[Spinosaurus]

I wonder how viable a sort of "micro PE" firm would be, basically a company that just buys many of these micro indie projects with positive cash flow with the goal of holding on to them for profit or investing into their operations and eventually reselling them.

There's been this trend of new firms popping up that acquire small ecommerce brands (in fact, there was one on HN just the other day). I'm wondering if the same model can (or has) been applied to small "indie" companies and projects.

[edmundsauto]

I think it's going to be more common than it is. Or, maybe its already super common and we just don't hear about it.

My reasoning is as follows: small products/companies have de-risked the initial PMF exploration, but aren't at a scale where they can hire specialists. Sure, maybe you can find a 10 hours / week data engineer who can build your analytics infra MVP. It's more likely you don't find someone good, IMO.

Building a portfolio of these means you can hire a specialist who can focus on the low hanging fruit of 3-4+ companies at a time. That's a huge advantage over the small companies.

[noodle]

I've also thought about this a lot wrt microsaas projects. Specifically, looking to acquire projects that are small but match my tech expertise such that I can consolidate certain aspects of them easily. Ultimately maintenance will probably be the biggest problem with acquiring numerous small projects, so making that as easy as possible is important.

It would probably not be "viable" in the sense of it becoming a unicorn, but it probably is a viable small business or side project. I get the feeling that once you become a medium sized business, you kind of necessarily outgrow the "micro" part of the monicker.

[ezekg]

I do remember seeing one, actually, aimed at smaller bootstrapped SaaS products doing >10k/MRR. But I can't for the life of me remember what it was called.