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He bought a GitLab engineer's hobby project for $125K cash, turned on chat support, and built every feature a teacher asked for — $5K/mo to $80K/mo in a year
up from $5K/mo at acquisition · bought February 2024 for $125K all cash at about 2x revenue · ~20,000 monthly searches for the category term
His acquisition filter was not profit. “What would happen if this business is turned off tomorrow? Are there at least 100 people that are going to lose their minds?” — that question is why he paid above ask for a half-built product with traction instead of a polished one without it.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Chanakya Yerneni — Chan — spent about a decade in corporate product and product marketing roles, most recently as a senior product marketing manager at OpenText. He wanted out, had a spreadsheet full of business ideas, and no idea where to start with any of them. So he skipped the starting part. He registered on Acquire.com, the marketplace formerly called MicroAcquire, and spent roughly 90 days going through listings, eventually looking at 25 to 30 businesses. He had just under $200,000 of savings he was willing to gamble, on the reasoning that losing it would not change his lifestyle. He looked at e-commerce and walked away — the expertise required is supply chain and he did not have it. SaaS felt native because that is where his career had been. Then he found EssayGrader.ai, listed by an engineer who worked at GitLab and had built it as a side project. It graded student essays with AI, for teachers. Chan had been a teacher in a previous life, and he knew exactly what he was looking at: the people who take grading home on weekends, skip dinner, order pizza for the family. He bought it in February 2024 for $125,000, all cash, at about 2x revenue — slightly more than the seller asked — when it was doing $5,000 a month. From seeing the listing to running the business was about three weeks. Then he did one thing: he turned on chat support, roughly 90 to 120 days after taking over, and talked to three or four hundred teachers himself until he nearly burned out. Every feature built since came from one of those conversations. A year later the business was doing about $80,000 a month, roughly a million dollars in recurring revenue. He had privately expected $30,000 or $40,000. He is 37 and says he should have done this at 28.
EssayGrader arrived with customers already attached, and that was the entire point of the deal. A GitLab engineer built it as a hobby project and it was doing $5,000 a month when it reached Acquire.com.
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Data credibility: Podcast interview with the buyer-operator on Jaryd Krause's Buying Online Businesses; every number is self-reported and unaudited. The purchase price ($125,000, all cash, about 2x revenue, February 2024), the starting revenue ($5,000/mo), the current revenue (about $80,000/mo, which the host first misstates as $800,000 and corrects on air) and the search volume (about 20,000 monthly searches for the category term) all come from Chan alone. The claim of more than 100,000 educators and ten-plus hours saved per month is marketing copy read out by the host from the company's own positioning, not something Chan substantiates — we have not treated it as a verified figure. He hedges his own recall on the deal timeline (“the details are a bit fuzzy in my head”) and on whether the transition period was 30 or 60 days. No pricing is disclosed anywhere in the interview, so we state none. Nothing here is third-party verified, and the interview format gives him a clear promotional incentive.
The first dollar came with the keys. Chan paid $125,000 in cash for a business already billing $5,000 a month, which means revenue started on day one and the real question was whether the price was right.
The turning point was chat support, switched on around May or June of 2024, three to four months after the acquisition. Chan did it himself and estimates he talked to three or four hundred teachers over the following year, until he was close to burning out on it.
For a buyer, the stretch with no feedback and no growth happens before the purchase, not after.
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