Postgres RDS has version 0.5 of the pgvector extension installed by default.
Adding vector support to our app was as easy as enabling the extension and created a table with vector columns. No additional database required and trivial to do mixed queries. Maybe Pinecone and friends have better scalability, but if you need basic vector support, you can do it easily on RDS.
One of my friends does a productized (fixed price) roadmapping session (1) as part of a larger "build your MPV" service. My understanding is that it works out really well for him and his clients. They get to try him out with a fix priced engagement. The output leads naturally to the next step in a larger engagement. If for whatever reason it doesn't workout the client has useful documentation they can take to someone else.
Unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find a good way to ballpark their financials without them supplying them. It's common in the cold email to say something like, "Our sweet spot is companies with an EBIT of $X-$Y". So the person you're contacting knows if they are too big or too small.
For deals of this size you can also look for smoke signals e.g. you're looking to buy something for 200k-300k in EBIT and you go to their about page and find 50 employees you're probably barking up the wrong tree.
It's also worth pointing out that you're looking for one person to say yes. If you hit on folks that aren't a fit and never email you back or laugh you away so what. That's the nature of the game. You just need one.
There are lot of similar type formulas. For larger deals you'd have some form of vender (seller) financing which is what the above really is. It's a type of loan from the seller. For smaller deals that are reasonably competitive you're going to probably have to do an all cash offer.
If you think you're in a good negotiating position or if you've got concerns about the business then a vender take back or an earn out or both should definitely be on the table. It never hurts to ask ;).
For sure. As a seller I think services like FE make a lot of sense. They have relationships with a lot of potential buyers to put your business in front of. Unless you're well connected it's going to be a lot harder to drum up buyers on your own. As a seller what you want is an auction where multiple buyers are competing to buy your business.
Are you asking about valuations? FE has a post on how valuations work. It's pretty simple. Basically a multiple of how much cash you can take out of the business. If that number is small and not growing then the multiple is small. If the number is big and/or growing fast then the multiple will be larger. The key is it's about how much cash the business makes now vs. traditional tech VC land is about... how big this might be some day maybe.
If you're interested in buying a business the people who know how all this stuff works are the private equity people (PE). These guys do this stuff all day long (obviously at much larger scales. If you search you can find a fair amount of info on PE. On a smaller scale there is good info from people researching search funds. Search funds are basically small scale PE. Here's a good starting point: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/centers-initiat....
From the seller's perspective you've got to have a buyer and buyers at this price point buy on a multiple of SDE vs. development cost. If dev cost is greater than what buyers will pay then as the seller... you're probably going to have to eat it and take less.
Importantly as the buyer a big part of what you're buying is customers that you can talk to and work with vs. just the code. If we thought Codetree would have taken twice as long to build but had zero customers we wouldn't have bought it at half the price. Having paying customers proves that you've bought something that other people value. Buying code just gets you code and you may find out that no one will ever pay to use it.
Having your financing together is going to give you a leg up in a competitive deal for sure. Of course not all deals are competitive so it might not matter. In some cases your bank will give you a letter saying they are willing to lend you $X under reasonable circumstances which might help you get in the door with with sellers by convincing them you can close even if you don't actually have the cash upfront.
See my comment above on the alternative approach. The short answer is to approach the problem the other way. Build a list of businesses you'd buy and start emailing.
kareemm has already answered the questions about financing but I actually think your second question about "where to find these deals" is really the more interesting and important question. The obvious answer is places like FE where we found Codetree but that was a total fluke and it's not the right way to approach it.
The truth of the matter is that many business are for sale if you ask. The right approach is to think about the type of business you want to buy, build a list of all of the ones that fit and to cold email them and see if they'd be interested in selling. Basically the same approach you'd take if you were trying to sell B2B software i.e. Predictable Revenue style.
I can already hear people saying, "No way people don't do that" or "That would never work" but it does and people do. In fact we know a number of people that bought their businesses using that approach and it is exactly what we were about to start doing before Codetree fell in our laps. It's also the way that a lot of PE, VC and search fund deals get done.
See my comment up the thread. It seems like that might be changing at least in Canada. I've heard similar things about SBA loans in the US though so perhaps similar changes are afoot in the US as well.
(I'm one of the purchasers of Codetree) I had also thought that banks wouldn't be interested in lending in cases like this but surprisingly enough when we talked with our bank after we made the purchase they mentioned they'd be very interested in financing us if we were looking at buying other software businesses in the future. When I had talked with them a few years ago there was no way they'd have loaned money for a purchase like this because it has no tangible assets. They told us straight up that they understand the world is changing and they are now interested in making these types of loans. They get that small businesses owners today are just as likely to be software companies as they are to be restaurants. We're Canadian and our bank is TD.
Actually this is why I'll likely use GDrive and it's one of the few things that leads to frustation for me with Dropbox.
I use Dropbox for two reasons: backup and sharing. Almost everything I have in Dropbox is documents. I mostly use Google Apps for my document editing needs but I sometimes use Office b/c I prefer Excel for complicated spreadsheets. I also use Word when the folks I'm sharing with aren't hip to Google Apps and/or I need to do a level of formatting that Google Apps doesn't support. I prefer Google Apps to Office because the collab is so good.
Because I use both Office (files) and Google Apps it means that my docs live in two places. Dropbox (my local hard drive) and Google Apps. That drives me crazy. Where does that doc live again? Why doesn't it show up in Spotlight searches? I want them in one place. I could manually import/export but I'm lazy and can't be bothered.
Also GDrive could make for a great leaver to get "normal people" that use Office to start using Google Apps.
First off this is a great idea. I'd pay (see caveats below).
100% agree on YABP. It never even occurred to me that this would lead me into your "non-standard" blogging platform. I can't imagine most people wanting to do that. I know I wouldn't.
But I think combining this with WordPress hosting would make for a killer unique selling angle for non-tech savvy folks that need to setup a blog for their business. Selling a one-time use blog template generator isn't super compelling. Recurring revenue is SO much nicer.
If it was me I'd either:
1. Go into the same business as http://wpengine.com/ and use this as the differentiator or
2. Make this in to an engine you could sell to every company that hosts WP and it's friends.
Picplum reminded me of picwing which I believe is another YC company.
I had a chuckle when I noticed that they both have the exact same testimonial from Jessica Livingston, modulo the company name.
I'm not quite sure how both can be true:
"Picwing is the easiest way for me to get digital photos printed. I just email pictures to my account and never have to think about it again. With Picwing, I can be sure that my family back East receives photos of my new baby regularly. They couldn't be happier!"
"Picplum is the easiest way for me to get digital photos printed. I just email pictures to my account and never have to think about it again. With Picplum, I can be sure that my family back East receives photos of my new baby regularly. They couldn't be happier!"
