Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition

For those of you who don’t know me, hey — I’m DJ, a Big Tech software engineer with a graveyard of failed side projects in my wake: a podcast platform using Bitcoin micropayments, a blog monetization tool, a scheduling automation bot for immigrants, and many more I’d be glad to talk about over a drink (though I might need a couple beers before I really want to talk about some). It’s a common story: some launched with users but no revenue, others found revenue but in tiny markets, and a few never made it past development.

Possibly the worst part of these projects was the slow feedback loop. I was learning, but when each project took months (or even a year) to develop, the process felt extremely inefficient. How many times was I going to have to learn that you have to make something that people want (to pay for)? So I decided to skip a step: from failed wantrepreneur with nothing to show for it to small-scale entrepreneur with an active business with which to learn, experiment, and — hopefully — grow. I was inspired by micro-PE firms like XO Capital who seemed to be printing money with their portfolio of small SaaS acquisitions, and I hoped I could do something similar while accelerating my entrepreneurial learning process.

A few months after starting my acquisition search, I found BaseQL, a small SaaS which transforms Airtable into a powerful backend by providing a GraphQL API, helping developers and agencies build custom applications faster without managing complex database code (nine months in and I’m still working on the pitch). I was instantly drawn to it as a profitable, self-sustaining step-1 business with a passionate and technical customer base, and the latter I viewed as important for a technical founder like myself to more easily understand user needs.

The prior owner (Ben) is quite technical and had built a stable product with happy customers — in fact, one customer told me during diligence that it’s “one of the best pieces of software they’ve used”. However, since he hadn't focused much on marketing or growth, I viewed it as the perfect opportunity to take something people already wanted and try to grow it — hopefully learning valuable lessons about marketing, growth, and entrepreneurship in general. After a long nights-and-weekends diligence process, we completed the acquisition in late April 2024, and it’s been a rocket ship ever since! It turns out I had untapped marketing genius, and I’m considering taking BaseQL public in 2025. Who knew?

The Reality Check

Hopefully the sarcasm was evident wherever you are. I’m not sure what I expected, but here’s the truth (the good and the bad): things have been pretty steady over the ~9 months I’ve owned BaseQL. I haven’t made any huge mistakes (knock on wood), MRR has increased ~25%, and the business requires very little time to maintain — it already had a very low support load, and by now I’ve automated most of the remaining manual processes. I spent 280 hours (!) last year on the business (115 pre-acquisition, 165 post), making my hourly rate embarrassingly low. The other parts of my life haven’t suffered that much. I’m still progressing in my day job and Spanish learning, my relationship is great, and my health / fitness only degraded slightly.

So what have I been doing with my time, if not doubling the profit in the first year and becoming rich and ripped? Well, we closed the deal in April, after which I did some basic onboarding chores: make sure I can run everything locally, make small updates to each component (e.g., changing the copyright year and fixing typos), rotating secrets, etc. We had one small transfer-related outage where my notification came as a slack ping from Ben (who was notified by a customer), after which I hastily implemented automated uptime monitoring to ensure I’d be the first to know if BaseQL went down. Since then I’m happy to say BaseQL’s API has had great (near 100%) uptime, the only instability coming from Airtable itself (which, granted, has good uptime — just not as good as BaseQL’s).

In May I didn’t work much due to some travel I had already planned before the acquisition, as well as some sickness I hadn’t planned but blame on surfing a river wave in Munich (worth it). On one hand this was great initial validation of the low ongoing maintenance load, but it was also a minor repudiation of the great indie hacker digital nomad dream — at least in the jump-from-city-to-city sense. Mortal man can only be so productive on trains with spotty internet and in hotels when there’s tapas to be had outside.

From June through August I really dove in, with a focus on increasing my visibility of the business — e.g., tracking conversion metrics and churn reasons and setting up keyword alerting — as well as getting the house in order (fixing bugs, automating manual processes, enhancing database backups, implementing welcome emails, etc.). I had a lull in hours in September as I felt stuck and realized these development efforts were not going to lead to growth (ironically, (spoiler) since my marketing efforts haven’t shown much success, perhaps some of these development efforts did contribute to the modest growth I’ve seen). Taking a vacation day for strategizing got me out of that hole, and I convinced myself to shift my focus to marketing.

Marketing Woes

Where does one turn when venturing into the unknown, headed towards disaster or glory, if not religion? For someone like me, a technical guy with no experience in marketing, that religion is Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. The gospel of Traction is so tantalizing that it inspired in me a blind faith that I, too, could reach the promised land of discovering my “bullseye” growth channel, if only I followed its commandments. So from my ivory tower I dutifully brainstormed ideas to cheaply test each of the 19 sacred growth channels. After which I, a mere novice monk, chose a handful of channels on which to focus my mortal energy.

After a few months of piety, the Traction gods have spoken, and they seem a bit angry based on the results:

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): I liked SEM because it gave me a constant stream of traffic / signups, but so far that traffic has been quite low-quality, with only 10% of signups even connecting a base (the metric I use for initial “activation”). Even after adding activation nudges and surveys to my onboarding email campaign, this channel resulted in ~500 signups and zero new paid users, leading me to conclude that I’m reaching the wrong audience through these ads.
• Search Engine Optimization: I wrote three articles targeted at technical Airtable users, ultimately generating… a single signup (but hey, they activated too!). This made those three articles I spent hours writing roughly equivalent to a whopping $5 of ad spend. I know SEO is a long game, but I think I might die of boredom before generating 100 signups this way. I also found it hard to pick keywords to target, as my bottom-of-funnel keywords are often too niche to even register on SEO tools, and top-of-funnel keywords often seemed too broad and competed with Airtable itself.
• Community Building: I tried responding to technical questions on the Airtable forum and Reddit. This channel had low overall traffic and felt like an uphill battle as I was competing with full-time Airtable consultants. However, it ended up having reasonable signup and activation rates, and it’s the only channel which feels like it could possibly move the needle when compared to organic traffic. This channel has an additional benefit, which is that I’m continuing to get traffic from my posts months later — a phenomenon I so far attribute to the communities’ high search rankings.
• Engineering as Marketing: I scraped the Airtable community forums to find highly-liked issues and ideas faced by technical users, and brainstormed free tools I could create to solve those issues. As an engineer, I of course like the idea of Eng as Marketing, but I’m having second thoughts about the first tool I came up with, which would require ongoing support and uptime and thus feels like a step in the wrong direction. Maybe it could work as an additional (paid) product which I could cross-sell, but it doesn’t exactly feel right for eng-as-marketing, so I stopped working on it. I still think this could be an interesting channel in the future, but I think I would have to come up with a tool that only runs on-demand (like the classic marketing grader).

For you data nerds out there asking "but how bad were the results really?" — feast your eyes on this masterpiece of marketing efficiency: a pristine 3 x 0% funnel. That's right, zero paid conversions across all channels. I should probably add this achievement to my LinkedIn.

The Road Ahead

Just as I decided last fall that I should deprioritize development and prioritize marketing, I now have decided to deprioritize marketing (or what I’ve been calling marketing — aka throwing marketing approaches at the wall) and prioritize learning more about my customers and the broader market, after which I’ll return to marketing/growth. While BaseQL's growth has been steady rather than explosive, I'm getting back to the fundamentals: really understanding who my users are and what problems they're trying to solve.

At the same time, I’m putting myself out there more to build a network of interesting entrepreneurs whom I can learn from and grow alongside. This approach has already started to open doors — I’m now in conversations I would have never been a part of before. I’ve joined a mastermind group and have begun plugging into the local entrepreneurship crowd. The drawback to this is that I have to deal with a bit more imposter syndrome than usual, because I’m actually sort of an impostor who bought his way into the conversation. But I think people can tell that even though I am an imposter, at least I’m an honest imposter who’s willing to take risks and have skin in the game in order to learn and improve. I’m also going to use some of my vacation time to give myself a full weekday each month to focus on BaseQL, as well as quarterly hack days where I can work on whatever I want, to help fuel my creative energy and to relieve some pressure to always be thinking about BaseQL.

If nine months of owning BaseQL have taught me anything so far it’s that my strategies are going to change often as I learn more — so I might learn something next month that makes me completely drop them: strong strategies, loosely held. In this way, building a business is akin to learning a language: it’s an ongoing, multi-year process. It’s not about whether or not it’s working perfectly in the moment, it’s about staying in the game — sustainability above all else. Just like with language learning, day-to-day progress may feel slow, but eventually you’ll look back and realize you now understand the beauty in something that seemed like gibberish before. In summary: put in consistent effort, be experimental, have fun. Follow my journey of turning gibberish into growth at x.com/dj_seeds.