Back in 2011, Nathan Latka started Heyo, a social media company that helped businesses advertise on Facebook. By 2016, Heyo had raised $2.5 million in seed and venture capital financing and, by all accounts, it was a growing and successful business. 

Then Latka sent an unusual email that would ultimately garner him seven offers to buy his business – with the winning bid amounting to an incredible 11 times revenue. Listen to Latka describe the content of the email in this episode of Built to Sell Radio.

About Nathan Latka

Nathan Latka (@NathanLatka) is the founder and CEO of Heyo. After selling $70,000 worth of Facebook campaigns from his dorm room, he dropped out of college and has since raised over $2.5 million from a Forbes Billionaire while supporting over 250,000 small business owners as they look to capture emails and drive sales from Facebook. Latka is a frequent contributor on Inside Facebook, All Facebook, and Social Media Today. His content is taught in the best-selling book, Facebook Marketing for Dummies. He is an expert in Facebook marketing, social analytics and social selling. Latka doesn’t care about big business and is focused on supporting 500,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs by 2017.

Some Highlights Of The Show

Business: Heyo

2:00: “Drag and drop Facebook campaigns specifically marketed so they could avoid having to hire a coder.”

2:30: “We grew it to over 10,000 monthly paying customers. It was a SaaS business.”

3:14: “We ended up raising another $2 million based on a cold email I sent to a Forbes Billionaire.”

3:53: “I love winning; board games are a small manifestation of what a business is for me. I’m not focused on taking a company public by the time I turn 30, so I’ve got three years to do it.”

4:10: “I am running a podcast called The Top Entrepreneurs… I did this for myself; I expected nobody to listen. I wanted to learn from the best. When I emailed big business people and said, ‘Hey can I talk to you for 15 minutes,’ nobody replied… When I said, ‘Hey, can I interview you for my podcast?’ it’s a whole different framing… My response rate went up by 10X.”

4:53: “Now the show, at six months old, is doing over a million downloads.”

5:30: Convertible note explained.

6:03: “There are three critical terms in a convertible note.”

7:20: “We didn’t want to raise capital… Let me explain.”

8:15: “Eventually people with money started writing back, ‘Nathan, you are growing 30%, 40% month over month in terms of revenue. Can we invest?’”

8:30: “I knew if I could get the people interested in investing to spend even more time coaching me, they would see me almost as their child and everyone wants to support their children.”

10:50: “We have no need for $9 million; the maximum we will do is $2 million… We didn’t need that much capital; really, we didn’t need any capital, but I knew I would learn having these guys [onboard].”

12:20: “You will become less creative when your solution to everything is to throw money at it.”

12:55: The triggering event.

15:00: The ‘Heyo is shutting down … next steps’ email explained.

20:40: “If you had a healthy retention rate … and you were growing month over month … you would sell anywhere between [5X and 12X]… We sold for 11X top-line revenue.”

23:20: “I felt like I had to share the acquisition story live as it was happening… I thought it would be tremendously valuable to record the whole negotiation and publish it on my podcast.”

24:15: Hone in on those negotiation episodes at NathanLatka.com/Sold.

26:00: “There is more upside to being totally transparent … than there is to hiding everything and surprising everybody.”

30:00: The BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement).

38:05: “You have to put your ego on the back burner [during negotiations].”

38:30: “You always want to have someone else in the decision making process, otherwise it’s a bottleneck and a risk.”

39:00: What Latka would change looking back.

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