In this segment of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr outlines a simple but powerful business hack: acquire small, engineering‑led SaaS or widget companies at low valuations (often around 1× revenue) using minimal down‑payment financing such as small‑business loans. Because these products are typically built by engineers who underprice them, the new owner can dramatically increase subscription prices—often by an order of magnitude—by simply editing the price in the code (e.g., changing $5 to $50). Despite inevitable customer complaints, the majority of users stay, revealing a high price‑elasticity that most founders underestimate. Parr cites Quiet Life Brokerage as a source for such deals and emphasizes that this approach can scale from $10,000 purchases to multi‑million‑dollar acquisitions, providing a fast path to building a multi‑million‑dollar business.
Chapters
A little trick to make money. I don't think it's the easiest way, but this is a small trick. Find a business, and you could buy these businesses for cheap. Find a business that's engineering-led, so someone who made the software, built it, okay? And you could buy these companies for as cheap as $10,000. Or all the way to billion. I mean, it doesn't matter. But you could buy— there's all these— Quiet Life Brokerage, who sponsored this, is one of them. You can find these widgets or whatever. You can buy them for 1x revenue. And if it's too expensive for you, you can put a small business loan. You can put only 10% down. So you can buy $100,000 business that make— that for $10,000. And if it's engineering-led, the likelihood that the pricing is wrong is high.
Yeah.
So you literally just need to buy a product okay, and just change the number on Command+F, find price. Yeah, like Command+F $5, find the price, okay, and put a zero. Like, so if it's like $1 a month, make it $10 a month. If it's $10 a month, make it $100 a month. If that's all you did, people will bitch and complain to you, customers might bitch and complain to you, the numbers will likely stay the same except for the revenue will change. Change. Yeah, that is like— most people are shocked by that.
No, it's, it's, it is always surprising the price elasticity of most customers. Like, if you have a good product, not even a great product, a good one, an average product, most people will pay so much more than you think.
But engineers in particular are always guilty of this.
Absolutely. And by the way, that's the same thing too. If you are even a decent marketer, buying one of these businesses is a huge opportunity for you because A, you could just jack up prices. You're so— and as you so aptly pointed out, and B, if you can even get like 1% more efficient at acquiring customers, between that and higher prices, you've basically built yourself a substantial flywheel that can really be a multi-million dollar business.
