HN Explorer

My Experience with MicroAcquire

9 points by cpncrunch ↗ HN
I decided to list my business for sale on MicroAcquire. After inputting some of our info, but before I wanted the listing to go live, they emailed me and said they had made my listing live. I thought there was a button to submit the listing before it went live, but they told me it just automatically goes live as soon as you enter all the required info. So I asked them to make the listing non-public, which they did.

But then the next morning I got another email saying our listing was live (I hadn't done anything). Not only that, but they had added a whole bunch of private info, such as our customers, to the public page!

So now I've just edited out the confidential information and asked them to remove our listing. I just can't trust them, so I won't be using their service.

It's a shame, as it looked like a useful service. I'm not concerned that they might sell my data.

10 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] thread
giantg2
Huh, I never heard of this site. Interesting stuff on there. It seems there are some mobile apps making <$100 annually, <1k users, and asking like $15k. Haha I wish my similar user base (free) apps would sell for that.
f0e4c2f7
I haven't listed a startup there yet but I love to browse it to look for deals or see whats in the market.

You read stories about major acquisitions in the billions and get the idea of just how good software businesses are, but seeing the tech stacks and fincicals of smaller companies has been eye opening.

One thing I've wondered about is how close to asking price they tend to sell for. Maybe there is a filter for recent sales I don't know about.

As an aside I too can imagine losing trust after the situation the original poster described and not feeling comfortable using the site after (totally understandable).

cpncrunch
In my own case, my business makes a great profit with minimal effort, so I'm in no hurry to sell. I was really just testing the waters. But I think I'll just carry on as I've been doing.
f0e4c2f7
Completely understandable and I mostly just added that to make it clear that I wasn't disagreeing your reasoning. I think I would have done the same thing in your shoes.
giantg2
Yeah, I was surprised that there were some apps on there with $25k revenue and $20k profit. Nice margins. I wish I could make $1k per year.
cpncrunch
It really depends on the app. I made about $35k last month with about $100 hosting expenses and maybe $500 paypal fees (which I've managed to reduce to a bare minimum by using TransferWise as much as possible). But it's taken over 20 years to get to that point (and my recurring revenue is a fair amount less than that...I had a large one-off source of revenue this month).

Having said that I've tried various other ventures over the years, but haven't managed to get anything else to make any traction at all. So I realise I'm actually very lucky (in addition to being persistent and building a product that works well).

The best advice I can give is to listen to what customers want.

giantg2
Yep. I ended up just leaving my apps as free because they don't make anything really. They are useful, but kind of niche, so the user base is small.

I have an idea for another app, but I'd have to teach myself some new skills and find the time to build it. It would probably be a $250k-500k idea tops, but that's also niche. Not to mention it would require some physical hardware too.

[Angrily shakes fist at sky] damn real job getting in the way of everything...

$35k in a month is a lot. Even if you make that normally over the course of a year, that's awesome.

microacquire
Hey there, Andrew from MicroAcquire here.

Really really sorry for this experience, this is definitely not typical and I've shared this with my team to ensure this never happens again.

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention so we can improve our processes & deliver a better experience to entrepreneurs.

If you'd like to reach out to me directly for additional feedback you can reach me at andrew@microacquire.com.

Cheers.

cpncrunch
Ive been in contact with you and your team last night and this morning. My acvount is now archived and i left feedback when doing that. All the pertinent info is in this post.

The only thing I will add is that I think you must have gotten the info about our customers from our website, as I see a blurb from our website (including our customers) ended up pasted into our public info.

microacquire
Thanks David.

I've shared your feedback with my team so this does not happen again and is a rare case which I take full responsibility for. Sorry for the troubles.

I'm really sorry for the experience you had with MicroAcquire and thank you for sharing your candid feedback so we can improve moving forward.

If you'd like to speak with me directly I just emailed you my cell number. Wishing you all the best.

Cheers.