This is very cool. I tried to signup though and it required a LinkedIn account. I deleted my LinkedIn account due to privacy policy changes I disagreed with.
Hope it can one day remove the prerequisite of a LinkedIn account.
Yeah, I agree about the LinkedIn requirement. I deleted mine for that and other reasons one of the primary being people bombard you asking for recommendations.
I learned about MicroAcquire after reading the article The rise of the one-person unicorn here on HN. It gives good context on selling startups and tools used in bootstrapping:
Seeing stuff like this and Pipe popping up everywhere in my feed, as well as firms like Polymarket financializing event betting and NFTs financializing art/community membership. Financialization of everything is something that excites me, but curious what the drawbacks of this might be. Financialization is eating the world?
It’s a cool product and I’ve only lurked so far. But without contacting each seller to release private info, you know only super generic info like “e-commerce startup with $x ARR”. There’s kind of too little info at a glance to even know if you want to engage the seller.
I signed up for a few of these marketplaces but they want some pretty large money upfront to find out any real info about the startups being sold. I guess it makes - you could go around them and make an offer directly. But it’s kind of irritating not being able to see any info. I was just more or less curious and wanted to see a few examples of companies/projects that went through this process.
The website is completely unusable to anyone who doesn’t have a LinkedIn account. And it requires you to sign up before showing any content whatsoever. But the worst thing is how it strings you along. When you click “View Listings” you don’t expect to be forced to sign up with an email address first. I did that, then in order to continue I had to fill out another form with “all fields required” where one of those fields is to point to a LinkedIn account. And based on other comments here, apparently to get any value you need premium anyway. I can’t stand sites that use these dark patterns.
If anyone is interested in selling their eCommerce business, we are working on some great features at Clearco.
Look at https://Angel.clearbanc.com or send me an email kent [at] clear dot co
I wonder if their sales data will parallel the gender bias of VC funding. They’re anonymizing but still showing userpics and names, so all the usual biases have opportunity to occur.
I’ve seen this before, but similar to others her have had a difficult time finding info about examples. I’d be very interested to hear from someone on HN who has first-hand experience with them.
It's weird to me that these days people start companies with a greater emphasis on selling the company than on selling a product or service. It has a very "decline and fall of the Roman Empire" vibe.
It's fun to build a company. It's also sometimes time to unload it, and move on to something else. It's a very different kind of person that wants to start a company vs operate it for the rest of their natural life.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 77.6 ms ] threadHope it can one day remove the prerequisite of a LinkedIn account.
Great idea and great work!
Yeah, I agree about the LinkedIn requirement. I deleted mine for that and other reasons one of the primary being people bombard you asking for recommendations.
Agreed. Not a big LinkedIn fan, but was able to sign up with my really crappy minimal-info LinkedIn account.
As lots of people on this thread have mentioned - not everyone has a LinkedIn profile, and making it a required field on the signup form is dumb.
I’m curious how you’d vet users if you were running the platform.
I think you can use your email to signup. Linkedin is just an option.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28187204
https://www.wax.run/
The site is full of dark patterns.
https://mixergy.com/interviews/microacquire-with-andrew-gazd...
It's fun to build a company. It's also sometimes time to unload it, and move on to something else. It's a very different kind of person that wants to start a company vs operate it for the rest of their natural life.
In the near future we'll be enabling other ways to verify your account but trust is crucial for founders so it's required for access.
Thanks for all your support, I really appreciate it and if you ever have any questions I'm pretty easy to find on Twitter or LinkedIn (pun intended).
Cheers.