It started with a coffee grinder.
I was sitting at my desk at MetaLab, our design agency in Victoria, BC, when I heard this awful whirring noise coming from the kitchen. I walked over and found Ali Bosworth, one of our developers, hunched over the counter like a surgeon. He had a Baratza grinder going full blast, a gooseneck kettle at the ready, and this weird plastic tube that looked like he'd bought it at the hardware store.
He carefully tapped the grounds into the tube, then pulled out a little eye-dropper and started dripping water onto them.
"What are you doing?"
"Removing the static," he said, like this was a perfectly normal thing to do at 2pm on a Tuesday.
I watched him pour water from the kettle, wait exactly ninety seconds, then press down on this PVC-pipe-looking thing with the focus of a man defusing a bomb. Dark, syrupy coffee dripped into a mug.
"What is that thing?"
"It's the AeroPress. Made by this really cool serial inventor. Guy also invented the Aerobie."
I'm a coffee snob. I had a $5,000 La Marzocco espresso machine at home and a subscription to a fancy roaster. I took a sip of Ali's contraption expecting it to taste like gas station drip.
Whoa. It tasted the way the beans smelled. Rich, clean, no bitterness. That's insane.
"Twenty-nine bucks," Ali said. "Cheapest and best coffee maker on the planet."
That afternoon, I drove to Discovery Coffee on Cook Street and bought one. I took it home, made a cup, and looked at my La Marzocco the way you look at a luxury car after test-driving a go-kart that's somehow faster.
But here's the thing. I wasn't thinking about coffee anymore. I was thinking about the business. Twenty-nine dollars, millions of units sold, invented by a Stanford professor named Alan Adler who also invented the Aerobie flying disc. The product was patented. It had a cult following so intense that there was a World AeroPress Championship with thousands of competitors from sixty countries. People had AeroPress tattoos. Tattoos. Of a coffee maker.
I wasn't just a consumer. I was an investor.
I spend a lot of time thinking about moats. Not the medieval kind, though those are cool too. I mean the thing that keeps competitors from eating your lunch.
AeroPress had maybe the best moat I'd ever seen. Nobody searches for "plastic press coffee maker." They search for "AeroPress." It's like Kleenex or Band-Aid or Advil. The brand IS the category. When you own the noun, you own the market.
Alan Adler had built something that couldn't be copied, even though the device itself was simple. The patents mattered, sure. But the real protection was that word. AeroPress. Try launching a competing product. What are you going to call it? The PressoCoffee 3000? Good luck.
And then there was the community. The World AeroPress Championship isn't some corporate marketing stunt. It grew organically, run by volunteers, with baristas from Melbourne to Helsinki competing to brew the best cup. Thousands of participants across sixty countries. The kind of grassroots enthusiasm that money can't manufacture and competitors can't replicate.
When I saw the tattoos, I knew. That's not customer satisfaction. That's religion.
After we bought AeroPress, I started looking back at every deal we'd done at Tiny and realized there was a pattern. The businesses we loved all had the same DNA.
Dribbble isn't a design portfolio site. It IS the designer network. If you're a graphic designer or illustrator, you have a Dribbble profile. Full stop. It's how you get hired. It's how you get seen. Try explaining to a designer that they should use some other portfolio site. They'll look at you like you suggested they switch to Internet Explorer.
Serato isn't DJ software. It IS DJ software. Ask any DJ on Earth what software they use. They'll say Serato the way a carpenter says Makita. The software has been the standard for over two decades. Clubs install it. Tour riders specify it. When Pioneer tried to compete with Rekordbox, DJs shrugged and kept using Serato.
Letterboxd isn't a movie logging app. It's where film people live. When Scorsese releases a new movie, the conversation doesn't happen on Twitter. It happens on Letterboxd. Film students rate obscure Tarkovsky films at 3am. Casual viewers log their Friday night comedies. A hundred million logs and counting.
Creative Market isn't a design assets marketplace. It's the place independent designers sell fonts, templates, and graphics. Over seven million creators and buyers, all connected in one ecosystem. There's no second choice.
The pattern across all of them: each one IS the thing. Not a thing. THE thing. They're category-defining brands with fanatical users who wouldn't switch even if you paid them. Nobody says "I want gravel from Acme Gravel Pit because they have the finest gravel." But people absolutely say "I need to check Dribbble" or "Let me log this on Letterboxd" or "I'm making my AeroPress."
That distinction is everything.
Early on, Chris and I spent a lot of time driving around Victoria looking at boring businesses. Bottle depots. Elevator repair companies. Gravel pits. Funeral homes. We'd heard all the advice about buying boring businesses and we thought maybe that was the move.
So we'd drive by these places and do the math. A bottle depot might do a few million in revenue with hundreds of employees, massive operational complexity, razor-thin margins, and a small profit at the end of the year. You'd need to show up every day, manage a fleet of trucks, deal with broken equipment and employee turnover, and at the end of it all you'd make what a mid-level software engineer earns working from their couch.
Then we'd think about what happens when something changes. And that's the thing about commodities. Something always changes.
I think about newspapers a lot. In the 1990s, newspapers were money-printing machines. A regional paper might generate $50 million a year in classified revenue alone. Subscribers renewed automatically. Advertisers had nowhere else to go. If you owned a newspaper in 1995, you were basically collecting a toll on information.
Then Craigslist showed up. Then blogs. Then Google. Within fifteen years, newspapers went from gold mines to pennies on the dollar. The people who bought newspaper chains in the early 2000s — smart, experienced operators — watched their investments evaporate. Not because they ran them poorly, but because the moat was never real. The moat was the absence of alternatives.
That's the risk with any commodity business. You're one innovation away from irrelevance. One competitor who figures out how to do it 20% cheaper. One technology shift that makes your entire model obsolete. Gravel is gravel. Bottle depots are bottle depots. There's nothing stopping someone from opening one across the street.
The businesses we buy? Good luck opening an AeroPress across the street.
Over fifteen years and forty-plus acquisitions, we've refined what we look for into six criteria. They're simple, but they're non-negotiable.
A business we can explain to our parents. If I can't describe what the company does in two sentences over dinner, it's too complicated. Complex businesses require complex management, and complex management requires me to be way smarter than I am. Simple businesses let us focus on what matters: making customers happy and growing revenue.
Healthy profits. We look for businesses generating between $500K and $50M in annual profit, with a consistent track record. Not hockey-stick projections. Not "we'll be profitable in eighteen months." Real cash, coming in reliably, year after year. We've seen too many companies with great revenue and no profit. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity.
Happy employees and customers. This one sounds soft, but it's the hardest to fake. When we talk to a company's team and their customers actually like them, that tells us more than any financial model. High employee retention and low customer churn are the best leading indicators I know. If people are miserable, no amount of financial engineering will fix the business.
A unique advantage. A brand people search for by name. A community that self-organizes. A network effect where every new user makes the product better for everyone else. A patent. Something — anything — that means the business isn't one price cut away from losing everything. We want the AeroPress, not the gravel pit.
A long track record. Three to five years minimum. Ideally longer. We want to see how the business performs through recessions, through management changes, through competitive threats. A company that's been profitable for a decade has proven something that a two-year-old startup hasn't. Survival is its own credential.
A fair price. Our simple test: can we get our money back in five years or less? We don't do bidding wars. We don't pay thirty times earnings because a banker created a pretty PowerPoint about "synergies." We offer a fair price, quickly, and if it works for both sides, great. If someone else wants to pay more, they should.
I have this concept I think about called the "New Zealand company." Picture a business where you could move the entire team to New Zealand, a beautiful and expensive country on the other side of the planet, and still grow revenue dramatically without needing to hire proportionally more people.
Software companies can do this. AeroPress can do this. Marketplace businesses with network effects can do this. The product gets better or sales grow without a linear increase in headcount. A twenty-person team can serve a million customers.
Services businesses usually can't. If you run a consulting firm and you want to double revenue, you need to roughly double your team. That's linear scaling, and it caps your upside while multiplying your complexity. Every new employee is a new salary, a new management relationship, a new potential problem. You end up running faster to stay in place.
I watched this play out firsthand. We started MetaLab as a web design agency, and I spent years watching revenue grow in lockstep with headcount. More clients meant more designers, more project managers, more office space, more everything. We'd land a huge project and I'd think "great, we're growing" and then realize we needed to hire eight more people to deliver it. The profit margin barely moved.
The businesses we love are the opposite. Dribbble can add a million users without hiring a single person. AeroPress can sell another hundred thousand units with the same team. Letterboxd doubled its user base during the pandemic and barely needed to grow the team. That's the magic ratio: revenue goes up, headcount stays roughly flat, and profits compound.
Most acquirers show up with a team of bankers, a ninety-day due diligence process, and a term sheet that looks like it was drafted by a committee of anxious lawyers. By the time the deal closes — if it closes — the founder has aged five years and the employees are terrified.
We do it differently.
Speed. We can make a fair offer in days, not months. No endless rounds of negotiation. No death-by-committee. Chris and I look at the numbers, talk to the founder, and make a decision. We've closed deals in under a week.
Permanence. We don't have a fund with a ten-year lifecycle that forces us to sell. We're a public holding company. When we buy a business, we intend to keep it. That means the founder's legacy — the thing they spent years building — doesn't get flipped to some private equity firm in four years and stripped for parts.
Autonomy. Here's the part most founders don't believe until they see it: we don't want to run your business. We want you to run your business. If the founder wants to stay, great. If they want to leave, that's fine too. If they want to stick around three days a week and spend the rest of their time surfing, we can figure that out. We come in, give the founders a huge payday, and do our best to solve all of their problems. It doesn't mean they have to leave.
We're not trying to be the smartest people in the room. We're trying to be the most trustworthy. Founders spend years, sometimes decades, building something they love. They've missed vacations, worked weekends, stressed about payroll at 3am. The least we can do is treat that with respect and not show up with a spreadsheet full of "cost optimization opportunities" that's really code for firing half the team.
If your business sounds like any of these — a brand people search for by name, a product with a community that organizes itself, a simple model throwing off real profit — I'd love to hear from you.
Not because I'm trying to buy everything in sight. But because I know what it's like to build something you love and not know what to do with it next. You might want to take some chips off the table. You might want a partner who can help with the stuff you hate. You might want to step back and know that your team and your customers will be taken care of.
Whatever the situation, I'm happy to talk. No bankers, no pressure, no ninety-page NDAs. Just a conversation.
Read more about how we built Tiny or advice for founders thinking about selling.
That's all for now…
-Andrew
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