Issuu Sold for Nine Figures on $30M of Revenue — the $100M Was the Price
The $100 million attached to Issuu is the price Bending Spoons paid, not revenue Issuu ever booked. Joe Hyrkin sold in July 2024 at just over $30M — and what he refused to do in 2021 is why the cheque landed the way it did.
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Joe Hyrkin had been on the Latka podcast twice and given up almost nothing both times. On stage at SaaS Open, about a month after his company changed hands, he finally answered the question. “As a company we’re doing just north of 30 million in revenue, profitable — not very profitable, but sort of barely profitable — and we sold the company for nine figures.” That is the entire financial disclosure: nine figures, all cash, no earnouts, to the Italian acquirer Bending Spoons, at the end of July 2024.
The $100,000,000 that trails this story is not revenue and never was. Issuu’s GetLatka record carries revenue of $30,000,000, dated 5 October 2023, and the largest revenue figure spoken aloud anywhere on the tape is Latka’s “32 million bucks.” The nine figures is the price Bending Spoons paid. Hyrkin never named it — “I can’t give you specifics, because you’re never allowed to give specifics like this” — so “nine figures” is a floor the seller confirmed, and “over $100 million exit” is the host’s framing from the stage. The first is sourced. The second is rounding, and it is not a revenue number in either case.
The distance between $30M of revenue and a nine-figure cheque is the whole story. Issuu did not grow its way there. GetLatka’s dated rows run $20,000,000 in July 2016, $25,000,000 in December 2020, $30,000,000 in October 2023. What produced the exit was structural: a cap table with no preference stack, a balance sheet financed with debt instead of a 2021 mega-round, and a decision to sell into inbound interest at the moment Hyrkin judged to be the top of his lane rather than hold and hope the market came back.
The multiple, negotiated live on stage
A range exists at all only because Latka does the arithmetic in public. Told the company sold for nine figures on just over $30M, he offers: “Fair to say like a 4 to 6x revenue multiple, something in that range?” Hyrkin takes the top off it immediately.
4–5x“Yeah, not six. I mean, unless you’re AI right now, you’re not getting north of five.”
That is as close to a price as the tape gets, and it is worth being exact about what it is: a seller trimming a range the host proposed, not a figure from a press release. Nothing else in the conversation puts a number on the deal.
Eleven and a half years to move $4M to $30M
Hyrkin was not a founder. Issuu was started in Denmark and launched in 2007; he took over in 2013 from a chief executive the board had already removed six months earlier, which he flags as unusually clean handling. “Most times when there’s a CEO switch, the board will bring in the new CEO and then say, hey, lucky you, you’ve got this previous CEO.” He then ran the company for eleven and a half years. What he inherited had spent its first stretch chasing scale rather than money: get every brochure, catalogue, magazine and sales deck uploaded, make it look good on the newly launched iPad, and work out later which parts businesses would pay for. Reading the revenue graph on screen, Latka calls it “10 years of hustle before your first 5 million of revenue.”
The funding rows are small and far apart, and the tape corrects the public record on one of them. Latka reads the 2007 round off Crunchbase as $10.3M; Hyrkin says it was a little less, and that Crunchbase doesn’t have everything. GetLatka carries it as $10,000,000 in 2007, plus another $10,000,000 in 2014 — the raise that brought in KDDI, the Japanese telco, alongside the Scandinavian lead investor already on the register.
- 2007 · Launch Issuu launches out of Denmark. GetLatka records a $10,000,000 round that year; Hyrkin says Crunchbase’s $10.3M is slightly high.
- 2013 · Hyrkin arrives Recruited from Silicon Valley at about $4,000,000 of revenue, six months after the board removed the previous CEO. The company is re-domiciled from Denmark to the US, and every preferred share is agreed to rank alongside common.
- 2014 · $10M round KDDI joins; a very small SVB debt line is taken alongside it.
- Jul 2016 · $20M revenue GetLatka’s dated row, with 60 people on the books.
- Oct 2021 · $20M of debt Announced as $31M. Hyrkin says $20M was drawn with access to another $10M — no equity, no new preferences.
- Oct 2023 · $30M revenue GetLatka’s dated row; headcount 175 that August.
- Jul 2024 · Nine figures Bending Spoons buys the company outright, all cash, no earnout.
Between the two ends of that dated series Issuu added $10,000,000 of revenue, over seven years and change, in what Latka called “a very competitive space.” The headcount rows move more than the revenue does: 60 in July 2016, 117 in December 2020, 187 at the end of 2022, back down to 175 by September 2023.
The $31M “Series C” was $20M of debt
GetLatka’s funding table carried a single row for 21 October 2021: $31,000,000, labelled Series C, valuation $500,000,000. The tape dismantles most of it. “It was announced as 31, but it was really 20,” Hyrkin says — $20,000,000 drawn with access to another $10,000,000, and all of it debt. There was no priced equity round in 2021, which means the $500,000,000 valuation stamped on that row, and carried forward on the company record, did not come from anyone buying shares at it. That row now reads $20,000,000 of debt financing, and the valuation has been cleared from the round and from the company record.
What he was avoiding is the more interesting half of the decision.
“We would have had to raise 30 million on a $250 million valuation, which meant that for everyone to feel successful we would have had to have a billion dollar exit.” It would also have created the preference stack the company had spent a decade without.
$20,000,000 drawn, $10,000,000 more available, no new share class. The money went into an enterprise product and deep integrations with Canva and Adobe. Flexibility was the point — and it kept a nine-figure outcome a good one for everybody.
That is not a footnote. When Issuu re-domiciled from Denmark to the US, Hyrkin, the founders and the investors agreed everyone would be treated equally: “There were basically, they were preferred shares, but they were treated the same as common.” A company with no preference stack can sell for nine figures and have the proceeds land where the cap table says they land. A company carrying a $250M post and a $30M preference cannot.
What a 12% lender costs when the exit is nine figures
Hyrkin had been on this podcast right after that 2021 raise, and Latka replays the memory from the stage: “In the moment when I interviewed you in 2021, right after you did the debt deal, you loved it.” Hyrkin doesn’t dispute it. “They were a really highly recommended firm.”
About a year in, Issuu missed a revenue covenant — “on a $7 million quarter, we missed by about 150k.” The penalty and the step-up in interest were not the problem, and he says so. “There’s two forms of predatory: there’s interest rates, and then there’s process.” The rate was around 12%, which Latka stops the conversation to underline, because it is nowhere near what most founders picture when they hear the word. It was the process that turned.
- Renegotiation after agreement — covenant terms were settled verbally, then the lender kept negotiating and kept adding terms.
- 1% of the company per month — at one point the demand was an additional point of equity for every month Issuu had not refinanced.
- A $1,000,000 penalty on a three-day clock — payable if those 1% warrants were not handed over within three days.
- Refinanced out — Issuu moved the debt to Eastward Capital in Boston before any of it landed, and Hyrkin says they didn’t end up paying much of those penalties.
Latka prices what almost happened, and the arithmetic is his rather than Hyrkin’s: on a sale north of $100 million, two points of warrants is $2,000,000 gone, and every further point another million off the founders’ side. No warrants were ever issued, so no money actually moved — but it is the cleanest illustration on the tape of why debt has to be priced on its terms and not its coupon. Hyrkin’s own conclusion is about attention rather than money: “A CEO’s main job is to limit distractions. That’s it.”
Why July 2024 and not 2022
Bending Spoons is a specific kind of buyer and Hyrkin describes it precisely: “They’re buying companies that have some pretty good scale, kind of revenue in the 25 to $200 million range, profitable or close to it, and then they go run them. They buy to own. It’s not a PE firm.” He names Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer and Hopin as earlier purchases, and says the firm had sat on his own list for whenever the moment arrived. It arrived as inbound interest, and the process started from there.
He is blunt that the price would have been better earlier, and equally blunt about why it was never available. Asked about 2022: “If we had sold it two years prior, in 22, we would have gotten 2 to 3x what we got.” Why didn’t you? “Because we weren’t at the size we’re at now.” The market that would have paid the higher multiple was a market Issuu was too small to sell into, and by the time it was big enough the multiple had gone.
Holding gets ruled out on the same logic. “We could have held on and continued to grow and build Issuu for another two years and hope that the market comes back. But I think it’s also important to understand where we are in the business is where we are in the opportunity cycle.”
The strategic buyers were real, and slower. Issuu had deep conversations with Canva — which had just bought Affinity — and with Adobe. Asked whether Adobe’s price would have been higher, Hyrkin says all in it would have been, then flattens it: the numbers were around the same, with some strategics maybe a little higher. He took the Italians anyway. “If I’d signed with Adobe, we’d still be negotiating and I’d worked there for four more years.” Bending Spoons was very good terms, really fast, all cash, and no retrade: “Price was the price.”
The cost of getting it done he names without hedging: over $2,000,000 to the bankers, and a deliberate choice on lawyers — Goodwin Procter, and Larry Chu specifically, whose phone calls Hyrkin credits with moving both the term sheet and the contract faster than they otherwise would have moved.
One to three buyers, not twenty
The 65,000 paying customers Hyrkin cites on stage — drawn from what he describes as a million free customers a year — match the GetLatka record exactly. The undated fields on that same record put Issuu’s customer acquisition cost at $40 and gross churn at 24%: a self-serve funnel, not an enterprise one, cheap to fill and continuously refilling. It is a good business and a modest one, and that combination is exactly what shortens a buyer list.
Latka’s closing framing is the part worth keeping. If you spend your time in rooms like that one, he says, you would think the $100 million exit is the norm, something that should happen every day — and it is actually the rarity. Hyrkin’s version is more practical, and it is the last thing he says about the process.
“Most companies when they get acquired, there’s one to three that really come to the table. So don’t be disappointed if the 20 folks that you thought were going to buy you, that you thought were going to keep raising the price and quadrupling it — if that doesn’t happen.”
Joe Hyrkin, former CEO, Issuu
Sources Joe Hyrkin interviewed on stage by Nathan Latka at SaaS Open, recorded about a month after the deal closed at the end of July 2024 (GetLatka’s capture stamp on the tape reads 5 September 2024); GetLatka’s dated revenue, headcount and funding records for Issuu; Bending Spoons’ acquisition of Issuu, announced July 2024.
