How to value your Micro-SaaS startup in 2023
Hey guys.
This is the last newsletter issue this year, and it's time to summarize the year's results. It was a challenging year, no doubt, the war started in my country, and many people and families faced the global crisis.
As one author said: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times".
When the war started, I said to myself that I couldn't shut down Microns, I wanted to continue, and whatever happens, I'll keep building and growing the project.
Is it risky? Yes, but for me, riskier to work for a boss and live with the false belief that everything is good. I prefer to act and experiment, analyze mistakes and learn from the best in the industry. I recommend you do the same to become more successful than you were this year. Constantly improve yourself, don't stop, invest in self-education and read a lot.
This year, Microns transformed from one person team to four people team (entirely bootstrapped, with zero investments). I hired great operations and customer support person (thanks to my friend's recommendation), an excellent blog writer, and a nice SMM professional (from Ukraine). We also have development freelancers. This helped me grow Microns faster, freed up time, and made the company more independent. I love my team.
We launched a new critical service called Transfer by Microns which helps people to safely exchange digital assets and close transactions on the marketplace faster. It gave us some revenue. Still, our primary revenue channel is Premium subscriptions from our buyers. I predict that in the coming years, our concierge service will become more popular and earn us more money than subscriptions.
In 2023 I have a bunch of plans for Microns:
Improve current services and products.
Grow the audience.
Redesign the site.
Introduce new services.
Run a few competitions and giveaways.
Besides this, I plan to double our revenue to make everything I described possible.
Thank you so much for being with me by supporting, helping, and giving advice. I value every member of our community. Substack allows you to like and comment on issues, a super helpful feature. You made me shy since my last newsletter by showing much love. I appreciate it.
P.S. Special thanks to my fiancee, growth partner, and family.
👋 Welcome
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🎉 Recently sold startup
At the end of the year, we found a new owner for an interesting AI e-commerce project. This startup used stable diffusion integration to create customized prints. It had seven customers and was fully working, which made it an attractive opportunity for buyers — the project was sold in one day.
Another exciting part of this story is that a few weeks before, this seller bought one startup on Microns using our concierge service.
That's great that our buyers become sellers and vice versa. It shows that there's value in the marketplace and community keeps growing.
📈 Micro-SaaS valuations & key metrics
One of my subscribers' most popular questions is how you value a micro-SaaS business. For this reason, I decided to write a post and include our "secret" tactic we use in Microns to keep the best prices in the niche.
I plan to keep writing articles about the valuations of different online businesses. The micro-SaaS is the first article in this sequence. Let me know what category of startups I should cover next.
📰 Looking for new owners
Freelance Jobs Newsletter
$24 in Annual Revenue
Business model: Subscription
151 customers
Target audience: Freelancers
Built with Wix, Airtable and Zapier
Founded in 2022
Growth opportunity: Running social media ads will drive traffic to website & convert visitors into free trial users
🔥 Asking Price: $1,000
Customer Feedback Widget
Pre-revenue
Business model: SaaS
360 visitors this month
Target audience: Indie makers, marketers and product managers
Built with Angular, Firebase and Cloudflare
Founded in 2022
Growth opportunity: Engage with relevant communities on Twitter and Reddit to grow the sales pipeline
🔥 Asking Price: $1,500
Reddit Growth Hacking Community
$120 in Annual Revenue
Business model: Sponsorship
3,414 members
Target audience: SaaS builders
Built with Reddit
Founded in 2018
Growth opportunity: Actively crosspost to increase membership base and create new sub communities
🔥 Asking Price: $2,000
💡 Wisdom from subscriber
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Stay awesome,
Ilya Novohatskyi
love your content!