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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

I bought a side project back in 2014 (3-4 month old then with about $2000 MRR) and grew it to a bootstrapped SAAS company of 20 employees as of today with revenue in 100K MRR range. Happy to answer any questions.

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> 20 employees as of today with revenue in 100K MRR

That's an interesting pair of statistics. Part time employees? Outside the US? A business that is heavy on inexpensive support personnel and light on engineering?

How validated was the side project when you bought it? Were there already paying customers? What kind of due diligence did you do in order to find out if the project was worth buying?

Yes it was validated and had like 7-8 paying customers. The guy who sold the project was an excellent content marketer which really helped early on as I had no clue how to market :).

How did he do the marketing? Was it blog posts or YouTube videos or something else?

Why did the original creator sell? Was the growth not possible for him?

he was more of a flipper :). He didn't want to run any operations. Just build, market and sell. After selling to me, he built and sold other projects as well. The guy is a marketing genius!!

Would you be comfortable doing an intro? Looking for this exact skillset for an ambitious project

How did you find it? I'd love to buy a few of these a year but the information I can find seems to be for either brick-and-mortar or angel/vc investments.

Not OC but flippa.com and bizbuysell.com are the marketplaces I’ve heard of

How long did it take to recover your investment?

And if you had to do it over again would you buy the business again or did it change dramatically enough that you'd try to create it from scratch next time?

I recovered the investment within 12 months. I would not create from scratch if I could find similar deals. I love the idea of buying businesses :)

What was the MRR when you acquired it, and how much effort did it take on your end to shape it into a workable product? Was code quality good enough?

MRR when acquired was give or take $2000 but it was only 3-4 months old so there was huge risk. Code quality was garbage and mostly built with WP plugins duck taped together. I along with my CTO rewrote the whole thing after 12 months.

Was a rewrite the best way to increase customers? Or was there more energy and resources dedicated to marketing and sales?

Marketing and Sales is always better. But rewrite was needed because we pivoted a bit and changed our target market and after lot of validations and testing.

could you provide a link. very intrigued.

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