The story behind BuyMeASaaS
Small SaaS products were dying quietly when someone would have bought them. So we built the marketplace for second lives.
The trigger
A developer we knew shut down a profitable micro-SaaS. Real revenue, real users, four years of his life — archived.
Why not sell it? "It only makes a few thousand a month. The brokers don't want it, and I don't want to deal with tire-kickers on a forum."
So the product died. Not because it failed. Because selling something small was harder than turning it off.
The problem
The small end of the SaaS market has no real exit. Business brokers serve companies with meaningful EBITDA. Marketplaces for tiny products were informal, untrusted, and full of lowballers. Founders rationally chose shutdown over hassle.
Meanwhile, on the other side: operators with skills and some savings, looking for exactly these products — something small, real, and improvable.
Supply existed. Demand existed. Trust didn't.
The first attempt
The first version was embarrassingly simple: a listing board with a schema. Revenue range, stack, churn, reason for selling. Every listing reviewed by a human before going live. No escrow, no payments, no tooling.
We assumed we'd need to build marketplace machinery fast. We were wrong. The schema was the machinery — forcing sellers into structured, honest data did more for trust than any feature could.
What failed
- We initially ranked listings by recency. Useless. Curation beat recency, and "featured, reviewed listings" became the front page.
- Our first buyer-side tooling assumed people wanted dashboards and alerts. What they wanted was fewer, better options.
What we learned
- A marketplace is a curation business wearing a software business costume
- Structured data is trust. The same claim in a schema is more believable than in prose
- Two-sided cold start: seed the supply side with quality, and demand follows. The reverse doesn't work
Where it is now
BuyMeASaaS is live and growing — the small end of the market, taken seriously.