Startup Sphere Weekly #6

$4 million dollars a year selling Viking products and making $30,000/month automating Salesforce

Hello again and welcome back to the 6th edition of Startup Sphere. In this edition, we’ll dive into a SaaS for Salesforce, an e-commerce store with Viking products, and a B2B SaaS that automates tedious finance tasks for businesses.

Let’s get right into it!

Software for generating Salesforce reports, dashboards, & documents

Asking Price: $2.5 million
Monthly Revenue: $38,000
Monthly Profit: $30,000

This business is a great example of building where your customers already are. Salesforce is one of the largest software companies in the world. Therefore, it is almost impossible for them to address every customer’s unique pain points with their platform. That’s where a third-party business like this can step in and help customers have a better experience on Salesforce while charging a small fee. It’s a win-win. With a business like this, the marketing becomes much more straightforward. You know you are targeting Salesforce users, and there are infinite ways to do that. From a product perspective, you can continue listening to feedback from Salesforce users and continuously improve and build on the Salesforce experience. An example of a competitor is Conga.

E-commerce store that specializes in Viking-inspired products

Asking Price: $550,000
Monthly Revenue: $336,000
Monthly Profit: $42,000

Now this is niche. I had to do a double-take when I read the business heading, but it completely makes sense. The more niche a community or interest, the more loyal the fanbase. These customers don’t just like the products, they love them. This store has generated over $10 million in lifetime sales, so it’s obvious that there is an interest in this niche. Looking at competitors like Norse Tradesman and Grimfrost, there are endless possibilities and products to sell in this niche. For example, Nose Tradesman best sellers are drinking horns and horn mugs. Grimfrost even sells gym gear, merch, and beard care kits. I think this is a fascinating niche with a lot of potential and a dedicated customer base.

B2B SaaS that streamlines financial processes with Quickbooks integration

Asking Price: $810,000
Monthly Revenue: $20,000
Monthly Profit: $17,000

This business is a SaaS that helps businesses streamline financial and operational processes by combining Quickbooks accounting capabilities and Monday.com’s project management platform. I must admit, this integration seems odd to me. But it makes so much sense. Who wouldn’t want to spend less time on their business financials by automating repetitive tasks? The listing mentions that this business holds 99% of the market share in this niche, which gives a huge headstart to anyone looking to buy the business. This is similar to the Salesforce SaaS as well, in that you know where your customers hang out (Monday.com and Quickbooks), you just need to go pitch them. The listing mentions Workflow Magic as a competitor, although the businesses seem a bit different to me.

Recently Sold

Payton wrote an awesome thread detailing why and how he sold his startup, EssayGrader.

EssayGrader helps take the workload off of teachers by automatically grading essays. The website mentions that instead of taking 10 minutes to grade an essay (manually by a teacher), the SaaS does it in just 30 seconds.

There are lots of cool features as well, like letting teachers upload custom rubrics for grading and detecting essays for AI writing. It seems like a great all-in-one tool.

Payton doesn't mention how much the business sold for. But we do know that there are over 30,000 users and the SaaS reached an MRR of $9,000.

I encourage you to read the thread if you’re looking into buying or selling a business, as Payton provides a lot of insight.

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— Vlad Verba

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