Australian investing app Goodments sold for AU$1.5M, on 12,700 users averaging age 24

Since Australian and US dollar amounts appear together, converted USD figures include a rough ¥150-to-$1 note where relevant.

12,700 users. That’s a small number for a fintech app. Even so, the Australian investing app ‘Goodments’ was bought by listed fintech Douugh Ltd in April 2021 for AU$1.5M (about US$1M, roughly ¥150M). What got valued wasn’t revenue. It was the customer profile (an average age of 24, an almost even gender split) plus onboarding that carried users all the way from sign-up to a funded account. And the consideration wasn’t cash at all; it was 100% the buyer’s stock. This case draws a clear line between what became the price and what didn’t.

Business and deal numbers

What the app did

Goodments was a mobile investing app that let users select investments aligned with environmental, social, and ethical values. It offered access to sustainability-focused portfolios, ETFs, and fractional US stock trading (Tesla, Nike, Disney, Amazon, and others), and used ‘profile modelling and cohort analysis’ to recommend investments assessed against the user’s values. Users could start from as little as AU$1 and promised to have them investing within five minutes. On top of that, the company built ‘Goodments Academy,’ a set of investing-education tools, and used it as a way to build its customer base.

Culver himself attributes the win to a combination of ‘a unique value proposition, a strong user onboarding process, and an effective data strategy.’ Indeed, the company’s conversion rate from sign-up to a funded account was, in the company’s own words, ‘incredibly high.’

The decisive call

The turning point in this case was choosing sale over further fundraising the moment growth was recognized as hitting a chasm. The source states that after building its customer base through educational tools, growth hit a ‘chasm’ and plateaued. It’s a classic wall: having exhausted the early adopters, unable to move past them.

What Culver chose at that point wasn’t to inject more capital and push through the wall. His advice runs: ‘Exit when you’re at your strongest, not your weakest.’ And: ‘Build relationships with potential acquirers at least a year before you start talking acquisition. That’s what creates competition for the deal and improves your odds of closing.’

That advice isn’t a generic afterthought. Douugh’s founder and CEO, Andy Taylor, had known Culver for years through the fintech industry. As he puts it, ‘CEOs in this space tend to all know each other pretty well.’ The negotiation didn’t start from a first meeting. It began on top of a relationship that already existed. That’s the substance behind the ‘build the relationship a year ahead’ advice.

The before/after numbers aren’t disclosed. There’s no record of when or at what level the plateau occurred. What’s public is only the endpoint, 12,700 users at the time of sale. What can be traced in this case isn’t a change in numbers, but a sequence of decisions.

Why 12,700 users got a price tag

Looking at the buyer’s motivation clarifies what was actually being priced. Douugh wanted reach into a younger demographic and an accelerated path to its ‘Wealth Jars’ feature, custom investment portfolios tied to savings goals. Goodments satisfied both at once.

The customer profile itself was scarce. A base averaging 24 years old, near-evenly split by gender, is exactly the segment existing financial services struggle hardest to acquire. And they’d signed up specifically because they wanted to invest according to sustainability values. That’s a different quality of user from the same number acquired through ads. For the buyer, this represented the cost and time it would take to acquire the same segment independently.

The onboarding, likewise, was transplantable as a finished product. In finance apps, the biggest drop-off point is account opening and identity verification. A flow that carries users through that step at a high conversion rate is less a feature than a proven process, and it’s exactly the part that would take the buyer the longest to rebuild from scratch. Listing ‘a strong user onboarding process’ as a win factor reads not as sentiment but as the buyer’s actual evaluation criterion.

What made the deal happen at all was paying in stock. Douugh, a public company, didn’t have to lay out cash, and the seller received consideration tied to the buyer’s growth. In fact, Goodments’ technology was used to launch Douugh’s ‘Wealth Jars’ feature, which is live and operating.

Points worth discounting

Against AU$1.5M raised, the sale price was also AU$1.5M. On paper, shareholders got back roughly what they put in, and they received it in the buyer’s stock, not cash. Stock consideration means the effective payout falls if the buyer’s share price falls. A headline of ‘sold for roughly ¥150M’ is, for four years of building, on the modest end.

Of the two co-founders, only Culver stayed on with the buyer. Taylor did not remain. In acqui-hire deals, who the buyer actually needs shows directly in how each person is treated. Revenue was never disclosed at all, so it’s impossible to judge how much the business was actually earning. The all-stock structure itself suggests a deal at a level where the buyer didn’t want to, or couldn’t, put up cash.

What’s replicable, what isn’t

Three of the decisions here work anywhere: moving before growth stalls, building relationships with buyer candidates more than a year ahead, and building onboarding as an asset rather than just a feature. The last of these, in particular, holds true even outside regulated industries. Whether the buyer has a process it would struggle to reproduce on its own is the line that determines pricing.

On the other side, the conditions you cannot rebuild are heavy. Financial licensing and regulatory compliance can’t be assembled without capital and time, and the credibility gained through an accelerator like H2 Ventures can’t be bought after the fact either. Having known the buyer’s CEO for years assumes a narrow market where industry CEOs already know each other. And being able to make the buyer a public company is precisely what made stock consideration viable, in a market with only private buyers, this deal simply couldn’t have taken this shape.

What Goodments left behind isn’t a lesson about a large number, but about sequence, the moment you realize you’ve hit the wall is not the end of your strongest position but the point where you should start negotiating.

Related reading

• Plausible — how growth looks when you choose not to raise capital
• ScrapingBee — sale negotiations for a small-team product