At Volition, we are seeing a wide variety of internet platforms that enable entrepreneurs to easily create profitable businesses. These businesses can be either a side-hustle or full-time career but are all powered by the rise of many internet distribution platforms. Examples of these distribution platforms include Amazon providing the infrastructure for third party sellers through FBA, Instagram providing an audience for influencers to sell ads, Etsy enabling the sale of crafts and homemade goods, Airbnb providing a marketplace for property rentals, or OpenSea enabling the sale of NFTs.

Internet platforms provide out-of-the-box enterprise infrastructure and immediate scaled distribution. One of the most difficult aspects of building an online business is acquiring customers. Many D2C businesses may have a strong product offering but lack the ability to efficiently market their products. Internet platforms provide inherent consumer demand to solve this challenge. Of course, there is still competition within these platforms but most of the time there are easy-to-use advertising features. The critical aspect for scalability is that the platforms do the advertising to bring initial consumer demand, eliminating that most difficult part of customer acquisition. We believe there are over 4 million new digitally-enabled entrepreneurs across these internet platforms with cash generative businesses without an exit strategy.

At Volition we believe there is an opportunity to be the financial partner to provide these entrepreneurs with a liquidity opportunity. We have seen these liquidity events provide financial freedom to digital entrepreneurs and allow them to pay off loans, start new businesses, or even retire.

We would welcome the opportunity to meet digital entrepreneurs that leverage an internet platform for distribution who are looking for liquidity. The main characteristics we are looking for are profitability and stability or growth of topline revenue.

Our focus is consolidating these digital platform businesses into a single entity. While the market size of each product or service alone may be limiting, the addressable opportunity expands with each acquisition. By consolidating these cash generative businesses there are back-office efficiencies gained and the ability to invest in more products or services while increasing the marketing budget to drive revenue growth.

Whether you are a digital entrepreneur or a consolidator, we would love to hear from you!

Volition has a long history of investing in portfolio companies executing an M&A strategy. Our first wave of M&A partnerships was primarily in entrepreneurs creating the internet-enablement of offline transactions, such as GlobalTranz, a freight brokerage that created online systems to match shipper demand and carrier capacity in real-time. Our learnings from these investments are driving our investment thesis in creator economy acquisition platforms:

These learnings have led to investments in Dragonfly, a consolidator of Amazon third-party sellers, and Doing Things Media, a consolidator of social media publishers. There are a growing number of internet platforms that have these attributes, and we are excited to be the partner to grow the consolidation platform while providing a liquidity event for digital platform entrepreneurs.