Building a $100M ARR portfolio of products
Tim Schumacher is on a journey to build the world's biggest portfolio of indie SaaS products — and with 25 brands bringing in $100M ARR, saas.group is well on its way.
I caught up with Tim to learn how he's doing it. Here's what he had to say. 👇
From marketplace to holdco
I have been an entrepreneur since my teenage years, starting with coding and building Sedo.com, a domain marketplace I ran for ten years.
After becoming an angel investor and founding several other companies, a few things became clear:
Talented founders were getting burned out, stuck in their businesses, or unable to scale further despite great products.
Acquisitions were going wrong because the acquirers didn’t understand how to run the products.
I was far better at scaling than building from scratch.
Combining my love of scaling with the need founders have for trusted long-term homes became the foundation of saas.group.
Building the world's biggest indie SaaS portfolio
Today, I work on building the world’s biggest platform of independent SaaS brands, now over 25 brands and around 400 people across 30 countries.
We typically acquire SaaS companies with between $2 and $5 million ARR. Several of our companies contribute meaningful ARR in the mid- to high-seven figures. And altogether, we are at $100M ARR now.
Our portfolio includes brands like:
GitTower.com — a wonderful graphical GIT client
ScraperAPI.com — an amazing dev-friendly web data/scraping tool
Ayrshare.com — social media connectivity made easy for devs
Prerender.io — helping visibility of large websites in search engines and AI at scale
Building the "product"
For saas.group, our “product” is the acquisition and operating model itself. It began with our first acquisition, DeployBot.com.
Since then, we've been refining processes around tech diligence, culture alignment, and our founder-friendly model. We've built a repeatable engine that consists of small, high-performance teams and shared central services for marketing, DevOps, and finance. We apply this engine to all acquisitions.
If I started over, I’d formalize this acquisition playbook even earlier because repeatability and structure have proven to be our biggest advantage.
Focusing on bootstrappers
Working with founders who share the bootstrapper mindset has been a major advantage. It makes our teams efficient and frugal because the founders take deep ownership of their products. This aligns perfectly with our operating philosophy.
Small, high-performance teams consistently outperform large orgs, and giving those teams autonomy while providing central support has been one of our biggest success factors.
Simple, maintainable stacks
Because saas.group acquires independent brands, the portfolio uses a variety of stacks. There is no single enforced stack, but teams try to keep variations limited so knowledge can transfer. Technical due diligence focuses on code quality, maintainability, and debt rather than specific technologies.
The common theme is developer-driven stack decisions with a bias toward simplicity and long-term maintainability.
Growing a portfolio organically
Growth hasn’t just come from traditional user acquisition, but from becoming known as the most founder-friendly home for SaaS businesses.
We keep our reputation strong by being transparent, honoring deals, and letting brands stay independent. Word of mouth from founders, brokers, and investors has generated a steady inbound stream of conversations and acquisition opportunities.
On the "traditional" user/customer acquisition side, we work a pretty normal SaaS playbook:
Content marketing
SEO
SEA
Social
Product-led growth
It's not rocket science, and I don't think we have any totally unusual "hacks". I would say our marketing team is simply very good and very efficient in execution.
As far as revenue growth, it all happens through internationalization, better marketing, pricing improvements, and, simply speaking, by improving the product.
Ongoing development of acquired brands
After we acquire a profitable SaaS company, we keep the team focused and support them with shared services where it adds leverage.
We make sure to continue to develop all our brands, depending on what they need most. In some cases, it's marketing, sales, and other go-to-market strategies, like internationalization; in other cases, it's a complete rethinking of the product.
One practical example is AddSearch.com, an amazing website search tool for website owners. With classic search becoming less important, the brand needed to reinvent itself. The team did this successfully by launching "AI Answers," an AI-based answer engine, that helped increase ARR again.
Same for Keyword.com, another brand of ours. Classic SEO/keyword monitoring got a little less interesting, so ARR was declining until a few months ago when the team launched a tool to also track brand visibility across all major AI search platforms, including ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini. That helped grow ARR again!
We also cut costs by reducing infrastructure costs and operational consistency. A good example is Prerender.com, where we reduced AWS costs by 80 percent after joining. That alone added hundreds of thousands to the bottom line.
Advice for building and exiting
Prepare well, understand your numbers, and talk to real users early because everything else compounds from that.
If you ever consider selling, treat it like product-market fit: Have conversations, learn what buyers care about, and come prepared.
Most importantly, stay focused on building something people truly want and avoid comparing your business to unicorn stories that distort expectations.
What's next?
The long-term vision is to build the world’s biggest platform of independent SaaS brands. That means continuously improving our operating model, staying true to the founder-friendly approach, and growing a diverse ecosystem of niche SaaS tools.
The goal is sustainability and longevity rather than chasing hype cycles.
To learn more, readers can visit saas.group, explore our brands, or listen to the saas.unbound podcast. We also share knowledge internally and occasionally publish insights for founders who want to understand the acquisition process better.
My Indie Hackers AMA also provides additional background into how we evaluate and operate SaaS businesses — it is a few years old, but literally, our evaluation framework is exactly the same.
And you can find me on LinkedIn.
Leave a Comment
When you mentioned product-led growth as part of your playbook, i'm having a hard time imagining streamlining this for such a huge # of brands. Since you've cracked it, Kudos!
Really insightful journey — the strategy of focusing on multiple independent products to reach a high ARR resonates with long-term sustainable growth.
this is the kind of “boring but real” $100m story i respect
quick q: when you buy in that $2–$5m arr range, what’s the #1 reason you pass on a deal even if the numbers look good? (churn, tech debt, founder risk, channel risk, etc)
This really resonates. The execution gap you’re highlighting is the real problem for most indie founders, having a plan is easy, but shipping, distributing, and closing the feedback loop consistently is where things break down.
One channel that’s been especially effective for execution-focused teams is Reddit, when it’s used less as “promotion” and more as intent-driven distribution. High-signal threads already capture users actively searching for solutions, and thoughtful contributions there can compound far longer than typical social posts.
When tools like this are paired with channels where demand already exists, that’s often where indie products start to break through.
Happy to share what that looks like in practice if it’s useful.
This was a great read — especially the part where the operating model is treated as the product.
A few things really stood out to me:
Small, autonomous teams + shared services > scaling headcount
Founder-friendly reputation as a real acquisition moat
Stack simplicity and maintainability over dogma
Growth driven by fundamentals, not “growth hacks”
The AddSearch / Keyword examples were especially insightful. Reinventing products instead of letting them decay feels like the underrated skill in long-term SaaS portfolios.
It’s refreshing to see a $100M ARR story that’s built on patience, process, and respect for bootstrappers — not hype or forced consolidation.
Thanks for sharing this. Lots of lessons here for anyone thinking beyond a single-product SaaS.
This is long-term thinking done right.
Treating the operating model itself as the product — and staying founder-friendly — is a powerful moat.
Proof that sustainable SaaS wins come from focus, systems, and patience, not hype.
"ONLY channel you need" - honestly starting to believe this too.
I wasted months on Twitter and PH before realizing Reddit was where my actual users were hanging out.
The trick that changed everything: stop chasing hot posts. Target threads with under 5 comments, posted recently. Way less competition.
I use a desktop tool for the filtering - search "reddit toolbox wappkit" on google if curious.
What subreddits are working best for you?
Great insights — especially the emphasis on sustainability over hype. Building a diverse portfolio and optimizing operations (like cost efficiency and real user feedback) really compounds over time. It reminds me that focus and consistency matter more than chasing big valuations early. Thanks for sharing!