How I Bought a Business for $0

Editor’s note: We know that a lot of our readers are interested in acquiring and building businesses, so we’re re-publishing one of our most popular pieces on this topic from our archives. It’s part of a series on side businesses by author and founder Justin Mares.

Before starting Kettle & Fire—a direct-to-consumer bone broth company—I had a previous life in the SaaS world, running growth for a company that bought small SaaS apps and grew them. We sold the bundle of businesses to Rackspace for eight figures in early 2013. 

When I left Rackspace after the acquisition and went out on my own, I wanted to replicate the model with which we’d seen so much success: I wanted to buy and grow my own SaaS business. 

My partner Ryan and I were on the lookout for a business that fulfilled one of my side hustle criteria. A strong potential acquisition had to:

• Solve a problem someone is already aware of,
• In a niche where customers are already paying,
• Where the product does not require a lot of maintenance or hand-holding,
• And is profitable or has a no-brainer path to profitability.

In early 2016, we stumbled across Notify: a Shopify plugin that would pop up at the bottom of a website, displaying a purchase another customer had recently made.

As soon as I saw it in action, I installed it on Kettle & Fire and saw a 40% lift in conversion… and $1,400 in extra sales (this was 2016, so the company was a lot smaller then).

Whoa. 

If it helped my site this much, how many others saw a similar sales lift? We had a strong hunch that we could buy Notify, add a few features, put some marketing behind it, and grow it. 

On February 1, we fired off this email: