# Growing Ventures > Lessons from buying, building and growing software ventures. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages - [About Bernhard Hauser](https://www.hauser.io/about-me.md) - I'm the founder and CEO of Waterglass, where we focus on AI strategy, AI agents and our venture studio, along with the business acquisitions we have made since 2024. Previously, * I incorporated and managed a corporate venture with €3.8M in total funding * I launched Facebook's first startup accele… - [About this site](https://www.hauser.io/about.md) - Bernhard Hauser is an independent publication launched in May 2025 by Bernhard Hauser. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Bernhard Hauser to continue… - [📫 Subscribe for free](https://www.hauser.io/subscribe.md) ## Posts - [Good Pricing Grows With the Value You Deliver](https://www.hauser.io/good-pricing-grows-with-the-value-you-deliver.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/205.1396251× At our portfolio company Notehouse, AI agents run our recurring BI check-ins, do SEO research and manage parts of our outbound campaigns. This kind of work gets done every week, with some initial time investment upfront and regular check-ins since t… - [My New Coworker Is an AI Agent With Its Own Computer](https://www.hauser.io/i-gave-an-ai-agent-its-own-computer-and-it-changed-how-i-see-the-future-of-saas.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/293.0677921× Note: The title of this post has been updated. A few weeks ago I came across a post on Reddit that explained how to set up a fully autonomous AI agent that simply links to your existing Claude subscription. No paid orchestrator, no new platform to l… - [Productized Services Are Back](https://www.hauser.io/productized-services-are-back.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/266.9453331× Do you remember when everyone online was talking about productized services? Just two years ago, productized services were everywhere. Many founders I knew who were doing consulting work on the side were packaging up their work into fixed-scope offe… - [Today, Distribution Is Built Before The Product](https://www.hauser.io/today-distribution-is-built-before-the-product.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/228.9110421× After publishing last week's story on everyone being a media company now, I had lunch with Thomas, a content creator who has 50,000+ followers on TikTok and 24,000+ on Instagram. He started creating video content about 1.5 years ago across different… - [Everyone Is a Media Company Now. Most Just Don't Know It Yet.](https://www.hauser.io/everyone-is-a-media-company-now-most-just-dont-know-it-yet.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/251.2196251× a16z, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world, has its own content division. They produce podcasts, write essays, hire editors and run newsletters. They treat content as a core part of their business, not a side project. That is not an a… - [AI Made Software Easier to Build But Harder to Price](https://www.hauser.io/ai-made-software-easier-to-build-but-harder-to-price.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/262.0604171× Not too long ago, I worked with a client on a new AI-native software product that helped their users create personal branding content for social media. Their main business, however, is a hands-off service where they produce personal branding content… - [Build a Boring Business](https://www.hauser.io/build-a-boring-business.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/232.4375831× I've been working in tech for close to 15 years and have founded several businesses during that time. Some were successful, but most were not. Regardless of that, I was fortunate to build a network of founders and operators who I truly admire. Many… - [Building Software Businesses for an AI Future](https://www.hauser.io/building-software-businesses-for-an-ai-future.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/324.5714581× Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been the darling of investors and founders alike: build once, charge forever, watch margins expand as revenue scales faster than cost. But once AI has entered the market and found product-market-fit with software dev… - [In a World of Software Abundance, Focus On Distribution](https://www.hauser.io/in-a-world-of-software-abundance-focus-on-distribution.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/279.9542921× When we acquired Notehouse in summer 2025, it looked like a straightforward software deal on paper. A HIPAA compliant CRM for social workers and nonprofit leaders with $100k in annual recurring revenue, 250+ customers and a 4.7 star Capterra rating.… - [AI Changed What We Build. Then It Changed Who We Hire.](https://www.hauser.io/ai-changed-what-we-build-then-it-changed-who-we-hire.md) - Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)0:00/234.8669581× I recently worked with a person on a client's venture project who was shipping faster and with better judgment than people with twice their experience. They weren't a senior product manager nor were they a full-stack engineer – and I couldn't tell y… - [Six Months to Ship a Full Rebuild](https://www.hauser.io/and-we-are-live-the-new-notehouse-has-officially-launched.md) - 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 ha… - [Rebuilding a Product Without Losing Customers](https://www.hauser.io/how-our-latest-acquisition-is-rebuilt-from-scratch.md) - 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 seve… - [Buying a Business With a Broken Codebase](https://www.hauser.io/the-second-acquisition-notehouse.md) - 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 counselor… - [Finding a Partner by Building in Public](https://www.hauser.io/a-new-partner-at-waterglass.md) - 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 hustling/hoping/praying for product-mark… - [187 Signups, Zero Retained Users](https://www.hauser.io/why-the-responder-cx-experiment-failed-and-why-im-not-surprised.md) - 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 187 waitlist… - [When AI Changes What's Worth Buying](https://www.hauser.io/how-has-ai-changed-our-acquisition-strategy-2.md) - 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 fulfil our mission of run… - [Growing SaaS With Mini Tools and Directories](https://www.hauser.io/how-i-build-pxls-seo-strategy-with-mini-tools-and-directories.md) - 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 especially after the acquisition, altho… - [A Billion Requests in Four Days](https://www.hauser.io/1-billion-requests-the-attack-on-pxl.md) - 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 mind-blowing number of 1 billion re… - [What 71 Customers Told Us After the Deal](https://www.hauser.io/pxl-the-privacy-friendly-bitly-alternative.md) - 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 rule: the earlier the (a… - [Add an AI Feature and They Will Come](https://www.hauser.io/add-an-ai-feature-and-they-will-come.md) - 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 usage metr… - [Rethinking SaaS Pricing After an Acquisition](https://www.hauser.io/how-pxls-saas-pricing-strategy-is-evolving.md) - 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. Thes… - [55 Questions Before Buying a Business](https://www.hauser.io/55-questions-i-ask-before-i-buy-a-business.md) - 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?… - [Three Quick Wins After Buying a Business](https://www.hauser.io/3-things-i-started-working-on-right-after-the-pixel-acquisition.md) - 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. When someone n… - [The First Acquisition Took Seven Weeks to Close](https://www.hauser.io/the-first-acquisition-pixel.md) - 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 on board as an independent… - [Getting the Price and Terms Right](https://www.hauser.io/the-basics-of-micro-pe-the-right-price-and-the-right-terms.md) - 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 area in which the terms of a deal c… - [Knowing Where and What to Buy](https://www.hauser.io/the-basics-of-micro-pe-where-and-what-to-buy.md) - 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 a price? * Can this really be a… - [Why I Buy Instead of Build](https://www.hauser.io/the-independent-micro-pe-entrepreneur.md) - 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 all that… - [The Independent Technology Business Manfesto](https://www.hauser.io/the-independent-technology-business-manfesto.md) - 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 marg… ## Optional - [RSS Feed](https://www.hauser.io/rss/) - [Sitemap](https://www.hauser.io/sitemap.xml) - [Full content of pages and posts](https://www.hauser.io/llms-full.txt)