Acquiring micro-SaaS products and growing them to $120k MRR
Pascal Levy-Garboua has bought and sold multiple companies throughout his career. And now, he is the founder of Noosa Labs, a serial acquirer of small, profitable SaaS companies. His current portfolio of three products is bringing in $120k MRR.
Here's Pascal on how he did it. 👇
Building for 23 years
I have been in tech for 23 years — half of my career in San Francisco, half in Paris.
I started as a cofounder of VirtuOz, an AI chatbot company that Nuance Communications later acquired (now, part of Microsoft). I then joined an image recognition startup, and we invented photo search before Yahoo acquired us to power Flickr search. I also founded a local delivery startup in San Francisco that failed before I joined Checkr as its 9th employee. When I left, the company exceeded $250M in annual revenue run rate with 300 employees.
I have been an angel investor for 13 years and invested in Notion, Checkr, Baseten, PayJoy, Kin Insurance, and Crusoe Energy. I am also a venture partner for Long Journey Ventures.
In 2021, I founded Noosa Labs, a serial acquirer of small, bootstrapped, profitable SaaS businesses. We acquire very profitable SaaS businesses with $200k-$600k ARR and 50%+ margins, mostly selling to SMBs with product-led growth motions.
Noosa Labs operates three businesses today. Across our portfolio, we are at $120k MRR.
Pivoting to small acquisitions
I started Noosa Labs because I am not a zero-to-one person. I have done it, but I am not great at it. I am much better at taking something that exists and bringing it to the next level, which is why I wanted to acquire companies that my team and I could run.
I also like working on a diverse set of problems, so I figured I might as well acquire multiple companies to solve different problems every day!
I first discovered this business model when I learned about Constellation Software in 2015. I was exploring potential vertical SaaS partners at Checkr, and their annual letters showed me this could be a valuable path.
Initially, I wanted to acquire larger SaaS businesses ($1M ARR+). I started by targeting those, but six months into this journey, I discovered Acquire.com on Twitter and found the first business I was interested in on that marketplace. I bought it to learn while continuing my outreach efforts on larger SaaS businesses.
Talking to these larger businesses, I realized their valuations would require me to raise a lot of money — at the time, in early 2021, most asked for 4-8x ARR.
So, I decided to settle for smaller, very profitable SaaS assets and start from there. In our first year, we closed four acquisitions; we eventually shut one down, sold two, and the fourth, Sendtric, is our largest business today.
Avoid platform risk
Our first acquisition was WAMessages, a Chrome extension used to send personalized messages on WhatsApp.
The business grew significantly (from a small base) after we redesigned it. It was highly profitable, but unfortunately, we had to shut it down in December 2022 after WhatsApp LLC sent us a cease-and-desist letter.
It took my COO and me nine months to recover from that setback. This was a (very) painful experience, but it taught us not to rely on large platforms, especially when a SaaS is operating in a gray area of the terms of service.
Learn and grow, as I say!
User and revenue growth
Sendtric and Mava are pure subscription SaaS businesses, while Evalart gets 1/3 of its revenue from subscriptions and 2/3 from pay-as-you-go credits.
Historically, our businesses rely on SEO, word-of-mouth (driven by Sendtric’s strong reputation among email marketers), and viral features, such as customers discovering Mava AI bots in other Discord servers.
We also use Google Ads for Evalart. And we recently began using outbound strategies and product partnerships. While partnerships have been less fruitful than anticipated, ads and outbound efforts have shown promise, now accounting for one-third of our pipeline.
As far as revenue growth, we focus on:
Pricing increases and new tiers. For Sendtric, the introduction of Enterprise and API plans for email service providers accelerated growth.
Pricing simplification. At Evalart, we defined clear pricing and moved away from customers requesting significant discounts.
Improved onboarding and reduced churn. For Sendtric, we recently updated the onboarding process and added new "widgets," which successfully reduced churn by 20-30% year-over-year.
Product improvements to become a product leader while offering a value price tag — we want to be a cheaper option despite our product leadership.
Be patient and ask for help
Here's my advice:
Be patient. It always takes more time to find product-market fit than what one reads on X!
Avoid businesses where one platform has a kill switch.
Focus much more on growth initiatives than product improvements or new features.
Also, ask for help and feedback from fellow indie hackers! I've found many people in our community are incredibly generous with their time. This spirit of support is what inspired me to launch the podcast, Indie Board Session, which aims to guide founders who may feel isolated as they pursue growth and excellence.
I also recommend checking out Jason Cohen's blog, A Smart Bear. For sales or Go-to-Market advice, especially for building a team, Jason Lemkin's content on SaaStr is spot on, even though it skews towards VC-backed startups.
What's next?
We initially aimed to grow the company to $20M in ARR over the next 5-7 years. However, with Boopos (our debt provider) exiting the market and the current uncertainty surrounding AI, it is difficult to determine if these targets remain realistic.
For 2026, our primary objectives are to accelerate growth for Mava and Evalart, scale Sendtric with enterprise customers, and complete one new acquisition.
Meanwhile, I have spent significant time exploring Claude Code to better understand emerging trends and rethink our long-term strategy. If customers continue to buy software, distribution will become increasingly critical. I believe companies like ours have an opportunity to act as a distribution hub (the "record label") for other founders, similar to models Tibo Maker or John Rush use. I want to explore how we can leverage our strengths to play a role in this space.
You can learn more at our website or read my frequent posts on LinkedIn. You can also listen to our podcast, Indie Board Session, on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If interested in speaking on our podcast, you can reach out too!
Leave a Comment
Acquiring and growing micro-SaaS is fascinating — revenue recovery is often the hidden unlock. Curious: across your portfolio, how do you currently handle failed Stripe payments? Most founders I talk to are losing 2-5% of MRR to churn from card failures alone, but it barely shows up in dashboards until it compounds.
This is a great breakdown of a path that more founders should talk about openly.
The “small profitable SaaS acquisition” route feels underrated compared to the usual VC narrative of building something from zero. In many ways it seems more like operating a portfolio of cash-flowing micro businesses than chasing a single big outcome.
One thing I’m curious about: when you evaluate a $200k–$600k ARR SaaS today, what signals tell you the growth ceiling hasn’t already been reached?
Is it mostly distribution opportunities (SEO, outbound, partnerships), pricing inefficiencies, or product improvements you think the previous founder never pursued?
The WhatsApp cease-and-desist section is the most important part of this post and it's easy to skim past. Nine months to recover from a single platform dependency not because the business was bad, but because the kill switch existed and got pulled. That's not a business risk, it's a structural flaw in the asset. The lesson generalizes beyond "avoid gray areas": any SaaS where a single third party can unilaterally end your revenue stream should be priced and underwritten like a lease with no renewal guarantee, not like an owned asset.
The Constellation Software discovery thread is worth pulling on for anyone reading this. Constellation's model acquire vertical SaaS, operate forever, never sell, compound quietly is probably the most consistently underrated playbook in software. The annual letters Mark Leonard wrote are some of the best operator thinking publicly available. Pascal's adaptation of it to the micro-SaaS layer is genuinely smart: same logic, lower multiples, faster feedback loops, and less capital required to prove the model.
The "record label for founders" framing at the end is the most interesting strategic direction in the post. The insight underneath it: distribution is becoming the scarce resource in software, not product. If Noosa Labs has three products with established SEO footprints, email lists, and word-of-mouth engines, the marginal cost of distributing a fourth product through those existing channels is close to zero. That's a real structural advantage over a solo founder launching cold. The question is whether the products need to be acquired or whether some version of a distribution partnership with existing founders could work lower capital outlay, potentially better alignment.
One pushback on the "focus more on growth than product improvements" advice: it's correct for most mature SaaS businesses past PMF, but the sequencing matters. Pouring growth effort into a product with a structural retention problem just accelerates churn. The 20–30% churn reduction from the Sendtric onboarding improvement is the data point that earns the right to prioritize growth because now the bucket isn't leaking as fast.