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🟣 Built, scaled, and sold a company to private equity (in 3 months)! 🎉

Author

Matt Espinoza
May 01, 2024

Exciting news: Journey+ has officially been acquired 🎉

Here's the crazy untold story of how we built, scaled, and sold a company to a private equity (in 3 months):👇

Estimated reading time: 7 min 09 sec

Progress update

We’ve added two new team members (growth & dev) to Halation.

The last 3 months was spent too much on focusing on one portfolio company (Journey+).

This limited our potential to scale as fast I wanted.

Now we got the team in place, we can focus on more ventures.

We will be launching 12 new companies in 12 months.

Just released our company newsletter for monthly updates:
🤝 https://halation.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Learnings in Selling to Private Equity

This acquisition will always have a special place in my heart.

It was the first portfolio company in Halation, and our first major win.

Now we are launching ONE new company a month, but Journey+ was the one that started it all.

Here is the story of how it went down:

1/ Only build products to solve problems.

From search data alone, there was strong search indicators of of the problem we were solving:

(side note: I'm building a tool to figure out pain killer ideas -- email me to get access)

2/ Get the A-team together

Brought on the best designer I know (Hannah) to create the product mockup. And my close friend (Miguel) to develop the software alongside me.

Little did I know what would happen next..

3/ Test Ideas Publicly

Our launch went VIRAL!

Hundreds of comments in a couple hours.

And even hundreds more through direct messages.

We easily got our first batch of paying customers.

4/ Scale FAST

We aggressively grew over the next 3 months.

At our peak we were getting 5 new users every 3 seconds.

And customers absolutely LOVED us.

Churn rate was nearly non-existant.

5/ Find One Growth Channel

We experimented ALOT with different growth channels.

But we finally found it: influencers & directories

From there, we doubled our revenue every month after.

6/ Build to Sell

Yet, at the peak of our growth... we got a message.

It was from a private equity firm.

They saw the potential to scale it even further.

Through a couple discussions, it was clear it was the right fit.

Just like that I signed one of the most important contracts of my life.

Absolute shivers.

Right then, I sold majority stake of Journey+ to a private equity firm 🎉

Here are the main story breakdowns:

  1. Build to Solve Problems

  2. Get an A-Team Together

  3. Test Ideas Publicly

  4. Scale FAST

  5. Find One Growth Channel

  6. Build to Sell

Forward this to someone who might also want to build companies (and eventually sell them). It's free to share. 😉 

Chat soon,

~ Matt | (@mattespoz) 🥷🏼

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🧪 This is going to be my place in my newsletter where I can run some fun audience experiments

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