SaaS Multiples Are Hiding in Plain Sight

I was on a coaching call recently, catching up with someone I've been working with for a while. We got into the business side of things - specifically, how to find, grow, and exit small SaaS companies. And I realized something: most people have no idea what a tiny SaaS is actually worth once you understand the valuation math.

Not because the math is complicated. It isn't. But because nobody's explaining it plainly.

So let me do that right now.

The Number That Changes Everything: 36x

Here's what most people don't know: small software businesses - the kind that a solo developer or indie hacker builds and then quietly runs in the background - sell at roughly 36 times their monthly recurring revenue on platforms like Flippa and Acquire.com.

Let that sink in for a second.

If a SaaS is doing $2,000 a month in recurring revenue, the market says it's worth around $72,000. Not exciting. But if you take that same business to $10,000 a month in MRR? Now you're looking at a $360,000 exit.

That's not a rounding error. That's a life-changing number. And the gap between those two outcomes - between $72K and $360K - can be closed in nine days if you know what you're doing.

That's the entire game I'm going to walk you through in this post.

Why $2K MRR Is the Sweet Spot to Acquire

The strategy I've been using - I call it RAGE, which stands for Research, Acquire, Grow, Exit - starts with one very specific target: a SaaS business already at $2,000 per month in recurring revenue.

Why that number? Why not start your own?

Because starting from zero is brutal. On average, it takes eight months to get a SaaS from zero to $2K MRR. You've got to have the right idea, write the landing page correctly, figure out pricing that converts, drive traffic to the thing. Some people spend ten years stuck on this part. I've seen it. I've talked to those founders. They're grinding and grinding and never cracking through.

So skip it. Don't start from zero. Find a business that already solved the hardest problem - getting its first paying customers - and then come in as the marketer.

Here's the thing about most indie hackers who build SaaS products: they're coders. They figured out how to write beautiful software. What they haven't figured out - and what they actively hate doing - is marketing and selling that software. That's where you come in.

You walk up to one of these developers and say: "I can take you from $2,000 a month to $20,000 a month."

That's a 10x growth lever on their business. Even if they have to give away 50% equity to make it happen, they're still coming out massively ahead. And so are you, because when you exit at a 36x multiple, you're splitting a much bigger pie.

Where to Find These Businesses

The indie hacker community is obsessed with building in public. These developers post their revenue numbers on Twitter, talk about their MRR milestones, and share everything. What's painful for them is gold for you as an acquirer.

Search Twitter's advanced search for hashtags like #buildinpublic or keywords like "MRR" and "indie hacker." Click through the profiles. A lot of them list their exact revenue numbers right there in their bio or their pinned tweets. You're hunting for the ones between $1,000 and $2,000 a month - the ones that have already proven the concept but haven't figured out growth.

Once you find your target, you reach out, explain what you bring to the table, and negotiate for 50% equity in exchange for your marketing and distribution expertise. No money down. This works because what they want isn't cash - they want scale. And you're the person who can give them that.

If you want a structured approach to building prospect lists for acquisition outreach, tools like ScraperCity's B2B database and the email finder can help you contact founders directly once you've identified targets. You can also use cold email - check out my top 5 cold email scripts to get your outreach dialed in fast.

The Three Numbers You Need to Know (And Fix)

Once you've acquired the business, your job is to move it from $2K to $10K MRR in nine days or less. To do that, you need to understand what's actually limiting growth. And here's the thing - it almost always comes down to three numbers.

1. Number of New Trials

How many people are signing up for the product? If the app isn't getting enough signups, that's a traffic problem. The fix is straightforward: more outreach, more social media, more influencer partnerships. Every prime task you do - every email you send, every post you create - is working the numbers toward your growth target.

2. Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate

This one is huge, and most indie hackers get it completely wrong. If you're getting a hundred signups and only one or two of them become paying customers, your conversion rate is broken.

The single fastest fix? Require a credit card upfront. Gate the entire product. Don't let people in without a card on file.

I know the Silicon Valley crowd loves the freemium model. Try everything for free, no credit card required. That's fine if you have venture funding and can afford to wait. But if you're trying to print money fast, collect the card upfront. You don't even have to charge it immediately - just require it to access the product.

The difference this makes is insane. We're talking about going from a 1-2% conversion rate to something like 40%. That's not a typo. On Tapleo - one of the SaaS businesses I built and exited - 40% of people who started a free trial became paying customers at $49 a month. The reason? We asked for the card upfront.

The second piece of fixing conversion is giving new users a win fast. Think of it like a magic trick. When David Blaine does something impossible in the first thirty seconds, you can't look away - you're hooked. Same thing with software. If someone signs up for your app and immediately gets a result they care about, they're going to stick around.

With Tapleo, we promised AI would write their LinkedIn content. They'd hit a button and get the best LinkedIn post they'd ever read. That immediate wow moment kept people subscribed. With Omni - another SaaS we built - someone would fill out a form and instantly get a cold email script they'd been putting off writing for months. The product delivered on its promise in seconds. That's how you get people to stay.

3. Churn Rate

The third number is how many people cancel every month. Churn is the leak in the bucket. If you're adding customers on one end but losing 30% of them every month, you're running in place.

High churn is almost always one thing: the product isn't delivering on its promise. People signed up because you told them you'd solve a specific problem. If you're not solving it - either because of bugs, because the AI output is mediocre, or because the UX is frustrating - they're going to leave.

Fix the product. Reduce the bugs. Make sure the core value is delivered every single time, automatically, without friction. That's how you kill churn.

Once you patch these three holes - trials, conversion, churn - you can take almost any SaaS from $2K to $10K MRR systematically. Work the numbers backwards. Know how many trials you need to generate $10K. Know your conversion rate. Send enough traffic. Do the math. Nine days is tight, but it's doable when you're not guessing.

The Exit: Why 36x Changes the Entire Equation

Once you've hit $10,000 a month in MRR, you go to market. You list on Flippa, on Acquire.com, or you approach strategic buyers directly. At a 36x multiple, that's a $360,000 exit. If you negotiated 50% equity at acquisition, that's $180,000 in your pocket from a business you didn't start, didn't code, and that you grew in a little over a week.

Even better - sometimes a strategic buyer pays more. With Tapleo, we went through this exact process and ended up with a seven-figure exit in about three months. Strategic buyers who see synergies with their existing customer base will go above market rate. They're not buying a spreadsheet of MRR numbers - they're buying users, technology, and market position. That's worth more to the right buyer.

The formula that makes all of this click: spend 9 days growing the business, then sell at 36x. The multiple is where all the value lives. The growth sprint is just the lever you pull to move the multiple.

This Is Why Marketers Win in the SaaS World

Here's the part most people miss: you don't need to know how to code to do any of this.

In fact, being a non-technical marketer is a feature, not a bug. The indie hackers who built these products are coders first. Marketing is foreign territory to them. They know how to ship features. They don't know how to write a cold email sequence, run influencer partnerships, or think about conversion rate optimization.

If you've spent any time in agencies, in outbound sales, or in growth marketing, you already have the skills they're desperately missing. You are solving their hardest problem. That's why they'll give you 50% equity. That's why this deal makes sense for both sides.

I've done this multiple times now - Tapleo, Omni, LeadChart - and every time the pattern holds. Find a product at $2K MRR. Agree on equity. Fix the three numbers. Exit at 36x. Repeat.

The One Thing That Takes Eight Months (That You're Skipping)

I want to go back to the starting-from-zero problem because I think people underestimate how brutal it is.

Getting a SaaS to its first $2,000 in MRR is a gauntlet. You need a viable idea. You need a landing page that converts. You need pricing that people will actually pay. You need to get traffic to the thing. Most founders get stuck at zero for months. Some never crack it.

When you acquire a business that's already at $2K MRR, you know three things for certain: the product exists, the funnel works at least a little bit (because they have paying customers), and if you send enough people to the product, some of them will convert. You've already proven the most important part of the equation.

Going from $2K to $20K with a working funnel? That's a marketing problem. And marketing problems are solvable - especially with the right outreach, influencer plays, and email campaigns working in your favor.

If you want to get serious about building out your prospecting and outreach infrastructure to support this strategy, check out the Best Lead Strategy Guide or grab the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint - both have frameworks directly applicable to the kind of distribution-first thinking you need here.

The Practical Path Forward

Let me make this concrete. Here's what the process looks like from the outside:

• Week 0: Find your target on Twitter using #buildinpublic or similar searches. Look for SaaS products between $1K-$2K MRR with a frustrated or burned-out founder.
• Week 1: Reach out, pitch the 10x growth story, negotiate 50% equity with no money down. Get access to the analytics so you can see the three numbers (trials, conversion, churn).
• Days 1-9 post-acquisition: Diagnose which of the three numbers is the problem. Run the fix - influencer outreach, email campaigns, product tweaks, credit card gating. Hit $10K MRR.
• Month 2-3: List on Flippa or Acquire.com (or pitch strategic buyers directly) at a 36x multiple. Close the deal. Move to the next one.

For your outreach during the acquisition phase and the growth phase, tools like Smartlead or Instantly will handle email delivery at scale. For contact data and lead sourcing, ScraperCity's Apollo scraper is one of the fastest ways to build a targeted contact list. These aren't optional extras - the whole strategy depends on being able to reach people quickly and at volume.

Why Most People Never See This

The reason most people walk past this opportunity is that a $2,000/month SaaS looks like nothing. It looks like a hobby project. It looks like a developer's side thing that never took off.

But once you understand the exit math - once you see that 36x is the multiple the market pays for recurring revenue - it reframes everything. That "failed" project is a loaded gun. It just needs someone who knows how to aim it.

The indie hacker who built it doesn't know what they have. They're measuring success by MRR growth, and since theirs hasn't grown much, they think they've failed. They haven't failed. They've done the hardest part. They built the product, got paying customers, proved the funnel. They just don't have the marketing firepower to unlock the exit.

That's you.

The multiples aren't going anywhere. SaaS continues to command premium valuations precisely because of recurring revenue - the same $10K comes in next month, and the month after that. Buyers pay for that predictability. And every dollar of MRR you add before an exit is worth 36 dollars in your pocket at close.

The Bottom Line

Stop thinking about SaaS as a technical person's game. It's not. It's a marketer's game, and the marketers who understand valuation math are printing money right now while everyone else is trying to build the next big thing from scratch.

The math is simple: find a $2K MRR SaaS, get 50% equity, spend nine days fixing trials, conversion, and churn, hit $10K MRR, and exit at 36x for $360K. Take your 50% cut, and do it again.

I've done this. The exits are real. The multiple is real. The nine-day sprint is real. What's missing for most people isn't opportunity - it's knowing where to look and understanding the numbers well enough to move with confidence.

Now you know the numbers.

If you want to go deeper on the outreach and cold email side of this - because that's what actually fuels the growth sprint - start with my Cold Email Manifesto. And if you want to work through a strategy like this with me directly, check out Galadon Gold - that's where we get into the details on live calls.