Hidden from public view there is a massive world of small, profitable software businesses nobody talks about. No VC-funded hotshots, no billion dollar exits, just boring, cash-flowing tools that make real money in the shadows.
Most people in tech still only know one path for the past few decades: raise money, hire fast, pray for an exit. In the last years, other approaches like bootstrapping, the solopreneur, and what we call the micro PE approach got more popular though.
The landscape
Micro-SaaS: Small software products, often built by one or two people, doing €1-50k/month. Usually niche, usually boring, usually profitable. The opposite of what TechCrunch covers.
Micro PE: Private equity, but tiny. Instead of billion-dollar leveraged buyouts, you're buying these micro-SaaS products for €5-100k and improving them. Think Warren Buffett energy at indie hacker scale.
ETA / Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition: Instead of starting from zero, you buy something that already works and make it better. Search funds are the more formal version: raise money to search for a company to buy, then acquire and operate it. Popular in MBA circles, slowly trickling into tech, becoming more popular the last 1-2 years.
Venture studio: Instead of one bet, you build or acquire a portfolio of products under one roof. Shared ops, shared learnings, compounding over time. Tiny Capital (Andrew Wilkinson) is the poster child.
The Thesis
0→1 is the graveyard. Finding PMF, finding your customer, getting the first dollar. Most products and most founders die here. The hardest, most uncertain phase of any software business. The hit rate is very low.
Once something has paying customers, retention, and a clear ICP: you're at 1. Getting from 1→100 is execution. Better pricing, positioning, onboarding, retention, ops. Playbook work. Still hard, but knowable. The odds are dramatically more favorable than rolling the dice on PMF from scratch.
The acquisition thesis: Buy at 1, execute the playbook to 10 or 100.
The reality check: most publicly listed startups or products are lemons. Or more clearly formulated: garbage. Opportunities are few and far between. You can’t just sit around and wait for dealflow to happen.
So we also build. When we see signal in a market, we build. When we find a good acquisition, we buy. The GTM and ops playbook is the same either way. What is important is repeated bets and refining the playbooks. Constant learning and improving.
Kaion does both: building for learning and dealflow, buying to earn. The building sharpens the playbook. The acquisitions are where it compounds.
What Kaion is doing right now
We are early, bootstrapping, learning in public. We’re currently launching bookcall.io (a better calendly/cal.com for high ticket solopreneurs, advisors etc.). Refining the playbook. Bonsai, a scheduling tool for freelancers and coaches, got acquired by Zoom. Proof that niching down can be a winning bet. Clear signal on traction from the market with a clear path to increased revenue. Buying neglected and improvable SaaS and executing the playbook. Ideally with products that make each other more valuable. We bring the M&A/PE approach of rollups and similar strategies to micro SaaS.
The acquisitions we’re evaluating are strictly filtered: boring, B2B, founder-independent, no hype or shovelware, no big platform risk or AI/API wrappers. And the goal is simple: buy neglected B2B SaaS from burned-out founders, apply operational improvements, build a portfolio of cash-flowing assets. Using leverage to grow by utilizing seller-based financing and using cashflow from the portfolio for future acquisitions.
We’re actively evaluating raising a search fund to acquire a portfolio of micro SaaS. This will be announced via this newsletter, so stay tuned for opportunities.
Who is writing?
Hi, I’m Christian!
10+ years as CTO across European startups, from inception to growth phase.
Founded and sold 2markdown. I've been on the other side of this.
Currently fractional CTO for VC-backed startups. I see the inside of these businesses every day.
MSc in CS with AI/ML focus. I’ve been coding for 20 years now.
The honest bit: I burned out as a full-time CTO. This path is me designing a career that compounds wealth through ownership, not just trading time for money.
Feel free to say hi on LinkedIn.
What’s to be expected in this newsletter? Deals I’m looking at, lessons from operating and improving small software businesses, numbers and financials, market observations and mental models for evaluating acquisitions. Learning the finance side of things. The building-in-public side: portfolio progress, GTM experiments, what's working and what's not.
That's Kaion in a nutshell. If any of this sounds interesting, hit reply and tell me what you're most curious about. If not the unsubscribe button works great, no hard feelings.