Growing Ventures – by Bernhard Hauser

Six Months to Ship a Full Rebuild

After exactly 6 months, we released the rebuild of Notehouse, our latest acquisition at Waterglass. When we acquired Notehouse in Summer 2025, we knew that we would need to rebuild the full application. The codebase had been passed through multiple agencies over the years, and the technical debt had piled

Portfolio Venture

Rebuilding a Product Without Losing Customers

In Summer this year, we made our second acquisition. You can read more about it at The Second Acquisition: Notehouse. However, during the due diligence process, it became increasingly clear that the product’s foundation needed to be rebuilt from scratch. The application had been passed between several external engineering

New Acquisition

Buying a Business With a Broken Codebase

I'm excited to announce that over July and August, we closed the second acquisition in Waterglass's history. Notehouse (getNotehouse.com), which originated as note-taking software that eventually transformed into a lightweight, HIPAA-compliant CRM for nonprofit leaders, social workers and counselors, is a $100k ARR business that

Team

Finding a Partner by Building in Public

I'm excited to share that Nemanja Zarkovic and I are now official partners at Waterglass.io. Here's how we connected and what's coming next. Buy, not build I started Waterglass in January 2024 with a simple idea: instead of building software from scratch and

Experiment

187 Signups, Zero Retained Users

Do you happen to run a business and handle customer support requests through email? Four months ago, we created an internal tool called Reply•AI to manage customer support emails for our portfolio company Pxl. Reply•AI was soon renamed to Responder.cx and launched to the public. We got

Acquisition

When AI Changes What's Worth Buying

If you've been following my journey with Waterglass, you know we focus on acquiring and scaling niche software businesses with the help of AI. One of our guiding principles, however, was that AI not only helps to run businesses more efficiently, but that we will be able to

Portfolio Venture

Growing SaaS With Mini Tools and Directories

The first couple of months after I acquired Pxl in May, I spent most of my time talking to existing customers understanding how happy they are with the product and what they are still missing. I'm happy to say that Pxl is growing and has been growing steadily

Portfolio Venture

A Billion Requests in Four Days

Last weekend, Pxl was attacked through a series of high-traffic requests. We are still not entirely sure whether this was a targeted DDoS attack on some of the links of a specific Pxl team or whether it was actual traffic. In any case, what we do know is that the

Portfolio Venture

What 71 Customers Told Us After the Deal

Have you been thinking about acquiring an early-stage business? Or are you running one yourself right now? Chances are high that you are working on your product's USP, growth channels, and ideal customer segment then. Let's say, the basics. In my opinion, there is a general

Growth

Add an AI Feature and They Will Come

As you probably know by now, Pxl is all about helping you become a better marketer. We do that by providing you with short links, dynamic QR codes, and Microsites (‘micro websites’ or link-in-bio pages). Our users especially like Microsites, but when I looked closer at the overall UX and

Portfolio Venture

Rethinking SaaS Pricing After an Acquisition

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about pricing strategies for Pxl, the first acquisition in the Waterglass portfolio I made earlier this year. Throughout the last 1.5 years, a few pricing experiments have been conducted by the previous owner, mostly around custom packages and lifetime deals. These experiments

Acquisition

55 Questions Before Buying a Business

When evaluating a new acquisition opportunity at Waterglass, I follow a simple process: asking lots of questions. First, when I check out a listing like the one in the video below, I try to ask myself high-level questions about the business, such as... * What is the opportunity with this business?

Portfolio Venture

Three Quick Wins After Buying a Business

After the Pixel acquisition was finalized about two weeks ago, I started working on what I deemed the three most important tasks. Generally speaking, for founders who work on a business for many years, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision when it comes to the product they are building.

New Acquisition

The First Acquisition Took Seven Weeks to Close

It's done. The first acquisition has been finalized this week! I'm very excited to welcome Pixel (pxl.to) to the Waterglass portfolio. Pixel is a leading short link, QR code and microsite builder for marketers, based in Great Britain (UK). The founder of Pixel will remain

Acquisition

Getting the Price and Terms Right

The market is a wonderful imaginary thing, especially when you are about to buy a business. I mean, any deal is about finding the right price for which the seller is willing to sell and the buyer is willing to buy. But between these two prices lies a pretty broad

Acquisition

Knowing Where and What to Buy

In this edition, you will learn where a micro PE fund looks for opportunities and what criteria they have to meet. I will also dive deeper into some of your most frequent questions, such as: * Who would even sell a company so early? * What do you really get for such

Strategy

Why I Buy Instead of Build

For the past 10+ years, I have been working with startups, and B2B SaaS in particular, across different settings: I bootstrapped a startup, At Meta I started and operated a startup accelerator in Berlin, I 'corporate ventured' a startup and I consulted companies in Germany & Austria. With

Manifesto

The Independent Technology Business Manfesto

We often hear stories that technology companies "must fundraise" in order to capture relevant market share and become leaders in their industry. This thinking originates from a time where technology companies needed large sums to get started, and then create a business that can scale at little marginal