What should you check before buying a micro SaaS?

6 checks: the inbox, the price, the stack, the dependencies, the customers and the slot. A bought product skips the quiet first month, but it brings everything its last owner stopped doing, and you inherit all of it on the day you pay.

The dog walkers' tool

In my ninth year I spent an evening reading a listing for a small booking tool for dog walkers, for sale by the person who'd built it. It had customers and a few years of history. The idea of buying it had a seductive simplicity: no first quiet month, no hunt for the first 3 customers, no launch.

The owner was friendly and honest, and I liked him. (Most people selling a small product are perfectly nice. That's never the problem.) He'd built it for a dog walker he knew, it had grown a little by word of mouth, and then his life had changed and he'd stopped looking at it.

Most customers were on a price set in the first year and never raised. It was written on a framework I don't use. Its sign-in went through a big platform that had announced changes to how small apps could use it. And when he shared his screen to show me the support inbox, there were questions in it that had been waiting for weeks. I wrote the next morning to say I wouldn't be buying it.

The 6 checks

• The inbox. How long are customers waiting for answers right now?
• The price. When was it last raised, and does it cover the work at today's costs?
• The stack. Would I have built it on this? If not, every bug is a lesson in somebody else's choices.
• The dependencies. What platforms, services or sign-ins does it rely on, and have any announced changes?
• The customers. Can I find them, talk to some, and recognise them as people I understand?
• The slot. Do I have a free one? A bought product needs a weekly look like any other, and for its first months a bigger one.

None of the failures on its own would have stopped me. Together they meant buying a rescue.

A useful exercise: run the 6 checks on your own product, as if you were the buyer.

The Second Product has the chapter.