Build solo without VC money, then sell the app within 18 months

Josh PelegYeah, definitely a spectrum. And we see a lot of these technical-first founders who were great coders but then can apply the skillset of learning coding to all the different bits and bytes, whether it's optimizing UA or building out the infrastructure, optimizing their team.

Josh PelegAnd what you just said really reminds me of a company we just bought in Brazil, is this incredible technical founder who is one of those jack-of-all-trades that kind of learned through necessity how to do a bit of everything, how to do UA, how to build backend, frontend, et cetera. And it just goes to show that if you can garner that skillset and build something that people want... He lives in Brazil and he walked away with over $4 million because he didn't raise any VC money, he just built from the ground up from his bedroom. And within a year and, I think, six months of launching his app, he walked away with $4 million. And the deal went through in three months because there was no VCs to mess around with. It was straight to his bank account. Crazy. And there are a lot of people like that. We see them all around.

David BarnardSo let's circle all the way back around. We chased a bunch of rabbits, but we were talking about red flags for early acquisition. I wanted to throw one more in there. And if you're building that kind of app and you're thinking about an acquisition, a huge red flag is to try and juice numbers leading into an acquisition. So, just tell me about what you've seen and how bad that can be.