This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu.
For the past few years, I’ve been getting emails from people wanting to acquire MARU: Learn Japanese Kana.
I thought they were scams or spam. But as the emails kept coming, I got curious about what they’d even do with my app.
Down the rabbit hole I went.
Turns out, there’s a growing trend: acquisition companies (often called Micro PE firms) offer roughly 2.5x your annual profit to buy your app, hand it off to their engineering team, slap on a few features, shove in a subscription model, squeeze every last drop of revenue out of it, and maybe flip it later at several times the price. If the app has other advantages, the offer could go up to 5-10x annual profit.
Developers sell for all kinds of reasons:
- Lost passion for the project, don’t want to maintain it anymore
- Need the cash to fund the next thing
- Worried AI or competitors will make them irrelevant, and profits will only decline from here
- Feel like they can’t give users the best experience anymore
Even the legendary Mac app Bartender got acquired, and the new company immediately stuffed it with tracking and analytics code. The backlash was brutal.
I’d probably never sell MARU, not even for 10 years of profit. But then it hit me:
I could be the one acquiring other people’s apps.
As an indie developer, I get what other developers want and care about. I wouldn’t be like those profit-obsessed companies that ruin apps with aggressive monetization. I’d actually take care of the existing users. After all, I hate ads. And if I’m buying an app, it’d be one I genuinely love, so I’d never flip it. I’d treat it like my own. And because I’d genuinely love it, I’d be willing to pay more than the typical 2.5x, maybe 4x or so.
What I’d look for: apps where the creator poured real effort in, but the app is still struggling. A bit of a shame, really. The creator might have lost steam. But if I love it enough, I could take it over, improve it with years of experience, and localize it into multiple languages for new markets.
Sounded like a perfect fit for me.
Here’s the kicker: if I just acquire an app that’s already found product-market fit, doesn’t that solve my problem of never shipping a second app?
So my fleeting obsession locked onto this for a while. I took an entire course on acquisitions. I even registered a company for it.
But after a few cold emails went nowhere, the excitement faded. The company website is still just an AI-generated first draft that I never finished.
Beyond acquisitions being harder than I expected, there was a bigger reason:
I realized I was just avoiding building my own app.
Most apps on the market that people are willing to sell aren’t even as good as what I could build in a month. I have a pile of cool ideas I want to make, but I never finish them. I keep using new shiny ideas to avoid the hard work.
In April, I procrastinated on writing my book under the guise of “researching UI/UX.” That’s when I stumbled on a really cool app: grug.
It delivers life wisdom in a caveman’s voice. Endearingly simple and pure. Beautiful UI. Basically a polished take on the internet-famous caveman skill concept. I had no idea what “grug” meant at first, or why they didn’t just call it something like “caveman insights.” Turns out the whole caveman-speak style originated from The Grug Brained Developer. But the creators put so much thought into it that the app feels alive. The writing is incredibly natural too, not something you could get from blindly prompting AI.
Here’s the thing: at the time, it had only 50 reviews, no real revenue, and their Instagram hadn’t been updated in months. My guess was the creators had moved on to other, more promising apps. Unlike me, they’d already shipped four apps, including a Sudoku app that was doing really well and deserved more of their attention.
I loved this app. And I was convinced I could make it even better. Plus, it seemed like there might be a chance.
The cold acquisition fire inside me reignited.
I mustered up the courage and reached out to the creators. Told them it was the most interesting app I’d seen recently and that I genuinely loved it. Said if they wanted to focus on other projects, I’d pay good money to acquire it and would maintain it properly.
They said they loved the app too and weren’t looking to sell. I hadn’t gotten my hopes up too high, but it still stung a little.
My not-yet-started acquisition company had failed again.
I shared some improvement ideas and feedback, and mentioned I might build a similar version in other languages. After getting their blessing, I figured that was the end of it.
Then a few days ago, the creators emailed me out of nowhere:
Hi Alex,
Hope you are doing great! Wanted to let you know that grug became a finalist in the Apple Design Awards. I wanted to share the news as you are a big fan too of what grug is all about. And to express that you have great taste!
Hoping we are going to win!
Jip & Michel
They said I have great taste. grug had been nominated for the Apple Design Awards.
Sure enough, just yesterday, grug won this year’s Apple Design Award for Delight and Fun. It’s even the first app on the awards page.
How cool is that!?
So happy for them.
What an inspiring story.
And in a way, my taste just got officially validated by Apple? (Ha.)
I really need to stop using acquisitions as an excuse to avoid building my own apps.
Time to go build.
The app I most want to acquire is the one I should build myself.
Further reading: grug’s award interview: grug team make app good1
Footnotes
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Reading this I learned they render the handwritten font themselves. No wonder it feels so unique. ↩
