Thread by @jakobgreenfeld

You've probably already heard that I sold Product Explorer to @agazdecki

Here's the backstory and why I decided to sell 👇

This was the announcement tweet in case you missed it.

https://twitter.com/agazdecki/status/1363557541704126464

Andrew first reached out to me just a few days after the launch and made an acquisition offer.

We had a great Zoom call but ultimately I declined because I first wanted to figure out what exactly I had there in my hands.

https://twitter.com/jakobgreenfeld/status/1326918142573076484

In the months afterward, I gathered quite a bit of data and feedback from users of Product Explorer.

I also worked on a few similar projects like Gum Spy and Newsletter Spy.

This helped me understand a bit better what the corresponding idea maze looks like.

One of my biggest learnings is that projects like mine generally struggle with churn.

The data is valuable to people but for most there's not a good enough reason to stay subscribed. Getting access to one month's data set is sufficient for many use cases.

As an experiment, I launched Newsletter Spy with a subscription and one-time payment plan at the same price.

If you subscribed and cancelled right away you'd still get one update of the dataset.

Nevertheless, 95% of the customers preferred the one-time payment.

I'm of course extremely happy that my first paid products generated some income.

But I also felt as if I was hitting some invisible asymptotes.

My products were featured in some of the biggest newsletters in our little corner of the internet (Trends.co, Trends.vc, For the Interested, Every.to, ...).

While this always led to a nice revenue bump, my MRR roughly stayed the same.

It's no secret that it's hard to build a sustainable business with one-off products.

So I started wondering what I need to change to level up from making some nice cash here and there to building a business that generates significant recurring revenue.

I still haven't found the answer but I have a few ideas that I want to experiment with.

After I tagged him in a tweet Andrew reached out again and asked if I'd changed my mind.

I wasn't entirely sure but suggested that we schedule a Zoom call.

During the call Andrew explained that his plan would be to use Product Explorer as a lead gen for microacquire.com

Given everything I learned in the past few months I think this makes perfect sense for a project like this.

My only concern was that there might be "non-compete" issues since I want to continue launching products in the same idea maze.

But Andrew quickly assured me that there won't be any problems.

"Maybe I'll then simply buy your next project as well."

What also really helped was that I trust Andrew 100%.

Beginners like me can easily be scammed in the acquisition game, so doing my first deal with someone I trust instead of a stranger was ideal.

Another important factor was that learning as much as possible is currently my main priority.

And this was definitely a great opportunity to learn a lot about things I know nothing about.

In this thread I focused on the "Why" behind the acquisition.

I'll write another one to talk a bit more about the "How" since there are quite a few cool things I learned.

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