Andrew
Gazdecki

He Grew Up Broke
and Sold Three Companies

San Clemente, California. Wealthy beach town. Ocean views. Real Housewives energy. Andrew Gazdecki grew up here on food stamps, watching his stepfather fix cars and counting the gap between his family's reality and the neighborhood's. That gap is where the ambition lives.

His father died when Andrew was six. His family moved from Poland to Chicago to Detroit before settling in Southern California. Money was not abstract - it was the difference between stability and the edge. So he sold baseball cards at 10, built his first for-profit website at 15, ran an eBay flipping operation at 17, and had his first actual company exit at 20.

He wasn't building toward a vision. He was solving the problem immediately in front of him.

Today, Gazdecki runs Acquire.com - a marketplace for startup acquisitions that has processed over $500 million in deals across 100+ countries. It's a company he built not from a whiteboard but from the specific, grinding experience of actually selling a startup and realizing the whole process was a mess.

The better origin story, though, is the cold email.

Three Swings,
Three Exits

What He Actually
Thinks About

Gazdecki is not building for the press cycle. He is building for the founder who made $30K MRR, doesn't want to raise Series A, and just wants to sell cleanly and move on. The founder that every VC blog ignores.

When he launched MicroAcquire on Product Hunt in January 2020, the insight was simple: there was a Zillow for houses, a Cars.com for vehicles, nothing transparent and accessible for startups. Every exit was a phone call with a broker, an NDA, and months of opaque back-and-forth. He wanted to commoditize the process - make it fast, fair, and founder-friendly.

The model is deliberately unusual. Sellers pay nothing. Acquire.com takes no cut of deals. Buyers pay a premium membership. This is either a wildly founder-friendly philosophical position or an extremely smart moat - because no founder ever looks at Acquire.com and feels like the platform is working against them.

By 2022, the platform was closing deals large enough that "micro" felt wrong. He bought the domain Acquire.com for exactly $240,020.16 and rebranded on January 5, 2023. "The micro just doesn't apply anymore," he said. The platform now serves every profitable online business - e-commerce, newsletters, content sites, SaaS - not just sub-$1M SaaS deals.

In April 2025, Acquire.com expanded explicitly beyond SaaS. In March 2025, the company posted its best revenue month ever. The Inc. 5000 ranked it #563 that year. The 2026 Acquisition Multiples Report, with real deal data from 2023-2025, became a market reference document.

He Wrote the Manual
He Wish He'd Had

"Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup" is the book that didn't exist when Gazdecki needed it. It covers the whole arc - founding Bizness Apps as a broke 21-year-old, leading 100+ employees without real management experience, the Apple App Store near-destruction event, the cold email, and finally selling for millions before his 30th birthday.

It's available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. Available on gettingaccquired.com and Amazon. It is, by all accounts, brutally honest about the parts that almost didn't work.

What Makes Him
Actually Different

He skateboards. Or at least, he once cared enough about skateboarding to petition his middle school administration about skateboarding rights - and got interviewed on ABC News for it. Before he was a serial founder, he was a 12-year-old who thought: "This is unfair. I should do something about it." The pattern is pretty consistent.

On Twitter/X, he's prolific. He has called it "basically a free $1,000,000 MBA." He shares unfiltered startup lessons, threads on sales, lists of people worth following. He is unusually honest about failure, near-failures, and the specific texture of what building companies actually feels like - not the highlight reel version.

He believes decisions should be made at 60-70% information. He believes attitude matters more than skill in hiring. He believes most startups don't need to change the world - they just need to make someone's life noticeably easier. He believes in cold emails.

He also believes - loudly and publicly - that you don't need to build a billion-dollar company to be successful. In an ecosystem that celebrates unicorns almost exclusively, this is a slightly radical position. It also happens to be the entire business thesis behind Acquire.com.