This interview with Gary was uniquely valuable because it's our first guest that acquired the company they are now building so he certainly brought a new perspective. He bought Business Hangouts in 2015 when the company had 1.5 million customers however most of them were not paying anything so his team is now focused on converting as many customers as possible to paid accounts. They're doing this through content, email, webinars and demos. It seems to be working so they're now looking for other companies to acquire with complimentary products where they can execute a similar strategy. 

Business Hangouts is currently bootstrapped and they have no plans of raising capital. The team is approximately 10 people and it sounds like most of them are working remotely. 

In this interview I spoke with Gary about why he bought BusinessHangouts.com, how long it took to negotiate the deal, did he keep the former team or bring in his own people, how are they converting customers to paid accounts, why BusinessHangouts is different or better than other web conferencing services, how they price their service to enterprise clients, what advice he has for other people looking to buy an existing business and what mistakes they need to avoid, why it can be much smarter to buy a company/product than rebuild one from scratch and much more. 

Learn more at BusinessHangouts.com

 

 

Thanks for listening.

All of our interviews and episodes are available StartupSense.net

You can find me at JonahLupton.com or email me at [email protected] 

 

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