568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the acquisition itself. At what point did you start speaking with the acquirer? I introduced you to a whole bunch of people as well. We were working on getting you in front of people. Discuss when did you start this process and how you put one foot after the other.

Abinash Saikia: At our peak, we were close to a million dollars in revenue. Towards the end of the year, the pandemic hit and we were not able to close the deals, but we were in that range. When the pandemic hit, it was a very uncertain time. We knew that we had some backup in terms of funding but not a whole lot. We know that we’re going through a phase where sales would drop significantly.

For close to a year, the market was bad. We figured that it was time for us to start engaging with these potential acquirers and not just to get the acquisition. We wanted to do that over time. We also wanted to start some partnerships. If the market gets better, we have good things at both ends. We knew there was a larger market globally.

We thought some of these partnerships would help us acquire more customers not just in India but globally. That’s how we started thinking about acquisitions. That’s how we started. Thanks to your help, we could talk to very interesting people in the process. I was also trying to connect through you, but I was also reaching out to a lot of relevant people.

Sramana Mitra: In general, the process that you have to keep in mind is, if you want to do an acquisition, starting with a partnership is a very good way to start discussions. What we typically do is identify targets and find out who are these people who would be meaningful people to have these partnership conversations with. Whether or not that leads to an acquisition remains to be seen, but you have to start the conversation somewhere. Some of it is in product organizations. Some of it in corp dev [corporate development].

In prior sessions here, I have introduced you to corp dev people. Here, we are discussing from the sell-side. You have to get on people’s radar – both corp dev and product. If you’re navigating this process, the best way is to identify those players and connect with them on LinkedIn. Put all your resources that you possibly can bring together.

People have to know you exist. They have to have a deep understanding of what you have. What is the unfair advantage? What problems can your product solve? What is the TAM? You need to bring this to the radar of potential acquirers. That is the process of bootstrapping to an exit in a B2B scenario.

Abinash Saikia: LinkedIn is a very good tool. There’s no playbook for this. I was reading up. I was trying to figure out how do you go about reaching out to these people. This was a one-year experience. Finally, it led to an exit.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 568th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Abinash Saikia, EnCloudEn
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