Fomo: a $10,000 MRR widget bought on seller financing, a best month of $154,000, and a seven-figure sale to Relay Commerce six years later

In this case, the person who lowered the cash bar wasn’t the buyer.

Fomo was doing $107,200 a month at the time of sale, with ARR above $1 million.

The sale price was published only as “seven figures,” with no exact number from either side.

The price Ryan Kulp paid for the business in 2016 is also undisclosed, by agreement with the seller.

Both ends of this story are sealed.

What makes it worth writing is that everything in between is public.

MRR at purchase was about $10,000. The best month reached $154,000, of which roughly $112,000 was recurring. Revenue rose for 39 months without a break.

Stories about growing a business by buying one usually assume the buyer has capital.

Kulp didn’t.

He was a salaried employee at a San Francisco venture fund who, by his own account, was burning everything he earned on rent in 2015 and 2016.

The cash requirement came down because of the seller’s circumstances, not because of any negotiating skill.

39 straight months of growth, and what came before and after

The seller, not the buyer, set the cash requirement

It started with a beef jerky subscription.

Logging in to update his payment details, Kulp saw a notification saying someone had bought five minutes earlier. He inspected the page HTML and traced it to a tool called Notify.

He approached the founder as a venture investor offering capital. The founder had no interest in raising and said he’d rather sell.

Justin Mares suggested they buy it themselves, and ownership changed hands in under 30 days.

Installing Notify on Mares’ own store, Kettle & Fire, lifted conversions by 40%, according to TheyGotAcquired.

Kulp has described the deal structure on a podcast. The seller asked for two things.

1. Keep a slice of equity

   He believed in what the buyers planned.

2. Get paid over time

   He preferred installments to an up-front payment.

3. The buyers' cash need drops twice over

   The monthly installment was set at roughly what the business was earning at the time.

4. Run it with a day job

   The trip around wealthy friends became unnecessary, and Kulp kept his fund job while running Fomo on nights and weekends.

To be blunt about it, here’s the point.

What makes this deal repeatable is not the buyer’s capability but the accident that the seller wasn’t in a hurry for cash.

Kulp later framed the pattern himself while running his fund: people selling side projects aren’t living on that income, so their attention goes to maximising valuation rather than to getting paid quickly.

The 103 integrations were distribution, not features

Notify at the time of purchase only spoke to Shopify. The code was too rigid to extend.

So they rebuilt it.

Kulp, a marketer who couldn’t code, took online courses on nights and weekends. He fixed small bugs while the contracted agency slept, putting every dollar of revenue back into the product.

After the rebuild, a new integration took about three hours to add. By June 2022 there were 103 of them.

This is the hinge.

Integrations weren’t sold as features so much as used as a pretext for co-marketing.

After Fomo built the Mailchimp integration, Mailchimp put Fomo at the top of its partner directory for months. Every new integration borrowed one more distribution surface.

What Fomo was accumulating was a count of other companies’ pages carrying its name, more than a count of features.

The operating detail is sharp too.

Integration requests were harvested from saved queries in the search box on the integrations landing page. Five searches for Squarespace in one week meant building it, even with nobody asking.

Individual requests got a condition attached: the customer had to upgrade to an annual plan first.

Five or six hours of development at a few hundred dollars of cost is already paid for if the annual charge lands before the work starts.

A company selling social proof grew on social proof

Kulp names social proof itself, rather than integrations, as the biggest growth driver.

The team opened review profiles on Shopify, Capterra, G2 and BigCommerce and kept a public spreadsheet ledger of reviews. They built up more than 300 reviews and over 100 case studies.

A company selling social proof growing on social proof is at least coherent.

Reading the sequence of numbers, though, we think the push from $10,000 to $100,000 came from co-marketing through integrations.

Count the misses instead

The lesson in this case lives in the count of things that failed rather than in the wins.

On the marketers, he ended up making the company an engineering organisation and handing engineers marketing campaigns directly every few months.

The reason he gives for the hires failing is that each one created a new job of brokering between a marketer and a developer.

The free plan was killed a few months later. The few hundred users from that window are still grandfathered in.

The pay numbers make the point plainly.

While company MRR stacked up through $15,000, $20,000 and $22,000, the founders’ take-home was zero.

As Kulp puts it, people look at a company’s MRR and assume the founder is rich, when the founder is making $0.

The five yardsticks he held buyers against

He started thinking about selling in early 2021, five years after buying in.

His friend Nick Gray published a post titled “SaaS Company For Sale” without naming the company. Leads came in, but Kulp wasn’t committed and paused for several months.

When he restarted he brought in Neil Soni. Soni wasn’t a broker but an acquaintance who had written a playbook on selling to corporations.

Kulp wanted five things from a buyer.

• Knowledge of marketing technology
• Respect for the brand and IP
• Keeping the team as it was
• Letting Fomo operate independently
• A growth mindset, meaning a marketing budget

A deal came close to signing in December, and he walked away because the partner didn’t fit.

Relay Commerce eventually surfaced through Soni’s network, and the first and final offers were drafted within seven to ten days of each other.

The regret he names is spending close to a year in an “open to selling” posture without deciding.

That was time he could have spent on growth instead of fielding half-baked offers.

Both prices sealed, so no multiple can be computed

MRR was around $100,000 in January 2020, and monthly revenue was $107,200 at the July 2022 sale.

Roughly two and a half years, essentially flat, leading into the exit.

Kulp writes that the theme of that period was optimising margins and workflows.

So the sale was decided partway along a plateau rather than at a peak.

The “buy it rather than build it” pattern has other records too.

Fomo is the entry in that line whose purchase price is least visible.

The opacity extends to how the deal began.

Kulp met it as an employee of a venture fund. A network that could introduce buyers and an acquaintance who had literally written a playbook on selling were both in place from the start.

On the technical side, the premise is that he had the hours on nights and weekends to learn to code from zero.

And with the purchase price sealed, how good this was as an investment can’t be checked from outside.

Both numbers needed for the multiple are withheld.