Cents · B2B · software for laundromats
Buy a hardware company when building your own hardware gets too hard
Revenue went from $6M to $36M the year of the deal
Workedexit-mafeature-development
What they did
Commercialized in-house hardware in late 2022/early 2023; it made a couple million dollars in sales but was costly and hard. In 2024 bought a hardware business to derisk and speed up hardware execution.
What happened
Guest says the acquisition accelerated a lot of hardware growth; revenue went from $6M (2023) to $36M (2024), which likely includes the acquired business.
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- In-house hardware effort for ~1-2 years before the acquisition
“Uh and while we made, you know, a couple million dollars of sales, and we were pouring a lot of money into the effort, realized best way to derisk and accelerate uh that execution was potentially through M&A. And that's what led us to kind of buying a business in 2024 that accelerated a lot of our hardware growth.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Cents: Sign a 73-store operator as your first customer and build with themGot full access to their stores and back office; product a bit overbuilt but solid
- Cents: Walk into laundromats and call them, pitching a no-labor delivery add-on firstGrew to about 80 stores and ~$700K revenue in 2021
- Cents: Sell your own payment hardware at a profit, with software and payments attached~$140M a month in payments; 200-250K devices installed; 99% customer retention
- Cents: Raise at a price investors can 4-6x, and turn down higher offersRaised $140M at 10-20x revenue while profitable; guest says exit options stay open
- Cents: Set aside $30M of a funding round to buy shares from employees$30M tender inside a $140M round; employee retention 98%
- Cents: Aim for $1M of revenue per employee and keep the team small~$750K revenue per employee, 20%+ EBITDA margin, 98% employee retention