Buyer.co's Rapid Acquisition

Andrew Wilkinson shares how they started and sold Buyer.co, a software negotiation service.

"When we started Buyer, our negotiation service for software that we launched 2 years ago and ended up selling to Ramp, I think we started that business for 50k. We were basically finding someone who wanted to start a company, giving them all the tools to do it, and partnering with them to provide all the capital.

We were looking at really simple capital-light businesses that could get revenue within 2-3 months. The idea came because Chris and I were maniacal about negotiation in the early days. When you're the owner of a business and you save $30, that's $30 directly in your pocket. But what we noticed was as we got bigger and bigger, we had managers and CEOs running the businesses who were compensated based on hitting large numbers, so $30 or $30,000 doesn't really matter anymore. But to us as owners, that really matters.

So we wanted to make negotiation easy for CEOs because nobody likes the discomfort of negotiation. The idea was if I can outsource it to some scrappy person who loves to negotiate a car, a house, a lease, or whatever it is, I'll do that all day long."