Buying a Business That Already Had Customers: Cloakist and Sotion

Buying a Business That Already Has Customers

On February 16, 2022, Bruce McLachlan acquired the small software service Cloakist for $60,000. At the time it had about 160 customers and roughly $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue. The purchase price was about 2.5 times annual recurring revenue, giving him a foothold in independence through a business that already had paying subscribers.

He had worked as a programmer and a software designer before becoming head of technology at the fintech company Backbase. With a wife and two children, he wanted to avoid repeated business experiments with no income. Acquiring a product that already had paying customers and improving it fit those conditions.

Finding and vetting a business to acquire took ten months. He looked for existing customers, core features that worked reliably, and an acquisition channel that was already in place. It also mattered that the room for improvement was clear to him. Over roughly five weeks of negotiation, due diligence, and handover, he talked with the seller for an hour every day and heard both the strengths and the problems of the business.

Cloakist puts a customer's domain and branding on public pages built in other tools. It can take a Notion document, an Airtable page, or a Calendly booking page and change the address, logo, and colors. Customers keep creating content in the tools they know while visitors get a site carrying their own brand. The product saved them from building a separate website from scratch.

Sotion, which focused on Notion, had also been running alongside Cloakist before the acquisition. Its original developer, Louis Barclay, announced $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue in June 2021 and noted that Sotion had contributed much of the recent growth. Bruce was able to take over a Notion product with demand already proven and expand it.

Growing Revenue Through Signup and Search

The first thing he changed after the acquisition was the customer's initial setup. He removed the requirement to enter a credit card at signup and made the free trial start once the customer's site was actually connected. Customers could finish setup, see a working site, and then decide whether to subscribe.

He also cut repetitive work. In June 2022 he automated the service emails, ending the manual sending of about 80 messages a week. Improvements like this freed time to maintain the existing service while developing other features and products.

In the figures he published in mid-2022, 13 of 161 new signups turned into subscriptions, a paid conversion rate of about 8%. Monthly recurring revenue reached $2,500. In June alone, however, new subscriptions and cancellations nearly offset each other, leaving monthly recurring revenue growth at 0.7%. He had to handle both bringing in new customers and keeping existing subscriptions.

Support also expanded to Trello, Loom, Microsoft Sway, and others. At the time, most new customers arrived through organic search, followed by the user communities for each of those products. Adding more integrations and reaching the people already using those products moved forward together.

He reduced repetitive work when producing content for search. In September 2022 he moved 25 existing posts from Ghost into a setup where Notion handled management and Feather handled publishing. Shared passages lived in Notion synced blocks, and templates combined with property values produced 15 new pages. One edit could update the same text across many posts.

The topics matched tasks customers would search for. In 2023 the Cloakist blog covered how to connect a custom domain to a Linktree page, how to serve a Canva page from your own address, and how to connect a domain to Typeform. The content explained the problem people hit at the next step after choosing a tool and introduced Cloakist as part of the solution. Marketing focused on bringing in more of these organic search visitors, with no paid ads.

Going Deeper into Notion Membership Management

Sotion began adding membership features. In 2022 it let visitors register with an email address and then reach the Notion page. Content operators could publish material and take on visitors as members at the same time. In December 2022 Bruce showed how to connect Notion and Gumroad to build a paid membership site. Notion handled writing and organizing content, Gumroad handled payments, and Sotion linked buyers to access.

The content users distributed included online courses, paid reports, ebooks, and resource libraries. They needed a way to deliver finished material to specific people and control who could see it. In March 2023 Bruce named password protection as a particularly popular Sotion feature. Without offering a full set of complex site-building tools, setting the conditions for access to material alone was enough to meet a concrete demand.

In 2024 he added the connections needed to run paid memberships. March brought paid membership through Stripe, and April through Lemon Squeezy. In May he improved the email link login flow so the logo, reply address, and other details could be configured. The range of work content sellers could run under their own brand stretched from payment through login instructions.

Sotion's revenue model is a monthly or annual subscription, with plans split by number of sites, number of members, and feature range. Customers manage content in Notion and subscribe to the features needed for distribution and membership operations. The same product covers everything from a small membership site to managing multiple sites and many members.

The Arrival of Notion Sites and the Response

On June 25, 2024, Notion released Notion Sites, which offered custom domain connections, page styling, and search metadata settings. Customers who only needed basic publishing and a domain connection gained an option that required no outside service. Bruce later said the change encroached on Sotion's market.

Two days later, on June 27, he published a post that led with Sotion's membership features. He presented courses, content hubs, and customer resource libraries built on passwords, email signup, allowed email lists, and paid membership features as the main uses. The access control features he had already built were the reason Sotion stood apart from Notion's built-in site features. He pitched the product to customers who needed to deliver content to specific people and keep managing it, rather than to those who just wanted a public page.

The Weight of Operations and Growth of Two Services

As the business grew, so did the operational load. Changes to more than 30 outside platforms sometimes broke customer sites, and a spike in AWS costs forced him to redesign the core infrastructure. He also had to build monitoring and response for phishing and scam sites.

Running a job and the business in parallel for about three years took its toll. Even after moving to a role with less pressure he dealt with burnout, and although revenue still did not fully cover living costs, he chose to work on his own businesses full time in July 2025, supported by money he had set aside.

In October 2025 he reported combined monthly recurring revenue of more than $12,000 across Cloakist and Sotion. By then Sotion, focused on Notion, had overtaken Cloakist, which supported several platforms. The Notion-specific product he had grown alongside the acquired general-purpose service had become the larger revenue source.

Sotion v2, announced on April 12, 2026, made the membership and customer management direction more concrete. Where a single authentication condition applied to the whole site, the new version let each page use a different condition: public, password, email signup, or invite only. A site could keep an introduction page public while showing client work only to allowed members. It also included member groups that set access scope by client company or tier.

The update also added per-customer views of Notion database content. An agency could manage projects for many clients in one place while each client saw only the items related to them. Staff kept editing in Notion, and clients checked the material in a dedicated space on the company's domain. The setup reduced the work of moving content into another system and maintaining it twice.

Product Range and Pricing Structure

His portfolio also included ZerpHost, which helps Carrd sites appear in search, and AliasLinks, which manages affiliate links. The operating company Inver Digital lists them alongside Cloakist and Sotion. Pear HQ and Notion Subs, both about Notion content access, are classified as retired or exited projects. He kept experimenting in adjacent areas without continuing to run every attempt.

The Cloakist and Sotion plans take in different kinds of expansion. As of September 2026, Cloakist splits by the number of connected sites into tiers of 1, 3, 10, and 50. Sotion bundles site count with features like member counts, team management, and paid content access. The structure gives customers who want to connect many sites and customers who want to handle more membership work on one site each a reason to move to a higher plan.

What stands out in this shift is the scope of work customers hand over. The product's role widened from connecting a domain to a public page to accepting members and delivering material per client. While Cloakist took in demand for connecting pages across many tools, Sotion kept adding reasons for customers who use Notion for work to keep paying. Bruce made concrete the needs inside a small market where transactions were already happening, the kind that could grow into a business of its own.