Startup Acquisition Stories Are You Selling an Asset or Selling a Job?
If Ian Fourie could give two pieces of advice to founders selling their SaaS startups, he’d say:
- Register your business in only one country
- Start pushing founder responsibilities to employees as soon as you can
Ian sold his online corporate training startup, Pluto LMS, on Acquire.com fast (in just two weeks). However, he thinks he would have been even quicker had he addressed these points.
Pluto LMS almost didn’t happen. It was a project started on a whim when Ian realized schools spent a lot more on their facilities than their material. He saw online education as inevitable and built an online platform for a client in the UK.
Pluto had customers but it didn’t seem like it was going anywhere. That all changed during Covid as schools and corporations raced to the internet to see how they could conduct business online.
Between 2020 and 2025 Ian grew his team to five employees and brought in a range of clients. Finally, he decided to sell on Acquire when his health started to worry him.
Now Ian is working as a consultant for his acquirer for a year while he finds his next project.
Tune into the Acquire podcast with Andrew Gazdecki and Ian and listen to them discuss:
- How he found his first clients.
- The advantages of selling alongside a professional advisor.
- How you can make your business seem more like an asset and less like a job.
Ian is just getting started and you can follow him on his journey below: