If you go to my newsletter signup page right now, it still says this:

"Subscribe for a case study on how I acquired Sourcely.ai for $4k and grew it to a valuation of $150k in 4 months."

That's been sitting there for three years.

Three years of the same case study, written by a 22 year old who had bought a business for $4,000.

I'm retiring it today. Along with the name.

This Is Bizness is dead.
This newsletter is called Still Searching now.

Let me explain, because the reason is more interesting than the rename.

I sent Edition Zero of This Is Bizness in May 2023. I was 22. I had bought a micro SaaS for $4,000 and I could not believe that was possible.

That was the whole point of the newsletter. A kid who'd found a door nobody told him about, over eager to tell everyone.

Sixty-seven issues later, some of that guy is gone in ways I like.

Sourcely sold for low six figures. I've bought seven businesses and exited two. The team went from me, in a bedroom, to twelve people: analysts, marketing, engineers. There's a buyside arm now called Kautilya that sources and closes deals for PE firms, Search funds and more. Last year we closed $200,000 in deal value across five acquisitions, and the smallest was $8,000 and the largest was $110,000. This year, up to date, we have done close to $3,000,000 in deals closed.

Fifty businesses cross my desk every week.

So "This Is Bizness" doesn't fit anymore. That was a name for a guy documenting his first deal. I'm not doing that. I haven't been for a while, and that's most of why the newsletter got quiet - I kept sitting down to write in a voice I'd outgrown and closing the laptop instead.

Six months of that, if you noticed.

But here's the part that actually matters.

Every issue I've ever sent you was about a deal that had already closed.

Every one. The wins, the exits, the scoreboard. How We Closed $200K. The Sourcely One.

And that is maybe four days a year.

The rest of it is looking at businesses I am never going to buy. Reading a P&L, finding the thing that's wrong with it, closing the tab. Saying no, over and over, until something survives.

So the old newsletter was a highlight reel. Which is fine, except every newsletter about buying a business is a highlight reel, usually written by someone who hasn't bought one, and none of them help you at all when you're staring at a listing at 11 PM trying to work out if the revenue is real.

Still Searching is the other 361 days.

It's also just true. I am still searching. So is everyone doing this properly. The searching is the job, and deals closing is what happens occasionally when the searching goes well.

I'm not going to sit here and give you a rigid format I'll abandon by issue four. This thing is going to move around for a while.

What's fixed is where it comes from: my actual week. The deals we're looking at right now, and what I'm learning from them.

So some weeks that's the one I'm digging into and the question I can't answer yet — not why it's good, what I don't know. Some weeks it's the one I killed and the exact number that killed it: customer concentration at 61%, add-backs that didn't survive, whatever it actually was. Some weeks it's a question I started asking sellers in the first ten minutes, and you can steal it. Some weeks it's just the deals - sector, revenue, asking price, multiple, what I made of it.

Real prices. Real structures. Real deals. Anonymised where it has to be.

Hit reply and tell me what you want more of.

The deals themselves — what's on the market, at what price? How I find them in the first place? The structuring — earn-outs, seller notes, what I'll actually sign? Something I haven't thought of?

One line is fine. I read every single reply, and for the next few issues the replies are the editorial calendar.

And my side of it: this goes out every week now. Every Thursday.

Six months of silence was me waiting to have something impressive to report — that was the mistake.

Selling a business? [email protected] — tell me what it does and what it makes.

Want someone to find one and buy it for you? That's Kautilya. Reply "Kautilya" and I'll send details.

– Dev

P.S. - The mission hasn't changed, only the name. Make buying a business the third option — next to getting a job and starting a business from scratch. I just stopped thinking the third option is about the buying. It's mostly about the looking.