ExitGuide Profile

“ExitGuide helps small business owners plan and exit their business by finding a buyer, selling to family, business partner or employee.”

“Our mission is to transform how small business owners plan and manage the transition of their business by making it easy and affordable no matter what path they choose for exiting their business.”

“Raised pre-seed from VC firms and angels”

“Two full-time employees and fractional contractors”

“I spent 17 years in venture-backed startups in Silicon Valley and worked with over 20 startups. The last few years I was a ‘fixer,’ which means VCs hired me to engineer a turnaround or wind down and sell the assets to recover some money. Lots of stories there but I grew tired of cleaning up messes for millionaires and heard a story on the radio one day about baby boomers that are struggling to find an exit for their small business as they age out. I learned that about 95% of small businesses are simply too small to attract the help they need to exit their business, and many are not looking for help finding a buyer because they plan to sell to an employee, family [member], or business partner. What they wanted (but did not exist) was an online service to learn their options and then get help navigating exiting their small business. While the same people have dozens of options to form a business entity online (LegalZoom, ZenBusiness, etc.) — there is nothing like that for exiting a small business, so I created ExitGuide.”

“I had a bunch of bad names! I was able to get the ‘exit.guide’ domain, and the .com domain was not in use and had some legacy SEO issues because someone used it for assisted end of life. I wanted to test the concept out before acquiring the .com domain because I believed if acquired I could work my way out of the legacy SEO issues. I spent a year on the old domain and then bought the .com domain, and we now have a Domain Authority (SEMRush) of 38 and improving.”

“I started as an entrepreneur in 1994, took a job in 1996 at what became broadcast.com, and a few corporate stints but have worked in startups for most of my career. Not sure I can do anything else!”

“I know we are solving a big problem for main street businesses (we are not tech/startup-focused) and we can acquire small business owners seeking help. Productizing that help has been the biggest challenge — they want help but narrowing the scope of that help into a feature set that is a SaaS product is hard.”

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“Main street businesses with less than $3 million in revenue. This is the long tail of small businesses and accounts for 96% of small businesses. The only way to help them plan and exit their business is through technology.”

“SEM and SEO have been very effective for us.”

“SEM”

“CAC for a user to create an account, form completion rate and we just released a paid offering so will track conversion rates free to paid.”

“Slack and ClickUp are vital as we are a distributed team.”

“The isolation is even more than I expected and the hardest part.”

“Not sure I ever achieve it but I schedule my day, even if working by myself so I know what I am doing when and add social/personal commitments to my calendar and treat them as priorities too.”

“I set a goal to have a prototype to engage small business owners to talk to and get some validation on the problem (needing help coming up with an exit plan) and wanted to see if I could acquire these owners for less than $30.”

“First relevant job was selling webcasting when most PCs did not have a soundcard or speakers. I learned to grind away but along the way, changing my approach so that I could iterate and learn what does not work to eventually find what does work. Later I learned that this was the same approach (sort of) Thomas Edison took — find 1,000 ways something does not work to eventually get the way it does work.”