GTM Sauce

Handwrytten · robot-written handwritten notes

Buy weaker competitors and move their clients onto your platform

Unknownexit-ma

What they did

Idea discussed with host (who proposed debt-funded roll-up): buy competitors like Simply Noted and move their clients onto Handwrytten's better tech; fulfil UK-based RoboQuill's orders from the US and drop-ship.

In their words

Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M

Play from 13:26

… Those are the two. They're both spending, it looks like a fortune on paid ads, right? Simply Noted is here. Letter Labs has funded. They do. Yeah. The guy over there worked for the Boring, not the Boring Company, the Hyper, the tube train. Hyperloop. Hyperloop. And some of those guys were ex-SpaceX, so they had money. So it's like, I think it's like a friends and family round. What's your guess on what their revenue is? Fix, if I had a guess.

13:26

Yeah. Interesting. And what do you think the other one is that you mentioned? What is it? Simply noted? Two. Interesting. So even if you had a limited money- The only way I'm saying that is I'm very familiar with Simply Noted. They've been around a long time, very confident that we have the best technology. We would just buy them, throw their clients on our platform. Their clients would have an upgrade, immediate upgrade and experience. and we would just keep building our existing platform, basically. And it sounds to me like the hard thing about competing in this space

13:57

is actually building the 200 robots and the systems to make this all work smoothly. It's fixed OPEX, basically. This is real sort of inventory you're holding on your balance sheet, probably millions of dollars worth of equipment. You know, and it's funny, Nathan, if you asked me a year ago if I liked that, I'd be like, I will never do another CapEx business again, full stop, period. These days, I'm like, thank God I have CapEx because I can't be …

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Tags: roll-up, acquire-competitors, customer-migration