- Acquire.com has facilitated over $500 million in startup acquisitions across 100+ countries since 2020, with 500,000+ buyers and 2,000+ founder exits completed.
- Andrew Gazdecki started flipping items on eBay at 13, founded his first company at 21, and sold it in an all-cash deal at 29.
- Gazdecki bootstrapped Bizness Apps to $10 million in annual recurring revenue and 100+ employees before selling to Think3 in 2018.
- The painful, opaque process of selling that company inspired him to build what would become Acquire.com — first launched as MicroAcquire in January 2020.
Every day, founders list companies they spent years building on Acquire.com — $500 million in deals closed, 2,000+ exits completed, half a million buyers in 100+ countries. Some sell for $100,000. Others for millions. But for each of them, it’s the same moment: the one where all the sleepless nights finally pay off.
Behind all of it is Andrew Gazdecki — a 40-year-old serial founder who built, sold, and got burned by the very process he’s now trying to fix for everyone else. Here’s how he got there — and why he’s not done yet.
A Kid From Detroit Who Started Selling at 13
Gazdecki was born in Detroit in the mid-1980s to a Polish-American family. His father fixed cars for a living. His mother raised the kids. When he was five, the family moved to San Clemente, California — a sleepy beach town south of Los Angeles where he’d grow up.
But something clicked early. At 13, Gazdecki discovered eBay — and with it, the strange thrill of convincing a stranger to pay money for something you own. He listed video games, electronics, whatever he could get his hands on. Most kids his age were playing those games. He was selling them.
”List something online, someone buys it, and suddenly you’ve made a sale. That moment kind of stuck with me. Since then it’s just been startups nonstop.” — Andrew Gazdecki
He wasn’t building software — he was building sales pitches. From the start, Gazdecki’s instinct was always commercial, not technical. Sales and marketing came naturally. Code didn’t, and he never pretended otherwise.
21 Years Old, Zero Dollars, One Idea That Hit $10 Million
Gazdecki studied business marketing at California State University, Chico — but his mind was elsewhere. By that time, every small business wanted a mobile app — but none could afford one.
So in 2009, still a senior, Gazdecki built Bizness Apps — a drag-and-drop platform that let anyone create a mobile app without writing a single line of code. No co-founder. No venture capital. No one backing him.
The company grew to $10 million in annual recurring revenue and over 100 employees. Then Apple nearly killed it overnight. A blanket App Store policy change threatened to wipe out the entire business model. Gazdecki cold-emailed Tim Cook. The company survived.
Selling a Startup in 2018 Was a Broken Process
But it was in May 2018 that everything changed. A private equity fund called Think3 acquired Bizness Apps in an all-cash deal. Gazdecki was 29. The exit, the payout, the validation — on paper, he had it all.
In reality, the process was a nightmare. Months of opaque negotiations. Middlemen who seemed to care more about their commission than the deal. Buyers whose legitimacy he couldn’t verify.
”The process was way harder than it should’ve been. Lots of middlemen, slow processes, not very transparent.” — Andrew Gazdecki
The whole system felt like it was designed for Wall Street bankers, not for founders with zero experience in M&A. Gazdecki took the check — and started thinking about everyone else who would go through the same ordeal.
MicroAcquire Launches in January 2020, Right as COVID Hits
Gazdecki’s idea was simple: a marketplace where founders list their startups, vetted buyers make offers, and deals close without brokers taking a 10% cut. He put together the first version himself, answered every support email, and walked first-time sellers through the process one by one.
And it worked. Within a year, 100,000 users had signed up. No marketing blitz, no viral launch — just word of mouth that carried the bootstrapped platform to $30,000 in monthly revenue.
Every founder eventually faces the same question: should I raise? Gazdecki stayed true to his instincts and turned to founders instead of traditional VCs. HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah was an obvious pick — he wrote a check. The $17.6 million seed round was filled entirely by people who had built and sold companies themselves.
From MicroAcquire to Acquire.com: a Signal That the Micro Era Was Over
By 2022, the name didn’t fit anymore. MicroAcquire was handling deals worth tens of millions of dollars. So Gazdecki did what any founder obsessed with momentum would do — he bought the domain acquire.com for $240,000 and rebranded in January 2023. The “micro” era was over.
What followed was the kind of growth that makes venture capitalists wish they’d gotten in earlier. Over $500 million in total deals. More than 2,000 founders who walked away with a check. Over 500,000 registered buyers in 100+ countries. In a single month — June 2025 — the platform closed 90 transactions worth $35 million. The 2025 Inc. 5000 ranked Acquire.com at #563 among America’s fastest-growing companies.
“I’d love for selling a startup to feel as normal as selling a house. List it, find a buyer, close the deal. Fast and simple.” — Andrew Gazdecki
Acquire.com: On Track to Be the Standard for Startup Sales
Gazdecki put the whole journey into a book — “Getting Acquired” — half memoir, half playbook for founders staring down their first exit and wondering where to even begin. His advice cuts through the noise: clean up your numbers, make sure the business runs without you, and stop waiting for the perfect moment. “Buyers want businesses, not jobs,” he tells every founder who asks.
Something is shifting in the startup world, and Gazdecki saw it before most. Fewer founders are chasing billion-dollar moonshots. More are building small, profitable companies — and more buyers would rather acquire a working product than build one from scratch. The age of the quiet exit is here, and Acquire.com is where it happens.
There’s a straight line from a kid in San Clemente flipping video games on eBay to a CEO running one of the fastest-growing startup marketplaces in the world. It’s not a story about luck or timing. It’s about a founder who went through something painful, looked around, realized nobody was fixing it — and decided he would.
