PA Crunch, a $300,000 Exit on the Founder's Fifth Attempt

In 2018, Kenny Schumacher let go of PA Crunch, an Instagram growth SaaS, for $300,000. At the sale it carried $18,000 in MRR, $9,000 in monthly profit, 600 paid subscribers and four full-time staff. In the yen-normalized figures this site uses, the price lands at 45 million yen, slightly above the 37.5 million yen median across our 41 recorded exits and short of half the 97.5 million yen median across the 10 SaaS exits. What catches the eye is the time. His personal involvement had fallen to roughly three hours a month before the sale. At three hours a month for $9,000 in profit, there is no reason to sell. The reason he gave They Got Acquired was not idleness but burnout: “I was spending about three hours per month actively on the business, but mentally I was always thinking about the business and was getting burned out.”

The numbers behind the deal

With 600 subscribers producing $18,000 in MRR, the average subscriber paid about $30 a month. Acquisition channels, churn, ad spend and the buyer’s identity are not disclosed.

The price needs a footnote. They Got Acquired first reported the deal at $285,000 and later corrected it to $300,000, explaining that “different sources list slightly different prices; we’re reporting $300,000 because that’s what the founder told us directly.” This article uses the $300,000 figure as well, while noting that it rests on the founder’s account rather than on filed documents. Schumacher’s own site also records a 2018 sale at $300,000.

What the buyer bought was a state, rather than a business

Set $300,000 against revenue and it works out to about 1.4 times the $216,000 annual run rate and about 2.8 times the $108,000 in annual profit. Against monthly profit it is 33 times, and against MRR it is 16.7 months of revenue.

That multiple sits low compared with other exits in the same price band. Feather, which turns Notion pages into a blog, sold for $250K on $6,000 MRR, which works out to 41.7 months of revenue, or 3.5 times the annual run rate. PA Crunch had three times Feather’s revenue and fetched roughly the same price. The sales are six years apart, in 2018 and 2024, so the comparison is not clean, and even allowing for that the gap in multiples is wide.

Speculating here, part of the gap comes from what was being sold. A service that grows Instagram followers and engagement can lose its foundation to a single policy change on the platform side, and buyers price that uncertainty in. Our archive holds a parallel: SearchSEO, a SaaS built on a method that carried terms-of-service risk, also landed at around $300K. Buyers look at how long revenue lasts rather than how large it is.

So what produced the $300,000? We read the price as attached to a state where the business ran on three hours a month rather than to the business itself. Four full-time staff handled daily operations, and a business whose founder is down to three hours a month looks, to a buyer, like almost zero handover cost. In small SaaS deals of the kind FE International handles, the central question is whether revenue evaporates the moment the founder steps away. PA Crunch had the answer prepared before it went to market. A four-month close fits that reading.

Delegation removed the hours without removing the occupation

Schumacher calls PA Crunch “the business where I really got to learn the power of delegation,” and his site records that “prior to being sold, the business required just around 3 hours per month of personal commitment.” Delegation is the success factor he names.

Our reading overlaps halfway. That delegation built the price is not in dispute. Delegation did nothing, though, for the other problem he cites as a reason to sell. The hours fell to three a month while the share of his attention did not fall at all. Taking your hands off a business does not get it out of your head. The gap between those two numbers reaching its limit fits his published statements better than any other explanation for why he sold.

He listed three reasons. Growth had stalled at $18,000 MRR and his existing strategies no longer moved it. He wanted capital for the next business. And, “more importantly,” he wanted to mentally let go of this business and focus fully on other endeavors. Two of the three are about attention rather than money.

The fifth company, and eight out of ten

Read only through the numbers, this is a tidy story about a profitable business at a 50% margin selling as expected. The path there was not tidy.

According to They Got Acquired, the four businesses Schumacher launched before PA Crunch all went inactive without an acquisition: a mobile car wash, a Yugioh card trading blog, and others. The fifth attempt was the first to reach an exit. The same outlet reports that he has launched 10 businesses in nine years and that eight of them are now inactive. That is a hit rate of two in ten.

His own words start from that premise. “I’m convinced that the more projects I work on, the greater the odds that at least one of them will become successful, or teach me something valuable that I can use on the other projects.” That is the language of someone placing volume against an expected miss rather than someone explaining the design of a single win.

What followed runs along the same line. He used the PA Crunch proceeds to fund Delesign, a flat-rate design subscription service, and sold that in 2021, telling They Got Acquired that the second sale was far faster and easier. He is currently running five side projects, including a card game and two apps for the real estate industry.

What failed, and what stays invisible

The failure is stated plainly in his own words. At $18,000 MRR, “my existing strategies weren’t working to grow the business further.” What he tried and what did not work is never itemized. Nothing in the public record lets an outsider judge whether $18,000 was the ceiling of the market or the ceiling of his playbook.

A great deal stays hidden. Acquisition channels, churn, cost per acquisition, ad spend, the payroll behind four full-time staff, the buyer’s identity and what happened to PA Crunch afterward. The 50% margin survives as a result with none of the costs that produced it. The main source is They Got Acquired, a secondary outlet, and the figures come from the founder’s own account. His site corroborates only the sale price and the three hours a month, and we found no independent confirmation of the MRR or the headcount.

A 2018 price tag, and four companies left off the ledger

The $300,000 was agreed in 2018. Micro SaaS priced differently then, and the rules around Instagram tooling were enforced differently too. The figure does not work as a benchmark for what a small SaaS fetches today.

Some costs never reached the ledger at all. Schumacher got here on his fifth company, after four others had gone dormant, and the time and money spent on those four is nowhere in the record. A hit rate of two in ten is a rate measured with the cost of the eight misses left out of frame. The buyer clearly paid for a business that ran on three hours a month. What it took to reach that state appears nowhere in the deal figures.

For another case of selling something small but easy to hand over, Potion moved from one indie developer to one individual buyer for $300K in the same price band. That one was a solo operation with no employees, and both sides of the deal are named, which makes the contrast instructive.