How Ian Blair Jumped From Building Apps to Selling Laundry Sauce With Acquire.com

How Ian Blair Jumped From Building Apps to Selling Laundry Sauce With Acquire.com

Author: Acquire.com November 20, 2024 Duration: 20:26

Ian Blair has been an entrepreneur his whole life. As a kid, he sold lemonade, and then graduated to golf balls in adolescence. 


While in university, Ian found his calling for the next decade: white-labeling Andrew Gazdecki’s Bizness Apps app-building software to churches. Later, he built his own template app builder, except with more customizable features (Bizness Apps meets Wordpress is how he describes it) called BuildFire.


He completed his new app-builder in 2014, and through ten years of savvy marketing, helped over 15,000 satisfied customers build custom phone and tablet apps.


But Ian always considered himself more of a marketer than a technical founder.


In his free time, he’d cooked up an ecommerce project in 2021 – a new take on laundry detergent called Laundry Sauce. In just a year and a half, it brought in eight figures in revenue while Ian was still working at BuildFire pulling 80-hour workweeks.


To return funds to investors (and time for himself), Ian sold BuildFire on Acquire.com with the aid of none other than Acquire.com CEO and former competitor, Andrew Gazdecki. Andrew helped Ian close an all-cash offer with an interested buyer, funding a surf trip to Indonesia and enough seed money to feel secure going all-in on his new venture.


Listen to Andrew and Ian chat post-acquisition as they discuss:

    • Their unique experiences of the app-builder industry
    • Why modular SaaS businesses are hard to scale
    • Why Ian settled on laundry detergent for his next business

  • Ian is just getting started and you can follow his journey here:


    Behind every successful startup acquisition, there's a story-a complex mix of strategy, emotion, and paperwork that rarely gets discussed openly. Startup Acquisition Stories, from the team at Acquire.com, pulls back the curtain on those real-world transactions. Each episode features founders and entrepreneurs who have personally navigated the process of selling or buying a business through their platform. You'll hear them recount the nuanced decisions that don't make it into press releases: the challenging conversations around valuation, the subtle art of vetting the opposite party, and the critical, often overlooked, steps after the handshake. This podcast digs into the practicalities of due diligence, structuring terms, and managing the transfer of assets, all the way through to escrow and the crucial post-deal transition. It’s a grounded, detail-oriented look at the mechanics of a business exit or expansion, straight from the people who’ve lived it. For anyone curious about the actual path to a deal, beyond the theory, this series offers a rare archive of lived experience and hard-won advice.
    Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

    Startup Acquisition Stories
    Podcast Episodes
    How to Build a Profitable SaaS in 6 Months and Sell it in 5 Days [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 20:49
    Software businesses can be immensely profitable in very little time. But they can also die just as quickly. Software engineer Mark Jivko built Go index me!, a tool that speeds up Google page indexing, in six months for a…
    Startup Acquisition Stories With Eric Pacifici of SMB Law Group [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 17:46
    What are the three biggest mistakes SME buyers make when choosing an M&A lawyer? M&A professional Eric Pacifici says new buyers often pick lawyers who: Aren’t entrepreneurial Bill hourly rather than flat rate Don’t have…
    Startup Acquisition Stories With Jeel Patel, Founder of InvoiceOwl [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

    Duration: 23:28
    Jeel Patel and his father built InvoiceOwl, an online invoicing tool for tradesmen like plumbers after Jeel noticed his family’s landscaper using an inefficient paper invoicing system. Three years later, they sold the co…