How to buy your first side project

Ilya Novohatskyi

Nov 3, 2022

Hey guys.

This week many people joined the newsletter. So I would like to introduce myself in two words.

I'm Ilya startup founder from Ukraine 🇺🇦 For four years, I worked as a front-end developer for different companies. When COVID-19 started, my boss fired me, and I started my front-end agency Quanti Coders. After two years of hustling, we reached $15k per month in revenue.

Scaling agency became cumbersome, and I delegated most of the work to start another company.

After some research, I decided to tackle marketplace. I realized there is no friendly way for bootstrapped founders to sell their micro-startups. So that's how Microns was born.

One year later, we helped 30 founders sell their projects with a total amount of $200k in transactions. It is a challenging journey, and Microns isn't profitable yet, but I believe it'll pay off.

Okay, let's return to the newsletter.

This week I want to experiment with a new format called Growth advice, where I share a marketing channel that helped me somehow grow Microns or another business. Would love to hear your feedback.

Besides this, I prepared a renewed article about buying your first side project, which should be interesting for you.

👋 Welcome

Welcome to the 61 new people joining this week.

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

Prefer Twitter? Drop me a DM here.

Now let’s crack on with the newsletter ☕️

🌱 Growth advice

Every startup founder should have a Twitter profile. It is a great distribution channel to grow your audience and project.

Unlike LinkedIn, Twitter is much more engaging, based on my experience, and could give you loyal customers if you provide value to others.

Transparency and consistency are very important for this social media. Still, you can see results if you dedicate at least 20 minutes daily.

I spent one year organically growing from zero to thousand followers by engaging with others and tweeting (not regularly). But in any case, I found our early Microns customers from Twitter, and they're so loyal and helpful that I can't imagine.

So I definitely will double down on this social media even if Elon introduces an $8 subscription. Twitter is a small but friendly place for bootstrapped founders.

Next step: create a Twitter account, learn how to grow your audience, and start engaging.

P.S. Let me know if you like this kind of content.

📈 Monthly update

This month was one of the hardest for us. We've got some churn, and acquisition costs increased drastically. This is because of the economic situation in the world.

Interesting fact that we published less than 50% of submitted startups because we want to keep the quality of the listings high.

Ilya Novohatskyi 🇺🇦 @ilyanovohatskyi

Monthly update for Microns 🚀 😊 3,738 newsletter subscribers 🎉 201 new subscribers 👀 48.2% average open rate 🎯 7.6% average click rate 💰 108 premium members 💸 10 new premium members 🚗 21 startups submitted 📌 9 startups published 📈 2.4k users visited the website

Anyway, I expected this because the previous year's trend was similar, so we need to keep doing our job.

🧵 How to buy your first startup

This week I updated our post about buying your first startup. This version has more helpful information for entrepreneurs starting their way into the acquisition world.

I covered the basic things you need to complete your first transaction successfully and confidently. From contacting seller to due diligence and payments. I hope it will be useful for beginners.

How to Buy Your First Side Project — www.microns.io There are so many benefits to buying a side project. You'll learn something new and your small business could be of value to members of your community. Here are the steps to buying a profitable side project.