I Found a Business for Sale and Rebuilt It Into $20K/Month

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I Found a Business for Sale and Rebuilt It Into $20K/Month

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Oct 19, 2025

Meet Adrian Horning. A year ago, he came across a scraping API that was already making money. Adrian saw it as validation, rebuilt the app, and now makes $20K/month. This video covers the full copying framework.

🤖 100+ Creative AI Use Cases Beyond Cold Outreach → https://clickhubspot.com/0761f2

🛠️ Want to build your own app with AI? Check out Starter Story Build → https://build.starterstory.com/build/ai-build-accelerator?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=adrian

Adrian's app: https://scrapecreators.com/
Follow Adrian: https://x.com/adrian_horning_

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🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

This video is an educational case study of one founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

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No tools listed for this business.

The number one question I get is how do I come up with a good business idea

But the truth is you don't have to

And this video is proof

Meet Adrian a solo developer from Austin who had a different approach

I copied a successful app and now it makes me 20 000 a month

A year ago he saw a successful app for sale but instead of buying it

he rebuilt it himself and now it makes 20 000 a month

If something is working you have a moral obligation to copy it

I invited Adrian onto the channel to share exactly how he did it

including the specific platform he used to find proven ideas

his method to validate if an idea is worth copying and the playbook he would

use if he had to start over again today

If you've been looking for the right business idea

this episode might change everything for you I'm Pat Walls

and this is Starter Story

All right Adrian welcome to the channel

Tell me about who you are what you built and what's your story

Hey my name's Adrian I'm a solopreneur

I built a SaaS to 20K a month and I found this idea not by coming up with

something new but rather I copied a successful app

I found on an online business brokerage and built it myself

Okay cool So you built this API doing 20 000 a month

Can you share a little bit more about some of the numbers behind it

Sure Yeah So monthly revenue is about 20 000 a month right now

And it is a credit based model

So you just pay for credits and then use them There's no subscription

So right now we have 600 people who have paid

but aren't necessarily paying on a regular basis

We do almost like 20 million API requests a month right now

Okay cool

Before we get into how you found this idea and kind of the genius way that I

think you did it I do want to understand a little bit more about your

background How do you get to the point where you build a SaaS like this

So I moved to SF wanting to be a part of tech

learn how to code at this program called App Academy It was a code bootcamp

Then got a job in Utah as an engineer for three years

always with the goal of starting my own business

Then quit with 30 000 in savings and then

freelanced built a course built some products

but didn't have success until I stuck with this one thing

which was scrape creators And then here we are now

All right Adrian

what I love about your story is how you came up with this idea and how you

validated that this was something that was worth building

Before we get into all that

can you share how you even come across the idea to build a web scraping API

Absolutely

One of my followers on Twitter actually DM to me telling me to check out this

listing for micro acquire or acquire com And it was a scraping API

And the reason that he DM me that is because I already had a product that had to

do with social media So he thought that I might be interested in checking it out

Once I did I saw the numbers and was completely blown away

I had no confidence myself that a scraping API could make that much money

The fact that they were only getting their customers through SEO

I thought this is a product for me I'm going to do this exact same thing

Okay So you see this idea on micro acquire which lists business for sale

You can kind of see how much money is making or how much the business is worth

How'd you know that this is something that you could replicate and could

potentially be successful

Well a couple of different things One

I had this skillset because I had been studying scraping for three years

So I had already kind of built those APIs that were hosted on this website

So technically I had the confidence that I could build it

And then the reason that I thought I could make money off of it was because they

were doing 30 000 monthly recurring

They were around for three years

only got their customers from SEO and they had less than a hundred customers

So doing that math in my head I was like

I could probably do that and I have a little bit of a presence on Twitter

So even if I just messaged people on Twitter

I probably could get there even without SEO

Okay cool Well you find this idea

You think that is something that you could potentially replicate

How do you go about building this

So I am a node JS developer Everything is written in JavaScript

So really it was just a matter of hosting the APIs like on a server

So I had them all in one of my repos

So put those scrapers on a node JS server on render com

So then hosted the API there for the documentation

I just put that actually in a notion doc and then a basic website

And then that was it So it was pretty bare bones

And it probably took just a couple of weeks because I had built that experience

and those scrapers for my previous three years of experience and got my first

customer a few weeks later

Okay So you build this you get your first customer pretty quickly

I think a lot of people watching this may be similar to you software developer

They have the skills to build something like this

but the hard part is getting customers growing

scaling this and replicating what this business that you sort of cloned had

already done So how did you grow this business How did you get customers

I hang out on Twitter a lot So people see me there

People have seen my content

My first customer was just because I scraped a company's site

And then the CTO actually commented on that post So completely accident

And then also anytime someone has a launch video that has anything to do with

scraping social media then I comment saying Hey

Hey I'll give you 10 K free credits if you'll try my API

But the great thing about a scraping API also is that you don't have to have a

lot of customers to have a decent MRR

So I have maybe like 12 who pay for the majority of that MRR

I love Adrian's strategy for copying successful apps

but here's the thing He didn't just copy the idea

He got creative and made his idea 1 better than the rest Nowadays

this creative edge is what separates winners from everyone else

And this is where the HubSpot for startups

creative AI use cases database comes in handy

It's a free database with over 100 creative ways to use AI in your

business These aren't the obvious AI apps that everyone's already building

These are the creative uses your competitors haven't discovered yet that can

give you an unfair advantage

My favorite part is the fact that they break down the list by difficulty

business impact and even steps on how to get started with which tools

Just find the one that resonates with you and run with it

So if you're ready to join Adrian and start your own SAS business

then download the free AI differentiation database at the first link right below

in the description Thank you to HubSpot for startups for sponsoring this video

Now let's get back into it

I want to understand a little bit more about this framework

If you were to start over today in 2025 and go to micro acquire and find another

idea how would you do that for people watching

Can you break it down step by step All right

this will be my playbook If I was doing this again step one

you're going to visit the micro acquire marketplace

step two filter by SAS and then step three filter by asking price

So we're not looking for apps that are making any money That's not great

We're looking for pre validated ideas

So increase that asking price to at least 300 000 or you can filter by annual

recurring revenue whatever you want All right

step four you're going to look for things that you would be good at or market

that you would know about For example

I knew I wanted to build a product that had something to do with web scraping

That was my niche It was niching down for that

You would want to build a product that you have some sort of knowledge about

All right step five we're going to try to find the website

Obviously a micro acquire they don't list what the website is

but we're going to reverse engineer and try to find the actual website

So a lot of these SAS businesses are really easy to find because you can just

Google what they have in their listing

So in the title or description you can just Google part of that

And usually they're using like their title or H one or description actually in

the micro acquire description So it's pretty easy to find

or they actually list competitors if you scroll down

So all you have to do a lot of times the website will write blog posts or pages

that will say competitor name and then alternative

So all you need to Google is the competitor and then alternative or

alternatives One of those two ways will get you to the site

And then you can just view the site and see if the copy is similar

Then boom you've got the site All right

All right step six try to reverse engineer how they acquired customers

This is arguably the most important part not so hard to build a product

but how are they getting customers So for example the app that I was copying

I knew that they got their customers mostly from SEO

read everything that you can on the site

any information that they talk about how they're acquiring customers

Try to look at like the founder on Twitter LinkedIn

try to find podcasts or YouTube videos

any way that they talk about the product or how to grow the product

Step seven actually build the damn thing Step eight Yeah

this is just don't copy word for word Don't copy everything literally exactly

You just want to copy the concept the idea Step nine

don't get distracted with other projects

Do something every single day to promote or improve the product

You know that this idea is making money So now you just have to execute

do something every single day to build the product or market it

And I guarantee you will make money You will be successful Okay

Thanks Adrian for sharing that full playbook I think that's awesome

We haven't really talked yet about what your API does specifically

You have this sort of micro SAS API Can you just share what it does

how it works what type of customers use it Yeah

So it scrapes specifically social media that can be Instagram

YouTube Twitter and we just scrape public data

Got to say that for the lawyers out there

We scrape social media as well as like their ad libraries as well

So the Facebook ad library LinkedIn ad library et cetera

And this obviously helps developers because scraping is a pain in the butt

So we scrape so you don't have to we handle all of the infrastructure

proxy rotation et cetera And who uses this tool

There's a lot of like Lincoln bio tools anyone who's tracking analytics

like short form content Yeah So it's a credit based system So pay as you go

So we have three payment plans right now 10 for 5 000 credits

50 for 25 000 and then 500 000 credits for 500

I think it does well because it works

works Like there's a lot of scrapers out there like social media in particular that

break pretty often So with mine

I think people like it because it's reliable And then if it's not reliable

then I'll communicate with people pretty frequently as well

as well as it's really easy to get ahold of me

Whereas a lot of developers who would build these sorts of things

you don't even have their email or a way to contact them

So I think that is also okay Let's change topics a little bit

I want to understand tech stack You're a developer

you have a scraping pretty technical type of product How did you build this

What's your tech stack Yeah honestly it's pretty straightforward pretty easy

So everything is written in Node js JavaScript and it's just a bunch of HTTP

requests So one important thing that I use is this package called Input

It's developed by Appify So another scraping framework

So you NPM install Input use that for HTTP requests

And then just a lot of proxies So I have four main ones that I use

which are Evomi Core Residential which are the cheapest residential out there

Decodo WebShare and Massive

And then I host everything on Render com or I host some scripts on AWS Lambda

Obviously I use Cursor So that's 20 bucks a month

And then Supabase for the database And then the front end is Astro plus React

And on a similar note I'm also curious

what are the costs to use all these tools

What does the profit margin look like for your business

Yeah margin is about 80 Most of it is spent on proxies

So about 1 500 a month right now is spent on proxies

And I hire a developer in the Philippines to monitor the API for outages at night

So he's about 500 and then server costs are about 400

Okay cool Thank you for sharing that

Thank you for being transparent about all that That's awesome

Last question that I want to ask we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story

what would be your advice for anyone watching this starting out in 2025 about

how to do something like you've done

Stop bouncing around ideas and just pick one thing

Do it every single day focus on it every single day

and you'll make it stop getting distracted because that's exactly what happened to me

Cool That's amazing Adrian Thank you for coming on

Thank you for sharing all this being super transparent

I love the business you built Thanks for coming on and sharing everything

Thanks man Appreciate it

Big thanks to Adrian for coming onto the channel

I love his story because it flips the startup myth on its head

Adrian didn't need to invent something brand new

He just saw a model he copied it and he executed better

And that turned into a SaaS that makes 20 000 a month and effectively changed his life

I think the lesson that anyone can take from this is stop waiting for that genius

idea Just start build and keep improving

And you never know what might happen

This is exactly why we launched Starter Story Build

where we will show you how to take your idea

use AI to build it fast and launch in just a couple of weeks

Even if you're starting with no team no money and no clear idea

If you want to finally build your first app

launch it and potentially turn it into a profitable business

we'll head to the first link in the description and check out Starter Story Build

That's it for this episode guys Thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed it

We'll see you in the next one Peace

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