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An HR product that lives inside Microsoft SharePoint, bought for one times revenue with an SBA loan and $75,000 of the buyer's own money — because everyone else thought the Microsoft ecosystem was boring.
about $2M now, roughly $2.2M expected this year · bought for $1.6M, which the bank scored at under 3x SDE on about $550K · the previous owners were taking home around $750K a year on under $2M of top line
He paid one times revenue because he was the only buyer still in the seller's inbox eighteen months later. His own verdict on the search: something strange has to happen for any of these deals to get done.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Andrew Swiler started in distressed private equity in 2006, doing restructuring work on names like Starbucks and Polaroid, burned out on it and on Chicago winters, and left for Europe in May 2010. He met his wife on a beach in Croatia after a kayaking trip, convinced her to move to San Francisco, spent two years doing what would now be called fractional CFO work for startups, and then moved to Barcelona when she decided she had had enough of a city where everyone only talked about technology. In Spain he helped her run an eyewear company — interchangeable customisable glasses, built on about $30,000 of raised money, franchised into Mexico, Italy, Dubai and Abu Dhabi — which they sold in 2019 for not very much, but enough to stop and think. He had been to a search fund conference at IESE in 2016 and never let go of it. Over the next stretch he looked at more than 2,000 deals. Spanish service businesses were priced like American ones with a tenth of the market and ten times the financing difficulty. E-commerce he had already run and did not want back. That left software. Lanteria turned up on SearchFunder, unnoticed, unvoted, nobody paying attention. The seller wanted around three times revenue. Andrew said no thanks and kept checking in. Eighteen months later, with the war in Ukraine on the horizon and their clients and staff getting nervous, he offered one times revenue and they took it. He had no money at that point. He raised it in sixty days, walking ten kilometres a day around the park outside his flat, phoning investors.
Lanteria did not start as a product company. It started as a Microsoft SharePoint consulting firm doing offshore work for American clients, which is why it had a US LLC from 2012 — Americans were not going to pay a Ukrainian entity, so a US company was table stakes.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. The exact words are quoted below, with a timestamp that jumps to the second each figure is said.
“These guys are taking home like 750k a year uh on this business that's doing like less than 2 million top line.”
26:13 · hear it in the video“So, we ended up paying 1.6 million for the business.”
1:09:48 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder interview on a business acquisition podcast, given by the buyer about his own deal. Every figure — the $1.6 million price on $1.6 million of revenue, the roughly $550,000 SDE the bank calculated, the $600–650K of investor capital, his own $75,000, the just-under-$1.2 million SBA loan including $100K working capital, the $100,000 post-closing consulting agreement, the rise from $12K to $16K a month in debt service, and the roughly $2 million current revenue — is stated by him and unaudited here. He flags his own uncertainty in places, saying the SBA total is from memory and that the audited financials available at closing were from 2020 with the 2021 figures unaudited. The claim that Microsoft's user base doubled in 2020 is relayed from another buyer he spoke to during diligence, not sourced. He is unusually candid about what he got wrong, which raises rather than lowers the credibility of the rest.
The first dollars were consulting invoices from American clients, paid to a US entity set up specifically so those invoices would clear. The product's first dollars were perpetual licences — one payment, permanent access, very low price.
The turn came in 2018, when the owners stopped selling perpetual licences and moved to SaaS. They expanded the product into more modules, including a learning system, and raised prices significantly.
Lanteria was flat for three or four years before the sale, growing 3 to 5% a year while comparable products grew 30 to 50%.
HR software that lives inside Microsoft SharePoint rather than beside it. Everything runs on Microsoft infrastructure — Azure databases, Azure servers — and the product is built to sit inside the tools a Microsoft-shop HR team already has open: Teams, OneDrive, Viva, and SharePoint above all. The practical shape is a single source of truth. Employee data, contracts, documentation, pay stubs and assessment results live in Lanteria and flow out to the other Microsoft surfaces where people expect to find them, and Microsoft Viva sits inside the Lanteria dashboard coming the other way. An HR manager never has to leave SharePoint, which is where they already spend their day. About half the customer base is still on on-premise servers, and the company migrates them to private cloud steadily. The current product dates from 2018; before that it was a much more basic perpetual-licence tool sold from 2012. Our read: the positioning is the asset and the constraint at once. Every buyer Andrew spoke to turned their nose up at Microsoft, which is exactly why the business was available at one times revenue — and why Microsoft's own sales people have an incentive to feed it. He is candid that a pure cloud product with no ecosystem dependency would fetch a better multiple on exit, and that the direction of travel is to stay focused on Microsoft users while becoming something anyone can run.
Annual subscription contracts, all of them billed yearly, plus a services layer that is about 30% of revenue: implementation, customisation and configuration work. The annual billing mattered enormously in the deal. Every contract renewed on its own date, so at the point of sale there was a large deferred revenue balance — money already collected for service not yet delivered. The sellers had booked all of it as revenue because it was in their bank account. Andrew had to teach them what deferred revenue is, using a loan analogy: the customer has lent you money that you repay in service over the year, and until you do, it sits on the balance sheet as a liability. That education became a price negotiation, and a chunk of the deferred revenue came off the deal. Our read: the services line is the most interesting number in the business. Most SaaS buyers discount it as non-recurring and low quality, which is why this company was cheap. In practice it does three things — it locks customers in, it funds the product rebuild when equity markets are shut, and it makes the revenue harder to churn than a pure self-serve subscription. The cost is that it caps the exit multiple, and the cultural residue of a consulting past is real: the team still thought in billable hours long after the business had become a product company.
The whole product runs on Microsoft infrastructure, which means the hosting bill is an Azure bill and the integration surface is fixed by someone else's roadmap. The capital structure is the part worth studying. Total price $1.6 million. Investor capital around $600,000 to $650,000. Andrew's own money about $75,000, plus all the due diligence work unpaid and no closing fees taken. The SBA loan was just under $1.2 million including $100,000 of working capital, roughly 75% of the stack, with no single investor above 15%. He took a materially lower salary than a CEO would normally draw. The cost line that moved against him was the loan itself: $12,000 a month at closing, $16,000 a month by the time of the interview, which he prices honestly as roughly one developer he cannot hire. Our read: the labour model is where the margin actually lives, and his hiring method is worth stealing. LinkedIn allows one free job post at a time, so he posts one every day in a different city or country and harvests up to fifty applicants a day, of whom perhaps five are serious. He is explicit that this is not cheap labour — his Ukrainian developers earn what American ones do — it is access to a much larger pool than any single city offers.
Copy the patience. He saw the listing at three times revenue, declined, and then circled for eighteen months while the seller's other options evaporated. When the war made them genuinely motivated, he was the buyer already in the relationship. He is careful to say the war did not create the deal — they had been talking for a year and a half — but it removed the last reason to hold out. Copy the deferred revenue move. All-annual contracts mean the seller is sitting on cash for service they will not perform, and most small sellers have never accounted for it properly. That is a legitimate price adjustment and it was worth real money here. Copy the contrarian ecosystem bet. Every other buyer dismissed Microsoft as boring; the platform's own business development team hands deals to partners it knows about. Our read: change two things. Hire the technical leader before you close, not a year after — he calls the missing CTO his biggest structural mistake and the cause of a year of tribal knowledge risk and one adversarial developer who demanded double salary in week one. And raise more than you need to close, which is his own closing advice: he raised exactly enough, planned a growth round for a market that shut, and spent two years clawing cash out of customisation work instead.
Platform dependency is the obvious one and he does not pretend otherwise. If Microsoft raises prices, changes SharePoint's direction or builds the feature, the product's position changes overnight. He accepts the risk explicitly and says it will cost him multiple on any exit. Technical debt is the live problem. This is a legacy product that needs rebuilding, and the plan is module by module on a modern stack over about twenty-four months. That is a long time to be running two architectures with the bank taking $16,000 a month out of the business. Key-person and geographic risk nearly bit. Three developers in Ukraine held the tribal knowledge of a poorly documented product built over eight to ten years, and for almost a year there was nobody who could have brought replacements up to speed. He admits in hindsight that the risk was larger than he let on to investors. Our read: the deepest risk is the one he names best. SaaS is not enduringly profitable in the way a trades business is — it is sand dripping through your hands while you scramble to add more, and every six years you are effectively reinventing the product. The debt service is fixed and the product decays continuously. That is a fine trade at good margins and a brutal one if growth stalls.
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