Hello and welcome to the exit presented by flippa.com the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses flippa manages over a billion in deal value annually and combines expert buy and sell side advisory with its market leading valuation tool deal room off market offering market insights and AI based deal by deal matching engine now for the exit the exit is a 30 minute podcast featuring amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it.

The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes you learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits.

It's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many now in this episode I sit down with john nific is an awesome entrepreneur who's currently the partner investor at K to the P also known as K to venture partners.

Now he is a really cool story because he talks through his experience selling a company called wiser now why this is unique is because they were effectively allowing universities to let virtual interviews take place during the admissions process and it is a really phenomenal example of timing here.

They were right at the beginning of covid you know trucking along with about six people and covid the pandemic hit and they saw a just hockey stick curve in the month of March and he said in 45 days they just quadrupled their growth and they scaled the team to just under 20 people and then by the end of 2020 they had gone through the acquisition by company name EAB.

And we talk through how that you know worked with timing obviously it was a brilliant timing for a virtual business with focus on colleges.

It's just the perfect example of timing happening and being in the right place at the right time and as a company they were going through a fundraise he was going out there looking for investment.

And ultimately they went through the acquisition process and we go through a lot of the really cool details of what it looked like you know after the after the deal went through and how conversations began and just about you know the trials and tribulations as I speak about this multiple times on the show and it's just a really fun conversation.

I'm going to talk further ado let's dive right into my conversation here on the exit with John Kniffick the current partner at K2 venture partners.

Hey everybody today I am joined by John Kniffick and he is a partner at K2 venture partners. How's it going John it's going great how you doing Steve doing fantastic I'm eager to unpack this exit.

But before we do get there we always like to start with your background how did you get into business and entrepreneurship.

Yeah I think like most people it's a windy and interesting path to becoming a serial entrepreneur just for a little bit of background so I'm based in Cleveland Ohio moved here to go to school in 2005 went to Case Western Reserve University.

I thought I was going to be a doctor I was pre met for for all four years even got accepted to medical school and ended up deferring for a year because me and a my roommate had built this self hosted sort of video trans coder that we started using for virtual interviews and auditions and maybe you can see the stack of keyboards behind me.

I've always been a music geek pianist keyboardist but essentially we started licensing that product into universities as a way for them to collect admissions videos and before graduating college we were at six figures in annual recurring revenue ended up raising a seed round fast forward that sort of put me squarely in kind of education technology software as a service this was kind of the ramp up of Web 2.0.

Sadly that venture didn't have the happiest of exits if we want to unpack a sad exit we could talk about that that venture that was called decision desk but the great news there is from that venture I met my co founders who we started wiser with which we had a very happy exit.

But and that was also in the education space we attacked it a little differently and I can get into that later but that's sort of what what got me into this space and fast forward 12 years.

This is this is my career very nice so I guess let's talk about the we can dive right into the exit with with wiser.

What were you tracking in terms of you mentioned AR that's of course a very important number but yeah what's the things were you tracking to define success you got into the exit.

It's a good question so for a little added context so wiser started in 2016 we were around for about five years actually five years almost to the day to the exit we licensed a.

Virtual communities product to universities originally to connect students with alumni for career opportunities but our real growth arc happened when we pivoted to connect perspective students and parents to current students at the university as a recruiting mechanism and it's almost a happy version of sort of the influencer model where.

If i'm interested in becoming an engineer and I can talk to a current engineering student at a school that sort of gives me a believability of what all experience on that campus and it ended up being a very great way for schools to recruit students anyways higher ed itself is a very niche market right there's only about 4000 I mean that's actually a fairly big number but if you think about target market there's about 4000 higher education institutions and in the US.

6000 if you count some two year program certificate programs so AR are or land and expand opportunities per campus become really important right I see a lot of solutions that are sort of hey this is a nice $7000 a year or $500 a month product kind of trying to you know tap into higher ed which is fine as a starting point but if you think about your world of a.

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