The Consumer Subscription Roll-Up Opportunity

...built on operational excellence playbooks, top-tier talent networks, and a long term commitment to the business model in the mold of ThomaBravo or Vista Equity seems on the horizon.

The strategy tends to work well when the group of companies being brought together are similar enough that they can benefit from shared, scaled out fixed “infrastructure” across core business functions but are different enough (end customer demographics, positioning/brand, geography, etc.) that they don’t encroach too aggressively on one another.

Multi-Brand Vertical Platform — Match

...the strategy would be best focused on vertical opportunities in companies that are either:

Vertical Agnostic Operational Excellence — The Thoma Bravo / Vista of Consumer SaaS

Match — who owns Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid among many others — has spent the last 20 years building up a set of brands that cater to virtually every dating desire. The depth of expertise and data Match has developed via this strategy has enabled it to understand better than anyone else what features and experiences users across the portfolio are s... See more

- Largely founder owned via capital efficient growth

This is what I call the "Hub and Spoke" model — leverage a core subscription userbase and then upsell additional offerings to gain a larger share of wallet from your core customers. Until recently, this option seemed out of reach for most Consumer SaaS companies struggling to simply generate enough demand to support a single product at scale.

Hub and Spoke — Spotify