Reverse Engineering Acquire Listings - $450K 1 year old SaaS Startup

Crack the Code of Reverse Engineering High-MRR SaaS Startups

Here’s a smart strategy for uncovering profitable SaaS ideas: find a thriving SaaS with a solid MRR, break down exactly what makes it successful, put your own unique twist on it, and then launch your version. Think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants. The idea is already validated, so you’re not starting from scratch. What you have to do is to add your unique spin and executing it strategically!

How can you find MRR data for SaaS companies? Isn’t that information usually kept under wraps? Not always! In fact, plenty of SaaS founders are more transparent than you might think—you just have to know where to look. Many SaaS founders and Indie Hackers are part of the Build In Public movement and regularly share their MRR data, usually on platforms like Twitter/X and LinkedIn. Even those not in the movement often share achievements like hitting $1k MRR , driven by the excitement of hitting a new milestone. Some SaaS founders publicly disclose revenue figures during interviews. There’s also a growing trend of what’s known as Open Startups, like ConvertKit, where founders voluntarily disclose detailed financial metrics, including MRR, for anyone to see. We’ve come across so much publicly shared data that we actually built a product around it.

Also when SaaS founders decide to sell, they’re required to reveal their financials, which means you can often find this information on marketplaces like Acquire, Flippa or Empire Flippers. While these platforms don’t always disclose the URLs of startups being sold, we’ve found that it’s often possible to reverse-engineer this information with a bit of sleuthing.

Acquire Listings

Let’s take Acquire as our example. As the largest and most popular SaaS marketplace today, Acquire features hundreds of SaaS listings across a wide range of sizes. These listings include basic financial data, with one piece missing—the URL. Signing up as a buyer is free, giving you access to all the listings.

Once logged in, navigate to “All Listings,” and under the Type filter, select “SaaS,” then click “Apply.” You can refine your search further by filtering based on Price or sorting by Asking Price, Date Listed, Annual Revenue, or Annual Profit. For this strategy, we’re specifically looking for young Micro SaaS companies (1-3 years old) with high MRR and a high Asking Price. Unfortunately, Acquire doesn’t have a built-in filter for the founding date, so this part requires some effort by manually opening each listing and checking the date. We’ve created our own in-house dashboard that includes a date filter—something you could develop too if you plan to do this at scale.

To streamline your search, you can use Acquire’s feature for creating lists of apps you’re interested in—similar to bookmarking. Simply click the heart icon on the top right of any listing, then click “Add to List.” You can later access all your saved listings in the “My Deals” section. Once you’ve bookmarked the listings that catch your eye, the next step is to reverse-engineer the URLs.

The details provided in Acquire listings make it possible to reverse-engineer URLs, but it’s a manual process that requires a lot of trial and error. Some listings might take just 5 minutes to crack, while others can take up to an hour or may even be impossible to uncover. However, the majority of SaaS listings on Acquire can be successfully reverse-engineered.

Acquire Example Listing

Let’s say you’ve selected this listing titled: AI-powered business idea analysis tool for entrepreneurs to validate concepts. What makes this listing particularly attractive is that the company is relatively young (founded in March 2023), it’s a micro SaaS (it caters to a specific niche or industry), boasts a high MRR ($11k average), has a strong net profit margin (89%) and a high asking price ($450k). Plus, the product can essentially be considered an AI/ChatGPT wrapper, making it easier to reverse-engineer compared to more complex SaaS models.

According to the listing, their USP is: “Our unique selling point is its rapid, AI-driven approach to business analysis and validation, reducing a process that traditionally cost thousands in consulting fees and weeks to complete down to minutes.” From this description, it’s clear that the USP is easily replicable, which makes the reverse-engineering process more feasible.

Google Searching

To reverse-engineer the URL, start by searching the listing’s heading in Google exactly as it appears. This brings us to the next reason why this process is often straightforward: Micro SaaS companies with high MRR and high Asking Prices tend to be leaders in their niche. This means they typically have a strong SEO presence, which contributes to their success.

Using our example, the listing is titled : AI-powered business idea analysis tool for entrepreneurs to validate concepts. By simply Googling this heading, we found the company ranked in the top 3 on the search results. However, it’s not always this easy. In some cases, you’ll need to dig deeper by using more details from the listing description, competitors, or other information provided.

This process is more of an art than a science, so there’s no exact blueprint to follow. But here’s the general approach: start by searching the heading verbatim. If that fails, Google search using the core parts of the description which is under Company Overview. Another technique is to assume that the company is good at SEO and think about which keywords they might rank for.

For instance, the description for our example states: “We are an AI-powered platform for instant business idea validation... Using a freemium model, the platform has generated over 110,000 reports, demonstrating significant market traction.” From this, we can derive a keyword like “business validation AI reports.” Upon searching this keyword, the company ranks again in the top 3. That’s why focusing on Micro SaaS is advantageous—they are niche and often have strong SEO footprints, making them easier to uncover through strategic searches.

After running a Google search, manually open each URL—typically the top 5 results, though sometimes you’ll need to go as far as page 3. Compare the contents of the homepage with the listing description to see if there’s a match. Again if you want to do this at scale you can automate it - we’ve developed an in-house tool that automates the search, opens the top results, extracts the web text content, and uses AI to compare it against the description from Acquire. If you find a potential match, jot down the URL and move on to the next result. By the end, you might have a shortlist of 2 or more URLs to evaluate further.

Verification

The final step is verification. Use the information provided in the listing to cross-check the shortlisted URLs one by one to identify the correct one. For example, this listing description mentions, “the platform has generated over 110,000 reports,” and the homepage of the potential match states “120k+ Reports generated,” which is a match despite the minor variation.

Similarly, the listing mentions “We also offer a spin off platform born from our other producr,” and the actual homepage highlights “New! Introducing…” with a Learn More button that redirects to the spin-off site, that’s another verification indicator. You can also verify using the pricing and the founding date. The listing states the company was founded in March 2023, checking the Wayback Machine, the website was first indexed in March 2023, which is a match. Ultimately, by comparing the homepage with the listing description, it becomes clear that they are a match.

We won’t share the exact URL here—it’s unnecessary since we’ve already guided you through the process and pointed you to the actual Google searches results. Please refrain from mentioning the URL in the comments. The goal is to empower you to do this yourself, not to publicly publish the URL.

Further Research

Uncovering the URL is just the starting point. The goal is to do this for multiple listings, giving you a collection of proven business ideas to choose from. But remember, the key is to improve and differentiate— we don’t advocate for simply cloning existing SaaS products without adding your own unique twist. You need to carve out your unique value proposition.

Once you have the URLs, the real work begins. Sign up on the platform, become a user, and get a feel of how the business operates. Dive deep into the tech stack, track their social media activity, follow the founders, and analyze how they started, how they market and grow their business. We’ve successfully gathered this type of intel on numerous companies.

Take it a step further by evaluating their SEO footprint using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. Monitor their advertising activities on platforms like Facebook and Google. While there are paid tools that can do this for you, you can also access their ads directly for free through publicly available databases like the Facebook Ads Library or Google’s Ad Transparency Center. Lastly, assess the competition in the niche. Is it crowded, or is there room for innovation and more players?

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy content like this, check out our website and subscribe.