The Unlikely Story of How I Built and Sold Brioched
From peddling referral codes to getting acquired
Get comfortable. Settle into a cushy chair, grab a mug of hot chocolate (or your refreshment of choice) and strap on your seatbelt because this will be a thrilling ride.
Minigame: take a sip of hot choc/a shot (maybe not a shot, unless you want to get wasted, which isn’t recommended during this reading) every time the words ‘referral’ or ‘code’ are mentioned.
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A halcyon inception — celebrations before the storm
Attempting to recall the distinct lightbulb moment Brioched popped into my head is akin to trying to find a missing sock in a messy bedroom — it’s there somewhere, but I just can’t seem to track it down. All I know is that it happened soon after realising I was binging an unhealthy amount of Netflix during last year’s brutal Melbourne lockdown in May or June, which spurred a dogged determination to do anything useful to atone for my complete lack of productivity… as long as it didn’t involve doing any uni coursework, which I was already miles behind on. Oh well.
An unlimited money hack
A few months prior, I had posted a referral code on a subreddit for the first time, curious about the prospects of someone not only finding, but then actually using my code. The subreddit wasn’t even a dedicated subreddit for the specific product, interest or anything with a remote nexus — it was straight up just a sub (subreddits, for those who haven’t caught on yet) for posting referral codes: r/referralcodes (or r/promocodes, I really can’t remember).
Like a kid getting an unexpected ice cream treat, I was pleasantly surprised to find that people actually use referral codes posted in subreddits. Mind you, these are subs which already house thousands upon thousands of these moneymaking codes, with many derived from the same platform.
Ecstatic is the only word that can describe the feeling of seeing the erratic free stock or a few extra bucks land in my piggy bank after some random internet stranger had found and used my code through Reddit. It was like I had discovered some kind of life hack: unlimited, free coffee money for almost zero effort.
I started treating the whole activity like a game where the score was kept with the $$$ I generated from referrals, and to master the game, I created multiple Reddit accounts, started posting in more subs (like r/referral & r/referralcodeshub) and downloaded a whole bunch of apps (that were mainly Australian consumer Fintech startups like Up, Stake, 86400, etc) that had referral programs, so I could go Purge-like crazy spamming the plethora of codes I had at my disposal.
Set on ‘winning’, I decided to ‘cheat’ a little to get my posts ranking higher within the subs (against other posted codes from the same apps/websites) and on Google Search rankings. To do so, I used my various accounts to upvote and comment on my own posts. Soon after, I started to get warnings of account suspension from Reddit for vote manipulation and spamming. And just like that, a game of cat and mouse was afoot.
I soon realised they tracked accounts on the same IP address to prevent vote manipulation, so I installed a VPN and switched locations every time before using a different account to post, upvote or comment, and guess what? I fooled Reddit’s nosy algorithm like the Four Horsemen in ‘Now You See Me’ crew did to the officials in their famous card scene. I continued doing this for a while, but I eventually got sloppy and would sometimes accidentally, and sometimes not-so-accidentally forget to use the VPN.
The hack stops working
Before I knew it, Snoo’s ban hammer came slamming down on all of my accounts one-by-one. Like a woman scorned, it obliterated my old posts from existence, and seized my ability to make new ones. A dreadful awareness soon arose: that my incoming stream of coffee money was virtually gone, and that I liked having free coffee. A lot.
At this point, my pocket was thicker by a few hundred dollarydoos from all the referrals, and that’s a lot of coffee — fully paid for by the marketing budgets of companies that dished out these random strings of letters and numbers that paved the way to moolah.
You may ask, ‘What’s with all the drama? Just create more Reddit accounts and we’re back on, baby! Right?’.
Wrong. As mentioned before, Reddit subs don’t like spam, so they impose restrictions on which accounts can post to ensure an army of bots don’t just create a million new accounts every five seconds and continually flood Reddit with low-quality content. Restrictions include, inter alia, having a minimum level of karma (total upvotes minus total downvotes on your account) and having a minimum age for the account (which is usually a month or two old).
My no effort money hack had turned into a low effort money hack with the use of multiple accounts and the VPN. When Snoo decided to enforce the rules of the game, I wasn’t willing to spend the time creating five more new accounts, use a VPN, farm karma (through posting and trying to get upvotes from others) and wait a month just to get a few more bucks, while still bearing the risk of being banned again. That would’ve made it a high effort money hack, and I thought I could definitely do something better with my time and energy to get the same amount of money (or more). Opportunity cost, baby.
Thus, I had to get creative to continue sipping from the Fountain of Referral Juice without the almighty Reddit’s community or its SEO.
Enter…
A sh*tty idea & the first pivot — forced to act
Posting referral codes in subs isn’t really a ‘thing/project/actual endeavour’ — so what I did next isn’t a pivot per se, but a move I made to preserve my standing in the game.
After some cogitation and a modicum of moping, I decided how I would remedy the situation: I would create my own website where I could publish a plethora of referrals how and when I wanted, without Snoo (or anyone else) interfering with bans.
And so, Free Referral Codes — ‘become a promo code millionaire’ was born.
No, it did not dawn upon me how cringey that tagline was when I coined it (okay, maybe a little).
Building a dud
I built Free Referral Codes on Wordpress to be a hub for every referral code I could get my hands on — a one-stop shop for the internet’s desire to eke out a few extra dollars from their favourite apps through strangers’ referral codes.
However there was a caveat, that the ‘strangers’ would not be a a collective group of Redditors, but the monopoly of me.
Three referral codes in with a makeshift logo, some tinkering around the website and it not being even four days later, I had an epiphany (if you can even call it that!) that this was a terrible idea.
How was I to get anyone to visit the site, much less use the codes?
Perhaps sharing it on social media and trying to bake in some good SEO for Google Search would have helped, but this project definitely did not instil much pride in me. In fact, I think I would have been embarrassed to share something that felt so ‘cheap’ — because I viewed it as pleading with others to ‘please use my codes’, like the desperate Puss in Boots in Shrek.
Apart from my fragile feelings, I knew deep inside that if I were to spend actual time and effort building something, it definitely would not be a hub for referral codes that wouldn’t even be able to compete with:
existing platforms like it driven by bots, and
Reddit, where droves already flock to for their satisfaction.
Who knew there was so much to say even before getting to Brioched, huh?
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Putting the ingredients together — baking Brioched
As mentioned before, many of the referral codes I shared came from platforms like Up, Spaceship Voyager, Stake and the like. I was an avid user (still am for some) of these platforms, and if not, then I had at least done enough poking around to quench my curiosity and then decided to not continue using them.
Being somewhat of a tech/Fintech enthusiast and an all-around curious cat, I read and watched multiple reviews prior to and while using these platforms.
Uncovering the problem
I realised that when searching for reviews of platforms like ‘Up Bank’ or ‘Stake’ on Google last year, the top 9-10 results yielded fell short of the essence of the word ‘review’ despite the title. Most were either summaries of the platform and its features, or poorly written writeups which had failed to cover important questions or missed out key features.
It’s likely many of these websites had writers who are either paid by the word (contracted copywriters) or just didn’t care too much about producing in-depth and insightful content.
Noticing this gap in the reviews space, I decided to fix my referral code issue by exploiting the need for high-quality, in-depth and transparent writeups on consumer Fintech.
Two birds, one stone
And how would publishing these writeups solve my problems? Ding ding ding! You guessed it — by placing my referral codes within the writeups! This way,
Readers would feel a little more obliged to use my code instead of a random Reddit one because I elucidated all the nooks and crannies of the platform for them
People will discover the platform through my writeups and try it out with my code
There’s a place for me to plug my codes while still being able to maintain shreds of my dignity when sharing my writeups because they are amazing and I am proud of them
I would also be able to put some ads on the website + get sponsorships sometime in the future.
Hence, a rough purpose for my project came to life.
I quickly got to thinking how I could implement the idea the best way I could, and laid down a few unrefined ‘principles’:
The name has to be catchy and able to be easily remembered (ie three syllables max and not weird or complex)
The domain has to be the name itself up till dot com; no variations for brand recognition & perceived legitimacy (ie not briochedwriteups.com, br1och3d.com or brioched.wordpress.com)
The website has to be minimal with a focus on the writeups, but still relatively well designed
The whole thing needs to be relatively cheap to launch and operate (in terms of buying the domain and hosting the website).
These weren’t points I wrote down at the time, but lingered somewhere in the back of my head, making sure that I was on the right track (to me, at least).
What’s in a name?
In deciding what I should call it, I just threw a whole bunch of darts at a board (not literally) to see what stuck:
In making the list, I constantly checked potential names against Porkbun’s available domains to ensure I could have a ‘clean’ domain which matched the name letter for letter until dot com.
During the brainstorm session, I looked around my room and saw a bag of brioche bread, which inspired me (that’s kind of funny, having a bag of bread inspire) to write down Brioched, a play on the French word brioche.
I settled on Brioched after ruminating on it for a couple of hours and then asking my girlfriend about it — she looked at my list and laughed before telling me after 5 minutes that ‘temporising’ was a dumb name and that Brioched was her favourite.
Brioched’s first logo was taken straight from Google Images (but don’t tell anyone that!), and I can’t exactly remember what the search query was, but it was probably something along the lines of ‘brioche icon’ or ‘loaf of bread icon’.
Giddy with excitement from having settled on the name (and bought the domain for and having found a humorous yet fitting logo, I started to research how I was going to build the website.
A tale of two Wordpresses
Of course, Wordpress came to mind as the easiest way to do it, as it had been quite breezy setting up Free Referral Codes on Wordpress.
However, Wordpress.com wanted to charge me a relative arm and a leg to upgrade to a higher tier so I could connect a custom domain (being brioched.com), host the website and use a whole bunch of other ‘paid features’. Sayonara Wordpress (sort of).
Without diving too deep into the minute details, I discovered there was a difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org, and that you could host the latter for much cheaper through a third-party host.
I started hosting the first iteration of the site on DigitalOcean, because it was relatively cheap and the storage, RAM and processing power could be easily scaled up by just adding on extra $$$ when needed (if I ever needed a faster website that could handle a larger amount of visitors).
I definitely screwed up multiple times soon after while tinkering with the settings, because I had to wipe and reinstall the entire site three times after tinkering around the settings while trying to build it.
The first writeup
On the third attempt, it was already past midnight when I started writing ‘Up Bank Review: AU's First Fully Digital Bank’, the first writeup on Brioched.
About an hour into writing, I got a call from a friend for a scrumptious, spontaneous late night snack at Dragon Hotpot in the city. If I recall correctly, it was when the lockdown had just been lifted (for a quick sec!). After being stuck inside for what felt like an eternity, I was raring to go for some food beyond homecooked (because I’m not the best chef) and the same five restaurants I always ordered from on Uber Eats.
Within 10 minutes, I was in the car on the way to the city, with Brioched on my lap and my fingers typing away. Upon arriving, we saw a long line of eager beavers outside the restaurant, presumably dying for a midnight snack inside an actual restaurant for the first time in a while.
Like a lovesick teen and his crush, I was momentarily absorbed with finishing the writeup. So much so that I continued to research Up and write while waiting in line and after we ordered, before the food came.
It was past 3am by the time I returned home and the writeup was almost done — I put on the finishing touches, asked for a quick proofread from my girlfriend and then hit ‘publish’.
Having my little project come to life felt awesome. I raced to post it in the ‘Up Bank Community’ Facebook group and to share it with my family group chat, which swiftly alerted me to the worst nightmare of any launch: the website was constantly crashing and you could only get in after five refreshes (and not because of server overloads, because no one was on the site, LOL).
Panicked, I immediately deleted my post and unsent the message. This was DigitalOcean’s final strike and I was out!
After frantically searching for hosting alternatives of a similar price, I landed on EasyWP by Namecheap and shifted everything over.
A touch of traction
I then tested the site before sharing (which I should have done in the first place) again and although it was slow, it never crashed — I then dispersed my first ever writeup everywhere I could to get some traction: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
After a long slumber that went well into the afternoon, I was chuffed to see my post had gotten some attention — a buncha likes and some very supportive comments (thank you to those who commented, if you ever read this 😃):
My joy was amplified when I realised the man himself, Paul Tagell, the Head of Marketing at Up, commented too! Of course, at the time I didn’t know he was who he was until I saw this tweet two days later:
OH. MAN. That was it. I was famous! Well not really, but still. Those five retweets and 21 likes meant the world to me.
Want to know the cherry on top of this serendipitous occasion; the icing on the cake? Dom Pym, the CEO at Up, retweeted Paul’s tweet:
Remember why I started Brioched? You’re right — to become a referral code millionaire (haha). To me, seeing this tweet was a partial confirmation that Brioched could be much bigger than just a referral code hustle, that I could build to be something. Perhaps THE platform for Fintech reviews? One could dream.
3, 2, 1 — Lift off!
Before long, I was sitting in Saving Grace telling a friend about the new project I was working on. When asked further about it, I nonchalantly told him to search Google for ‘up bank review’, joking that Brioched would pop up.
It didn’t. With some wishful thinking, I asked him to tap ‘see more results’. Another second of scrolling and there it was!
In about a month, Brioched had started to rank on Google Search when searching for ‘up bank review’.
Like a second wind, this pushed me to craft the second writeup, ‘Stake Review: AU’s Amazon for US Stocks’, in the midst of fast-approaching assignment deadlines and another string of Netflix binges.
To me, seeing this tweet was a partial confirmation that Brioched could be much bigger than just a referral code hustle, that I could build to be something.
This discovery pushed me off the plank I was already walking on because of the tweet: that Brioched was more than just referral codes.
How do I get more readers —infographics?
At some point, every writeup published on Brioched made it to the first page of Google Search when searching for reviews of those products (some are still there, some relegated).
Despite this, the increase in unique views and visitors from Google Search was less than expected. This was because the products I reviewed weren’t viral material or wildly popular, but just increasing in popularity locally within certain communities.
I still had a large portion of my views and visitors from the social media sites I shared my writeups on, like Facebook and LinkedIn. Seeing this, I thought to myself: ‘How do I get more readers?’.
An idea inspired by the 2020 bull market
Last year was a phenomenal year for stock punters — government handouts and not going out left many with buckets of spare cash which they poured into hot stocks. With hordes of new, naïve investors flooding into the market, I thought of an idea to ride the hype: infographics on finance!
I also chose finance because I thought it would intersect nicely with Fintech (it is the ‘fin’ after all) thus bearing some relevance for my audience.
The thing with social media is that people have short attention spans. Someone reading a long, in-depth writeup on Spaceship Voyager from start to finish is less likely than a front to back reading of an informative and engaging infographic.
To remedy this, I started making infographics with the goal of growing my followers (especially on LinkedIn) and educating others on finance. They’d follow for the easily digestible infographics, allowing me access to a wider audience when publishing writeups.
I then decided to brand the infographics with a catchy name to make it unforgettable: #briochedbites.
The first ever #briochedbites on dollar cost averaging was crafted on Canva after I decided to skip a lecture one morning.
The hypothesis was proven to be true: people do engage more with concise infographics compared to long-form writeups.
The #briochedbites effect
At the start, with each additional #briochedbites, Brioched gained an additional follower. Over time, the value of each infographic increased as every new post gained an increasing number of followers.
Apart from the social media goals, I also thoroughly enjoyed creating the infographics as they allowed me to learn interesting topics comprehensively. It took me through the process of ‘you don’t understand something until you can explain it properly to a kid’, because infographics have to be word-light and design-heavy.
Seeing how it was working wonders for my engagement rates, I decided to publish the infographics at least once a week. I created infographics on topics like ‘How long does it take to double your money?’, ‘Why your bank account is robbing you’ and ‘The opportunity cost of buying a new iPhone’ along with 9 others, all focused on finance.
By the 13th infographic, I grew bored of making purely finance infographics. I wanted to make infographics on anything and everything that interested me, as long as there was a learning opportunity.
So, I decided to give #briochedbites a rebrand. It went from ‘Infographics on finance’ to ‘Infographics that build mental capital’. This way, it was vague enough for me to explore a range of topics, while still embodying a message of education. Besides, who doesn’t like free capital, whether monetary or mental?
Following this decision came two of the best performing #briochedbites, ‘Why you should stop using WhatsApp’ and ‘Jeff Bezos’ 2 pizza rule’.
The former was an infographic I quickly whipped up just when news was breaking of WhatsApp’s (then) new and controversial privacy policy, which ended up going viral on Instagram with over 760 shares, 340 likes and 160 saves.
With the rebrand, the subsequent infographics featured the new logo designed by my girlfriend to replace the previous one I got from Google Images 🤣
As life got more busy and as #briochedbites massively overtook the writeups in traction, I decided to focus more time on creating infographics than writing.
The last writeup I ever published on Brioched was ‘Is Stake Black Worth It? at the end of February ‘21. Since that writeup, I have posted 13 #briochedbites weekly, the last one being on April 15 before the acquisition.
A casual coffee catch up — the domino show
Throughout the journey of building Brioched, I was blessed with opportunities to meet a ton of cool people around the world along the way — lawyers, bankers, investors, like-minded students, founders, and others mainly by cold outreach (both ways).
As I walked home from class on the morning of March 26 2021, the LinkedIn notification for the message that led to pitchblak’s (now Pitch Venture Capital) acquisition of Brioched popped up on my lockscreen.
It was from Rish, then Head of Investment of pitchblak, reading something along the lines of enjoying my content and wanting to catch up for a coffee.
See how the story comes full circle from coffee money to coffee catch up? If you don’t get it, you probably just skimmed through this writeup, but it’s all good, still happy to have you here!
For me, casual coffee chats with strangers were a regular occurrence but this message was more exciting than usual. Why? Two reasons:
The report on Goldman Sachs analysts’ ‘100-hour work weeks’
Let’s unpack it one by one.
The earlywork community
I joined the earlywork community by Dan, Jono and Marina not long before I got Rish’s message.
As I built Brioched, I stumbled upon many startups on LinkedIn and naturally started to read more about startups and the ecosystem on various sites. However, I was still a skeptic of actually working at a startup, because I saw careers at startups as black and white in terms of appeal.
To me, careers in this space were either at scrappy startups barely making ends meet with some potential but heaps of risk or already well-established unicorns and soonicorns which I felt shared more similarities with Big Tech or Corporate than true startups.
While I did invest like a speculator (and still do), I didn’t want to work a job that has a negatively skewed risk-reward ratio. After all, 9 out of 10 startups fail right?
If you had asked what I wanted to do after uni at the start of the year, I would have told you either investment banking or management consulting. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because these two jobs are reserved for the crème de la crème of graduates and are highly coveted by many in my area of study.
However, after joining the earlywork community, I was exposed daily to a steady stream of new and exciting startup jobs and a community of students and young professionals in or interested in the tech and startup ecosystem who were ever so willing to help answer burning questions and share their stories.
Seeing this helped me understand that firstly, startup jobs aren’t black and white but a spectrum littered with careers at varied startups in terms of industry, growth & success and secondly, that I greatly appreciate the ‘tight-knit’ community feeling you get when you work at a startup and are in the ecosystem, as opposed to cutthroat corporate culture (I’m generalising here).
The report on Goldman Sachs analysts’ ‘100-hour work weeks’
Remember how I said if you had asked me at the start of the year what I wanted to do, I would’ve told you investment banking or management consulting?
Well, it isn’t so clear-cut anymore.
In March 2021, multiple news outlets reported on the survey done on 13 Goldman Sachs analysts and to put it concisely, wrote on how miserable they were working inhumane hours.
I do a fair bit of introspection from time to time, thinking about everything from my purpose in life to what I want to do the very next day and why. This particular piece of news got the gears in my head turning on topics like long-term personal and professional goals and work-life balance.
‘Do I really want to throw my life away for three to five years to run the rat race?’
After much pondering and talking to different people, my sentiment towards investment banking has become much less rosy, and I’m convinced the only reason some of them can still function normally at work is because they do a ton of nose candy (Only joking! Or maybe not?).
So, why was I more excited for this chat than others?
As discussed above, these two factors combined got me intrigued in dabbling in the startup ecosystem and learning if it would work for me in the long-term. It also introduced working in startups as an alternative to both IB and MBB consulting, but didn’t replace them completely.
So, when I got Rish’s message and saw that he worked at pitchblak, which works with many early-stage startups, I got to thinking about how I could leverage this inconspicuous chat for an opportunity to work with pitchblak.
The chat and the ask
I met Rish at Allpress in Collingwood, just right around the corner from the pitchblak office. Towards the end of our conversation, I decided to ask Rish my burning question in trying to create an opportunity for myself.
‘Do you guys hire interns?’.
Before he could say anything, I said these exact words, ‘Hire me.’
Now I didn’t say it because I’m a pompous prick, but because I felt the conversation was going splendidly at that point, and there wasn’t any harm in asking (or saying those words).
Rish paused before telling me pitchblak didn’t really hire interns, and the only student working at pitchblak at the time was up in Sydney working on a special project.
He did say however, that since he liked my work, saw that I had the drive for success and a passionate curiosity for startups, so he’d see what he could do for me back at the office.
Keeping in touch over LinkedIn the next couple of days, I sent Rish my résumé and the sponsorship contacts of a few university clubs I had reached out to to initiate a possible partnership with, since Rish had mentioned during the chat that pitchblak was looking to collaborate with some student organisations (gotta be proactive!).
Two days later, Rish got back to me saying that Cam, the Director at pitchblak wanted to catch up for a coffee to talk more about the potential internship.
I was stoked! Little did I know…
An unexpected offer — the acquisition
Meeting at Allpress again, Cam, Rish and I chatted about our backgrounds, the origin stories of pitchblak and Brioched, and the questions we both had for each other.
When the conversation finally landed on the topic of the internship, Cam said that pitchblak generally doesn’t hire interns, because they usually don’t add enough value for what they take, and it wasn’t efficient for pitchblak to do so being a relatively small business.
He then went on to say he liked what I had done with Brioched, and that there weren’t many in the space doing what I was doing. With that, he offered something better than an internship: a part-time role with pitchblak because he saw that I could add real value while providing me the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the business and about startups.
At that point, I was already pretty excited and taken aback with Cam offering much more than what I had asked for.
He then went on to say, ‘What if pitchblak buys Brioched?’.
Already stunned by the previous offer, this one left me completely dumbfounded.
Thoughts like ‘Why?’ and ‘What is happening right now?’ raced through my mind as I tried to keep the shock off my face.
At that point, I was unwilling to so easily part with Brioched, because I had gotten emotionally attached to building my passion project.
Cam went on to elaborate on the ‘why’, including reasons like wanting to pivot Brioched to startup-focused content for pitchblak and giving me a fantastic story to tell.
I asked Cam if I could take some time to think about it, catching up in about a week to update him. He agreed, and I went off to think about it after the conversation concluded (and also after I got a quick tour of the office and the rooftop!).
Making the decision
When thinking about why I sold Brioched, I always come back to the two main reasons I kept Brioched going, despite doubting its success countless times.
The reasons were
Having a story to tell and
Learning like crazy.
Having a story to tell
Although I started Brioched for the referral codes, it didn’t take long for me to realise the power of building in public and of having a unique story to tell, especially in professional settings.
I thought that even if Brioched utterly and completely flops in the long-run, at least I would have a novel story to tell while building it and even if I stopped working on it.
I wasn’t wrong — although the story didn’t pull its weight like it does today, it was still a good conversation starter and set me apart from many cookie cutter individuals. It was also a great story when I wasn’t directly telling someone, by virtue of Brioched being plastered all over my public LinkedIn profile.
When making the decision to sell Brioched, I thought about whether it advanced this goal/reason, and of course it did!
The acquisition took the story from ‘this is my side hustle’ to ‘I sold my startup’, wrapped it up in scented paper and tied it all together with a shiny bow.
That’s one down and one to go.
Learning like crazy
There were times when I spent myriad hours on writeups and infographics, thinking I did a fantastic job, only for those pieces of content to bite the dust.
It’s undeniably demoralising when you spend copious amounts of time creating something only for it to belly flop harder than Olympic diver Stephan Feck.
But I learnt through the process of building Brioched to frame success (for myself) more broadly than just social media metrics.
My idea of success shifted to how much I could learn, as opposed to being defined solely by the number of likes or views a post got.
Writing in-depth reviews and crafting concise infographics taught me a lot about presenting a mountain of information and jargon in an easy-to-understand way, without losing the essence of the explanation itself.
I believe that you don’t understand something until you can explain it properly to a kid, and the process of writing the reviews and especially the infographics forced me to deliver information on complex topics in finance, economics, business, etc in an easily-digestible way. This allowed me to learn deeply about any topic I came across for the purposes of content creation.
So once again, I thought about whether this goal of learning like crazy would be achieved by selling Brioched to pitchblak. Without much thought, it was obvious that the answer would definitely be: yes!
Creating content was still going to be a big part of my job at pitchblak, and now I would get to learn about a plethora of other things as well, especially startups, which was the original reason for me wanting to work at pitchblak.
Okay, let’s do it
After cogitating those two reasons and talking about it with those close to me, I met up with Cam the following week to discuss everything from details about the job to the specifics of the acquisition.
By the end of the conversation, I agreed to sell Brioched to pitchblak for [I can’t tell you] amount and I also took up the job offer.
With everything sorted out, I announced Brioched’s acquisition and my new role as Head of Startup Strategy at pitchblak the following week.
It was truly a surreal moment. When I started Brioched, an acquisition was not even far-fetched, it just wasn’t even within the realm of possibility. There were many times I had close friends and family tell me things like it wasn’t worth it and that it was just a waste of time. I’m glad that they’ve all come around now 🤣
There were countless times each month I felt like bowing out, but I’m glad that I didn’t and that I pushed on, because the journey has allowed me to meet awesome people, make new friends, land exciting opportunities and above all, believe in myself.
And that my friends, is the unlikely story of how I built and sold my bread.
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Thanks for taking the time to read my story! I hope it inspires you to create your own opportunities. If not, I hope you at least enjoyed the read.
Now that you know mine, I’d love to hear your story too — let’s stay in touch!