Could you have structured the deal in a more cash favorable way seeing as you are paying for it from cash flow? That way it would have been less of an immediate impact on finances. For purchases like this, a revolving line of credit is helpful, even tho there's cost to that, because it lessens the impact on cash flow.
Yup, absolutely — you see a lot of the larger brokers do some genre of lease-to-own program (pay us the purchase price plus a near-usurious APY over 24mos and at the end, you can keep the domain.)
My margins are solid and there aren't a lot of competing opportunities to deploy capital besides pulling forward cloud costs or hiring folks (which is a very different value prop altogether), so reasoning about the lump sum was pretty easy, but you're definitely right in that objectively speaking I should have just gotten a line of credit and amortized it that way.
Thanks for sharing your insights and experiences! I am a fan of bootstrapped SaaS, just keep it going as much as you can and avoid the temptation to sell early, although I am sure that opportunity will present itself.
