398: saas.group: Scaling Bootstrapped SaaS via Acquisitions - with Tim Schumacher

Primary Topic

This episode explores the strategies and approaches saas.group employs in scaling small and bootstrapped SaaS companies through acquisitions.

Episode Summary

In this insightful episode of the SaaS podcast, host Omer Khan sits down with Tim Schumacher, co-founder of saas.group, to discuss the intricacies of scaling bootstrapped SaaS companies via acquisitions. Schumacher shares his journey and the founding of saas.group, which specializes in acquiring small, independent SaaS businesses. With a portfolio of 18 companies generating over $60 million in annual revenue, saas.group offers a dual path for SaaS founders looking to either exit or accelerate their business growth by leveraging the group’s resources. The episode delves into the criteria for acquisition, the importance of a founder-friendly approach, and the balance between autonomy and support provided to acquired companies.

Main Takeaways

  1. Criteria for Acquisition: saas.group targets SaaS businesses with $1-10 million in ARR, focusing on profitable or potentially profitable ventures.
  2. Founder-Friendly Approaches: Emphasizes respectful and beneficial relationships with founders, whether they choose to stay post-acquisition or move on.
  3. Support for Acquired Companies: Provides centralized support in marketing, BI, and administration while maintaining the operational independence of the companies.
  4. Growth Through Acquisitions: Detailed insights into the acquisition process from initial contact to post-acquisition integration.
  5. Future of saas.group: Plans to continue growing through a mix of acquisitions and organic growth, aiming to make about seven to eight acquisitions per year.

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction and Background

Overview of saas.group's mission and Tim Schumacher’s background in the SaaS industry. Omer Khan: "Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast."

2: Acquisition Criteria and Process

Discusses what saas.group looks for in a SaaS business and how the acquisition process unfolds. Tim Schumacher: "We like to acquire businesses between one and ten million in ARR."

3: Supporting Acquired Companies

Explains the balance of autonomy and support saas.group provides to ensure the growth of its portfolio companies. Tim Schumacher: "We trust founders, we trust the teams."

4: The Future of saas.group

Tim shares the strategic growth plans for saas.group and the expected trajectory in the coming years. Tim Schumacher: "We're trying to grow about two-thirds by acquisitions and one-third organically."

Actionable Advice

  1. Build a strong, independent team to make your SaaS business more attractive for acquisitions.
  2. Ensure all legal and financial documentation is thorough and accessible to streamline the acquisition process.
  3. Focus on sustainable growth and customer satisfaction to build a sellable SaaS business.
  4. Consider the cultural fit and operational autonomy when looking for potential acquirers.
  5. Engage in continuous learning and improvement to adapt to changes in the SaaS landscape.

About This Episode

Tim Schumacher is the co-founder of saas.group, a company that acquires and operates a portfolio of small and independent SaaS businesses.

People

Tim Schumacher, Omer Khan

Companies

saas.group

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Tim Schumacher

Content Warnings:

None

Transcript

Omar Khan
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I talked to Tim Schumacher, the co founder of SaaS Group, a company that acquires and operates a portfolio of small and independent SaaS businesses for Bootstrap, SaaS founders who have built a solid product and customer base selling to an acquirer like SAS Group provides two attractive paths forward. Founders who are ready for their next adventure can take a well deserved exit, while those who want to stay on and want to keep growing their business can tap into SAS groups resources and expertise to accelerate their growth. With a current portfolio of 18 SaaS companies generating over 60 million in annual recurring revenue, Tim has a wealth of experience and insights to share.

In this episode, you'll learn what key attributes Tim looks for in potential SaaS acquisition targets, including size, business model, customer base and team how SaaS Group's acquisition process works from initial contact and valuation to due diligence and deal structuring. While why SaaS Group prioritizes a founder friendly approach and what that means to Tim and his team, we talk about how SaaS Group provides centralized support and resources to help companies in their portfolio to grow and succeed while still preserving their autonomy, and how you can build an attractive SaaS acquisition target and navigate the mental and emotional challenges of selling your business. Whether you're considering selling your SaaS business or are simply curious about how a portfolio of SaaS companies like SaaS Group operates, this interview with Tim will give you an inside look at the world of small SaaS acquisitions, so I hope you enjoy it. Is your team struggling with spreadsheets that can't keep up with your workflows? It's time to switch to jotform tables.

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Subscribe to the SaaS Club newsletter Today and get the support you need to keep moving forward on your SaaS journey. Tim, welcome to the show. Hello. So, tell us about SaaS group. What does the business do?

Who's it for? What's the main problem that you're helping to solve? So SaaS group buys and operates lots of small and innovative independent SaaS products. So we're essentially like a holding company for SaaS products. We offer founders an exit they deserve, give them financial freedom for their next adventures, and at the same time try to keep their companies in the bootstrapper mindset, which made them strong in the first place.

Tim Schumacher
So today we operate 18 SaaS companies in various different segments, online marketing, productivity and developer tools. Great. Can you give us a sense of the size of the business? Where are you in terms of revenue? So we're at about 60 million annual recurring revenue.

We've been growing about 100% from 22 to 23 and also trying to forecast strong growth for this year. A lot of the growth is through acquisitions, but we're still growing the business organically and we're 300 employees in 33 countries. Great. So you're a global business. You yourself are based in Germany.

Omar Khan
The companies in your portfolio, are they from, are they mostly european? US based? A mixture of everything. They're a mix of everything. We've got a lot of businesses in the US and Canada.

Tim Schumacher
We've got a few in Europe, Germany, Finland, Austria, the UK. We've bought things everywhere. For us, it's more important that we're comfortable with the products and where they sell to than we're actually the entrepreneur sits. We've looked at great businesses in locations all over the world, but it's more important what they do and whom they sell to. So the business was founded in 2018.

Omar Khan
But I think your story starts well. The relevant part of your story here, I think, starts when you founded a business called Cedaw, which I think most people will have heard of. Can you tell us about that from the point of you founding that company to your journey in terms of getting to the point where you decided that SaaS Group was really the business that you were going to focus on? Yeah. So I've been an entrepreneur all my life.

Tim Schumacher
I started coding as a teenager, then coded websites and games, sold them to others, financed my studies that way, and after graduation, then started Seto.com. and interestingly enough, a lot of entrepreneurs have bought a domain from Seto at some point. It's the world's largest domain marketplace. And, of course, buying domains, but also projects has always been kind of my DNA. I ran Cedaw for ten years, IPO ed the german stock market, and then at some point left the company, sold my remaining shares, and became an angel investor, and also started a few other companies.

For example, one of the companies I used to run is the company behind Adblock and Adblock plus the big adblocking companies. And that was one of my aha moments, because Adblock was not a product I developed, but it was a hobby project of a developer, and I scaled it to also now a couple hundred people. It's run by external management now, but I kind of realized that I was much better at scaling things than building something new. And I've got a ton of respect. For people who, like, can figure out.

Something from nothing, really. The zero to one phase, building out an mvp, starting for the first, kind of get the first customers, but then very often they struggle at a point when I'm like, okay, this seems to. Be my sweet spot. And then after I left Zido, I was approached by really talented founders who were really kind of the opposite of me. And they were builders, like early builders, and really, they didn't enjoy operating bigger ventures.

And so I was like, wait a minute, that's actually something I could do. And I just started buying a few projects, SaaS projects, and one thing kind of came to the next one, and. I.

Improved them, installed basic operating structures into them. And it wasn't rocket science, but it was just kind of one thing after the other. And, yeah, now we've got 18 projects and a decent sized business, but it was kind of a step by step thing. Okay, great. So in this interview, what we're going to do is deep dive into SaaS group.

Omar Khan
We're going to talk about what's the criteria that you use to acquire companies? What's your acquisition strategy and process look like. I know on your website you talk a lot about a founder friendly approach, so I want to dig into that. And we have a lot of founders listening to this who will be interested in what that means. And I want to talk about the future plans that you have, what companies you plan to acquire, and just generally your insights on how you see the market and industry trends around m and a in the SaaS space.

My hope is by the end of this interview, we're going to get to a point where founders who are listening to this are going to have a clearer idea of, number one, whether selling to SaaS Group or a similar type of organization makes sense for them, and secondly, how to make sure that their SaaS company can stand out as an attractive acquisition target. I think with that set as the goal for what we were trying to achieve, let's dive into just generally, what's your criteria when you are looking for potential acquisition targets for SaaS Group? First of all, we look at the size of the business. We like to acquire businesses between one and 10 million in ARR. We obviously like to have growing businesses.

C
We also like profitable businesses. Sometimes we've done turnaround businesses where there have been VC's, for example, who've kind of abandoned the company, or founders who just couldn't get the company profitable. But in the majority, we've been focusing on already profitable companies with a very healthy bootstrapper mindset. Then topic wise, we're looking at general topics. So we're not going into super niche vertical businesses, which we don't understand, but we try to go into general productivity tools, developer tools, online marketing tools, those sorts of things.

And yeah, then customer base should be in the US or North America and western Europe. That tends to be the market we understand best. But the location and the origin of the business can literally be anywhere in the world. And those are pretty much the main criteria. I mean, then we drill down into lots and lots of criteria.

We obviously do authority and everything, but kind of that sums up the main things. Okay, so a business between you said one and 10 million in ARR, and obviously the other signs just in terms of making sure that it's a healthy business, it's a growing business, or at least has the potential to grow with the right kind of focus and investment. I know there's from looking at your website, there was a bunch of information about the importance of cultural fit and values. That's not necessarily something we hear a lot about when we're talking about acquisitions. Can you just tell us about that?

Yeah.

At the end of the day, we're acquiring people more than anything else, a team, sometimes including the founder. By the way, we're pretty agnostic whether the founder stays on board. We've had cases where the founder is like, hey, I'm burned out. Here are the keys. I'm going to be out in four weeks.

And we have cases where the founder is still with us after two, three years. And both are great cases. Obviously, the latter is better. We love to work with founders, but at the same time, we totally understand if people just don't want to do it anymore. It kind of has an influence on price, but it goes either ways, regardless of the founder.

Founders build a culture and we will, and we want to work with the people there and we just want to have people who fit, who are autonomous, independent. We're a remote company and so people should work autonomously and independent who are, who have a can do attitude. Also a bit of a humble attitude of, yeah, just good people to work with. And so that we think that actually we can work with them many years to come. And of course, some cultures change a little bit after the acquisition, but overall it's really important that it fits to our culture because otherwise there's kind of a conflict in the making.

Omar Khan
And does the business have to be bootstrapped to be a potential acquisition for you? No. We really have a knack for bootstrap. Founders think that those businesses are usually super healthy. They're very lean and we prefer them.

C
But we've had quite a few cases, especially in the last two years, when some, some companies got a lot of VC funding. At some point, the VC's are like, this is not going to be a unicorn. We're going to sell it on a dime on the dollar. Or also we've had two cases which were in insolvency, in bankruptcy and, and we took them out of bankruptcy and got them nice and profitable again. And they're running really well now and tucking along.

Omar Khan
How do you find these companies? Is it mostly inbound or are you going out there and sort of searching for them? It's more and more inbound. In the beginning was only outbound because nobody knew us. I've written tons of emails myself, hundreds if not thousands of emails.

C
Now we're doing a lot of outreach. Like, for example, we have a SaaS podcast ourselves, SaaS unbound by my colleague Ana. We also, yeah, we do a ton of social media. My colleague Dirk, Dirk Salmer, he's doing like just a lot on SaaS metrics and stuff and has tens of thousands of followers on that. So we've got a decent sized origination team now and also a lot of founders recommend us.

It's a lot of word in mouth because doing an acquisition right and in a founder friendly way is something we really try hard. It mostly works. It doesn't always work. It's hard to acquire companies, but those things go around and founders recommend us and so we're getting more and more inbound. I also want to talk about what type of, what support do you provide these companies once you've acquired them?

Omar Khan
Because from what I understand, you still give them a lot of autonomy to continue running as a standalone business. As you mentioned earlier, the founder may decide to stay on or they may leave. And you've obviously got this expertise, you know, which is getting better at taking these businesses and helping them to scale. So along with that autonomy, what type of support are you providing those businesses to help them succeed? Yeah, that's a great question.

C
And exactly that balance between autonomy on the one side and support on the other side is something which we really try to perfect over the years. So, yeah, first of all, I think the default mode is autonomy. We trust founders, we trust the teams. We also want to keep those companies independently. We don't change the name, we don't destroy their culture.

We want to build a community of lots of independent SaaS companies because we really also believe that that small is beautiful. But at the same time, we also see that every founder has a strength in something and with every strength there is a weakness. So, for example, we have a lot of founders who are really strong in product and technology. They've built beautiful products, but we've come across sites which have a beautiful product. But like on the website, it's almost impossible to find any documentation, find a sign up button.

So they're very simple things. We sometimes improve, just make the website proper and then start do some marketing. And those there, we've really kind of, we've pretty perfect processes for marketing, for bi, for onboarding, for lots of different topic, and then also all the things which really nobody loves to do, finance, HR, administration, those sorts of things, those we usually just do centrally by default and nobody minds. And also this way we can really use that as a value add. So there are a couple processes which really centrally run all the time, but the majority is autonomy by default.

And then the founders or the leaders of the brand, they pick the services we offer, almost like in a restaurant menu. They're like, okay, I want a pay per click specialist to make my Google campaign super efficient, and I want to have a bi specialist to really do all those dashboards, super pretty and so on. And then some other things they just do in house. Got it. Great.

Omar Khan
So it's kind of like they're a standalone autonomous business, but at the same time, they're part of a larger company and able to leverage the in house expertise or that kind of infrastructure that you've built to kind of just basically be even more efficient, I guess, with the way they grow their business. So let's talk about the acquisition process. So you said these days, most of these leads you're getting are inbound. What happens? What are the main steps involved in doing an acquisition?

C
Yeah, so the first step is the founder deciding that he or she wants to get acquired. And as, as simple as that sounds, that step can take years. And also, sometimes we approach a founder is like, hey, you know, have you ever thought of selling your company and could we be the right ones? And then that thinking process starts and it might not be the right time, and it can take years until the founder is ready. And in other cases, for example, we're approached, the founder is like, hey, I've made up my mind.

I want to sell either directly or I've even hired a broker. And then it's kind of, that's when the process starts. But it really, there is this big part before, before someone needs to make up the mind if it's the right strategy. And I think we'll touch upon that later. When is an acquisition, right.

Like an acquisition, of course, or selling a company is a huge, is a huge step. It's equally big as sell as starting a company. And when, like, the question on when, when someone really wants to sell the company is magnifold. Is there multiple reasons and everything, but kind of thinking is okay. The real process starts when the founder made up the mind and then it's really okay.

It first starts with a very basic overview of the company. Like the first call, we exchange some ideas, see what we always want to know, why the founder wants to sell. And obviously we want to have some basic information about the business. And then we usually can make up our mind within one or 2 hours, one or two hour call. Whether this is a business that fits for us or not, if it doesn't fit, we'd be like, hey, this is not for us.

We might point the founder to a few different directions, but generally that's where the conversation ends for us. But if we then take it further, of course we learn more about the company. There are multiple calls with different people. We're looking at some data, and then kind of the first big inflection point is when we give an indication of what we're willing to pay. So that's called an indicative offer.

And at some point then usually a week or two later, this leads into a letter of intent. So a non binding term sheet. And there are different ways on how people view those term sheets. There's some acquirers who basically, I'm just going to put down a term sheet and then I'm going to start my DD. For us, a term sheet is a bit like a handshake agreement.

It's like if I don't find any real problems in your company, so literally like dead bodies in your basement, then we got to move ahead. Term sheet is really is quite a big step for us. And then after term sheet, and now from kind of the first contact to the term sheet, we're now maybe four weeks or something. We are pretty fast, but it still takes a little bit of time. We're then in the DD phase, and DD stands for due diligence.

We look at everything, we look at the technology, we look at the people, we look at some financial and legal stuff, and we continue to interact with the founder quite a bit. And in the meantime, we're drafting a contract, probably another four weeks, sometimes six weeks, and that's when we then close the deal. So the whole process, from kind of initial contact to closing, is usually around three months, but it can be shorter. We've done things in six weeks, but it can also drag on for months if they're stumbling blocks. Got it.

Omar Khan
Okay. And I think it can be a very difficult time for founders not knowing whether this thing is going to happen or not. I think it's. I'm curious whether the way that you approach the term sheets helps reassure people a little bit as opposed to kind of doing it the other way around in terms of, well, let's go through this first, and then we'll decide if we're going to go through this or not. You're kind of doing it a little bit differently.

C
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We try to be very open and transparent with everything and why we're doing things. And also, we're not like, we're not finance people. We obviously have financial professionals on the team, but we're all operators, and I think that's we approach things a bit differently.

Also, we're trying to work as little as possible with lawyers. Sure, they're important at some point along the route, but a lot of things are just kind of like two human beings who want to continue to work with each other doing certain things. And you just. Yeah, you don't need a lot of legal complexity when selling a small SaaS business. So we want to keep things simple and personal.

And really, that's, that's what we mean by founder friendly. And then how do you think about valuation and the way you structure deals? Is there a ballpark multiple that typically plays out with the types of companies that you're acquiring? Yeah, well, that's always kind of one of the first questions. It's also one of the hardest because it can be like we've paid multiples of zero point something for an acquisition on ARR, and we've all the way up to ten x on ARR majority kind of in the two to three times ARR region for small SaaS businesses.

But it depends on a lot of factors, profitability, growth, status of the business, and then also on the structure. So really, kind of price and structure are really, they kind of go hand in hand, because if the founder, the main lever in designing a structure is the earn out. And so basically, if founder says, I am going to be willing to stay on board for two or three years, I believe in my plans, I'm going to bring this business together with you to the next level, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is, then we can pay much higher prices than the founders. Okay, give me cash and I'm going to be out in four weeks. And we're basically on our own to figure everything out.

And so it's a huge range. And of course, sometimes founders read about multiples somewhere in the press or even compare with public multiples, and then it becomes kind of difficult to realign this. But it's a conversation like everything else. And sometimes also people need to shop around and then see that actually our valuation is good. It's a long process, and it's also new for most founders.

I mean, we do this all the time, but for most founders, it's the first time they're doing this. They sometimes have an advisor, but even that, it's still themselves doing it for the first time. So talking about founders and going through it for the first time, looking on your website, you talk about a founder friendly approach so I think you've kind of touched on what some of that means, but just tell me how you think about that. What does that mean to you and why is that important? Yeah, so we believe a founder friendly approach is important because at the end of the day, price isn't everything.

Yes, sure. If someone offers a crazy price, then most founders are willing to sell to anybody. But for one thing, you want to usually continue to build your business for a little while at least. You also want your people, the employees you hired, to be with someone who treats them well and also to understand what they're doing. There are a lot of financial acquirers in the market who really, they've got some people who can just do financial modeling, but at the end of the day, they've never run a business.

We've run a lot of businesses. We've scaled businesses to hundreds of people and done this multiple times. And so I think a lot of people can really see the value is that we essentially take their baby, and, like, if you start a company, this is like your baby. So we're going to take their baby and take it to the next level. And they see that we've done it a few times.

We've also failed. I mean, it doesn't work all the time. We've had a few businesses where it didn't work, but in the overwhelming majority, it worked. And people can see that. And then they relate to that, because most people are operators and founders.

And also the bootstrapper mindset, we're not this type of people who are like, hey, we're going to build a unicorn out of that and do some crazy stuff. But we actually just continue this very sustainable bootstrapper mindset, which made a lot of companies strong in the first place. And I think that resonates with people. People. So you talked about there are some founders who will be like, okay, I just want to sell the company, and I'm out of here, and other founders who decide to stay on and continue the journey with your help and support.

Omar Khan
What are some of the common challenges that you've seen maybe founders have during this transition, and how do you help them through that? Yeah, it's a tough decision for founders. A lot of founders have built this business for ten years, and that's their life. Also, they have all their eggs in one basket. Like 90% of their net worth or sometimes 99% of their net worth is this one company.

C
So, of course, especially during the transaction process, they're very afraid of screwing this up. They're afraid that something goes wrong, and rightly so, because it's their main net worth. It can relax quite a bit once the transaction is over. And that, for example, can go both ways. We've seen people who relax a little too much, and then sometimes it's better if someone who is new and hungry takes over.

But we've also seen a lot of founders who are then willing to make a little bit bolder bets because they've secured a few million behind the firewall. And they're like, okay, I actually can now grow this, and I can be more relaxed because it's not their main, their main net worth anymore. And that actually injects a lot of creativity and positive risk taking. And some of them have a lot of fun, also in different roles. So sometimes we take the administrative side away.

Some founders actually love to stay in their company. They just don't want to deal with managing people with salary reviews, with financial stuff. They just want to build their products and we can actually free them from a lot of the administrative side. And that, of course, is something a lot of people appreciate, especially some of those early builders. So you have 18 companies in your portfolio today.

Omar Khan
What are your plans for the next year? Like, how many acquisitions are you hoping to do? Where are you planning to take the business? Yes, so we're trying to grow the business by currently about seven or eight acquisitions every year, but also growing this number every year. So we're trying to grow about two thirds by acquisitions and one third organically.

C
That means our level of about 50 million last year means we need to acquire. Yeah, if we want to double the business, we need to acquire about 30 million of ar. And that's no small feat. That's a couple of companies. And then I think we just want to grow this business.

The great thing is that it's quite a scalable thing because we've got processes and we've got those central teams, and the actual business is still run very independently. And people like this, they run it like their own startup. And I've talked a lot about the founders and them continuing, but also we've got a lot of great people who would not become founders in the first place. Sometimes people just also have financial constraints. They need a certain amount of salary, and then running one of our brands actually gives them both.

They give them the financial freedom with a normal salary, but kind of the autonomy almost of a founder. And they're doing a great job because it's actually, yeah, it's a very interesting thing to run. And maybe at some point they go out and do their own stuff or they continue to run bigger and bigger companies within SAS group. But it's overall just, it's much more interesting for a lot of people than just being some little piece in a large corporate. Do you have any advice for early stage founders who are looking to build a sellable business?

Omar Khan
Maybe they are already a seven figure ARR business. Maybe they feel they're close to that. What advice would you offer them if they're thinking about potentially selling the business? Yeah, great question. So first of all, I think they should continue to build a good business because the most important thing is just a good business.

C
Healthy growth, making your customers happy at the end of the day. But then of course, there are a few specific things which you can do to increase your chances, your sellability of a business. A few things is just kind of keeping your house in order, making sure numbers are there, you've got proper tax advisors, everything is sorted. So basically taking a data room and you can just Google data room and get a list of things, what a potential acquirer would ask, and you basically should ask yourself, do I have that information ready? And that gives you a good idea where you might have holes.

You could start working on them. Actually, it's not for the acquirer, it's actually just for making your business better. It's things like employee contracts. That's simple. But for example, IP assignments, just to name one simple thing we see all the time, is like a lot of people have freelancers and that's great.

But sometimes just there's IP isn't properly assigned, that what the freelancers do is owned by the company. And so it's just sometimes just few pieces of paper. And so there are little things like that which can just improve the sellability of the business. And maybe one last thing it's trying to make yourself redundant as a founder is if you have that one person who could technically become your successor and you really groom that person, then you're already going a big step towards making the business more independent from yourself as a person. Because a tough thing is if we see a business and we're basically like, okay, this business is like 100% dependent on that founder.

And if the founder goes away, we have a real problem. That is a challenging thing in a business. So it's much better if there's a group of people, or at least one person, who in addition to the founder, can really understand everything and could run the job. Before we sort of wrap up, is there anything else that you think that we haven't covered that you feel like we should share with the audience before we wrap up. Yeah, maybe.

In terms of acquisitions, I think the biggest questions founders should ask themselves is kind of the why. Why do I want to sell? Is it the right thing to do right now? Should I wait a little bit and kind of really dig into kind of the inner motivation? Is it to get some money behind the firewall?

Is it. Sometimes it's very understandable things. Hey, I need some money to, for example, get a house for my family. But in other cases, really, also, especially if there are two or three founders, really discussing among the founders is like, who wants to sell? Who doesn't want to sell?

Because also that can differ from one to the other one. And it doesn't need to be the right thing for one founder, which is good for the other one, and just really be open and transparent and think about the why before you kind of go into the details. That would probably be my biggest advice. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

Omar Khan
And as you said, it's, from your experience with many founders, it's a question that could take a long time to answer and feel confident about that you made the right decision, and that's okay. It's not an easy decision. It's like starting a company and leaving your job, for example. That's also not a decision you take lightly. So I think, take your time.

All right, let's wrap up. We're going to get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quickfire questions for you. So, you ready? Yep.

What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received? Don't listen to business advice. Actually, it's one of my, one of what my professor always said in first year university. They kind of said if the consultants and bankers who give you all that advice knew what they're doing, they wouldn't be sitting there. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

C
I would recommend the Ministry of the future. It's a novel. It's kind of a mix of a novel and a fact based book. And it's about climate change. This is kind of my other passion project outside of SAS.

The SaaS world is climate technology. So all the tech software, but also non software things that can help us get away our addiction from fossil fuels and protect the climate. And that's a great book because it's also, it's a science fiction book and it's just a lot of, it's fun to read. Also scary to read. Very well written and also very educative.

Ministry of the Future. Highly recommended. Great. And that other business you referred to, that's world Fund. That's World Fund.

It's a climate fund. Great. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? Stamina. Just continuing.

And yeah, being there. And that's already 50% of things. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? It's using Gmail signatures as a hack for email templates. I get a lot of emails with all sorts of things.

For example, like, hey, I want to sell my SaaS company. And then I just have a few templates for that and I just put them as signatures into Gmail. I know there are also a lot of other better tools, but that's always the simplest thing and it basically just takes me one click to answer. It improves my email messaging time by like 50% or something. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

So I hope someone takes this idea because I don't have time for it, but I'm looking for someone for a true kind of 50 50 or one third, one third, one third office sharing. And I don't mean wework or any of that because I've never liked wework, but what I like is I like, and most companies like having their own office, but they don't use it all the time. And if they would have just kind of. They would be trusted partners to share it with. You still have your own office, but there's one group which comes Monday, Tuesday, the other one, Wednesday, Thursday and so on.

I think that would be great. Yeah. Yeah. It's happening more and more these days. Right.

Omar Khan
With businesses going hybrid that it's like, I don't know the logistics of many of those, but yeah, it does seem like there's a lot of excess capacity there that hasn't been tapped into. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know? Yeah, one fun fact, the first company I founded, so ceta.com holds an official Guinness World Record. A Guinness World Record for what? For selling the most expensive domain name ever.

C
And it was sex.com dot. Wow. How much did that sell for? I think it was like 50 million or something. I don't even remember.

I hope we still hold the. I mean, that was like ten years ago. I hope not. Someone surpassed them, but I think it's still in the Guinness World Record. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Yeah, I touched upon it in the book question. It's climate action. So it's including my climate tech vc. And I think software is great. That's kind of what I do well and what I know, but I think in terms of what we need to solve as humanity, I think software, we're on a pretty good path to solve it, to digitalize the world, but we need to solve this decarbonization and getting away from fossil fuels and a lot of few other things.

And that I think is something I also want to contribute to. And also I think by the way, SaaS companies can do that by getting the right servers, screen servers, screen power, becoming efficient, not flying too much, those sort of things. But yeah, overall I think that's probably my biggest passion outside of software. So if you want to check out SAs group, they can go to SAs group. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Email is timasasgroup very simple or also LinkedIn, of course. Just connect me also using the Tim at SaaS group email when you connect via LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining me and educating us on your business. And hopefully, whether founders choose to someday come and get acquired by SAS Group or go another route, hopefully I hope we've done enough to educate them a bit more and be able to move forward a bit with a bit more confidence.

Omar Khan
So thank you for doing that. I appreciate your time. Thank you very much for having me on the show. My pleasure. Cheers.

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