MicroAcquire: Sell Your Startup

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.

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.

Great idea and great work!

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28187204

Two friends have bought and sold a few small companies on here - it’s legit. Pretty crazy how “liquid” of an asset a project/company can be nowadays.

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 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.

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’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.

Hey everyone, Andrew from MicroAcquire. Really appreciate the feedback. I wanted to address the comments around the LinkedIn verification and flow.

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.

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?

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 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.

Here’s a good interview with the founder.

https://mixergy.com/interviews/microacquire-with-andrew-gazd...