Believing in the Power of Ideas: Startup Interview With Paul Wilcox

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I am a startup entrepreneur and small business advocate who believes in the power of ideas. I worked at Tesla for four years before jumping in on this latest small business venture.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

The Hatchit Marketplace is a platform for connecting sellers of software, e-commerce, and IT businesses with prospective buyers. We list startup tech and relocatable businesses for sale as well as established ones. It’s quick and easy.

What is the origin story?

We are three friends from a liberal arts college in Vermont who kept up over the years and decided to start another business together. Our first business was a campus laundry service that is still in operation today. The only high-tech part of our business was a Macintosh classic with 1 MB of memory and a 1.44 MB floppy drive that held our customer data. The Internet didn’t exist.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

The three of us have fun together and are all entrepreneurs on some level. Dennis has 17 years of M&A experience in acquisition search and really knows this market. Bob is a small business owner and has great people skills. I’m a writing and marketing guy who is fascinated by the challenge of solving a problem.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Try to save the world from a climate disaster. I worked for ten years in the areas of energy efficiency, electric vehicles, storage, and solar and continue to invest in new technologies.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We look at how well we are serving our customers and either getting them to post a business or digital asset for sale or connecting them with a professional to get a sense of what their business is worth. We have over $500 million in business value listed on our platform, and the number continues to grow.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We have over 450 posts with a strong showing among Amazon FBA sellers, Shopify stores, cloud service, and enterprise software providers. It’s exciting to see people making inquiries and getting nice feedback from sellers.

What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why?

I’m very excited about AI and how it will be able to customize the user experience by getting to know what our buyers are looking for. A little worried about the metaverse and what this will mean for the already blurry lines between fiction and reality.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

HackerNoon has a unique voice in the online world with those who are shaping its future. The diversity and depth of voices and viewpoints are inspiring.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Buy Apple stock. No, really - Don’t be afraid to go where others won’t. Speak up when it matters. And buy Apple stock.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Make a plan, do all your research and analysis, but be open to what you see happening around you along the way.