Small exit
Definition
A small exit is the complete sale of a profitable online business for a figure most commonly between $50,000 and $150,000, to a buyer who intends to keep running it. The word small describes the size of the company against institutional M&A, not the size of the payment to the founder.
A small exit is the complete sale of a profitable online business for a figure most commonly between $50,000 and $150,000, to a buyer who intends to keep running it. The word small describes the company against institutional M&A, and nothing else about the transaction is small.
At this level the transfer is complete and upfront, the buyer is an operator with capital rather than a fund, and diligence is real without taking nine months. On Indiemaker, 155 businesses are listed at $50,000 or above, carrying $20.3m of combined asking value, with 112 of them between $50,000 and $150,000 (platform data, 14 September 2026). This is an established band of the market with its own conventions, not the bottom of somebody else's.
Why the band matters
Because it is reachable and repeatable. A business clearing $33,000 of annual profit is in range of $100,000 at a conventional 3× multiple, and that is a level a single competent founder can build without outside capital or a team. Nothing about it requires a decade or a venture round.
It is also the band where founders learn the mechanics properly. Sellers who have been through one transfer approach the second one differently, because they know what buyers ask for and they build the business to answer it from the start.
Worked example
A SaaS at $3,400 MRR with $41,000 of trailing annual profit, two acquisition channels and 4% monthly churn. At 2.9× trailing annual profit it clears $119,000, paid in one piece at completion.
That single sum is more than the business produced in its previous two and a half years of trading. It arrives without a further year of operating it, and it can fund the next build outright.
A small exit is a serious financial event for the person on the selling side. Treat it like one. The founders who get the number they want are the ones who spend twelve months before listing making the business easy to hand over, easy to verify from the accounts, and easy for a stranger to run on the Monday after completion.
Related: micro-saas, profit-multiple, the-ownership-shift
See what a business at this level is listed at.
Everything on sale between $50,000 and $150,000, on the same fields.