The Moneyball approach (Changelog Interviews #612)

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John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He’s early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John’s acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 100,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan.
• Coder.com – Instantly launch fully configured cloud development environments (CDE) and make your first commit in minutes. No need to traverse README files or await onboarding queues. Learn more at Coder.com
• AssemblyAI – Turn voice data into summaries with AssemblyAI’s leading Speech AI models. Built by AI experts, their Speech AI models include accurate speech-to-text for voice data (such as calls, virtual meetings, and podcasts), speaker detection, sentiment analysis, chapter detection, PII redaction, and more.
• Unblocked – Other developer tools can’t tell you how your codebase works and why. Unblocked can. We augment your code with context from Slack, Confluence, Jira, and more, so you get accurate answers without having to search for them. Sign up for free at getunblocked.com

Featuring:

• John Nunemaker – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Acquiring Fireside
• Fireside.fm

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:01:27)

https://sentry.io/

3. The acquisition of a lifetime (00:04:52)

4. Scaling words with friends (00:16:21)

5. Saturation in the podcast space (00:20:20)

6. Sponsor: Coder.com (00:33:44)

https://coder.com/

7. Setting the valuation (00:35:54)

8. Multiples are hard (00:41:23)

9. Is this your biggest risk? (00:43:53)

10. This could be the hub to your spokes (00:49:18)

11. Enter Keenan Feldspar and the Keenan Vortex (00:53:46)

12. Could this be bigger? (00:56:56)

13. The right number of businesses (00:58:04)

14. Tiny buy mode (01:03:46)

15. Old and gray (01:07:32)

16. Hypothesizing from a lily pad (01:09:55)

17. Sponsor: AssemblyAI (01:12:46)

https://www.assemblyai.com/?utm_source=changelog&utm_medium=podcast

18. Sponsor: Unblocked (01:15:03)

https://getunblocked.com

19. Comfortable in a Rails world (01:17:01)

20. Not a Rails world? (01:20:09)

21. Predictability is key (01:22:08)

22. What if you have no more money? (01:24:23)

23. A pool of angels (01:30:01)

24. What if it goes to ZERO? (01:30:19)

25. We're "long" on podcasting (01:32:41)

26. We're trying to be calculated (01:34:35)

27. There's a BIG upside (01:35:49)

28. Is it a Rails world? (01:38:13)

29. Live podcasting at conferences (01:40:50)

30. Just like Less Conf (01:42:50)

31. Closing thoughts and stuff (01:44:13)