Look For This When Acquiring Startups, It Could Triple the Resale

Startup Acquisition Stories

After building and selling one of the first ChatGPT plagiarism checkers on the market in 2024, Tomer Tarsky decided to search Acquire.com for another project in the edtech AI space. He found a promising business, grew it for seven months, and sold it for three times the purchase price.

The business Tomer stumbled across was called Seamless For Science. It was an AI literature review generator with 20,000 free users. While it didn’t make much money, its users were extremely active and would immediately complain if the service went down even for a day.

After acquiring the business (which was built in a development language Tomer didn’t know), all he had to do was adjust the homepage copy and up the prices. Immediately, he earned $2,000 more in MRR despite some churn.

“I knew if just one percent of those free users converted, we would have a lot more money,” he says.

However, Tomer soon reached the limits of improvements he could make without hiring a developer. He’d already decided he wanted to expand outside of edtech, so Tomer returned to Acquire.com and sold it for three times what he bought it for within a few days.

Tune into Tomer’s podcast with Andrew Gazdecki post-acquisition as they discuss:

• Why Tomer thinks it’s easier to double ARR on a $3k startup than a $30k startup 💹.
• How Tomer recommends other founders look for good startup buys on Acquire.com 🔍.

• Why Tomer thinks you should beware of buyers who won’t get on the phone 📲.

Tomer is just getting started and you can follow him here:

• Twitter (@tomer_tarsky)

• His new project (www.conversionagent.ai)