Mauricio Blint, founder of AppSorteos, built his multimillion-dollar SaaS from an idea that started over a weekend at the in-laws.
Like many engineer-entrepreneurs, he’d searched online for a solution to a problem (in this case, how to easily create online giveaways on social media). Not finding one, he decided to build it himself. This was back in 2019. Just five years later, in March 2024, AppSorteos was acquired in a multimillion-dollar deal.
Mauricio’s path to a life-changing acquisition appears unusually straight and short. Most entrepreneurs can only dream of building a SaaS that later sells for seven figures. Perhaps that’s because Mauricio doesn’t think of himself as an entrepreneur, but a builder who loves solving problems.
I spoke to Mauricio remotely from his home in Argentina, a country where hyperinflation of over 200 percent has made it practically impossible to operate a business in the Argentine peso, never mind sell one. When AppSorteos outgrew Mauricio’s care, the choice of exit paths seemed hopelessly narrow.
Latin American companies are high-risk for most international buyers, with few lenders willing to finance the transaction. How did Mauricio find buyers and navigate such a complex acquisition? And how did a university dropout learn the skills he needed to scale his business idea?
Learn how Rainier Nanquil and the Guided by Acquire team helped Mauricio find buyers for his immensely profitable yet geographically challenged SaaS company, and why Mauricio believes that getting started is the single most important action for budding entrepreneurs.
Escaping the Corporate Cage
Maurico is curious by nature. When he was ten years old, his mom sent him to computer classes where he learned php and javascript. These languages opened doors to a world with endless possibilities. With the right knowledge, he could build anything he wanted. The freedom intoxicated young Mauricio.
“I’ve always loved working with computers and building things,” Mauricio said. “You can learn for free and alone if you want. All you need is a computer with internet access. Then you can build things that are useful to people without any capital. In fact, people might pay to use what you’ve built.”
After finishing school in Guatraché, Mauricio moved to Cordoba to study systems engineering at the Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. But academia couldn’t contain his restless nature. After three years, he quit when a friend suggested he apply to one of Argentina’s hugely successful tech companies, Globant.
“I got accepted at Globant in 2015,” Maurico said. “It was my first full-time job. I felt I could learn more while working there than in the classroom, so I never resumed my studies.”
At Globant, Mauricio worked with big, international clients like Southwest Airlines. Great names to put on his CV, but Globant’s corporate development cycle soon began to bore him. Like a Formula One driver stuck in a go-kart, he could only move as fast as the company allowed. It was stifling his drive to experiment and adapt on the fly, eroding his motivation and taking the fun out of building.
Would things be different at a startup?
Startups are known to be agile, flat structures that encourage employees to wear many hats and “move fast and break things”. After a string of senior positions at various companies, Mauricio finally took up the mantle of CTO at a social scheduling company called Postcron that had fewer than 12 employees.
“At Postcron, I learned what it takes to run a startup,” Mauricio said. “I also learned how to work with all the social media APIs – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. I probably wouldn’t have built AppSorteos so quickly had I not grown comfortable with the social media ecosystem. You learn a lot more working at startups.”
A Lucrative Weekend at the In-Laws
A weekend at the in-laws might inspire dread in some. For Mauricio, it inspired a business. Back in La Bamba, Mauricio was visiting his girlfriend’s parents for the very first time. He was a little nervous, so he steered the conversation towards his in-laws’ pharmacy business. Could he help them with social media?
“I asked my mother-in-law if she had an Instagram account,” Mauricio said. “When she said no, I set up an account on her phone and suggested she run a giveaway to build some followers. One month later, they needed to select the winners, so I looked online for options and couldn’t find anything good that was also free. I spent that weekend building my own solution which eventually became AppSorteos.”
AppSorteos’ first iteration was a simple webform where Mauricio would manually select a winner using a randomization tool. But he’d learned enough about marketing at Postcron so that within four months, Google was emailing Mauricio almost daily to announce huge bumps in site traffic.
Sensing an opportunity, Mauricio set up an Instagram account for AppSorteos and was inundated with DMs reporting bugs and suggesting new features. Mauricio had solved a real problem. So many people wanted to use AppSorteos to run their internet giveaways that Mauricio couldn’t run things manually anymore. Once he’d automated the process, he set up a Paypal account and earned his first 99 cents on September 21st, 2019.
And from then on, the till didn’t stop ringing.
Explosive Growth and Quitting His Job
Soon, AppSorteos was making ten times as much money as Mauricio’s day job. It didn’t make sense for him to do both, so he quit and continued to grow the business. If he has any regrets during AppSorteos’ first few years, it’s that he didn’t quit his job sooner. As CTO of a startup, leaving without finding his replacement would’ve been unfair, but it meant many months of late nights.
“Running your own business while holding down a full-time job is tough,” Mauricio said. “As the company grew, I had to incorporate in Argentina, learn about taxes, open a US account for Stripe payments, learn about US tax, and loads more. I had to learn these things progressively because I still had a full-time job. Now I understand all these things, I think I could start a new application much faster.”
Despite these challenges, Maurico is happy to have just started – even if the timing wasn’t perfect. One thing that troubles him about other budding entrepreneurs is their endless capacity for prevarication disguised as planning. You can’t charge people for something that doesn’t exist, no matter how good your idea is. And perhaps that’s an advantage for engineers like him who build solutions primarily for fun.
“The best advice I can give to other entrepreneurs is just to start,” Mauricio said. “Build an MVP. Release it. Gather feedback. Refine and re-release. Repeat this cycle until you’re confident people will pay for your product. Your first release probably won’t get many users, so don’t overcomplicate the process. Just release something basic to test your idea and see what happens. It worked for me.”
Getting Acquired by an International Buyer
At what point do you decide to sell a business? For Mauricio, it was the point at which he could no longer manage it solo. When AppSorteos had begun making serious money – the point at which Mauricio quit his job – his old boss and mentor at Postcron, Lucas Emma, became AppSorteos’ strategic advisor. Together, they discussed how to efficiently scale the business to maximize the valuation before Mauricio burned out.
“I said from the beginning that I didn’t want to hire a team,” Mauricio said. “With Lucas’s help, the business hit seven-figures in revenue, but I was overwhelmed with all the extra work I had to do. Lucas persuaded me to hire a customer success manager who handled the support tickets so I could focus on coding.”
In April 2022, Lucas and Mauricio began to collate all the information they’d need to sell AppSorteos. From profit and loss statements to expense reports, they prepared everything that a buyer might want to see. Then they listed the business on Acquire.com, taking advantage of the Guided by Acquire program, with Lucas leading the sale and our M&A advisor, Rainier Nanquil, supporting them through the process.
AppSorteos attracted over 100 interested buyers. The problem was finding the right one.
Rainier said: “Since AppSorteos was based in Latin America, international buyers couldn’t get acquisition financing. It’s then a lot harder to find buyers who can close the deal, so we had to get creative with deal structures. Seller financing, conditional holdbacks – initially, everything was on the table to ensure the right buyer didn’t slip through our fingers because the lack of leverage put them off making an offer.”
Deal leverage, or acquisition financing, minimizes the risk of acquiring a company by spreading the purchase price over time. A buyer can then use company profits to make repayments. Even high net worth individuals or well-capitalized firms don’t want to liquidate all their assets to finance an acquisition, and if leverage is in short supply, the seller may need to step in to offer financing themselves, for example.
With flexible deal structures on the table, Rainier helped Mauricio and Lucas whittle down their shortlist to a firm in the US.
“I wasn’t in a rush to sell, so we took our time and spoke to a few buyers,” Mauricio said. “But Graham Software stood out for their professionalism,” Mauricio said. “Their LOI was very detailed, at the price I wanted, and they also had some experience in the industry. Since it was their first acquisition in South America, they came here to Argentina to meet us in person, and they seemed like really good people.”
Mauricio had found the right buyer, but how would he transact the acquisition? Rainier helped untangle the complex process ahead. The Graham team shouldered the legal work to incorporate AppSorteos in the US, which involved many legal and due diligence checks. Finally, with a creative deal structure in place, Mauricio was able to close the acquisition while minimizing any financial loss due to currency fluctuations.
Now AppSorteos has been acquired, what’s next for Mauricio?
“I’m currently helping my new partners at GSD (short for Graham Software Development) build a development and marketing team to help the company grow,” Mauricio said. “Nothing changes for me in the meantime, and once I’ve transferred my knowledge to the new team, I’ll help my business partners achieve their goals in other ways. But I love building things, so I’ll probably build something new.”
Mauricio’s success might appear fortunate to some. But the headlines belie the power of his straight-shooting approach to entrepreneurship. Mauricio didn’t launch AppSorteos with a five-year plan to getting acquired. He observed a problem, built the solution, and then marketed it with knowledge he already had. It’s a refreshing simple yet effective path to entrepreneurship that so many aspiring founders muddy with overplanning. To use Mauricio’s words: “Build something and see if people use it.” Hopefully his story inspires others to do the same.
The content on this site is not intended to provide legal, financial, or M&A advice. It is for information purposes only, and any links provided are for your convenience. Please seek the services of a tax advisor before filing your taxes or conducting tax-related operations. It is not Acquire’s intention to solicit or interfere with any established relationship you may have with any tax professional.