From M&A Services to SaaS: The dealspec Story

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

“High agency” is one of those phrases everyone in startups uses now. Christopher Mezler is a good example of how you can nurture this trait even before graduating. He had barely arrived in Vallendar when he came looking for me to get involved, understand what was happening, meet people, and start doing things. And he kept doing that.

He did lots of things next to his studies. He was active at Young Founders Network e.V.  He built his own service businesses. He worked with M&A advisors, PE firms and Search Funds on AI and automation. At some point he even worked for a highschool friend of mine who is an ETA searcher himself. Small world.

In the last days, Christopher and Vincent Favro launched dealspec. dealspec is building an operating system for M&A, Private Equity and Search Funds. The problem they identified: deal data spread across different tools, manual long-list creation, pipeline tracking, Q&A, documents, spreadsheets, project management, lots of repetitive coordination. They are trying to bring more of that into one system.

How do you come up with the conviction for such a venture? Christopher first made money doing the work before saying: “I want to build SaaS for M&A.” Deal sourcing. Custom AI and automation workflows. Research. Workshops. Web development. Not especially scalable. Partially next to his studies. But probably a pretty good way to learn what people actually struggle with.

You sit next to customers, do the annoying work yourself, see which requests keep coming back, and eventually some of those repeated workflows start looking like product. Felix Wolters, also a WHU alum, is already featured as a customer testimonial on the website. Another one of those small WHU circles closing.

I’ve always liked founders who are willing to do slightly messy, non-scalable things early. There is the thesis that “services is the new software.” But beyond that it's just important that you learn the work reality of spaces you want to disrupt. Real work for real customers tends to teach you things that a lot of ideation sessions don’t.

Congrats Christopher and Vincent on the launch.

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