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How To Scale Faster Through Acquisitions
Ft. Ali Tajskandar - Founder of Wishpond
Amardeep Parmar
October 02, 2023
Each week, we interview real experts about topics you need to know about.
Today we have Ali Tajskandar, CEO and Founder of Wishpond. Wishpond makes it easy for marketers to create landing pages and contests, track leads, send emails and more. They have IPO'd and made 6 acquisitions along their journey so far.
We’re covering How To Use Acquisitions To Effectively Grow Faster.
Next 3 weeks:
Lars Albright (General Partner at Unusual Ventures) - How Founders Can Approach Negotiations During M&A
Adam Nathan (Founder of Almanac) - How To Use The Modern Work Method In A Remote World
Wei Lien Dang (General Partner at Unusual Ventures) - How To Scale An Open Source Startup - And Should You?
How To Scale Faster Through Acquisitions
Here are some of the key takeaways from the episode if you’re in a rush!
Save years
Doing acquisitions earlier makes sense, a lot of time the product maturity takes a long time and if I can buy that time and help the company with marketing, sales and distribution then I can save myself years.
The hustle is glorified but if you have the cash from your day job or business, why not look at microacquisitions to save yourself time?
It could mean you get to the scaling (and big profits!) part quicker.
Size Matters
We want to make it so a few things can go wrong and we’re still ok.
You often only hear about the blockbuster acquisitions in the news but you can actually make much smaller ones to get ahead.
Ali advises to never buy anything which would sink your entire business if you’re wrong!
Stay away from the light
A lot of companies have an interesting product but their financials just don’t add up.
What’s the point of your company? Is it to have cool products or make money?
It’s easy to believe you make a failing product profitable because you’re a fan.
It’s harder to convince potential customers!
The Playbook.
Building specific packages of certain size, setting up the email campaign side, the SDR side, the account executive side, the incentives and rolling that out is something that’s worked really well.
You can’t buy a company without a plan!
Have playbooks built from internal processes so you can align everything easily post-acquisition to best practice.
Want to appear on the podcast?
Our bar is high because we want our audience to get their advice from the best.
Meet one of these criteria?
For venture-backed businesses, we want valuations of $100m+.
For LinkedIn/X creators, we want 100k+ followers.
For VCs, we want partners with $1bn AUM.
For bootstrapped founders, we want $1m MRR.
If you want us to get someone else on, tell us and we’ll try our best!