Buying and growing micro startups as a software developer

[OVS]

Two days ago, I was at an event with 10 beginner founders, sharing their business failures, including my own, a SaaS for designers to get feedback.

A 27 yo woman joined the event and my god did she put me to shame (I am 27 too). She bought her first stand in a farmers market at 16 for 1k$, sold it later for 7k$ and then it was off to the races, to the point where now she had several businesses and growing a potential big one to an exit.

The main thing I drew from this, was that she had a very good work ethic, was bold and would not hesitate to call people and try new ideas.

I'm grateful for this encounter because it made me realise I got complacent in my job, fooling myself I was "preparing for entrepreneurship", but that was a lie. Most days, besides listening to a business podcast, I did not expand my learnings, I reverted to spending afternoons playing video games and woke up with my phone in hand... In other words, I got complacent.

I am a very good developer, and built SaaS in the past, but I have a curse of going back to working on features because it is comfortable. So now, to eliminate this issue, I decided to buy an already made app/SaaS and grow it.

Thanks to this thread I got hold of very good resources and I bought How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies by Ryan Kulp.

I have a budget of 8-10K$ to invest in this. My main goal is to learn how to manage and grow a business without getting bogged down in development. My fear is that I won't follow through because in the past I've done that. I know that I am responsible to not quit and do the daily grind and hard work necessary.

I'll post updates soon of the journey

 

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[WillHurtDontCare]

@Ovidiu Stoica here's a fastlane thread of another software developer who did just what you're describing

GOLD! - HOT! - From 0 To $240,000 Per Year PROFIT In 18 Months (Acquisition Entrepreneurship)

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

 

[MTF]

Following. Happy to hear that you decided to invest in Ryan's course after my thread. I think his course is even more useful for developers than for no-coders like me as you can do way more with way less (because you know how to code).

 

[Hong_Kong]

Two days ago, I was at an event with 10 beginner founders, sharing their business failures, including my own, a SaaS for designers to get feedback.

A 27 yo woman joined the event and my god did she put me to shame (I am 27 too). She bought her first stand in a farmers market at 16 for 1k$, sold it later for 7k$ and then it was off to the races, to the point where now she had several businesses and growing a potential big one to an exit.

The main thing I drew from this, was that she had a very good work ethic, was bold and would not hesitate to call people and try new ideas.

I'm grateful for this encounter because it made me realise I got complacent in my job, fooling myself I was "preparing for entrepreneurship", but that was a lie. Most days, besides listening to a business podcast, I did not expand my learnings, I reverted to spending afternoons playing video games and woke up with my phone in hand... In other words, I got complacent.

I am a very good developer, and built SaaS in the past, but I have a curse of going back to working on features because it is comfortable. So now, to eliminate this issue, I decided to buy an already made app/SaaS and grow it.

Thanks to this thread I got hold of very good resources and I bought How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies by Ryan Kulp.

I have a budget of 8-10K$ to invest in this. My main goal is to learn how to manage and grow a business without getting bogged down in development. My fear is that I won't follow through because in the past I've done that. I know that I am responsible to not quit and do the daily grind and hard work necessary.

I'll post updates soon of the journey

Checkout mudbrick ventures. Mudbrick Capital

Similar idea. Using capital to buy and hold online assets.

 

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[OVS]

@Ovidiu Stoica here's a fastlane thread of another software developer who did just what you're describing

GOLD! - HOT! - From 0 To $240,000 Per Year PROFIT In 18 Months (Acquisition Entrepreneurship)

From 0 to $240,000 per year profit in 18 months I've been a follower of this forum for about a year now, had read the Millionaire Fastlane book, and finally have decided to tell my story. About a year and a half ago, I found myself unemployed and with near zero savings, two house payments, and...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

Thank you for sharing.

Great story here. I can spend mostly 10k$ but I can invest more time into making it scale. But this story is very encouraging.

The first business bought, had 70% ROI in the first year - that seems like a very good deal

 

[OVS]

Following. Happy to hear that you decided to invest in Ryan's course after my thread. I think his course is even more useful for developers than for no-coders like me as you can do way more with way less (because you know how to code).

Haha, I'm glad to hear you follow along.

Indeed, hopefully coding skills will give me an advantage, however, I'll need to expand my marketing skills if I want to grow the businesses

Following your progress too

 

[Andy Black]

Two days ago, I was at an event with 10 beginner founders, sharing their business failures, including my own, a SaaS for designers to get feedback.

A 27 yo woman joined the event and my god did she put me to shame (I am 27 too). She bought her first stand in a farmers market at 16 for 1k$, sold it later for 7k$ and then it was off to the races, to the point where now she had several businesses and growing a potential big one to an exit.

The main thing I drew from this, was that she had a very good work ethic, was bold and would not hesitate to call people and try new ideas.

I'm grateful for this encounter because it made me realise I got complacent in my job, fooling myself I was "preparing for entrepreneurship", but that was a lie. Most days, besides listening to a business podcast, I did not expand my learnings, I reverted to spending afternoons playing video games and woke up with my phone in hand... In other words, I got complacent.

I am a very good developer, and built SaaS in the past, but I have a curse of going back to working on features because it is comfortable. So now, to eliminate this issue, I decided to buy an already made app/SaaS and grow it.

Thanks to this thread I got hold of very good resources and I bought How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies by Ryan Kulp.

I have a budget of 8-10K$ to invest in this. My main goal is to learn how to manage and grow a business without getting bogged down in development. My fear is that I won't follow through because in the past I've done that. I know that I am responsible to not quit and do the daily grind and hard work necessary.

I'll post updates soon of the journey

I remember listening to a Rob Walling book (Start Small, Stay Small maybe?) or podcast and he or his guest recommended building a productised service around some service you have no skills in. That way you focus on building the business rather than fulfillment.

 

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[OVS]

d I remember listening to a Rob Walling book (Start Small, Stay Small maybe?) or podcast and he or his guest recommended building a productised service around some service you have no skills in. That way you focus on building the business rather than fulfillment.

Indeed.

I'm very good at building saas products but this was an issue when I tried a software development agency because I focused way too much on fulfillment and using the best tech which proved to make no difference for the end client

Also in software development, big contracts can take years to fulfill

 

[MTF]

Indeed.

I'm very good at building saas products but this was an issue when I tried a software development agency because I focused way too much on fulfillment and using the best tech which proved to make no difference for the end client

My main skill is writing. Any product created with writing doesn't, at least to me, feel like a "real" product compared to software.

It's interesting to see your struggles looking at it from the perspective of a person with zero coding experience and no understanding of how it works. To me, it's like some kind of magic or an incredible superpower that allows you to easily build a great Fastlane business.

At the same time, I've seen many engineer types who can spend countless hours creating software but their business skills are horrendous. So I guess that's normal to be either an "idea/business" guy or a "product development" guy but hard to combine both.

 

[OVS]

My main skill is writing. Any product created with writing doesn't, at least to me, feel like a "real" product compared to software.

It's interesting to see your struggles looking at it from the perspective of a person with zero coding experience and no understanding of how it works. To me, it's like some kind of magic or an incredible superpower that allows you to easily build a great Fastlane business.

At the same time, I've seen many engineer types who can spend countless hours creating software but their business skills are horrendous. So I guess that's normal to be either an "idea/business" guy or a "product development" guy but hard to combine both.

Tell that to Morning Brew or to Milk Road, which are businesses built entirely on writing OR a business built on meta writing which is Ship30for30 - A challenge where you learn to write and commit to writing daily for 30 days - you pay 500$ to join the ship30 course and then 1k$ for an upsell, and people buy them.

I recently participated in that program, and let me tell you, there are folks out there that make $ bricks just by writing online. One example is Justin Welsh. That guy sold content products from his online writing worth 1.5 million$.

It's funny because me being in the software world and seeing how much automation and tools came out to help non coders and even coders. It is way easier to launch software now than 5 years ago. My conception is that building software products slowly becomes a commodity and the real challenge is getting attention to your products.

I'm not saying that is true, I want to highlight the difference in perception and how everybody can put imaginary forks in the road for themselves. You (a writer) think writing businesses are not "real" compared to software and me (a coder) think building software is overrated and the challenge is getting attention to your products.

The mind has funny ways of making you stay stuck where you are . We need to keep fighting these pre-conceived notions

 

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[MTF]

Tell that to Morning Brew or to Milk Road, which are businesses built entirely on writing OR a business built on meta writing which is Ship30for30 - A challenge where you learn to write and commit to writing daily for 30 days - you pay 500$ to join the ship30 course and then 1k$ for an upsell, and people buy them.

You're 100% right. I should have mentioned this in the previous post but that's just my mental limitation. We always think that someone else has it easier. Now that I'm learning more about the world of SaaS (spent the last few hours studying it) I'm actually appreciating my world (of writing) way more.

I recently participated in that program, and let me tell you, there are folks out there that make $ bricks just by writing online. One example is Justin Welsh. That guy sold content products from his online writing worth 1.5 million$.

I checked his website Justin Welsh | Building a portfolio of one-person businesses to $5M. - looks super interesting! Thanks for mentioning him.

 

[Andy Black]

Now that I'm learning more about the world of SaaS (spent the last few hours studying it) I'm actually appreciating my world (of writing) way more.

Good. I didn't want to say, but it felt like you were jumping ship, to end up in one you're unfamiliar with.

As an ex IT guy, I've personally steered clear of SaaS.

I checked his website Justin Welsh | Building a portfolio of one-person businesses to $5M. - looks super interesting! Thanks for mentioning him.

I bought his LinkedIn content course. It's really well done.

 

[OVS]

As an ex IT guy, I've personally steered clear of SaaS.

I'm curious of your reasons for this

 

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[Andy Black]

I'm curious of your reasons for this

I was 15 years in IT support (mostly as a Production DBA).

Thank goodness I got out of that world in 2009.

Release management, testing, integration, QA, migrations, implementation planning, backup and recovery, incident management, root cause analysis, problem management, patching and upgrades, security policy creation and implementation, service/helpdesk, 2nd and 3rd level support, data storage/retrieval/indexing/partitioning/etc - while data volumes grew by the month, fail-over sites, fail-over testing, version control, monitoring and alerting, automation, being on call, getting paged when systems went down, blah blah.

I like my nice simple business model of being paid to manage other people's budget using another company's advertising system. Oh, and I'll post my own content on other people's platforms (YouTube, LinkedIn, etc), while helping people in other people's communities (this forum and various Facebook groups).

My courses membership site and emails is via an all-in-one platform (New Zenler) rather than cobbling together lots of platforms.

I want as little contact with that world as possible.

Less stress.

 

[FIFL]

Two days ago, I was at an event with 10 beginner founders, sharing their business failures, including my own, a SaaS for designers to get feedback.

A 27 yo woman joined the event and my god did she put me to shame (I am 27 too). She bought her first stand in a farmers market at 16 for 1k$, sold it later for 7k$ and then it was off to the races, to the point where now she had several businesses and growing a potential big one to an exit.

The main thing I drew from this, was that she had a very good work ethic, was bold and would not hesitate to call people and try new ideas.

I'm grateful for this encounter because it made me realise I got complacent in my job, fooling myself I was "preparing for entrepreneurship", but that was a lie. Most days, besides listening to a business podcast, I did not expand my learnings, I reverted to spending afternoons playing video games and woke up with my phone in hand... In other words, I got complacent.

I am a very good developer, and built SaaS in the past, but I have a curse of going back to working on features because it is comfortable. So now, to eliminate this issue, I decided to buy an already made app/SaaS and grow it.

Thanks to this thread I got hold of very good resources and I bought How to Buy, Grow, and Sell Small Companies by Ryan Kulp.

I have a budget of 8-10K$ to invest in this. My main goal is to learn how to manage and grow a business without getting bogged down in development. My fear is that I won't follow through because in the past I've done that. I know that I am responsible to not quit and do the daily grind and hard work necessary.

I'll post updates soon of the journey

Hi @OVS , keen to hear how you're tracking on finding a business in your $8-10k budget range?
I'm following a similar path, and am more a business minded person, but with a background in tech - so a bit of a hybrid.

 

[Raja]

following

 

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