How this non-technical founder went from $800MRR to acquired
Katt here 👋
In No-Code Exits I share every week a success story of a non-technical founder.
This week I talked to No-Code founder @nocodelife, who built, grew and sold landing page builder yep.so.
How it all started
Kieran got the idea for Yep.so from his own experiences. He needed something that would help him share ideas faster with the world. In stead of just sitting on them forever or whispering them to one friend.
So he started working on a super fast landing page builder with Bubble. His goal was to remove all the barriers and add some smart features to track interest and talk to interested users. Testing and analyzing different ideas was suddenly much easier.
Kieran was able to grow this SaaS to $700MRR, especially by building in public and setting up partnerships with communities.
That tiny seed
In June, Kieran noticed that building Yep started to excite him less and less. That wave of energy to build and improve the product was fading. It planted a seed in his brain that it might be time to move on….
By chance a few weeks later, he received an interesting DM. It was Steven and he asked if Kieran would consider selling Yep. And that is how the ball started rolling…
Talk talk talk
Kieran shared some data on usage, revenue and costs. Next, he recorded an in-depth video where he talked through the entire app, not in great detail but just an overview of the features and set-up.
Over the next few months they had a few calls to answer questions. Kieran was very honest about everything. From negative (for example: indie makers are a tough audience to sell to) to positive (the app has had a consistent stream of new users without any marketing).
The big moment
Steven’s an entrepreneur and had previously bought and sold other apps. Without any marketing Yep had steady monthly recurring revenue. For Steven, it represented a good opportunity to take an unloved app and grow it.
So they sealed the deal for an undisclosed amount and went through the different steps to hand it over:
- Putting together an asset purchase agreement.
- Agreeing to a transaction day
- Transferring payment and assets
Next to that Kieran offered, as part of the agreement, to include 10 hours of dev work, a fixed hourly rate for future work and access to all of Kieran his Bubble courses. Like that Steven will be able to maintain the app himself eventually.
Messy stuff
And here some great final advice from Kieran for No-Code makers that are just getting started:
“If I were starting out now and wanted to build apps that I could later sell, I would do things a bit differently. I learned by building my own projects, which meant I didn’t really know the best ways to structure apps, so as a result my earlier builds like Yep were a bit messy. I would recommend doing some structured courses or bootcamps from the outset to learn the best practices so that when you come to sell an app it’s much easier for you to hand over a well-built, well-documented app. After all, the beauty of no-code is that people who buy our projects will hopefully be able to learn to maintain them themselves!”
☝️One more thing
Do you want to read more No-Code Success stories? Subscribe here and access 50+ interviews with No-Code Founders. Filter on No-Code Stack, Revenue, Acquired and much more.
