KRIT: A $1M/Year, 6-Person Dev Agency Gets Bought by a 4-Year Client

Founded in 2014 with $16,000 from an accelerator at the University of South Carolina, the dev agency KRIT was acquired in June 2022 by GreyNoise Intelligence, a cybersecurity company that had been a long-time client. The sale price wasn’t disclosed, but co-founder Andrew Askins has described it as “enough for a down payment on a house, not enough to never work again.”

Dollar figures below are converted at roughly ¥150/$1. The actual amount varies with exchange rates and timing, so treat this as a rough sense of scale.

Eight years, in brief

At the time of sale, the team was two co-founders plus four employees, six people total, supplemented by freelancers as needed. They typically had 4–6 concurrent clients, and their own website drew roughly 1,000–2,000 monthly visitors. $1 million in annual revenue divides to roughly $83,000/month, or about ¥12.5 million. Since agency revenue swings heavily month to month depending on how projects land, this figure is best read as an average.

What kind of company was it?

For roughly the first three years, KRIT was, in Askins’s own words, “a dev shop that builds for anyone.” Differentiation came mainly from being cheap, which made it hard to win higher-value work or speed up client acquisition, the classic position of a low-price subcontractor in an industry prone to exactly that race to the bottom.

From there, they re-carved their positioning along two axes: horizontally, “app development for non-technical founders,” and vertically, “cybersecurity startups from seed through Series A.” This wasn’t a snap decision. It followed months of customer research and deliberation with two hired consultants.

The moment things changed

The trajectory shifted right after that refocusing. Askins describes the effect: “It became easier to identify where we needed to be to connect with prospects, and they became more interested in talking to us. Suddenly, even cold email started working.”

That one sentence contains the entire mechanism of why narrowing works. As a generalist dev shop, you can’t define “where your prospects are.” If anyone could be a customer, there’s no way to decide which event to attend or which mailing list to join. The moment you define your target as “seed-to-Series-A security companies,” though, you can name, literally by name, which conferences to attend, which newsletters your prospects read, and which investors matter. Cold email didn’t start working because the copy got better. It started working because the recipient list became definable.

Much of the subsequent growth came through referrals from satisfied clients. In a narrow industry, referrals circulate within that same industry, so a track record compounds in persuasive power faster. Crossing $1 million in annual revenue in 2021 was the result of this cycle kicking in.

Where the buyer came from

The other turning point is that the buyer emerged not from the open market but from an existing client relationship. GreyNoise Intelligence had been a KRIT client for four years before proposing the acquisition. For a company looking to build out its engineering team, a six-person dev team that had spent four years hands-on with its product was a far more certain choice than hiring unknown candidates.

The step that normally consumes the most time and effort in a sale, the buyer verifying the seller’s capability, had in effect already been completed, over four years of working together. The roughly three-month timeline from the start of negotiations to close reflects that head start. The deal took the shape of an acqui-hire, and the founders themselves regarded it less as a pure exit and more as a change in employment status.

What wasn’t smooth

Behind a figure like “over $1M a year” lay a business that was far from healthy. Askins is blunt: “Revenue wasn’t predictable, and we weren’t making enough profit, which meant we couldn’t pay standout, competitive salaries.” Project inflow arrived in waves, so workload was unstable, and against the era’s rising engineer salaries, they couldn’t keep up on compensation. Even with consistently good marks for company culture, turnover continued because of the caps on pay and growth opportunity.

That thin margin fed straight back into the sale negotiation itself. Askins’s summary is unsparing: “The way to get the most leverage in an acquisition negotiation is to build a great business that you don’t want to sell and don’t need to sell. We weren’t profitable, and we wanted to be, so we gave up a lot of negotiating leverage.” “The more willing you are to walk away, the more leverage you have.”

He’s also candid about the toll of the sale process itself: “Selling a business is the worst,” and “one of the most stressful things I’ve done as a founder.” Even in a comparatively short three-month window, the business had to keep running normally without being able to tell employees or clients, and there were multiple moments where both sides nearly walked away.

How much of this is reproducible

The narrowing process is reproducible. Define your target along “industry × stage × customer attributes,” then work backward from that definition to figure out where to show up and who to list. Investing months of customer research and an outside perspective into this exercise is something any agency, at any scale, can undertake.

What’s hard to reproduce is where the buyer came from. The fact that four years of an existing client relationship became the foundation for the acquisition means, by definition, this isn’t something you can manufacture by deciding “I want to sell this year.” Whether an existing client can become a buyer depends on whether that client has capital and is heading toward wanting to bring the work in-house. It also mattered that the market they chose, seed-to-Series-A security companies, happened to be flush with funding at the time.

One more inconvenient truth this story surfaces: revenue scale and negotiating leverage are two different things. Even north of $1 million a year, if margins are thin and the founders want out, terms tilt toward the buyer. If you want a sale to be a real option, revenue is the wrong thing to grow. Profit, and a position where you’re not desperate to leave, are what count.

After the acquisition, Askins stayed on at GreyNoise for a time before leaving, took a break to walk the Camino de Santiago, and has since moved into fractional consulting and building an SEO-automation tool called MetaMonster.

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