Tired of Brokers Taking 10% — So I Built a Free Marketplace Where Founders Sell Their Startups Themselves
I Built a Free Marketplace Where Founders Can Sell Their Startups — No Broker, No Cut, No Waiting
Somebody I know spent four months trying to sell a SaaS tool that was making $800 a month. Four months. He had a broker, a listing on one of those polished acquisition platforms, and a very reasonable asking price. The broker took 10%. The platform charged a monthly fee to stay listed. The buyers who reached out were mostly tire-kickers who vanished after the first call. By the time he finally closed — and he was lucky enough to close at all — he'd handed over nearly $3,000 in fees and had nothing to show for the experience except exhaustion and a slightly lower bank balance than he expected.
That story stuck with me. Because I kept hearing versions of it. A newsletter seller who waited seven months. A tool builder who pulled his listing in frustration and just kept running the thing himself because the exit process was more painful than the business. Founders who built something real, something generating income, something another person would genuinely want — and couldn't find a clean path to the other side.
So I built one.
StartupFlip is a free, no-commission marketplace where founders list their startups, set their asking price, and let buyers contact them directly.
You can access it right now at https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/ — no account required, no approval process, no waiting list. You show up, you fill in a form, your listing is live in under three minutes.
The Problem With How Startup Acquisitions Work Right Now
The existing acquisition market is built around a model that made sense when buying a business required lawyers, accountants, physical documents, and months of negotiation. That model — broker in the middle, high fees, slow process — was designed for buying restaurants and manufacturing plants, not SaaS tools with 300 users and a Stripe dashboard.
The indie founder economy doesn't need that. A solo developer who built a Chrome extension making $400 a month doesn't need a broker. A Notion template creator with 5,000 email subscribers doesn't need an NDA to share their Mailchimp analytics. A bootstrapped newsletter with a 40% open rate doesn't need three months of "due diligence" before a buyer can say yes.
What these founders need is a direct line to someone who wants what they built.
That's the gap StartupFlip fills. The entire premise is radical simplicity: you list, buyers find you, you talk directly, you close on your terms. The platform takes nothing. There are no monthly fees. There is no approval process. The only thing between you and a potential buyer is a form and a search bar.
And honestly — that's all there needs to be.
What StartupFlip Actually Is
https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/ is a single-page web app built for speed, clarity, and zero friction. The design is dark, sharp, and functional — the kind of interface that respects your time instead of trying to impress you with animations that don't load on mobile.
Here's what the platform does:
When you open it, you see a live listing grid. Every startup currently for sale is there — name, category, monthly revenue, monthly traffic, founding year, and asking price. The numbers are displayed in clean monospace type so they're easy to read at a glance, the way financial data should be presented. You can filter by business type — SaaS, App, E-commerce, Newsletter, Tool, Agency — and by price range, from under $1K all the way to $100K and above.
When you find something interesting, you click the card. A detail modal opens showing the full picture: the ARR multiple (asking price divided by annual revenue, automatically calculated), the monthly profit, why the seller is exiting, the website URL if provided, and every contact channel the seller listed — email, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, LinkedIn. You hit "Contact Seller" and you're talking to the actual person who built the thing. No platform inbox. No intermediary. Direct contact.
The listing form itself takes about three minutes to fill out. Business name, category, one-paragraph description, your emoji icon if you want one, the website URL, monthly revenue, monthly profit, asking price, monthly traffic, founding year, reason for selling, and your contact details. That's it. You submit and your startup is live, visible to every person who opens that URL for as long as the listing stays in their browser session.
The platform also has an email subscription strip powered by Mailchimp — so buyers can subscribe to get notified when new startups hit the marketplace. If you're a buyer who found https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/ and didn't find what you were looking for yet, you drop your email in and you'll know when something matching your criteria shows up.
The Numbers That Matter When Selling a Startup
One thing StartupFlip does that most people gloss over is surface the ARR multiple automatically. If you're new to startup acquisitions, this number is the single most important piece of context in any deal.
ARR multiple = Asking Price ÷ Annual Recurring Revenue.
If a SaaS is making $500 a month — $6,000 a year — and the seller is asking $18,000, that's a 3x ARR multiple. If they're asking $30,000, that's 5x. The multiple tells you immediately whether a deal is priced at market rate, below it, or way above it.
For context: most small online businesses sell somewhere between 2x and 5x ARR. Newsletter businesses often trade at higher multiples because of audience loyalty. Simple tools with no ongoing maintenance needs often trade lower. Businesses with strong recurring revenue and low churn command premiums. Businesses that are heavily founder-dependent or showing declining traffic get discounted.
StartupFlip calculates and displays this multiple on every listing so buyers can make sense of the asking price instantly, without needing a spreadsheet. You see $24,000 asking price next to $1,800/month revenue and you immediately know you're looking at a 13.3x ARR ask — which is high, which tells you there's negotiation room, which tells you how to open the conversation.
That kind of transparency is what makes deals actually happen. When buyers can contextualize pricing immediately, they don't bounce. They engage.
What You Can List on StartupFlip
The marketplace is designed for the full range of indie and bootstrapped online businesses. Here's what fits:
SaaS tools — subscription software, productivity apps, developer tools, API products, browser extensions, anything with a recurring revenue model and a user base.
Mobile and web apps — consumer apps, utility apps, niche-specific tools, anything with active users whether it's monetized yet or not.
Newsletters — email lists with open rates, subscriber counts, sponsor revenue, or any engaged audience that a buyer could monetize or grow.
E-commerce stores — Shopify stores, digital product shops, print-on-demand operations, Amazon FBA businesses, anything selling physical or digital goods online.
Tools and websites — lead gen sites, SEO content sites, directory businesses, affiliate sites, web calculators, and niche tools that generate passive income.
Agencies — productized service businesses, freelance operations with recurring clients, content agencies, SEO agencies, anything with repeatable revenue and transferable client relationships.
Side projects — unmonetized tools with traffic, open-source projects with sponsors, GitHub repos with stars and engagement, anything someone built and no longer has time to grow.
If it lives online and generates revenue, traffic, or audience — it belongs on https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/.
The Human Side of Selling What You Built
There's something nobody talks about openly in the startup acquisition space, and it's this: selling something you built feels weird.
Not bad-weird, necessarily. But genuinely strange. You spent months — sometimes years — thinking about this thing daily. You fixed bugs at 2 a.m. You refreshed the Stripe dashboard more times than you can count. You got that first paying customer and felt a specific kind of joy that is hard to recreate. And now you're putting a dollar amount on it and hoping someone else sees what you saw.
The worst version of this process is going through a broker who talks about your business the way a used car salesman talks about a 2015 Honda. Clinical. Transactional. Like the thing you sweated over is just a line item. The best version is a direct conversation with someone who actually understands what you built, who's excited about it, who asks real questions and makes a real offer.
StartupFlip is built for that second version. When a buyer contacts you through your Telegram or your Twitter DMs or your email, they're reaching out as a person. They found your listing, read your description, looked at your numbers, and chose to reach out to you specifically. That's a warmer conversation than anything a broker ever facilitated.
There's also something deeply practical about keeping the process human. Brokers optimize for commission. Platforms optimize for engagement metrics. Buyers and sellers optimize for a good deal. When you remove the intermediaries, both sides are suddenly free to move at the speed that actually works — which is usually much faster than any platform process allows.
Some deals on StartupFlip will close in a week. Some will take longer. Some won't close at all, and the seller will decide they'd rather keep running the thing. All of those outcomes are fine. The point is that the decision belongs to the people actually involved, not to a platform trying to maximize its transaction fee.
Why Fikrago Built This
Fikrago is a blog and digital tools platform built around one core belief: that regular people — solo builders, indie hackers, side-project founders, digital nomads — deserve the same tools and infrastructure that used to be reserved for funded startups.
StartupFlip is a direct expression of that belief. The acquisition market was gated behind brokers and fees and slow processes. So we built a lightweight, beautiful, completely free alternative and published it at https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/.
This is the same approach we take with everything on Fikrago — identify where the friction is, build the thing that removes it, give it away free and support the platform through donations and digital products.
If StartupFlip helps you close a deal — whether you're selling a $500 side project or a $50,000 SaaS — we'd genuinely appreciate a small donation at paypal.me/websiteMA to keep the platform running. That's the whole business model. No commission, no subscription, no hidden fees. Just a tool that works, and an optional way to say thank you if it worked for you.
How to List Your Startup Right Now
Open https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/. Click the purple "List Your Startup" button in the top right. Fill out the form — it takes three minutes. Your listing is live instantly.
A few tips to make your listing convert:
Write a description that leads with what the business does and who pays for it. "AI-powered resume builder with 2,200 monthly users, AdSense monetized" is infinitely better than "innovative tool for career seekers." Buyers want facts, not marketing language.
Be honest about the numbers. Buyers will ask for proof anyway. Listings that show real revenue, real profit margins, and a realistic asking price get more serious inquiries than listings that are vague or clearly inflated.
Add every contact channel you're comfortable with. More contact options means more buyers have a path to reach you in the way they prefer. Some buyers prefer email. Some prefer Telegram. Some will find your Twitter and message you there. Give them options.
Set your asking price based on the multiple, not on what you wish you'd earned. A 3x ARR multiple is fair market for most online businesses. If yours deserves a premium — strong recurring revenue, growing traffic, low churn, unique technology — make that case in the description.
And then wait. Or don't — share the link. Post it in the indie hacker communities you're already in. Put it in your newsletter. Tweet it. The more eyes on your listing, the faster you find the right buyer.
The startup acquisition market doesn't need to be complicated. It doesn't need brokers and monthly fees and six-month timelines and 10% cuts taken out of deals that two people could have made directly in a week.
It needs a clean form, a good search filter, and two people who want to talk.
https://chrisayoub1.github.io/Where-startups-find/ is that. Nothing more, nothing less. Go list your startup.
Explore more tools at fikrago.com/p/tools.html · Browse the digital market · Check our products