road making all that money, you tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business.

That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who is facing this crossroads. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything.

So if you find yourself here already at this point, or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling a business on acquire.com because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already.

Just go check it out at try dot acquire.com arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It's always good to be in the know. Thank you for listening to the bootstrap founder today.

I really appreciate that you can find me on Twitter at avedkar a iv Eddie Kahl and you find my books and my Twitter course tattoo. If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It would be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder.

It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds and that's I think, where we all would like it to be. Just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening.

Have a wonderful day, and bye.

324: Tim Schumacher - The Bootstrapper's Mindset

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1: Introduction

2: Building for Scale

3: AI's Role in Business

4: Acquisitions and Exits

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