Tell HN: Things you need to know before submitting on aqcuire.com
I went through the process of submitting one of my projects on acquire.com, and the experience has been disappointing, to say the least.
TLDR: They purposely lie to you by making you believe you can submit your service easily, while in reality, you need to create an account at ChartMogul, have a Google Analytics account (forget Plausible, Fathom, and the like) and ... have an accounting service like Xero, Quickbooks, etc. (WTF?). What a waste of time...
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I'm sharing my experience here in the hope that you'll know the situation before losing hours writing every aspect of your project for nothing.
Acquire has a page where you have to fill in all your service details, including why you are selling, the stack, details about your visitors, customers, etc.
This is standard and makes sense to fill. As you want the sale to succeed at your highest expected price, you spend a lot of time writing each part well, ensuring everything is clear, well explained, and complete.
You also have to give some numbers - manually - about your revenues, profits, and the like. Again, this is standard.
Once all the fields are filled, you can submit them for review.
This is where the "fun" part begins.
Your project will be declined.
That was the case for me. They tell you an email has been sent to explain why; I never got the email (and the logs at my mail server shows it never came).
So your request why, and it turns out that despite the illusion they gave you of being able to submit your service for review, you need to connect your revenues metrics to Acquire.
That should be easy, most of the entrepreneurs out there use Stripe. Except they don't have an integration to Stripe, you need to create an account at ChartMogul and connect this to Acquire...
So here you go, having to create an account at ChartMogul, connecting your Stripe account, and waiting for the data to be imported.
Once it's done, you reach out to support, hoping they will accept the submission. It turns out you also need to connect to Google Analytics and an accounting software, both of which I don't have - and more and more entrepreneurs don't have either.
The worst in all that is that I've asked multiple times to the support if ChartMogul was the only third-party service needed, as I was annoyed but okay to connect to it, and they purposely never answered straightforwardly.
(Why is beyond my understanding).
So here I am, sharing this:
If you want to sell your service on Acquire.com, keep in mind that *you need to have the following*:
- ChartMogul (not Stripe, not Paddle, but exactly and only ChartMogul) - Google Analytics (Do you prefer your user privacy? Too bad you can't sell on Acquire) - A accounting service (because, why not).
I think FEInternational still has great days ahead.
Sorry for the rant, I had my hopes up, and they came crashing down.