Is it necessary to start everything from scratch to become an entrepreneur?

Hello everyone, this is Dheeraj Yadav, founder of OSINT Ambition and writer and editor of, “Lifelong Learnings with Dheerajydv”.
First, thank you everyone for showing interest in reading my thoughts. Before starting, do me a small favor, and reply to this email as “I love reading this newsletter”, firstly it will motivate me to write more posts more frequently, and secondly, it will send the upcoming posts to the primary section of your inbox rather than promotions. Let’s start today’s topic.

Backstory

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine who’s interested in startups. So, while our discussion was going on, I noticed a misconception, he believes that you need to start everything from scratch to start a business or a startup. It just made me wonder why everyone thinks we need to start everything from scratch. We have many options apart from doing everything from scratch.

I believe that starting everything from scratch is a good approach in most cases as you will be having full understanding of your business, it will be aligned with your mission and goal, and you can follow any path you want. In short, you have full control of everything. While starting a business from scratch has its benefits, there are also many other options which you can choose to become an entrepreneur while not giving much time to set up everything by yourself. Let’s talk about these options.

Acquiring a business is also a good way to become an entrepreneur and make money by doing business. While starting a business from scratch is very time-consuming, and involves a lot of risks, finding product market fit, there are a lot of headaches in this. But acquiring a business is much easy. In today’s digital world, it has become too easy to acquire a business.

The benefits of acquiring a business are -

• The product has already been validated for product market fit

• The AB testing has been done

• It doesn't require months to design MVP, and then launch it, it’s quick

• It contains less risk

There are thousands of examples where people had acquired a product and made huge money from it, but on the other hand, there are also many examples where people made huge losses due to acquiring the wrong business.

Some of the entrepreneurs whom I follow and who have been successful in this game of acquiring a product and then growing are John Rush and Tibo. These two are just amazing people whom I follow and read their tweets regularly. The inspiration for writing this newsletter has come after seeing so many people sharing their knowledge with the community, so I thought I should also start sharing my knowledge.

How to know which acquisition is a good fit for you?

The number of businesses that are ready to be acquired is insane, so how to choose which one is a good fit for you as per your skills? Which one has the most potential to grow? Where to find those? What type of business to acquire? How to find those?

As per knowledge and opinion, below are the things that you should look for -

1. Fit - Identify what’s missing in this business and how you can fill that gap to grow it. Find a business that aligns with your skills and strengths.

2. Growth - See what’s the scope of growth in this product. Is it a lack of marketing, sales, branding, customer success that prevented it from growing? What’s its current MRR, ARR, expenses, and other financial data?

3. Technology - What technology is it built on? Is it built on some technology that is hard to maintain, manage, or costly? If yes, don’t go for it. Understand the technology working behind the scenes and what will be its future.

4. Market - What is the market size for the business? Is it a niche-specific business that has a limited market size or a generic that has a lot of growth potential? Who are the competitors to business? How’s its pricing compared to its competitors?

5. Team - Who’s managing the business at the moment? Are they going to stay or they will be leaving along with the founder? What are their skills?

6. Reason for Selling - Why is the founder selling the business? Is it because the profit margin is less? or is it because they wanted to focus on something new? or is something else?

7. Price - Is it worth the price they are asking based on its potential to grow?

There are many other things that you should keep in mind while acquiring business.

Where to find?

There are many websites that lists businesses that are on sale. You can just explore those, and see if you find something good. I am listing some below where you can find some -

1. Best Marketplace to Buy and Sell SaaS Startups | Acquire.com

2. Micro Startups For Sale - Zero Commission - Microns.io

3. BizBuySell - The Internet's Largest Business for Sale & Franchise for Sale Marketplace

There are many website and online directories which lists businesses that are ready to be acquired.

Which type of business is Best?

While every business has its pros and cons if I had to acquire a business to grow and make money from it. I would have gone for SaaS. SaaS stands for Software as a service. As I am from a technical background, I would go for a SaaS because it’s easier to manage as compared to other types of business. It will be less headache for me. Apart from that, I have good knowledge of marketing and sales, so I will just need someone to manage the technical(coding) work and I can handle the rest of the work myself or if needed, I can hire a team and manage them to grow it to next level.

It’s a personal opinion of mine, maybe any other business type is more fit for you based on your skillset and passion.

That’s it for this issue, thanks for reading. Don’t forget to give feedback by commenting or sending a reply to this email.

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