Andrew Gazdecki had already sold two companies before he built the one that made him a fixture of the bootstrapper internet. He took Bizness Apps, a mobile app builder for small businesses, past $10 million in ARR and sold it to a private equity firm in 2018, and he sold a blockchain trading company called Altcoin.io to the investment firm BnkToTheFuture. In his own account of why he started Acquire, the selling part is what stuck with him. The process was long, complex and expensive, and it pulled him away from running the business. He also noticed he only got a decent shot at a sale because Bizness Apps was big enough to attract attention. A five figure SaaS business, he wrote, deserves the same chance but rarely commands it.

MicroAcquire was his answer: a marketplace where founders list for free, buyers pay for access, and nobody takes a cut of the deal. He launched it on Product Hunt on 21 January 2020 and finished number one product of the day. That date is the anchor for the timeline here, because exactly a year later, on 21 January 2021, he posted that he had "launched this crazy idea exactly 1-year ago on Product Hunt" and had reached $200,000 in ARR that day. Day 365, $200,000 in annual recurring revenue, from a standing start.

Getting there was less glamorous than the number suggests. Marketplaces die of emptiness, so before launch he ran cold email and cold calls at both sides at once. His targeting was crude on purpose: founders and CEOs on the seller side, anyone with private equity or corporate development in their job title on the buyer side. Asked separately in two Indie Hackers AMAs how he got his first users and how he got from zero to a thousand, he gave the same short answer both times: cold calling and cold emailing. Only once there were enough listings that the marketplace was not a ghost town did he launch publicly, and the Product Hunt win brought in over a thousand signups in one go.

He also did not charge anyone at first. Sellers were free and stayed free. Revenue arrived when he noticed sellers drowning in requests from buyers who were only browsing, so he put the ability to contact a seller behind a paid buyer membership. He has said he made the model up one day, partly to filter down to serious buyers and partly to generate what he called seed capital, and that it worked. In February 2021 the membership was $290 a year and he announced it was going to $390 on 1 March. By his first AMA on 18 February 2021 he was reporting $265,000 in ARR, profitable, growing 30 to 40 percent month on month, more than 200 completed acquisitions and 40,000 registered users, all of it run by himself as a solo founder.

The money to start was his own. He has said his initial investment was roughly $100,000 and that he eventually put in more than $200,000 in total, funded by his salary as chief revenue officer at another startup while MicroAcquire was still a side project. When that company closed its Series A in mid 2020 he hired his own replacement, resigned, and went full time, because by then there was enough traction to feel comfortable doing it.

From there the curve got steep. He posted $450,000 in ARR on 26 April 2021, and by his July 2021 AMA the number was $630,000, with 300 completed acquisitions, 70,000 registered users and more than $100 million in closed deal volume. That was also the point where he stopped bootstrapping: $2.8 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant and Andreas Klinger, then another $3.5 million from more than fifty entrepreneurs, taking the total to $6.3 million. His explanation was blunt. He had already sold a couple of companies and wanted to swing bigger this time. He passed $2 million in ARR in June 2022, by which point the solo operation had become a team with a VP of engineering, a VP of product and a COO.

Then comes the part most growth stories skip. Raising money let him build advisory, escrow, valuation tools and legal document builders on top of the marketplace, and it also let expenses run ahead of revenue for years. MicroAcquire became Acquire.com, and profitability took until 2025. In October 2025 he posted the year's figures: $6.1 million in revenue, up 24 percent, expenses of $4.5 million, down 26 percent, and $1.6 million in total profit, described as the first year the company finally became profitable. His framing was that it took years of simplifying, tightening focus and getting smarter about how they operate, with no shortcuts. In January 2026 he added that the team had pushed more than $100 million in deal value across the finish line during 2025, and that Acquire.com has now helped over a thousand founders sell.

The useful shape of this story is not the revenue curve. It is that the fastest stretch of the business was the part he did by hand, alone, for free, before there was anything worth paying for, and the slowest stretch was turning a well funded marketplace back into a company that makes money. Both halves are on the record because he posted them as they happened.