I started to answer the question by Jon C and realized it was more general and might be interesting to everyone, so I made it into an article. Hope you'll enjoy it!

---

When we first acquired Transferslot, (a marketplace to buy and sell online products), the background idea was to have an overview of every submission first and be able to acquire them before anyone else.

The marketplace worked well and we went up to a few submissions per day. But in total, much of the submissions weren't interesting for us.

... and it's, unfortunately, the same for everyone.

There are many reasons why this is the case, and by running Transferslot for a few years, we found out it boils down to the following:

  • The product will be too expensive. Because the owner is still attached to its baby, the price will be way higher than what it should be. It's often difficult to talk them to lower the price.
  • The product is not really aligned with what you are looking for. This could be the name, the codebase, some of the features, etc.
  • The work is not complete. You will have to spend a lot of time finishing the project, and in the end, you would be more efficient starting from scratch.
  • All is good? Congrats, now you have to fight against many other interested buyers.


If you manage to put your hands on the golden project, you are not done. Quite the contrary, it all starts now.


When we acquired ImprovMX, the code base was in Python - exactly what I love - but not the way I like it (of course! I didn't develop it). So guess what I did?... yep, rewrote the entire code base.

Now, what was interesting about ImprovMX is the established name on the web. We have around 150 new domains added every day on ImprovMX thanks for its popularity, so even if I did rewrote the whole code base, what worked really well for us was the popularity of the service.

Moreover, when we acquired ImprovMX, it wasn't making any money (it was 100% free). We had a hard time figuring out a way to make money out of a free tool and decided on a premium package that offers advanced features while keeping the original intent free.

This strategy worked really well for us because since ImprovMX wasn't making any money initially, we were able to acquire it for a reasonable price. And now that it's starting to make money, we are becoming profitable, and starting to get back the money we initially needed for the acquisition.

What we bought was the popularity of the service and - this is a big bet - the assumption that we would manage to convert it to a profitable business.

TLDR:

What worked well for us was to acquire a service that wasn't making any money - which allowed us to buy it at an interesting price - while having the possibility to make it profitable (other competitors were already making money).

But keep in mind that acquiring a project isn't "buy it and get rich". You will still have to work a lot on it - at least on the marketing side. You will have to adapt it to your vision which will rarely be the same as the creator.

So, good luck, and know that it takes time to find the perfect fit.