How Ian Blair Jumped From Building Apps to Selling Laundry Sauce With Acquire.com

Startup Acquisition Stories

Ian Blair has been an entrepreneur his whole life. As a kid, he sold lemonade, and then graduated to golf balls in adolescence.

While in university, Ian found his calling for the next decade: white-labeling Andrew Gazdecki’s Bizness Apps app-building software to churches. Later, he built his own template app builder, except with more customizable features (Bizness Apps meets Wordpress is how he describes it) called BuildFire.

He completed his new app-builder in 2014, and through ten years of savvy marketing, helped over 15,000 satisfied customers build custom phone and tablet apps.

But Ian always considered himself more of a marketer than a technical founder.

In his free time, he’d cooked up an ecommerce project in 2021 – a new take on laundry detergent called Laundry Sauce. In just a year and a half, it brought in eight figures in revenue while Ian was still working at BuildFire pulling 80-hour workweeks.

To return funds to investors (and time for himself), Ian sold BuildFire on Acquire.com with the aid of none other than Acquire.com CEO and former competitor, Andrew Gazdecki. Andrew helped Ian close an all-cash offer with an interested buyer, funding a surf trip to Indonesia and enough seed money to feel secure going all-in on his new venture.

Listen to Andrew and Ian chat post-acquisition as they discuss:

• Their unique experiences of the app-builder industry
• Why modular SaaS businesses are hard to scale
• Why Ian settled on laundry detergent for his next business

Ian is just getting started and you can follow his journey here:

• Instagram : @ianblair44
• laundrysauce.com