Hard to make sense of an acquisition at a cost this low. It’s like a month or two salary of a senior software engineer.
That’s pretty much across the board.
Even in London that would possibly be the case, it's just the way the market is.
He basically ripped off a github repo curated list of APIs and made it "searchable" + listed to PH then sold the site based on the traffic from that one spike. Not belittling it at all - he had the initiative to build it, monetize it, and sell it.
After he had the idea for tweet jobs, he said the original buyer submitted another offer on the original project (which it sounds like he had most abandoned).
Venture capital can be absolutely horrendous in some areas, and you're stuck with either
1) Go to the bank and get a normal business loan
2) VC peanuts with terrible conditions
3) Work hard and save up money, get co-founders and pool your money.
Not saying that it's not like that in tech-hubs, but I'm in one of the most expensive countries in the world, and our VC community is so underdeveloped that it's shameful.
(Also, I see the author is located in Southern Asia, so that's probably a nice payout.)