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How Ivan Homola Took QAPop to $10K MRR and Knew When to Let Go

Ivan Homola grew QAPop from a spreadsheet to $10K MRR in four months, then sold it on Acquire. The timing lesson every bootstrapped founder learns too late.

By David Mitchell, Founder of Ventura, SaaS M&A specialist · Published 2026-07-29 · 8 min read

Ask most founders what the hardest part of selling their company was and they will describe the process: the diligence questions, the awkward negotiation, the weeks of waiting for a buyer to decide. Ivan Homola gives a different answer. Every one of those steps turned out to be manageable. The genuinely hard part happened months earlier, in private, and had nothing to do with paperwork. It was admitting to himself that it was time to sell.

Ivan is a Slovak founder who has now exited three SaaS businesses. The story of QAPop, a Quora marketing tool he took from a spreadsheet to ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue in four months, is the clearest illustration of a lesson that costs founders more money than any negotiation ever will. Timing is not something that happens to you. It is a decision you either make on time or make late.

From Meme Sites to a Nine Person Agency

Ivan’s path started in 2012 with a website that shared memes and made money from ad networks. It was the kind of first project that teaches a specific and durable lesson: attention can be converted into revenue, and nobody has to give you permission to try. He followed it with a job as a system engineer at AVG Technologies, where he learned how software actually gets built and maintained inside a real company rather than a side project.

By 2013 he had co-founded his first development agency, Foxytouch, handling design, front-end work, project management, and sales himself. A few years later came Lunadio, a second agency built with college friends that grew to nine people at its peak and served international clients. Along the way he won three hackathons, including a travel hackathon in 2015 with a product called Tripo that never found its market.

Then he did something that looks strange from the outside. With the agency running and a team in place, he wound Lunadio down, handing the team to another agency so he could focus on building his own products. It was the first time he traded a working business for a better use of his own attention. It would not be the last, and the instinct behind that trade is the thread running through everything he has done since.

The Product That Started as a Spreadsheet

QAPop began as a manual service rather than software. Ivan and his co-founder Fabian Maume, a French growth marketer he met through a mutual contact, had noticed that Quora was an underused marketing channel. Businesses could find their exact customers asking questions in public, but nobody had a systematic way to surface the right questions or measure whether answering them was worth the effort.

So they sold the answer by hand. They delivered Quora marketing reports as spreadsheets for a few hundred dollars each, doing the research manually. It was slow and it did not scale, and that was precisely the point. Every report proved that businesses would pay for the insight before a single line of product code existed. By the time they built the software, they were not guessing about demand. They were automating something people had already opened their wallets for.

Ten Thousand Dollars a Month in Four Months

The first real SaaS version of QAPop launched in May 2021. In August they ran a Product Hunt campaign built around lifetime deals, selling fifty at first and then expanding to five hundred. By October the product had a thousand users, and in January 2022, four months after that campaign, QAPop crossed ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue.

For a bootstrapped two person product with no funding and no paid acquisition machine, that is a genuinely fast climb. It also created exactly the conditions that make the next decision so difficult. The product was working, the revenue was real, and the growth curve gave every reason to keep going. Nothing in the numbers said stop.

When the Founder Outgrows the Product

What changed was not the business. It was the founders. By the end of 2022 both had shifted their attention elsewhere, and Ivan had relocated internationally. QAPop was still running, still earning, and still had users who depended on it, but it no longer had anyone giving it their best hours.

This is the moment most founders handle badly, and Ivan is unusually honest about why. In his words, he was emotionally attached to QAPop, because it was the first product he ever built that gained that kind of traction. Selling felt like abandoning something he had a responsibility to see through. The uncomfortable realization that followed was that his divided attention was itself the thing holding the product back. The most responsible option was not to hold on tighter. It was to hand it to someone who would give it what it needed.

The distinction matters, because founders routinely confuse loyalty to a product with loyalty to its users. A tool quietly stagnating under an absent owner is not being protected. It is being devalued, month by month, while the founder waits for a certainty that never arrives.

One Night, One Listing

The way Ivan broke the deadlock is almost comically ordinary. One night he filled out the listing form on Acquire.com, mostly to understand how the process worked, and then submitted it. As he describes it, after that he felt there was no going back, only forward.

The market answered fast. Within a week of listing, QAPop had multiple offers, and the founders shortlisted three qualified buyers. It sold in March 2023 for a five figure sum to a buyer named Derek, who was genuinely enthusiastic about the product. Ivan stayed on afterwards as an advisor, which is usually a sign both sides left the table satisfied.

Two things about that outcome are worth sitting with. The first is that the process took days rather than months, because the underlying business was clean, understandable, and already proven. The second is that the deal happened at all only because someone finally forced a decision. The listing was not the conclusion of a long deliberation. It was the thing that ended it.

Choosing the Right Owner, Not Just the Best Number

With several offers in hand, Ivan and Fabian optimized for something other than the headline figure. They wanted a buyer who was passionate about the product rather than purely focused on extracting profit from it, because they cared what happened to the users and to the thing they had built.

That is the same instinct you find in almost every founder who exits well. Aligned buyers close more reliably, argue less during diligence, and cause fewer problems after the money moves. Chasing the highest number from a buyer who does not really want the business is how clean deals turn into six months of renegotiation.

The Cost of Hesitating

Ivan’s own summary of the experience is blunt: he would advise other founders to make decisions faster, without so much hesitation. Not to sell recklessly, but to stop letting a business drift while they wait to feel ready.

The cost of that drift is easy to underestimate, because it never arrives as a single painful event. It shows up as a slow leak. Growth flattens because nobody is pushing it. Churn creeps up because support gets slower. The last twelve months of numbers, the exact window a buyer will scrutinize hardest, start describing a business in decline instead of one with momentum. A founder who hesitates for a year does not sell the same company a year later. They sell a weaker one, into a story that is harder to defend.

This is why Ivan frames timing as the central skill of an exit. Know when the right time to sell is, prepare the project and yourself for that exit in advance, and being one step ahead helps you find the best buyer and close the deal faster. Note the two halves of that idea. Preparing the project is the part founders expect. Preparing yourself is the part that actually causes the delay.

What He Is Building Now

Ivan has kept doing what he did with Lunadio and QAPop: moving his attention to where he can do his best work. Three SaaS exits later, he is building Delegento, an AI marketing agent that plans, launches, and optimizes campaigns across paid acquisition, SEO, lead generation, and more, positioned as an alternative to hiring an agency or a full time marketer. It already serves more than fifty scaling companies.

The pattern is consistent. Build something people pay for, grow it while you are the right person to grow it, and hand it over cleanly when you are not. Most founders only ever learn the first half.

The gap between deciding to sell and being ready to sell is exactly what Ventura was built to close. It gives founders an honest read on what their company is worth today, the red flags a buyer will find, and a prioritized list of what to fix while there is still time to fix it. Ivan’s advice is to stay one step ahead. The goal here is to show you precisely what one step ahead looks like for your business.