Due diligence for small online businesses

Ilya Novohatskyi

Hey guys.

This week I have good news.

First, one of our early members prolonged the subscription for one more year. This is great because it helps us operate and improve the business further.

Secondly, we almost finished our first transaction with the Transfer by Microns service. This transaction helped us detect a few things that needs to be improved for future transactions to provide a smoother experience and higher quality of service.

My main goal is to help buyers and sellers be secure and comfortable conducting transactions on Microns. So Transfer service should help us achieve this goal soon.

Besides this, I prepared for you one growth tip that helped me build traction with Microns and a blog post that answers a bunch of questions for beginner buyers on how to check the startup before buying it.

P.S. I’m grateful to everyone who supports Ukraine in this challenging time 🇺🇦

Photo by Matej Rieciciar on Unsplash

👋 Welcome

Welcome to the 36 new people joining this week.

Let me know what you think of your first issue. Replying helps Google realize it’s not spam.

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Now let’s crack on with the newsletter ☕️

🌱 Growth advice

Today I’ll share with you one growth tip that can help your project get traction. It’s a fundamental thing. It’s simple and challenging at the same time.

Make your startup your growth lever. Enable word of mouth. So people organically share your product with their friends and colleagues.

But how?

For me, I found a few steps that can help you succeed. In this issue, I’ll share only one step. Make your messaging simple and easy to understand.

How do you reply when your wife or your kid asks you what your project does?

For instance, I help founders sell their small startups for free => Micro Startups For Sale. Zero Commission. Everyone can understand it.

Most people use complicated wording and sentences that make his value proposition unclear. You can argue that your product is built specifically for some niche or audience. That’s probably true, and for this reason, you should use language specific to this audience, but be easy on this.

Because how can an audience understand what problem your project solves if it’s overcomplicated from the start? If you can’t explain your startup in a straightforward sentence, you’re doing something wrong.

🎉 Recently sold startup

This founder made his third sale through Microns

I’m glad that more indie founders find Microns useful and use the platform repeatedly. An example is Ferhat, a Turkey founder who sold his third micro-startup.

Ferhat 🔥🚀💰

@fsuaterdogan

3/3! Sold my third SaaS project at @micronsio, thanks to @ilyanovohatskyi for supporting indie developers ❤️

4:57 PM - 27 Nov 2022

Also, we broke our previous record and sold five startups this month, which is excellent news. I hope that this metric will grow further.

Ilya Novohatskyi 🇺🇦

@ilyanovohatskyi

We sold 5 startups worth $18,000 this month. The least priced startup was money quiz at $1,500.

3:14 PM - 1 Dec 2022

🔎 Due diligence for online businesses

Recently, I’ve got a couple of questions about due diligence from beginner buyers. And I decided to write a post about it, answering all their questions and concerns.

In this post, you’ll understand the importance of due diligence and figure out how to do it with a plan before buying any online business.

Buyer Due Diligence Checklist for Small Online Businesses [2022]

If you’re an online business first-time buyer, you may not know the right questions to ask the seller to verify the claim of their business metrics. Plus it may be overwhelming, to say the least.

www.microns.io

📰 Looking for new owners

Put your read-later links into a custom newsletter

Link To Email Newsletter Tool

Pre-revenue
Business model: SaaS
188 downloads
Target audience: Users who love bookmarks and emails
Built with Swift, Gatsby and Firebase
Founded in 2020
Growth advice: Optimize pricing & start promoting on social media

🔥 Asking Price: $3,000

API to validate if an email is disposable

Disposable Email Validation Tool

$3,264 in ARR
Business model: SaaS
250 customers
Target audience: Developers
Built with Symfony and MySQL
Founded in 2014
Growth advice: Focus on cold email and Twitter outreach

🔥 Asking Price: $5,000

Find newsletters to promote your product

Popular Newsletters Database

$5,400 in ARR
Business model: One-time fees
800 subscribers
Target audience: Marketers and builders
Built with Gumroad and Softr
Founded in 2021
Growth advice: Relaunch on Product Hunt and convert startup to a SaaS product for recurring revenue

🔥 Asking Price: $20,000

💡 Wisdom from subscriber

Paul Lemley

@PALemley

We spent $172,000 on launching 10 new niche sites in 4 months.

This is how we did it...🧵👇

5:59 PM - 30 Nov 2022

💌 Share with a friend

If you found value in reading this issue, please share it with your friend.

You can read our previous issue about Microns first operating year.

To check all newsletter issues, visit our library.

Stay awesome,

Ilya Novohatskyi

Did you enjoy this issue? Yes No

Ilya Novohatskyi @ilyanovohatskyi

Microns is a newsletter where you will find your next startup to buy.

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Key phrases

online business firsttime buyer Buyer Due Diligence Checklist Prerevenue Business model Email Newsletter Tool small online businesses one growth tip indie founders find So Transfer service third SaaS project

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