5
8 Comments

Buying/Acquiring Software Rather than Starting from Scratch?

Hello, I'd like some feedback.

What's your appetite for buying an existing software business, rather than starting one from scratch? Have you done it or would you do it??

Like many of you, I'm hacking my way through my next software venture. My ultimate goal is to have a lifestyle, and if I'm able to take a shortcut to skip over finding an idea, building the initial MVP, and a customer base, it would save a lot of time.

#feedback #need-feedback

  1. 2

    acquiring software helps in many ways :-

    1). Existed result set (User's interest, market based feedback, etc.,)
    2). Fastest to kick start with where it is left.
    3). Most Important: [ Extremely cost friendly ]

    • Starting from Scratch has lots of Hidden pain [ one majorly being, you may drop in between due to lost of interest ] - Cost, feedback, research result set, time etc., are other included pain.

    It's faster to buy/acquire then to SFS ( start from scratch )

    You can easily find many company helping you buy/acquire existing product. Some of the being:

    1. Flippa.com
    2. CodeCanyons.net
    3. 1kprojects
    4. SideProject

    and more..

    1. 2

      Hey thanks!

      Yeah, I've bought a few small digital businesses. It started as a purely speculative 'buy a hobby project' thing and has started to formalize into more of a home-grown portfolio approach. My core reason was to have owned projects I could test tooling, funnels, and other marketing-related ideas on without getting client buy-in or risking larger more established brand positioning on un-proven ideas. The focus is the same with an interest in actually scaling these businesses now.

      I've bought some that just never worked out - primarily because I acquired a business I wasn't fit to run (technically). I've almost bought plenty and had sellers bail or get sketchy.

      I started tinyacquire.com to help with one piece of the process, which is sorting through the crap to even begin digging into interesting opportunities.

      I do believe that for the right person, acquiring a small project can be a big boon to moving forward quickly. You get previous data, a brand, possibly an audience/email list, and in general "something to work with". In a lot of ways it's a very similar decision to the ones big company M&A teams make regarding "build versus buy".

      1. 2

        I use to browse Flippa alot. I partly used it as a way to learn how other websites made money, but also from the aspect of potentially buying something. Got bored of sifting through all the bad stuff!

  2. 1

    Rob Walling bought one (or more?) of his products. Search for the story on that; it's a good read.

  3. 1

    I just read a podcast transcript on this topic here: https://mixergy.com/interviews/get-latka-with-nathan-latka/
    dude is heavily promoting his book, which presumably goes more into details, but you can get the gist of his method from the interview.

  4. 1

    I started writing an answer and I thought it would be interesting for others too, so I wrote it as an article ;)
    https://www.indiehackers.com/@cnicodeme/thoughts-on-buying-acquiring-a-product-04c197a3b4

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments