Introducing: Wildfront
Join us on our journey
Before we begin:
Many of you have been added to this list because you’re subscribed to The SaaS Boostrapper. While we may breathe some new life into that brand at some point, the focus of what you’re reading now is the result of my partnership with Alex Boyd, as Wildfront, where we’re building a new kind of bootstrapped holding company, with SaaS at its core.
I hope you’ll keep reading to learn more, and reply to let us know what you’re building. Or if you’d rather, you can unsubscribe here. No grudges.
-Mac (The SaaS Bootstrapper)
Hello, we’re Wildfront. We start, grow, and acquire bootstrapped SaaS companies. We also invest in SaaS and B2B services companies, such as marketing and dev agencies.
Right now, we’re growing ViewExport, a niche legal tech company. We also have a handful of other products in our pipeline, plus investments and other revenue streams.
We’re doing things differently than most, so we wanted to start by telling you about our approach and why we’ve chosen to carve a different path. (If you are interested in SaaS bootstrapping, we hope this newsletter will be very interesting for you!)
We’re Not a Venture Fund
We’d like to start by defining ourselves by what we are not.
Most of what we (and probably you, too) see out there is about Venture Capital. Funding rounds, Series A or B or Z, unicorns, decacorns, zombies. Billions of dollars being thrown around.
This is all well and good for the economy; we’re just not interested in operating that model ourselves. Making lots of bets that we expect will mostly fail, except for a hopeful one or two investments that 100X? All well and good, but not our thing.
Why? At the core, there are two reasons:
We love autonomy and fun a little too much
We’re not nearly as risky as VC-backed founders
From the perspective of the founder: taking on venture capital involves a loss of autonomy. It at least places a huge obligation on you. You take money and there’s a target on your back, whether or not you can literally be fired for missing that target. You also have to want that 100X return, since if you want a 10X return, your investors might physically block that from happening by not signing off on a deal that is too small for their needs. You usually need to want to be a billionaire, and you’re okay with a very very small chance of that happening.
From the perspective of the VC: it’s a grind. Raising money, hunting for deals, making sure they all behave, pushing them all to shoot for the moon. The life of a VC can be exhausting. You have to love it. And even if you do, it still might increase your risk of cardiac arrest from the stress. You might also become a billionaire if you’re an amazing VC partner. This is not appealing to us.
Profitability Means Creative Freedom
We at Wildfront have both exited (separate) companies in the seven-figure range. It was life-changing in the best kind of way. And while it definitely took persistence and skill to do this, the chances of that happening were relatively high, because we have always optimized for cash flow and profit first and foremost. The odds were skewed way more in our favor than if we had raised money from investors and foregone profits in the early days in pursuit of greater scale later on.
Were we starting foundations and putting our names on libraries, from those seven-figure exits? Of course not. But two things happened:
We learned a ton about how to start, grow, and sell companies
Money became not nearly as pressing a concern
Those are two really good ingredients for building more companies, but with less stress about the day-to-day grind of paychecks.
This has given us creative freedom: we are building, investing in, and acquiring more profitable businesses, but it’s not nearly as urgent for us as the founder or investor who just has to build a giant company starting now, because such and such is a huge opportunity that’s once in a lifetime and it can’t wait and the clock is ticking and… blegh.
Sharing Our Real Time Journey
Our goal with this newsletter is to share our journey with you. Every day, we think through thorny issues with our own brains, write with our own two hands, and solve tricky problems in our various businesses. Are we using AI in our portfolio to get things done? You bet. But we recognize that AI is not the silver bullet that many think it is, at least for now.
Instead, we’re dealing with things like:
How to build SEO quickly, on a budget
When and how to invest in ads vs focus on organic
How should we prioritize this feature vs that?
Should we make that investment/acquisition or not?
Is now the right time to reinvest profits or take them out?
Writing is a vehicle for clear thinking. It isn’t just about me “pumping out copy” to reach you in your inbox. Instead—by committing to sharing our journey with you—we’re obligating ourselves to think through what we’re building and why, well enough that it can be put into a newsletter.
And although we may sometimes write in a way that helps our content marketing goals, this isn’t a “marketing list” that you are on. So if you’d like to unsubscribe, we aren’t offended.
For those of you who want to hear more about bootstrapping, listening to customers, shipping features, and SaaS marketing? We look forward to exploring these topics with you as we deal with them.
Thanks so much for being part of the journey with us!
–Mac & Alex
If you’re curious, here’s how we can help:
Investing: We invest time and cash into profitable companies run by promising founders who want a partner that’s done it before
Acquisition: We acquire SaaS products outright from founders who want to sell and move on to something else
Community: Soon, we’ll open a space for SaaS bootstrappers with discussion, bootstrapper-specific tools, and the playbooks we use to grow our portfolio.
Just reply here if any of that applies to you ❤️
I have to say, that is such a nice photo!
I'm really excited you're doing this! I love keeping up on your adventures! Always something valuable to take away.