We acquired Prospero! How, what, why and where it is going
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 8:57 am
We knew Prospero’s story from the beginning. In fact, their launch story was one of the posts we read in depth to inspire our launch on Product Hunt .
Prospero ended up at #2 that day, and today the product has over 1,400 votes .
Here is Prospero's story in a video:
How do we get to this?
Our in-house designer at the time, Avi Entire , saw an episode on Ran Segall’s channel where Ran said they were looking for a partner in the marketing/business development field to help them skyrocket Prospero’s growth.
(A moment of objective recommendation – if you’re a designer, I run the YouTube channel. It has 63 followers and the episodes there can certainly help you take your freelance business to the next level.)
In fact, I had a few brief conversations with Ran beforehand, so I saved the small talk and got straight to the point:
Conversation
Sorry, it's in Hebrew, but I basically asked if they would be sold.
From there, we had more conversations, data sharing, phone calls, a meeting that included architecture and code review with Ran Margaliot (who
This is the email Ran sent to Prospero customers:
Subject: Prospero has new owners and a better future!
TL;DR - Prospero is now owned by a new team, nothing changes for you, your account or your proposals.
Full story -
As some of you may know, Prospero was built and operated by an initial designer (Ran) and developer (Ayal).
We supported the start-up and running of the company as freelancers, and over time we did so while trying to make Prospero better, and providing you with good service became very difficult (if you sent me a message without a reply, I deeply apologize).
A few months ago we realized that we couldn’t continue supporting Prospero ourselves. As our customer community (that’s you!) means a lot to us, we didn’t want to norway phone number library close the service and started looking for a partner who would like to pick up where we left off and continue investing in making the product better and giving you a great experience.
When we came across Tomer & Gal , we knew we had the right match. The guys have already created a successful online product (called poptin ), and we’re looking to expand into the proposal space as well.
We are transferring ownership to them today, in the hope that you will benefit from a better product and customer experience. As mentioned above, there will be no changes to your current account, pricing, or offerings.
If you have any questions, please reply to this email and Tomer & Gal will try to provide clear answers.
We had the pleasure of serving you.
Ran and Ayal.
PS - Tomer & Gal have big plans for Prospero in 2019, more details to come.
Why buy an existing product? How do we ensure that a product is good?
First of all, we were eager to build a big side project to poptin . A few months before we had thought of many ideas and even created full specifications for two projects, but in the end we abandoned them for various reasons.
At the same time as Poptin, among others, we manage Premio and have hired a new employee dedicated solely to that.
Okay, so why buy and not build from scratch?
Or: How do we validate and prioritize ideas?
The idea of creating beautiful proposals quickly is not a new idea, and that's part of what we love about it. There are already successful competitors and companies doing this, which means there's a huge market and there are people who get real value from these tools and are willing to pay for it.
Furthermore, Prospero has already achieved a good MRR and beyond testing POC (Proof of Concept).
We always prefer independent products. What does that mean?
Products that don't depend on third parties and can exist without fear of big companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
In the past, we already started developing a product that was built entirely on Facebook's platform, and while we were developing the product and after we had invested $7000, Facebook changed its policy and we had to abandon the idea (our potential competitor, who raised $2 million in funding, closed the deal the same day).
Acquiring an existing product saves a lot of time and uncertainty.
Creating a new product requires a lot of resources, strategy creation, manpower, and time (which is the most expensive resource here). We would have to sit down and spec everything from scratch, design the interface, interview users, find a programmer (and pay them X good months to develop a normal MVP), start marketing, and 1001 other things.
While we still had to find a programmer to lead the development, for all the other things we already have a good infrastructure and many lessons we took away from running Poptin.
Another reason we were confident in the deal was the people behind Prospero. A short meeting or conversation with Ran and Eyal (and also with Lior, who was part of Prospero for the first year) is enough to understand that Prospero was built to high standards.
This is a field in which we have a good knowledge and interest. Although we are talking about "sales" rather than "marketing", we do not buy a company in the field of IOT or VR, and our knowledge (and motivation to learn it) are close to zero. This is a system that, if we were familiar with it back in the days when we were sending dozens of offers to promotion clients as a digital agency, we would be happy to use it.
In addition to these points, we have a table where we write each idea in each column, and each row has another parameter that will influence the decision to go ahead with the idea or not. For each of these parameters, we give a score from 1 to 5 and, at the end, we add up.
These parameters can be:
An evergreen product, a product that is not fashionable and that we find difficult to imagine that people will stop using it in the next X years.
Type of clients: Are these clients fun to serve or not?
Is it possible to scale the product using paid campaigns (Google, Facebook, etc.)?
Technological depth and is technical support simple or complex?
Is the market educated (and are there competitors, if not then maybe the idea is not such a good one)?
Infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Market size and more.
Prospero's roadmap
If you sign up and play around with the interface, you'll find that you can create a beautiful proposal in just a few minutes. Próspero already does this and does it well.
Prospero ended up at #2 that day, and today the product has over 1,400 votes .
Here is Prospero's story in a video:
How do we get to this?
Our in-house designer at the time, Avi Entire , saw an episode on Ran Segall’s channel where Ran said they were looking for a partner in the marketing/business development field to help them skyrocket Prospero’s growth.
(A moment of objective recommendation – if you’re a designer, I run the YouTube channel. It has 63 followers and the episodes there can certainly help you take your freelance business to the next level.)
In fact, I had a few brief conversations with Ran beforehand, so I saved the small talk and got straight to the point:
Conversation
Sorry, it's in Hebrew, but I basically asked if they would be sold.
From there, we had more conversations, data sharing, phone calls, a meeting that included architecture and code review with Ran Margaliot (who
This is the email Ran sent to Prospero customers:
Subject: Prospero has new owners and a better future!
TL;DR - Prospero is now owned by a new team, nothing changes for you, your account or your proposals.
Full story -
As some of you may know, Prospero was built and operated by an initial designer (Ran) and developer (Ayal).
We supported the start-up and running of the company as freelancers, and over time we did so while trying to make Prospero better, and providing you with good service became very difficult (if you sent me a message without a reply, I deeply apologize).
A few months ago we realized that we couldn’t continue supporting Prospero ourselves. As our customer community (that’s you!) means a lot to us, we didn’t want to norway phone number library close the service and started looking for a partner who would like to pick up where we left off and continue investing in making the product better and giving you a great experience.
When we came across Tomer & Gal , we knew we had the right match. The guys have already created a successful online product (called poptin ), and we’re looking to expand into the proposal space as well.
We are transferring ownership to them today, in the hope that you will benefit from a better product and customer experience. As mentioned above, there will be no changes to your current account, pricing, or offerings.
If you have any questions, please reply to this email and Tomer & Gal will try to provide clear answers.
We had the pleasure of serving you.
Ran and Ayal.
PS - Tomer & Gal have big plans for Prospero in 2019, more details to come.
Why buy an existing product? How do we ensure that a product is good?
First of all, we were eager to build a big side project to poptin . A few months before we had thought of many ideas and even created full specifications for two projects, but in the end we abandoned them for various reasons.
At the same time as Poptin, among others, we manage Premio and have hired a new employee dedicated solely to that.
Okay, so why buy and not build from scratch?
Or: How do we validate and prioritize ideas?
The idea of creating beautiful proposals quickly is not a new idea, and that's part of what we love about it. There are already successful competitors and companies doing this, which means there's a huge market and there are people who get real value from these tools and are willing to pay for it.
Furthermore, Prospero has already achieved a good MRR and beyond testing POC (Proof of Concept).
We always prefer independent products. What does that mean?
Products that don't depend on third parties and can exist without fear of big companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
In the past, we already started developing a product that was built entirely on Facebook's platform, and while we were developing the product and after we had invested $7000, Facebook changed its policy and we had to abandon the idea (our potential competitor, who raised $2 million in funding, closed the deal the same day).
Acquiring an existing product saves a lot of time and uncertainty.
Creating a new product requires a lot of resources, strategy creation, manpower, and time (which is the most expensive resource here). We would have to sit down and spec everything from scratch, design the interface, interview users, find a programmer (and pay them X good months to develop a normal MVP), start marketing, and 1001 other things.
While we still had to find a programmer to lead the development, for all the other things we already have a good infrastructure and many lessons we took away from running Poptin.
Another reason we were confident in the deal was the people behind Prospero. A short meeting or conversation with Ran and Eyal (and also with Lior, who was part of Prospero for the first year) is enough to understand that Prospero was built to high standards.
This is a field in which we have a good knowledge and interest. Although we are talking about "sales" rather than "marketing", we do not buy a company in the field of IOT or VR, and our knowledge (and motivation to learn it) are close to zero. This is a system that, if we were familiar with it back in the days when we were sending dozens of offers to promotion clients as a digital agency, we would be happy to use it.
In addition to these points, we have a table where we write each idea in each column, and each row has another parameter that will influence the decision to go ahead with the idea or not. For each of these parameters, we give a score from 1 to 5 and, at the end, we add up.
These parameters can be:
An evergreen product, a product that is not fashionable and that we find difficult to imagine that people will stop using it in the next X years.
Type of clients: Are these clients fun to serve or not?
Is it possible to scale the product using paid campaigns (Google, Facebook, etc.)?
Technological depth and is technical support simple or complex?
Is the market educated (and are there competitors, if not then maybe the idea is not such a good one)?
Infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Market size and more.
Prospero's roadmap
If you sign up and play around with the interface, you'll find that you can create a beautiful proposal in just a few minutes. Próspero already does this and does it well.