A note on this story: an illustrative composite, published to set the format for this archive. Real exits here are published with the seller, named, or not at all.
A directory of vetted trades businesses for one metropolitan region. Listings were free; the revenue came from a $39/month featured placement, held by 48 businesses. Four years old, and flat for the last two.
Why nobody wanted it
The first listing sat for four months. The objections were reasonable:
Flat revenue for 24 months. No growth story at all.
91% of traffic from organic search, concentrated in one keyword pattern.
A founder who had visibly disengaged — the last meaningful commit was fourteen months earlier.
Manual vetting. Every new listing was reviewed by hand, roughly six hours a month of unglamorous work.
It was originally listed at $61,000 — about 3.5× — and drew two lowball offers, both under $30,000.
What changed
The seller relisted with three differences, and it sold in nine days at $52,000.
1. The numbers were verified at source
The original listing had a screenshot. The relist had revenue pulled from the payment processor and traffic pulled from analytics, both covering 24 months. Nothing about the business changed. What changed was that the buyer no longer had to discount for the possibility that it wasn't true.
2. The weaknesses were stated first
The relisting led with the problems: flat revenue, the traffic concentration, the disengagement, the six hours of manual vetting. It named the number of hours, the exact share of traffic, and the date of the last commit.
3. The untried levers were listed without being priced
Featured placement had never had a price rise in four years. There was no annual plan. There was no email to the 1,100 free listings offering an upgrade. None of these were pitched as "easy upside" — they were listed as facts, with the note that the business was priced on what it currently earned.
The deal
Term | Detail |
|---|---|
Price | $52,000 |
Structure | $40,000 cash at close, $12,000 over 6 months |
Multiple | 3.0× trailing annual profit |
Diligence | 4 days |
Close to release | 9 days total |
Handover | 8 hours over 30 days, plus the vetting checklist |
What happened next
The buyer, who ran two other directories, did the obvious things in the first quarter: raised featured placement to $49, added an annual plan at ten months' price, and emailed the free listings. Revenue reached roughly $2,900/month within five months — about 55% up on the purchase basis.
None of that was hidden. All of it was in the listing, described as untried. The seller could have done any of it and chose not to, which is the honest reason the business was for sale.
The lesson
This is the most common shape in this market: a perfectly good small business that looks unattractive because the seller has stopped caring, priced as though the disengagement were a permanent property of the asset rather than of its owner.
It sold for less than I first asked and about twenty grand more than I'd been offered. The only thing I changed was letting the buyer check the numbers themselves instead of asking them to believe me.