We bought a pre-revenue SaaS for $5k. Here's what happened...

A short SaaS bootstrapping saga

We didn’t start our latest primary SaaS product (ViewExport). We acquired it.

Because it’s unusual to acquire a pre-revenue SaaS for $5K, rearchitect it, and monetize it almost instantly, with a payback period of less than two quarters, I thought I’d explain how we did that:

How the opportunity came to us, what we thought of it at the time, what we did when we bought it, and how we’re looking at it now.

How We Got The Deal Opportunity

The way we get investment and acquisition offers is pretty simple:

We sit back and let the phone ring. (Kind of.)

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said that many times in Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters over the years.

For us, it’s not a physical phone that rings so much as it is our digital presence, of course. But the concept is similar.

I’m not saying we won’t knock on doors to try to acquire companies that we think are interesting. But we prefer to work with sellers who are actively looking to sell, not those who just want to have a chat about what we might pay. It’s a similar principle in sales: it’s much easier to put your offer out there, and then engage meaningfully with those who self-select to discuss that offer with you. You can definitely go and drum up business with cold outreach—but that’s always more difficult than just being at the center of an ecosystem in which tons of people know what you offer and tell their friends about it.

In this case, the founder of ViewExport reached out to us proactively based on a social media post we wrote, and said she had two products she is interested in selling:

One was an SEO tool she was asking $60k for because it had revenue, and the other one was a Slack backup tool (ViewExport) that she was looking for $5k for.

The $60k price point SaaS actually would have been a better fit for us on paper, since it already had revenue and traction. It was a lower-risk bet. But we didn’t want to buy an SEO tool right in the middle of what people are perceiving as a revolution in SEO due to AI (hint: it’s not… but a lot of people think it is, which is annoying when you’re trying to sell a product that meets customer demand in a consistently sustainable way).

We Didn’t Know What To Do With It

Our first reaction to seeing ViewExport was: “huh?”

It was positioned as a tool for backing up your Slack channel and visualizing the raw data dump you get when you run an export of your Slack workspace.

That was sort of interesting. We just didn’t know if people would pay much for it.

But what DID catch our eye was this: it had consistent, solid SEO for one topic, and people were signing up all the time to use the product.

What this meant to us was: even though it was a free tool with a use case we didn’t see a ton of value in, there was clearly demand for it.

Since at the time we were primarily focused on growing our last product, Aware (a LinkedIn tool), we pretty much just bought ViewExport and let it sit for a bit.

The Light Bulb That Led To Repositioning ViewExport

One day, I needed a break from Aware, so I thought I’d sit down and dig into the existing usage data on ViewExport to figure out who was using it and why.

I exported the email addresses of the prior free users, and was pleasantly surprised to find that - while many users were startups, Gmails, or other random stuff - many of the free users were from companies with 50, 100, 200, 4000, 5000 employees. Or they were law/accounting firms or consultancies.

Immediately, the light bulb went off in my head:

“Oh, this is NOT a free or low-cost product. This is an enterprise product in disguise. What are they using it for?”

I pulled the list of use cases and feedback, and…

Yep. It was clear as day: this was an eDiscovery tool used for legal and HR purposes. 90% of the active users were Senior IT Managers and CIOs!

Bingo. I showed all of this to Mac, my co-founder, and we immediately got excited. We knew this would change the game.

How We’re Looking At It Now

Fast forward a month, and we had already:

• talked to a few active customers who wanted new features and told us everything they wanted us to build and how much they’d pay for it if we did

• paywalled the product so new users couldn’t sign up without paying at least a little something

• completely rearchitected the product itself from the ground up, and

• rebuilt the website entirely, on Webflow, optimized for search discoverability

Today, we’ve held ViewExport for barely six months — the annual price point is literally 50X where it started out, we have 20 active paying customers, we’ve begun building pipeline with potential re-seller partners who provide eDiscovery as a service to law firms and corporations, and we’ve brought on two heavy-hitting advisors with deep networks in the eDiscovery space.

We’ve brought in more in revenue than our initial investment, and MRR is continuing to rise every week.

Just think: this past Summer, we had bought a free vibe-coded Lovable product that had only two things: (1) search rankings and (2) a user base. In a few weeks, we did everything we needed to do to get the product from ‘passable’ to ‘ready for market’. It’s not “done”, of course (it never is!), but it was good enough to start selling for a meaningful price point.

And now there’s nowhere to go but up.

-Alex & Mac