They hit me with the classic M&A playbook.
First the sweet talk: "Your metrics look incredible."
Then the punch: "Best we can do is $16M."
Even tried using our growth plateau as leverage during diligence.
Classic pressure tactics. Seen it before, wasn't born yesterday.
It left a heavy weight on my mind but it also led me to reflect on the difference between immediate gains and long-term potential.
Because here's something acquisition firms don't seem to understand:
I only care about your valuation if I'm ready to cash out on our future.
We're profitable (47% EBITDA), growing (even if slowly), and the team is delivering value (102% retention rate, rising NPS scores).
That’s what it’s all about.
If you are bootstrapped startup with sustainable growth in 2024, you control your future.
In a post Predictable Revenue model SaaS world, if you can grow sustainably—you get to choose your own path.
If your timeline is short and the market is pushing for quick exits: you can take the acquisition offer and cash out.
But if you're willing to take a longer term view of the world, you can pursue sustainable growth and you can fund yourself through strong fundamentals and customer satisfaction.
In this market, acquisition offers mean less than they ever have.
If you're not for sale, someone else's math doesn't matter.
You can work for someone else (private equity, VC, or even a boss).
Or you can work for customers and your team.
The choice is yours.
A new era of growth for Groove & Helply
After turning down the offer, I was fired up.
But I knew that if we wanted to realize Groove’s potential and the future with Helply, things had to change. Specifically, our approach to growth had to change.
We couldn’t simply rely on organic acquisition and word-of-mouth marketing, as we had been doing up to that point. We had become complacent about growth, thinking it would just happen.
We had to enter into a new era. These are the 5 pillars of growth for us today…
- The whole company now has a growth mindset. We’re constantly learning, iterating and improving. Making smart rational decisions.
- Those smart rational decisions that we’re making now come from being 100% metrics-driven — gone are the days of coming up with an idea off the cuff. Everything has to be tied back to our goals and metrics.
- We’ve created a growth experiment framework and we’re executing on 101 B2B SaaS growth experiments that are tied to key growth metrics.
- We’re committing to Journey Led Marketing and product-led growth.
- We’re going to start to build out a growth team to help us crush our growth goals and experiments.
That last point is possibly the one we’re most excited about. Working in the open and sharing the journey has always been a part of how we do things here at Groove and now Helply. We are pumped to have you along for the ride.
