Filling in the Gaps

This blog stops in October 2024. Even before that, the biggest things happened between posts.

Here's everything I never wrote down. Bullet points, no ceremony.

The two companies I sold

RickRollByMail — back in college. It went viral and someone bought it while I was sitting in finals, junior year. My first sale on the internet.
Jiffy Lead — the SaaS I sold on MicroAcquire at the end of 2021. About a $3,000 sale. A year later the buyer had done nothing with it, the domain expired, and I bought it back. That's the whole story of my second exit.

We were DMing each other interesting things to build on Twitter. That's it. That's the origin.
Eventually we got on a call and talked business a little more. Tried some cold email together.
No agreement, no grand plan. The partnership came out of the doing.
That experiment became the thing that went $0 to $100k ARR in 3 months.

At Ryan Kulp's house, helping him plant garlic — one of the first crops on the farm he'd just bought.
Kulp is the guy who livestreamed building my SaaS idea in 8 hours back when I couldn't code. First a hero, then a friend. Meet your heroes.
I left a farm to build software. My best business started while planting garlic on someone else's.
It ran up to $90k months. It's been up and down since. It's a service business — that's what they do.
The work held up, though: Instantly used us for their own cold email back when they were outsourcing it. The cold email software company, buying cold email.

Last September, Jakob and I met up in Thailand for a week. I started CommunityMentions while we were there.
Reddit marketing. The seed was planted back in 2022, when hanging out in forums was how I grew my own MRR.
It's around $50k a month now.
Sales.co took about 10 people to run. CommunityMentions is me and Claude Code.

Still a SaaS business. Every success so far has been a service business where I built my own software. One day the software gets to be the business.
And I've made a lot of good friends doing it.