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

Fomo was doing $107,200 a month at the time of sale, with ARR above $1 million. In the yen-normalized frontmatter this site uses, that is 2.2 times the median of the 97 SaaS cases here that disclose monthly revenue. 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 did not. 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.

The numbers in order

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, 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 would 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: to keep a slice of equity because he believed in what the buyers planned, and to be paid over time rather than up front. Those two conditions cut the cash the buyers needed twice over. The monthly installment was set at roughly what the business was earning at the time. 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, what makes this deal repeatable is not the buyer’s capability but the accident that the seller was not in a hurry for cash. Kulp later framed the pattern himself while running his fund: people selling side projects are not 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, and the code was too rigid to extend. So they rebuilt it. Kulp, a marketer who could not code, took online courses on nights and weekends and 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, and by June 2022 there were 103 of them.

This is the hinge. Integrations were not 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 not a count of features but a count of other companies’ pages carrying its name.

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, namely that the customer 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.

Kulp names social proof itself, rather than integrations, as the biggest growth driver. The team opened review profiles on Shopify, Capterra, G2 and BigCommerce, kept a public spreadsheet ledger of reviews, and 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.

Kulp writes that he hired five full-time marketers from 2016 onward and none of the five worked out. 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 missed too. Nearly everyone who arrived during launch week took it, and the first month added about $300 in new MRR. The free plan was killed a few months later, and the few hundred users from that window are still grandfathered in.

For the first 20 months or so, the two of them paid themselves nothing. 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, and leads came in, but Kulp was not committed and paused for several months. When he restarted he brought in Neil Soni, not 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, and a growth mindset, meaning a marketing budget. A deal came close to signing in December and he walked away because the partner did not 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, time he could have spent on growth instead of fielding half-baked offers.

The numbers that are missing, and where this stops

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 margin figures do not agree. Kulp wrote 65% or better around the time of the sale, and told TheyGotAcquired about 70%. The MRR at purchase does not agree either. He says roughly $10,000 on the podcast, while the same outlet reports $30,000 a month within 90 days of the acquisition and calls it a 50% increase, which implies a starting point of $20,000. Churn, total ad spend and the actual seven-figure number appear nowhere.

In the “buy it rather than build it” pattern we have published RecordJoy, bought for $10,000 and sold a year later for $20,000, Damon Chen, who bought a GitHub repository for $20,000 and grew it to $1.5M ARR, and Noosa Labs, which bought four micro SaaS products and reached $120,000 in combined MRR. Fomo is the entry in that line whose purchase price is least visible.

• Seller financing lowers the cash requirement only when the business is not the seller’s living, so their attention sits on valuation rather than on being paid now
• Building integrations counts as marketing only when the partner owns a distribution surface, such as a partner directory or a newsletter, with room on it
• Keeping a public ledger of reviews turns into acquisition only when buyers compare products through app stores and review sites in the first place

The limits belong on the record. Kulp met this deal as an employee of a venture fund, with a network that could introduce buyers and an acquaintance who had literally written a playbook on selling, 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 cannot be checked from outside, because both numbers needed for the multiple are withheld.