SaaS Acquisition: From Startup Weekend to Millions in 9 Months

Grant Miller and his co-founder built Look IO at a startup weekend, raised $200K in advisory funding, landed HotelTonight as their first customer, and completed a SaaS acquisition by LivePerson for millions of dollars - all in nine months. This is one of the fastest startup acquisition stories in SaaS history.

Grant reveals how he found his technical co-founder by teaching himself to code first, the cold-call from LivePerson's head of mobile that started the SaaS acquisition process, and why his new company Replicated has a fundamentally different ambition: building a multi-billion dollar business he never wants to sell.

After the SaaS exit, Grant studied GitHub Enterprise's playbook and built Replicated to help any SaaS company deploy behind customer firewalls using containers - a market he believes is worth billions. The selling a SaaS company experience taught him the difference between building millions and building billions.

🔑 Key Lessons

• ⚡ A 9-month SaaS acquisition proves speed beats perfection: Grant Miller went from startup weekend prototype to multimillion-dollar acquisition by LivePerson in just 9 months. He wasn't optimizing - he was "just not drowning" - but momentum and press coverage attracted the buyer.
• 🧠 Learn to code to find a great technical co-founder for your SaaS acquisition: Grant taught himself programming through Harvard's free CS courses. This earned respect from his elite co-founder Mark Campbell and let him evaluate technical decisions - the foundation for a successful partnership.
• 🤝 Raise money from people who already trust you: Even after a successful SaaS exit, Grant found that raising money from new investors was just as hard. All of Replicated's investors were people he'd known for 1-8 years. Fundraising depends on trust, not track record alone.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Meet Grant Miller - co-founder of Look IO and Replicated
• Grant's personal story - Cincinnati to LA
• Why LA over the Bay Area for building startups
• Success quotes - Carl Lindner and Steve Jobs
• The Stanford speech that opens your eyes
• Grant's background - 7 years at SparkPeople running acquisition
• Meeting co-founder Mark Campbell at a co-working space
• Finding the right co-founder - the most important decision
• Teaching yourself to code earns respect from engineers
• Where the idea for Look IO came from
• Mark's frustration as a mobile engineer at Tiger Text
• The startup weekend that launched Look IO
• Raising the first $200K with no customers
• HotelTonight becomes the first customer
• The Internet Retailer Top 500 guide as a sales bible
• How the LivePerson SaaS acquisition happened
• How much Look IO sold for - "millions of dollars"
• Biggest mistakes from the Look IO journey
• The amateur fundraising mistake - underpricing your round
• Raising money for Replicated - trust matters more than track record
• The hardest thing about building Look IO
• Building millions vs. building billions in value
• Where the idea for Replicated came from
• How big is the on-prem deployment market
• Replicated serves SaaS vendors and enterprise IT buyers
• Does Grant think about another SaaS acquisition with Replicated?
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/75
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email