Hey everyone, it’s Lexi here.
We’re launching something new at They Got Acquired — and we’re back with a short bonus episode to tell you about it.
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One of my favorite parts of growing a business is sharing how we do it. On this podcast, we usually focus on other entrepreneurs and how they’re building their businesses.
But today, I’m sharing something we’re working on that I’m really excited about.
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This week we’re launching a new report: 25 Content & Media Companies That Sold for 6, 7 or low-8 figures.
You can find it at TheyGotAcquired.com/Reports.
Here’s a little background on why this is a big deal.
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One of the things I wished I had when I sold my business, was examples of other deals like mine.
These are often called comps. If you want to sell your house, you’d pull real-estate comps for your neighborhood. You’d look around at other houses like yours to see how much they sold for.
Data like this is tracked for much bigger companies, but until we came along, no one was doing it for smaller, online businesses.
This is one of the gaps that led me to create They Got Acquired. It’s why we’re building a database that tracks companies that sell for between $100,000 and $50 million.
Our goal, is to eventually offer you access to that entire database. But first, while we’re still building it, we’re releasing slices of the database that cover certain companies.
So this first report covers content and media companies, our next one will likely cover SaaS companies, next year we’ll offer a report about companies with female founders, then digital agencies… you get the idea.
We started with content and media companies largely because that’s my personal interest and background — and we have lots of people building content companies in our audience.
So what exactly is in this report?
It covers 25 deals, with the smallest sale around $200,000 and the bigger ones selling for tens of millions. To make it easy to digest, we share the deals in a beautiful PDF slide deck, as well as a Google spreadsheet that lays out all the metrics.
Sale price tends to be the top metric we all look for, but we like to go beyond that and answer questions like, how did this company make money? How’d they find a buyer? How big was their email list when they sold? And why was that business attractive to buyers?
One of the reasons this report is so valuable is that these are all stories of real businesses with company names attached; we don’t anonymize our data. Why? Because we believe that transparency is what’s truly helpful to other entrepreneurs who are building and selling businesses.
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Now, because of this transparency, because we name each of these companies, sometimes we can’t get players in private deals to share certain details. For example, for some deals, we don’t have an exact sale price. But we might have a range, like low-7 figures or mid-6 figures. Or we’re able to dig up other helpful data points about the business. This is information you simply couldn’t get your hands on before our researchers and reporters began compiling it.
This data is really powerful. By painting a picture of each deal, we arm ourselves with decision-making power we just wouldn’t have otherwise.
Here’s one example. I was really proud of our reporting on this one, and it’s included in our content report.
CSS-Tricks, a blog for developers, was acquired by a cloud computing platform called DigitalOcean just a few months ago, in early 2022. The blog has a loyal following and sees a whopping 7 million pageviews each month.
Through our reporting, we were able to dig up a crucial detail that hadn’t been shared publicly: this content company sold for $4 million. It’s part of a trend where software companies purchase media businesses, so they own and can market to, a new audience that might buy their product.
Hearing this story and all the metrics we gathered — this is insight you can apply as you build your own business, positioning you to maximize the value of your company when you sell.
The full version of our content report covers 25 deals, and it’s priced at $299. This is truly data you can’t get anywhere else.
You’ll find it at TheyGotAcquired.com/Reports.
We’re also offering what we call a Lite version. If you’re not ready to invest in the Full version of this report, you can download the Lite version for free.
I want to give a quick shout out to Quiet Light Brokerage, because they’re the sponsor who made that free version possible. If you want guidance on selling your content business or help finding buyers, check out QuietLight.com, and say you heard about them on They Got Acquired.
If you’re on our newsletter list or follow me on Twitter, you know we’re big on experimenting and tweaking our approach based on what’s most helpful for you. We want to get these reports into your hands — and then you can let us know what’s most beneficial, what you want more of, and what we should do differently.
We’re open to all that feedback, so don’t hold back on emailing me at alexis@theygotacquired.com, or find me on Twitter @alexisgrant.
Thanks for listening, and for checking out TheyGotAcquired.com/reports. I’ll see you next time.
