I think there are many IH who would be very interested to learn about the process and your experience.
I purchased a (mostly)dead SAAS product 2 years ago, and have been sitting on the codebase since. It was called Houston, and was built to help founders of pre-launch products connect with and gather feedback from early adopters and supports to ensure they were building the right features. I determined that in order to succeed, the lifecycle of use had to move beyond pre-launch, so I've been ideating on a new and improved feature set for a while now. I purchased the product largely for the existing codebase, as it was a good starting point to work from, given the investment.
Happy to share more about the process if anyone is interested. Feel free to shoot me an email.
How did you decide it was worth buying this dead project, why did you believe in it?
I didn't necessarily believe in the current iteration of the product. I bought the codebase because for the money, it was a good starting point to refactor. It would have taken me more time and money to build it from scratch.
I bought recently two projects on 1kprojects. The process there is straightforward but not completely transparent as you do not know if the seller has read your mail, etc. Anyways, the overall experience was fine.
Once the seller contacted me back, everything else went over email and pretty smooth. We chatted, cleared any open questions, made contracts and payment agreements and triggered the transfers when 3rd parties were involved like domain transfer, hosting, etc.
Honestly, these 3rd parties were the only time-consuming and annoying part because we had to wait. And in one case, the support was so awful that it took almost 2 months to transfer an app in a store (chrome web store developer account exactly). Other than that, everything was fine.
I work a lot based on trust and so far have only made good experiences with it.
The big question left is, why did I buy them in the first place.
That's a personal one and your mileage may vary. For me, I believed they would help me with an existing project ( MindfulDevMag ) as they are quite related, niche wise, and bring their own user-base along. My assumption is that it will bring an overall improvement for those projects. Time will show what I can make out of it :-)