Buy & Sell AI Startups: from $1K TO $100M

"Hey, guys, I have a startup for you."

Hi!

It seems that building startups for sale is morphing into an increasingly reliable business model. According to Acquire founder Andrew Gazdecki, more than 500 buyers and 100 startups join the platform daily. Against this backdrop, more and more entrepreneurs are planning a profitable exit from day one.

Let's explore this topic today. I invite you to look at an example of a successful exit, discuss selling AI startups, and identify a few critical factors for an excellent deal.

In this newsletter:

• A great example of selling an AI startup

• Where to sell ( and buy) AI startups

• How to prepare your startup for listing

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How It Works | Real Case Study

Today, we have a fairly recent example: Nico Jeannen, who sold his Talknotes startup for $200,000 through the Acquire platform. Early last month, Nico wrote a post on X (ex-Twitter), where he revealed details about the startup, its development, and the decision to sell the startup via the Acquire.

For now, we’re not interested in the company, so here's your quick reference:

Talknotes is a notes app that records your thoughts and uses AI to transcribe, clean, and structure the information. It supports over 50 languages and is now available on Android, iOS, and the Web.

Nico launched Talknotes in August 2023, about a year ago. Since then, the creator has been developing the platform, improving its features, and promoting it through popular AI project marketplaces. Talknotes found its customer, so 11 months after release, Nico reached an MRR of $7500. And then... Well, he burned out.

Multiple bugs slipped into the app, and I had to spend 2 days fixing everything in an emergency while revenues plummeted. This completely fucked me up mentally and had a hard time working on the app after that.

To avoid even more burnout and depression, Nico listed Talknotes on Acquire (we'll talk about this platform a bit later) for $200,000, spoke about the planned deal on his social networks, and waited. He also mentioned that he could have sold the app for $300,000 as well but wanted to close the deal as soon as possible.

Pretty quickly, Nico found a buyer, almost lost the deal due to Escrow (you can read what it was about here), but was still able to do an exit later on. The creator took some time off to reboot, rest, and plan new projects to launch.

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I see a few small conclusions that can be drawn from this case study:

• Sometimes you must let go: You shouldn't dwell on one startup if you're close to burnout. Even if your product is booming and even if you feel like you're about to conquer a new peak.

• Don't chase the maximum price: Although Talknotes could have been sold for $300,000, Nico suggested a lower price. And it makes sense: this way, you'll commit faster and get more time to prepare for your new startup.

• “You only need to win once to snowball everything.” And the last, rather motivating conclusion from Nico himself is that you need to try all the time. He has launched over 40 projects in 7 years. Most of them failed, but a few took off, which was worth it.

By the way, if you want to know how to build a startup quickly and not burn out, this newsletter is for you:

Build AI-Powered Startup With These Tools

Now, let's move on to an overview of the marketplaces and the AI projects you can find there. This will help us understand the market, evaluate our own startup, and understand what we can expect as buyers.

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Buy & Sell: From $1K TO $10M

Starting with Acquire's review, it's a fairly obvious choice. The Nico case proved the effectiveness of this platform, and it is also one of the most popular: there are enough sellers and buyers on it. I propose to go from more to less: we will first deal with the most affordable offerings and then move on to the big companies.

Of course, with an eye on artificial intelligence.

$1,000 — $30,000

So, we're looking at starting offers in the $1,000 to $30,000 range. Acquire has the most of these offers. This category typically includes nascent AI startups or projects in the very early stages. These startups may offer unique ideas or proof-of-concept products but generally lack significant traction, revenue, or a large customer base.

Buyers in this range often look for innovative concepts, potential intellectual property, or development teams with promising skills. This is a suitable category for entrepreneurs who want to experiment with AI or add small-scale innovations to existing businesses.

Like this one:

It is an AI startup from France that has developed a platform for building, testing, and distributing specialized AI agents without code. The development team consists of just one person and the trailing 12 months (TTM) revenue is $4,000.

The asking price for this startup is $11,000.

It is not a very outstanding performance, but it is not a huge amount to buy a viable business either. I'd say this looks like a pretty good deal for someone who knows how to set up the development of this product or integrate it into a larger platform.

And we're moving on.

$100,000 — $1M