Original Summary

Well I need to say this once in public because I get the same DM literally every week now. Someone sends me an Acquire listing of $4k MRR it "runs itself" and it is asking $120k and wants to know if the code looks ok. And every time I want to reply it with a question instead. If it runs itself why is he selling it. Context so you know I'm not just bitter. I am running an agency since past 8 years, started with SaaS MVPs and now GTM and AI automations. Buyers have sent me somewhere around 40 of these codebases to look at before they buy. So I've seen the inside of a lot of listings and not just the screenshot. Think about it for one second. A thing that makes $4k a month and needs 2 hours a week is the best asset a solo dev can own. $48k a year for 100 hours of work. You don't sell that for $120k. That's two and a half years of income for something that costs you nothing. Literally no-one does that. Unless they know something about the next 12 months that isn't on the listing. And they do. Every single one I've opened had a bill coming. Dependencies untouched since launch. The deploy is the seller ssh'ing into a box and running git pull, and it's never been written down anywhere because he's the only human who's ever done it and he doesn't even think of it as a process, it's just what he does on a Sunday. One guy had billing reconciliation running as a cron job on his personal Mac. Laptop sleeps, customers don't get invoiced. 60 paying customers on that one. Not in the listing obviously. The seller isn't stupid. He's looked at the codebase, felt the dread of the rebuild, and decided it's easier to sell it to someone who'll price it on revenue. Which is everyone. 3x ARR, 4x if the chart goes up. Nobody, not one buyer I've worked with, has walked in with the rebuild already subtracted. So the guy pays $120k for $48k of revenue and a $50k rebuild he'll discover in month 3 when the first feature he tries to ship won't build on his machine. The bit that actually annoys me is who ends up holding it. Some guy who saved for 2 years to buy something instead of building from zero, and 6 months later he's on Upwork trying to find anyone who'll touch the code, and nobody will, and now he's the one writing "runs itself" on a listing because what else is he going to do. Meanwhile the original seller is on twitter with an "I exited my side project" thread. I'm going to give one piece of advice and it's the only one that's ever mattered. Before you read a single line of code, get on a call and ask the seller to deploy the app to a brand new server while you watch. Thirty minutes. I've done this maybe 15 times. About half of them couldn't. Actually couldn't. One guy went quiet for 4 minutes and then said he'd send me a Loom later. He didn't. The listing is still up btw. That's the whole test. If he can't

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/9/14 21:46:55