Hey hey peeps, this week we’ve got 3 online businesses… 2 of which I’m not sure if I like or not. They both have some positives or negatives. If you know anything about their business model or the industry, let me know!

Personally, I’m still having a blast in Queenstown New Zealand, going mountain biking everyday. I actually have a ‘low level’ Youtube channel, which i just published a Queenstown video on. Recently recently I’ve been too busy to edit & publish videos.

On that note, let’s jump into this relatively ‘quiet’ week of businesses hitting the market! (last week had a ton).

400k/yr Digital Service Business Publishing Novels

• 💰 Asking Price: $1,500,000

• 💼 EBITDA: $404,934

• 📊 Revenue: $906,514

• 📅 Established: 2019

I never realized the Novel market was thriving! This interesting business provides a service of assisting authors with self-publishing their books and then seeming promoting them as they note "maintaining full distribution rights on each one" and "Company Logo is on Every Book They Publish". I'm not familiar with the 'book sale' market so perhaps my intuition is a little off.

The numbers here are solid. 44% margin and $2,499 AOV, with 14,000 monthly visitors to the site. The business is using a combination of Google PPC ads and organic traffic to drive business.

What I see here is a digital service business, providing a service of enough rigor that it is unlikely to be made obsolete by AI, at a fair multiple. As a buyer of this business looking into other paid advertising channels (cough FB) would be a surefire way to acquire more customers. From a strategic perspective there may be additional publishing channels to expand into such as KDP.

View Lising

Text To Speech SaaS with 90 Languages

• 💰 Asking Price: $1,025,000

• 💼 EBITDA: $293,380

• 📊 Revenue: $504,700

• 📅 Established: 2018

I'm a customer of this type of service! This is a a software that lets users input their text and provides a lifelike Voiceover. It's a nifty service that's evergreen sticky as content creators, just keep creating more content and "The software was created for a global audience and supports 90 languages and 700 different voices."

At face value it seems great; Simple SaaS, with huge audience. But I don't know if I like this one.

For starters the value of SaaS businesses is that they are very sticky, with high switching costs to the customers. I don't see that existing for this service. 100% of the revenue comes from organic traffic. As it stands, the business is only as good as the next Google update (kindof). The market is ultra competitive with new and innovating competition coming up daily. Many competitors are bringing significant adspend budget.

Let's address that 'kindof'. The listing describes some "stickiness" and states that % of paid customers use the service for multiple months. Months are short. Good Saas typically has years of stickiness. The business may be a little better than the next Google update. If you're going to take on this business, you need a serious plan for increasing that customer stickiness. Along with that be prepared to make regular updates to stay competitive in the evolving landscape of AI voices.

Do you love this one or hate? Let me know.

View Listing

$1.5mm Per Year Selling Blue Collar Apparel

• 💰 Asking Price: $4,600,000

• 💼 EBITDA: $1,524,777

• 📊 Revenue: $4,050,591

• 📅 Established: 2016

These numbers are huge for an ecommerce business that sell green high visibility safety shirts and and hard hat stickers! Over 1mm sold on TikTok in 180 days, and they're producing it all in-house from a 4,000 soft space.

I like the numbers. I don't like the production.

The fact that they've been able to sell so many of these via social media advertising is shocking and/or impressive. I would never think that. Let's talk about the in-house production aspect though. In-house production can be a competitive advantage when you're producing a unique/customized product, or a large product that is expensive to warehouse/ship. These products however seem pretty standard and I'd believe some sort of producer could be found to shift this business from production to fulfillment model. The listing even states "The apparel or sticker industry as a whole is not too high of a barrier to enter as far as the ability to produce products."

This looks like a nice direct to consumer brand, if the production aspect can be squared away.

View Listing

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As always if you have any thoughts, observations, or feedback, shoot me a reply. Corey