Acquisite

Connecting investors and business owners one step at a time

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Inspiration

The amount of small businesses with ownership reaching retiring age is at its zenith. Most of these small business owners have no plans to pass down their business after they retire. Entrepreneurship through acquisition is a type of search fund method that connects entrepreneurs to established small businesses and facilitates acquisition. Acquisite came about as a platform to easier allow this sort of deal flow.

What it does

Acquisite is a platform that seeks to connect aspiring entrepreneurs and aging business owners who are looking to exit their companies at reasonable prices. Acquisite allows business owners to create an account and post their business(es) for investors to look at. On the other end of the platform, investors can make an account and view postings for different businesses and reach out to the ones that interest them.

How we built it

The website is built with Flask acting as the backend with Jinja2 and Bulma supporting the frontend. We are hosting the website on Google Cloud Platform.

Challenges we ran into

Our team ran into issues connecting the database to pulling data on the frontend web page. Certain web pages would simply not work all because we pushed buggy code to the repository.

Since none of us have had experience with the Bulma framework, it was a hurdle to understand the formatting schema and utilize it. However, we did learn that understanding such a framework empowered us to cleanly separate elements and segment them into a cleaner UI.

Since we were given Google Cloud Service credit, it was very helpful to host it on the web for everyone to interact with as well as assist in debugging when we uploaded our app onto a VM. There was some tinkering around with the Service since we were contemplating over doubling down and having a domain as well. After playing around with registering the DNS and name servers, we figured it out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Learning a new framework
  • Implementing SQL with the backend
  • Publishing our project to the cloud
  • Registering domain name

What we learned

  • Flask
  • Bulma
  • GCP

What's next for Acquisite

Acquisite plans on reaching out to sellers and investors to establish a customer base. Acquisite also plans to reach out to search funds that are actively working on acquiring small to mid-size enterprises (SMEs), as they definitely could benefit from a platform that aggregates small businesses that are looking for exits or to be acquired. From there, the firm can look to scaling up a size as popularity grows and working out development issues that could arise from that.

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