Zero Revenue to $3K/Month: Inside a $3K Micro SaaS Acquisition with Steven Macdonald

In this episode of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, host Jaryd Krause interviews Lisa Williams, CEO of Hello Again, a women’s wellness e-commerce brand. Lisa shares her journey of transitioning from running a marketing agency to acquiring a brand in 2024 with zero prior M&A experience and no outside capital. She dives into how she discovered the product during her own menopause journey, structured the deal to finance it herself, navigated complex legal challenges, reformulated and rebranded the products, and scaled the business through organic growth and content creation. If you're looking to buy your first business without relying on outside investors, this episode is a masterclass in creative deal-making. Click the ‘Play’ button to get started!

In this episode of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, Jaryd Krause interviews David Barnett, an author, educator, and former business broker with over 20 years of experience buying, selling, financing, and managing small businesses. They explore concepts from David's 11th book, Business and Asset Values, diving into how opinions, personal situations, and emotions influence how people value businesses. The discussion highlights strategies for becoming an "unfocused" buyer to avoid costly emotional mistakes, objectively assessing a business's build-versus-buy replacement costs, navigating competition from strategic buyers or private equity firms, and using a sales mindset to help buyers secure better terms. Check out this video to learn how to win deals without overpaying! Link here: _____

What actually keeps someone in the game when the business fails, the money disappears, and the strategy stops working? Joe Burrell knows that feeling. His first business cost him $700 and didn’t work out. Years later, he’s been involved in 300+ transactions worth nearly $7 million. But the interesting part isn’t the acquisitions. It’s what happened in between them. In this episode, Joe and Jaryd unpack the mindset behind staying the course - why the hardest part of entrepreneurship is often the dip, how belief is built through action rather than motivation, and why constantly chasing the next opportunity can quietly destroy the compounding effect of sticking with one thing. They also break down a simple but powerful progression: desire → vision → courage → belief. Because you don't need to feel confident before you start. Sometimes confidence is what you earn by refusing to stop. 🎧 Hit play — this one is about what happens when you stay in the game long enough to get good at it.

Buying your first business is exciting. Buying six more before you’ve figured out how to run the first one is where things get interesting. Dev Shah discovered acquisitions through Acquire.com and quickly went from being fascinated by the idea of buying businesses to actually building a portfolio of them. His first deal was Sourcely AI, a student research tool he bought for just $4,000 while it was making around $500 a month. A year and a half later, he had grown it to more than $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue and sold it for a low six-figure exit. But along the way, Dev acquired six other micro-businesses, all for less than $10,000 each, using the cash flow from his original acquisition. And that's where he learned one of the biggest lessons of his acquisition journey: just because you can buy another business doesn't mean you should. He couldn't integrate them as effectively as he expected. Some were sold. Some were shut down. Others continued running. Today, Dev has taken those lessons into a much bigger world of acquisitions. He runs a buy-side advisory firm helping search funds, startups, and other buyers source deals, conduct due diligence, negotiate, and get acquisitions across the finish line. And he's seen plenty go wrong. Sellers who disappear after an LOI. Businesses with information that turns out to be fake. Owners claiming revenue that can't actually be verified. Deals that look attractive until you start pulling apart the numbers. In this episode, Jaryd sits down with Dev to unpack what buying seven businesses taught him about moving too fast, how to build a buy box around your own skills and competitive advantages, and why serious buyers need to spend time in the market before they ever make an offer. Dev also breaks down his approach to due diligence, why you should treat those 30 days as if you're already taking over the business, how to avoid becoming emotionally attached to a deal, and why your relationship with the seller can be just as important as the numbers on the spreadsheet. From $4,000 micro-acquisitions to sourcing deals for buyers with millions of dollars behind them, Dev has seen both sides of the acquisition process. If you're thinking about buying an online business, especially for $100K or less, this conversation is full of lessons that could save you from making the same mistakes. 🎧 Hit play to hear what Dev would do differently if he could go back to his first acquisition.

What happens when you buy a SaaS business for $5,000… only to discover the deal comes with a $12,000 security bill, a mountain of technical work, and a newborn baby? Andrew Kamphey was the number one user of Pigeon, a tiny SaaS app built inside Gmail that he genuinely loved. Then the founder announced he was shutting it down. So Andrew bought it. There was just one problem. The business was already making $0. And within days of sending the $5,000 payment, Andrew found out he was about to become a dad. A week later, his son was born prematurely and spent three days in the NICU. Meanwhile, Andrew was waking up every few hours to care for his newborn and sometimes restart the servers. Then came the $12,000 Google-required penetration test. What started as a tiny acquisition quickly became a crash course in what actually happens after you buy an online business. Technical headaches. Unexpected costs. Customer recovery. Infrastructure. And the reality that owning a business isn't always about growth charts and big wins. Sometimes it's just figuring out which fire to put out next. But Andrew didn't walk away empty-handed. After roughly six months, he had reduced the infrastructure costs, brought back paying users, improved the product, and eventually sold Pigeon for just over $30,000. And that's only part of the story. Andrew has also built and sold an industry newsletter with 15,000 subscribers, experimented with strategic acquisitions, and built Better Sheets into a business around Google Sheets, tools, templates, tutorials, and some seriously unconventional products. In this episode, Jaryd sits down with Andrew to unpack what his strangest acquisition taught him about buying businesses with little capital, why strategic value can matter more than traditional valuation multiples, what makes a small online business worth acquiring, and why simply asking an owner if they'd sell can open doors you never expected. Because sometimes the best acquisition isn't the one with the biggest revenue. It's the one you actually know how to make better. 🎧 Hit play - this is what a $5K SaaS acquisition, a $12K surprise bill, and a newborn baby can teach you about buying online businesses.