I copied a business for sale and turned it into $20K/month | Starter Story

Adrian, a solo developer from Austin, was stuck. He had built a few apps that made a few hundred dollars a month, but nothing had taken off. Then he changed his approach. Instead of trying to invent something new, he looked for something that was already working and copied it. "If something is working," he says, "you have a moral obligation to copy it." A year later, the app he copied was making him $20,000 a month.

The idea came from a simple observation. Adrian was browsing Acquire.com, a marketplace where people buy and sell online businesses. He noticed a pattern: many of the businesses listed for sale were simple, boring, and profitable. They weren't flashy. They were tools that solved a specific, recurring problem for a small group of people. One listing in particular caught his eye: a Chrome extension that helped users manage their browser tabs. The business was listed for sale because the owner had lost interest. It was making a few thousand dollars a month. Adrian didn't buy it. He copied it.

The logic of copying