The BEST Way To Buy An Online Business In 2024
In this 30‑minute masterclass Jameson Camp, an experienced buyer and seller of internet businesses, walks viewers through a complete, step‑by‑step system for acquiring cash‑flow‑positive online businesses. He begins by debunking common myths about buying online businesses and frames acquisition as a realistic path to entrepreneurship for non‑founders. He then categorises the types of internet businesses—content sites (blogs, newsletters, YouTube), software (SaaS, one‑off tools), services/agencies, and e‑commerce—highlighting why content and micro‑SaaS are the most accessible for beginners. Camp lists the main marketplaces and brokers (Flippa, Acquire, Empire Flippers, Motion Invest, FE International, Off‑Market) and explains how each works. A detailed due‑diligence checklist follows, covering traffic verification (Ahrefs, Google Analytics), revenue source validation (Stripe, Shopify, AdSense, affiliate dashboards), SEO health, social‑media metrics (Social Blade), and cold‑outreach potential. He outlines valuation norms (typically 2‑4× annual net profit, with 3× as a benchmark) and offers strategies for structuring deals: seller financing (10‑30% typical), asset‑purchase agreements, and building a capital stack of cash, investor money, and debt. Growth levers such as ad‑network swaps, pricing tweaks, landing‑page optimisation, email‑list monetisation, and paid‑ads are discussed as ways to increase profit and therefore business value. Finally, he stresses a disciplined workflow—spending 20‑30 minutes weekly scanning listings, subscribing to his free NanoFlips newsletter, creating a clear growth plan, and making realistic, well‑backed offers—while warning against deals that look too good to be true. The video ends with a call to action to like, subscribe, and comment on desired business types.
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If you're looking to buy a business, I can promise you that most people are going about it completely, completely wrong. I want to show you how to find a cash flow positive business. It's affordable. You can run from anywhere and actually fits your lifestyle. So stick around because I'm going to show you the step-by-step foolproof process that I've used to buy and sell over 10 internet businesses and help over 100 people do exactly the same, including everything from little blogs to small SaaSes to e-com brands doing millions of dollars a year. At the end, I'm going to show you one of my favorite little tips that no one else in the industry is looking at when it comes to buying these Jameson Camp, and I buy and sell small internet businesses for a living. I don't really know how I ended up in this space, but I did. I guess I started out as an entrepreneur and I sold my first business when I was about 20 years old, a small affiliate network, and went from there. In the past couple years, I've done everything from buying a small hearing aid brand that was direct-to-consumer, growing it from about $50,000 to $300,000 a month, selling it to private equity less than a year later. So I think that by now most people really understand that there's a huge opportunity to buy an already cashflow positive online business, right? I think the magic is that entrepreneurs can be unlocked. I don't think everyone's meant to be an entrepreneur, but for a lot of people, entrepreneurship by acquisition is the easiest way. And some people love brick and mortar businesses. There are a lot of people on the internet talking about buying brick and mortar businesses. I'm not going to show you how to buy a laundromat or a restaurant or an ATM route. That's not my world. My world is small internet businesses, right? Things under a couple million dollars, but they can even start at a couple $100,000, right? That can start as a side hustle, you can improve and make them replace your income eventually. But honestly, there's a ton of trash out there. There's tons of marketplaces and brokers and people talking about this stuff. And I think that the most common thing that I see is people buying bad deals, right? In 2020, I bought a house to flip and I ended up being a total nightmare because I had to gut run of the whole thing. So I learned from that lesson to bring it into these businesses. One of my good businesses that are already making money and already growing, that we can pull a couple quick levers and make them make more money and grow more. In this video, I'll break down some of the places that you can go find these deals, how to set your criteria for a deal, how to due diligence a deal, and then what that process looks like to actually buy the deal and grow it from there. The trick is buying a good deal and then setting up some growth plan for it. So right off the bat, I actually write about all these deals. I have this newsletter called NanoFlips. It's totally free. Nanoflips.com. Just want to plug that real quick and say subscribe. Now let's dive in. Talk sort of like the different kinds of businesses. Like what are the different kinds of businesses? We're going to put them into categories, right? We're going to have content. You'll see here content businesses, right? For those, we're going to have newsletters, blogs, and theme pages, right? And we could put YouTube in there as well. Then we're going to have software businesses. So that will have like SaaS, software as a service businesses, or one-off software businesses. You have services, but it's going to be an agency. You might do maybe, maybe even a little lead gen if you're doing lead gen for them. If e-com, e-com obviously is going to be like classic DTC, right? Like selling direct to consumer. And those are going to be the main buckets. Those are going to be the main categories that all these internet businesses are going to fill in. Fit in. So what I'm gonna say is that for most people, everyone says SEO is dead. SEO has become much harder for these businesses just for long tail search like that. So, but there's still so much opportunity in social and newsletters, et cetera, et cetera. And content businesses are still ranking on Google. Search is not dead. Anyone who says that, it's just so, so broken. That's my hot take, right? For those that are just starting out, we work with, I do buy side advisory. I've helped over 100 people buy businesses. Ranging from like these tiny, tiny baby blogs, newsletters to much, much, much bigger deals in the tens of millions of dollars. So when people are brand new, right, obviously the vast majority of you that watch this are brand new. You're looking for a job replacement, you're looking for a side hustle. I think that the trick is to start with a side hustle. Don't think about replacing your job if you've never done anything like this before. Think about sort of buying a side hustle that makes like a couple hundred bucks a month and you're going to learn, get your hands dirty and grow it to a few thousand dollars a month. Maybe you flip it, make six figures in the flip,, or maybe you grow it to be way more and eventually place your job or you build a portfolio, but you're probably gonna sit in the content site space and the software, right? In the micro SaaS space. Um, and for that we're gonna go like no-code. These are gonna be your two sweet ones, content businesses and software businesses. If you're brand new to this, I can't code anything for my life, right? I can give you guys documents and we'll make other videos on like what the, like how to get, how to be inside of GitHub, et cetera for this. But I don't do this right. Like my SaaS business, my software business that we own, I'll show it to you guys later. I just bought it recently. We did some hybrid financing for it, paid a little bit, used debt fully, and then some seller financing was that I borrowed and we'll pay that off pretty quickly and we're improving it right now. Services businesses, I just— if you— I would say I wouldn't buy this unless you're already really good at this service. Like if you're good at SEO, you work at an SEO agency, If you're good at email marketing, maybe there's an opportunity to do that with email marketing. E-com is just such a grind. I'm a huge fan of e-com. You know, I, here's a hearing aid brand I sold, you know, there's a Kanuka. I sold my equity in that direct to consumer. Um, actually no, in retail as well. Um, skincare brand. Um, I love consumer, I love physical goods, but I'll say is that if you're new to this, it's just such a grind to get into. So you're gonna wanna stick with software and content businesses right off the bat. Okay, so next, we need to— where to find these businesses, where to find these businesses. Okay, I've got a list of like 20 different places to go look. What I'd recommend— I say this to people all the time— is that if you're really serious about this, go gather these places, right? I'll put some in the, in the section below. I'll do some videos on the more— on the newsletter, I send them all out. But look into these places and just spend like 20 minutes a week. If you're really serious about buying a business, right? 20, 30 minutes a week to look through listings is not going to kill you. So let me list some of these out. Gorilla the Room is going to be Flippa. Okay, then we have Acquire, another one that's really good. There's Empire Flippers. I'm just going to list a few now. Motion Invest. And then my favorite is Off Market. I'm going to show you inside some of these a little bit later. I, to be candid with you, like straight all disclosure, I own Off Market, right? I own NanoFlips.com, OnlineAcquisitions.com, and Off Market. OffMarket.so is where you find off-market deals. These are all going to be— Flipa is going to be a marketplace, Acquire is a marketplace, Empire Flippers is a broker, Motion Invest is a broker, right? Basically, marketplaces are where anyone can list anything. Brokers, they've sort of taken an obli— they've taken, uh, they've— the broker has taken the risk of like doing due diligence for you. You should still do due diligence. Talk about that in a second. Um, another will be FE International. Huge fans of FE. Thomas over there is the man. So between those, that's a great way to start. At the end, I'll show you another couple of hidden ones, but for now, stick with those. Off Market, uh, I will put a promo code in this, uh, in the description for everyone to give it a try since I own it. Um, the rest of these are somewhat free, some are not. But Off Market again is for finding off-market deals. You have to contact the owners yourselves and make an offer. So quickly, let's take a look at some of them. This is Flippa right here. You're going to see I call it the 800-pound gorilla because it is just the biggest player in the space. I know they had a couple hundred thousand buyers sign up last year. They've sold over 450,000 businesses. It's sort of a big deal, right? They don't mess around and they've got everything right. So if you want to go to— sorry, let's go back. And go to browse, you want to go to browse their blogs that they have for sale. Boom. It's going to show you all the blogs they have for sale, right? A lot require an NDA. Just sign an NDA. Some require proof of funds. Most just NDA. But a lot of these you have to be careful with, right? A lot of these you have to be careful with. My other videos, I break down much more in-depth how to do more due diligence, and I'll cover some in a second about how to make sure you're buying a good deal. But this is where most people get lost. They got websites, apps, domains, e-commerce, content, marketplaces. SaaS services, adsense, so much different stuff. Then you also have, let's look at like an Empire Flippers, right? Empire Flippers is another good one. They're a big player in space. They've been around for a very, very long time. They've got stuff more in like the $50,000+ range. Flippa, you can find stuff in the cheaper range. Motion Invest, Motion Invest, you're going to find stuff again in like the $850,000-$2,000,000. But again, please make sure, don't just go buy something random. I'm telling you, like, I've done this for a living. At least sign up for my newsletter NanoFlips or watch some of my other videos and you'll find out like how to find the right deals because we don't want like— perfect example, I'll cover this in a second. Like, I would never buy whatever this is, right? This is just trending down, is dying. So and then we got off market. This is going to look totally different probably by the time you guys see this video, it's edited. But we just have a database of totally off market deal flow for you to reach out to. You know, for like less than $100 a month, you can access everything. You can put in your niche, you put it in the industry you want to be involved in, the size of it. It and bring you all the contact information, the owners to reach out to and make offers. And then with the, all the stuff we have in the newsletter and the free videos, you'll see how to make those offers. Okay, so quick video here. Let me just show you the basics of due diligence. DD. Okay, we want to verify everything, right? Everything, y'all. I don't care what they say. I don't care if the broker says it, verify it, right? We want to check if it's SEO-driven. We also want to check for opportunities. Part of the goals here is not just buying stuff that already that already exists. We're gonna buy things that we can improve, right? That's everything that I've done and everything I should be able to do is buy things you can improve because incremental changes can make massive difference in the long run. So you wanna check for SEO opportunities with Ahrefs, and I'm gonna show you guys that in a second. Want, um, want to see, is there, uh, is there cold out? Reach up paid competitors. So to sum it up, what ops are there and is this all true? Okay, so that's a very high level of due diligence, right? We have all these checklists and spreadsheets that we use. We give those away in the newsletter and stuff, but for now, just remember those, right? So we want to verify everything. I don't really care if the seller says this or the broker says this, you know, let's look at like something on Flippa, for example. Let's just go find like a, let's just go pick anything random, right? Let's go to a blog that's for sale. Okay. Harley Insider. The main thesis, you guys, that we like to go with, and I'm not saying this is a good one or a bad one, we just found this, we'll find out right now, is we like to see traffic that's either stable or growing, right, for 12+ months. That's really the goal here. I wouldn't be buying anything that's 3 months old, 4 months old. I wouldn't be buying anything that's dying. Obviously things are gonna go up and down in trends. It's very normal. Life trends, stocks trend. Sometimes there's a little hit of traffic, but in general you're looking for stable-ish or growing, right? Not things falling apart. So actually this looks interesting to me. This, you know, right off the bat we would say like, is this growing? It is. This looks pretty interesting. Is the traffic stable? It is. Is the seller verified? Is the seller legitimate? Okay. Super Seller, broker. Excellent. That says, that says very positive thing to me. That's just some flipper, for example. They've got 93.5% positive feedback on $733,000 of transactions. Revenue looks good. It's making $200 a month. That sort of looks good, right? I might write about this for the newsletter, actually. So this would be just passing our first level of due diligence, right? It looks pretty good. Normally things sell for like 2 to 4 times their yearly profits. So 3 ends up being the average, right? So it makes $1,000 a year. It's probably going to sell for around $3,000. That's give or take. That's just for now. Just remember I said that for now, um, to go with it, right? So, um, let's say, let's take this domain, which is gonna be Harley Insider. Let's just see how it actually looks inside a tool called Ahrefs. You know, we do this for all of our clients, et cetera, et cetera. I teach you all how to do this, but if we go inside Ahrefs, let's see how it looks. That's weird to me. I don't like to see— basically want there to be congruency from claims to what, what we're seeing. And what they're seeing here is, I don't see how— I mean, the traffic is at zero. I don't see how it could be having the traffic that they're claiming. So that'd be a major red flag to me. Right. So the next thing you'd want to do is get asked to be added to, added to analytics.. So you could dive through some of this yourself unless it's saying all the traffic is coming from organic search. That'd be very odd to me, um, to line up with that. So you can't take everything at the seller's word. Okay? So that's just one thing. But let's look at another website, Love Night Shift, and see if there's opportunities. Basically, we use these tools here to see if there's opportunities. That's a whole different video. I will do an entire video breakdown, but the first step of all this, right, is finding out, Can you verify everything? Does everything line up right? Is when you can get access to the Stripe, can I get access to their AdSense, get access to their affiliate accounts? I don't need ownership of them. I just need admin or viewing access, right? Admin. Sorry, viewing only, not admin only access, right? Are there SEO opportunities? Are there cold outreach opportunities? Let me pull up an example of that. We use tools like ListKit, you know, to pull, to pull potential people to reach out, to reach out to. So for early insider, no, that's not gonna be one that we can re— use cold outreach for. It's just a blog, just a content site about these different things. This is gonna have to grow in a couple different ways. It does hit a couple things we like, right? Um, is there an SEO opportunity? Probably there is. Um, what are the ops? This is definitely niche enough that we could have a newsletter around it where people won't be re— wanting to read that newsletter. Could we put social media on this? Yes, we could. Perfect example of how we couldn't. Harley Insider could do that if it was bestmotorcyclecarburetor.com. You probably could not build a fantastic newsletter or do social media around that. But I promise you, there's a Pinterest and Facebook and Instagram opportunity around that. So when you're really in the content sites, you got to think, is it niche? Is there an opportunity to grow it? Are people going to be passionate about it? When it comes to micro SaaS or software businesses and agencies, you're going to say, can I use something like ListKit or Apollo? Sorry, Apollo to do cold outreach for customers, right? Is there an opportunity to run paid ads for it? We use Facebook Ad Library to see what competitors are running. So that's some basic levels of it right now. Okay, so high level. Now you understand where to find these businesses. You understand where to— how to do some basic due diligence. The final rule I'll say about all due diligence on these businesses, this is just it. If it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Now let me hear that one more time. Say it one more time. If it looks too good to be true, it is too good to be true. No one is selling you a 100% passive income dream that, you know, makes $5,000 a month and they're selling it to you for $15,000. Why wouldn't they just hold that? Now, would they maybe be willing to sell you something that takes an hour or two of work a week? To make $5,000 a month and sell it to you for 2 years of income? Yes, that's totally realistic. The market returns— the S&P is returning this year 17 or 16%, which is insane, but on average 8.5 to 10%, right? These businesses you can buy at 30-plus percent cash-on-cash returns. So you're going to triple the returns of the S&P 500. But when you pull the levers right without using leverage, I can show you how to use debt, but we're not going to do that for now. When you pull the levers, the pull levers are meaning like the monetization opportunities. Can you switch the ad network? I can. I have a whole list of other better ad networks in that sense. Can you do cold outreach to bring in more customers? Can you, um, change the pricing? Can you change the landing page to optimize more? These things are all things I've had videos on. We're making videos on, and we talk about in the newsletter. And this is all things that I do, we help people do. But if you gotta remember, if something sells for 3 times its yearly profit, that means for every dollar you add in profit, right? You get $3 in value for the business when you sell it, right? Think about that, right? $1 in profit you add equals $3 in business value. That's insane because that's easy, right? What if we add some zeros to that? What if I said that every year you're gonna add $10,000 in profit, right? $10,000 in profit. Equals obviously, God, I'm bad with this keyboard, y'all. $30K in business value. So that's $800 a month. $800 a month equals $30K in business value. Or, ready? $28 a day. So the goal here is can we find businesses that that opportunity exists in, right? So can we find these little internet businesses you can run from your laptop, that you can run from your kid's soccer game, that you can go full-time on if you want,, but then make $28 and we can add $28 a day in profit to it. Cause if we can add $28 a day in profit, we can flip 'em for an extra $30,000. It's, it, I, I'm just oversimplifying it, but I just want you to understand how magical that is. Now I want you to look, let's talk about the framework of making an offer. I almost never pay full price for something right now. You have to be realistic. You know what these businesses are worth. So you have to be realistic when you say like, um, you're not going to buy something for 50% of what is listed at if it's reasonably listed. If it's listed for 3x the yearly net profit and it's a good business, someone's going to buy it, right? The market is sophisticated enough, someone's going to buy it. But I would say often I'd go for seller financing in small amounts. Finance, okay, you see a lot of people on the internet talk about seller finance an entire business 100%. Shut down, it's just bullshit. It's just bullshit. Um, I think it's more realistic to seller finance on your first deal unless you have a lot of leverage with the person, 30% max, right? I often try and do even just 10 or 15%. You know, we did a 50%, 40% roughly seller finance on this last deal I did, but I paid it off over 2 months, right? Paid off over 2 months. That's partially just to keep the seller incentivized to help me through the transition and answer any questions I have. So I like to try and make sure that you have some sort of post-purchase support, whether it's through seller financing or through just like an actual agreement on paper that's post-purchase support. Um, next thing you're going to want to do is an asset purchase agreement. Now, the little secret that most people don't tell you is that you're rarely buying an entire business. Even at much larger scale, you're often buying just all of the assets of the business, right? That does not mean that you don't own everything. You own every single thing the business owned. You're just not buying the legal entity that owned it before. So that makes it much easier. You're buying the domain name, the website, all the content, all the logos, everything. Software, etc., etc., etc. Now, in another video, I'll do a much longer breakdown, but you basically want to do a capital stack, right? You want to put together a simple capital stack, which makes your offer more compelling. You want to give these sellers as much cash upfront as you can. So that might mean a little bit of, little bit of your own money, little bit of investor money, little bit bit of debt. That's the stack. One, boom, boom. See, it's stacked on top of each other. The debt might be seller finance or it might be money from a lender. We talk about another phone call, but essentially when you're making offers, you want to come with reasonable offers, right? So you want to come in knowing that this business, right, you're making offers, you want to know this business is worth what it's worth, the way that you think you can improve it. And then I would say don't ever come in less than 2 years. It's not a hard, fast rule, but I would say roughly don't ever come in with less often than less than 2 years of profit as the full cost of the business right now. Maybe you're only giving 30% of that upfront and earn— and your seller finds the rest over 2 years. Maybe seller financing over 3 months. But as a rule, I would say businesses are— a good business is going to sell for 3 times its yearly net profit. So anything above that, negotiate down to that, give or take. And I would start 10 or 20% below, trying to close that gap by a seller finance. So that's a little tip for you. Okay. So let's just talk about like a common pitfall. Let's just talk about that real quick. Cause that's actually, you know, once you guys do this, it's not fucking rocket science. It's not impossible to do. I've helped plenty of people do it. I've seen people do it. It's just private equity on a baby scale, but the most common pitfall I see is people buying something that's just too good to be true. Buying, thinking that they're buying something that's too good to be true. You need to understand that everything needs to be verified. I don't care if it says it, but you need to be able to just log into that Stripe account, log into that Shopify account, log into that AdSense account, at least get a screen share, right? On a bigger level, we're doing like Q of E, you know, quality of earnings. We're doing real deep dive due diligences. I want to see bank account statements matching things, but the sub $50,000-$100,000 you just need to be able to verify that it's all real and then also verify their claims make sense, right? If they, if they're saying they get all this organic traffic, are they, does it look like in Google they're popping up for these keywords, right? If they say they're getting all this traffic from social, does it look like their social media is legitimate? When you go on Social Blade, use Social Blade, right? Use Social Blade, plug in their profiles into there. And see what comes up for it, right? See if their profiles are growing on there. I mean, we could look at my Twitter, which is dead these days, but I'll show you guys just so you can see what a Social Blade looks like. Sadly, RIP to my Twitter, which used to be massive. Um, and it's just growing 60 followers a month now, but you can see, right? It's real, right? You can see my quality score, all these things. So make sure their stuff matches up. In fact, sometimes Little tip I'll give you actually is that one thing you can do with email lists, for example, is buy a blast from them. Pretend to be an advertiser, buy the product. If it's e-commerce, buy the product. See what fulfillment's like. Use that product, right? Find out and figure out whether it's real and if it all makes sense. That's just like this high-level, sounds like bullshit, but is the actual truth. Most people worry about all these little details, but like use the product, use the website, sign up for the newsletter. Their newsletters come in, How is it written, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, let's sum this up, right? Because I think this is like a little masterclass done shortly, but let's sum this up. Okay, here's the actual takeaway, right? Scratch this. I want to delete this section for the editor who's watching. Hold on. Okay, let's wrap this up. Let's go over— this is like a quick little masterclass in buying an internet business. But like, so let's do a little quick wrap up for you. You know, you wanna pick the right niche, right? Use something like Google Trends. Is it growing? Is it dying? Does it fit for something you're interested in? Um, do you have a competitive advantage? And then you wanna filter the right deals. Look every week for these deals, right? Look every week, just spend 30 minutes looking. I find that so often people just don't even put in any effort. Sign up for the newsletters. Of all the brokers and marketplaces and get their reports. Sign up for my newsletter, nanoflips.com. You know, we literally just aggregate deals and send them out for free. And then do your research, right? Make sure that everything is— do your due diligence. Let's change it to do your due diligence. Do your due diligence. Do your due diligence. You know, make sure everything's real. Make sure it's approved. And then, you know, I'm going to add one thing in here. That is the real magic if you have it, which is like make a plan, right? We talked about that earlier. What is the plan for growth? Can this business grow? Can you sustain it? Because it is a little business. It breathes, sleeps, eats. It's not just this like you want 5% returns, go invest in AT&T. They'll give you a 5% dividend yield. They've done that for 25 years straight. You want 30 to 50, 100% returns, buy a small business, right? Private equity is the only industry that's going to give it to you. Ownership equity. That's all of it. But you do have to have a plan for growth and have a plan to run it. And then honestly, you want to make smart offers, make good offers. Do not low people so lowball that they're never going to take you seriously. You want to buy deals that are good at fair rates that we can increase. If you buy a deal and you know that you can improve it and you improve it, doesn't really matter. If I buy something for $50 grand, $20 grand, $300 grand, but I know that within 6 months I can make it worth $1 million, I'm not really worried so much about the negotiation as much as I'm trying to get it it'll, um, uh, pass due diligence in my mind and then own it as quickly as I can. Sup? If you like this, hit the like button, subscribe. All I do is talk about internet marketing, entrepreneurship, and a lot about buying these little internet businesses. Let me know in the comments what kind of business you want to buy, and I'll do some breakdowns of places you can find them.
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