In 2019 I acquired 1kProjects — a small marketplace for digital businesses — which eventually became Indiemaker. I'd built things from scratch before. I thought I understood how businesses worked. Buying one taught me I understood almost nothing about how they actually run.
When you build from scratch, you write the history. When you buy, you inherit it — and that changes everything about how you see a business.
Building gives you the luxury of starting clean. You design the systems, set the culture, choose the customers. Buying forces you to understand someone else's decisions — why they built it this way, who the customers actually are, what holds the whole thing together. That forensic reading of an existing business is one of the most valuable skills you can develop, and you can't get it from building.
When I looked at 1kProjects, I was reading the shape of someone else's effort. The gaps in documentation told me where the founder had been overwhelmed. The customer concentration told me where the real risk sat. The traffic sources told me what growth had been intentional and what had been lucky. None of that would have been visible if I'd built it myself — I'd have been too close to it.
The other thing buying teaches you is what an asset actually looks like from the outside. When you're building, you're inside the story. When you're buying, you're reading it from a distance — and the gap between what founders think their business is worth and what a buyer can verify it's worth is almost always enormous. That gap is instructive.
Every acquisition I've looked at has made me a better builder. Knowing what a buyer looks for changes what you document, what you systematise, what you stop treating as tribal knowledge.
The practical detail — what to check, what to ask, how to structure a deal — belongs on the Indiemaker blog. What I want to say here is simpler: if you've only ever built, go and try to buy something. Even the due diligence process alone will change how you think about the businesses you're building right now. That perspective shift is worth more than most courses.
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