How Andrew Culver Sold Churn Buster to Matt and Joelle Goldman (with Ken Johnson) (2015)

Churn Buster is a failed-payment recovery and dunning tool for subscription businesses. Andrew Culver started it in 2013 as a side project while working as a CTO at another company.

The buyers were Matt Goldman and his wife Joelle, who had previously run the Stripe analytics product HookFeed. They had known Andrew through MicroConf and a founder Slack group and had told him they would be interested if he ever sold. Once he got serious about selling, the two sides negotiated over a few months and followed a lightweight, low-legal-cost acquisition process with diligence focused on metrics and code. Andrew kept a partial ownership stake, and Ken Johnson, formerly of Manpacks, joined to lead sales. Andrew's LinkedIn lists his Churn Buster role as ending in November 2015, and a June 2017 interview describes the new owners as having run it for about a year and a half, which points to a late-2015 handover. The price was not disclosed.

In that interview Matt Goldman said the new team changed too much right after taking over and lost many customers in the first two months, and that cash was tight because they had raised money to buy the business but not to grow it. Andrew went on to build the Bullet Train Rails framework and later became President of ClickFunnels.