FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.
Is buying a SaaS really easier than building one?
Different tradeoffs, not universally easier. Acquisition trades capital for time: you pay $100K-$1M upfront to skip the 0-to-1 grind. You get a validated product, revenue on day one, and a customer base — but you inherit whatever technical debt, customer concentration risk, and category decay the prior team created. Building trades time for capital: you start with nothing but pay very little, with total risk that the product never takes off. For operators with cash but not patience, acquisition wins. For those with patience but not cash, building wins. Most successful solo acquirers today started as builders and moved to acquisition once they had capital — it's a sequencing, not a fork.
Where do I find SaaS businesses to buy?
Public marketplaces are the visible tip: Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire, biggest inventory), TrustMRR (Marc Lou's, quality-curated solo founders), Flippa (noisy but sometimes great), Empire Flippers (higher-end, $500K+ deals), Indie Hackers and Hacker News 'for sale' threads. Off-market deals — founder-to-founder — are where the best prices live but they require relationships. Post on X that you're buying, DM founders of products you admire whose X activity has gone quiet, monitor Indie Hackers for burnout posts. The off-market pipeline takes 6-12 months to build but produces the best deals.
How much should I pay for a small SaaS?
Industry standard is 2-5x annual revenue for small SaaS ($5K-$50K MRR range), depending on growth rate, churn, and category health. A stable but not growing product with sub-5% monthly churn tends to trade at 2-3x; a growing product at 3-5x. You should stress-test whether the business would survive at acquisition multiple + transition friction + your opportunity cost — if the math requires 2x revenue growth in 18 months to work, that's speculative and you should either pay less or walk. Your AI CFO can model the acquisition ROI under multiple scenarios before you submit an LOI.
Can I really run an acquired SaaS solo with an AI team?
For products in the $5K-$50K MRR range, yes — this is exactly the operating scale where one founder plus AI outperforms the previous 2-5 person team. The operational load (support, content, growth experiments, financial close, basic engineering maintenance) is exactly what Tycoon's AI team handles. Where solo-with-AI struggles is products that require deep custom sales motions, complex regulated compliance, or heavy R&D — those usually still need a specialist human. Before acquiring, run the diligence question: 'could a Tycoon workspace with skills X, Y, Z cover 90% of what the prior team did?' If yes, the solo-with-AI model works.
What are the biggest risks?
Three: (1) Customer concentration — if 40% of revenue is one contract, you inherit that risk; demand diversification before close. (2) Churn cliff — many solo SaaS hide rising churn under gross new revenue; pull 12 months of cohort data. (3) Platform dependency — if the product is built on an API whose pricing can change (Twitter, Reddit, some LLM vendors), factor that into the valuation. Tony Dinh's Black Magic died on a platform pricing change; the same could happen to an acquisition you make today. Your AI CTO's diligence should specifically stress-test platform risk before any LOI goes out.