Turning tiny startup exits into a $1K MRR marketplace

Ilya Novohatskyi did not start Microns with a big acquisition platform. After a COVID layoff in Ukraine, he first co-founded a small development agency, Quanti Coders, to stabilize his income. At night, he kept reading Indie Hackers and Twitter, where small founders were trying to sell side projects through scattered tweets. Larger startup marketplaces existed, but they were not built for tiny profitable projects.

The first Microns version stayed deliberately cheap. Ilya used no-code tools and a newsletter-style marketplace to feature micro-startups, side projects, apps and newsletters for sale. The value proposition was trust: help buyers discover small validated businesses, and help sellers avoid pitching randomly into social media. The live Microns about page still reflects that positioning, with verified buyers and sellers, managed transfer tools, 30-day post-sale support and a hall of fame of completed deals.

The early path was slow. In a founder interview, Ilya says it took one full year to reach $1,000 MRR. A Microns newsletter from the first operating year says the business crossed $25,000 ARR, started with annual subscriptions around $99, and stayed bootstrapped while operating through Ukraine's internet and electricity disruptions. That is the useful part of the story: marketplace trust did not appear from a launch spike. It compounded through consistency, public journey-sharing and repeated successful small exits.

By the later MRR Story interview, Microns had grown from $3,000 revenue in 2021 to $71,284 in 2025, with more than $500,000 in cumulative GMV across 100+ successful deals. Ilya did not just scale buyer subscriptions; he added offers, transfer support and seller success fees as the market matured. The lesson for founders is that a small marketplace can start as curation, but the business gets stronger when it owns the trust and transfer workflow around the transaction.