Buying a Business With a Credit Card: The $15K/Month Pivot

💬 Brandon Pindulic recently tweeted about a business he bought 2 years ago…

At the time the business was doing ~$2k a month in revenue

Now it does about $15k a month

… I paid 3x revenue, $74k

I put $65k down on a credit card and the rest was an earnout

The business is Planet Compliance, a B2B (business-to-business) media site and directory that focuses on covering business regulations. They also offer listings for businesses.

Why Brandon decided to buy 👇

I have spent my entire career in B2B SaaS (worked at/invest in SaaS) and previously started and sold a 7 figure B2B Demand Gen/Marketing Ops Agency that worked almost exclusively with SaaS companies.

So I know the market and opportunities here

😕 But things didn’t exactly go to plan…

The business model was a membership site

Customers would pay ~$800 a year to access the content and community.

I assumed that I’d be able to scale this up and grow the subscriber base quickly

My goal was to go from $24k in annual revenue to $300k in 2 years

Turns out, my original thesis was wrong

The premium memberships were extremely difficult to sell

That forced him to pivot…

I spent time building up the newsletter, which is what I knew advertisers would value more than website hits

I partnered up with companies that wanted to advertise to the people in my community and charged them either a flat fee or by the lead

Now, 2 years later…

This year, Planet Compliance will do about $150k, with $115k or so being profit

💰

While I don’t generally recommend going into debt to buy a business, there are some good takeaways from Brandon’s story.

A big one: it can be easier to buy and grow an existing business than to start one from scratch.

Brandon found Planet Compliance for sale via Acquire.com, which is free to join and browse listings. Last I checked, they had many businesses listed for $1000 or less 👀

Brandon tweeted after buying Planet Compliance…

The prior owner (now a friend!) was not spending much time on this asset. His HoldCo has bigger investments, businesses. Fair enough… this site drives ~100k pageviews/mo and is under-monetized & under-developed…

That’s the kind of opportunity to look for.

Mega bonus points if you already have some experience you can leverage to take the business to the next level 👍