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How Tomer Tarsky Bought a Sleepy SaaS and Flipped It for 3x

Tomer Tarsky bought a SaaS with 20,000 users and almost no revenue, fixed its pricing and positioning, and sold it for 3x within seven months. The dormant-value playbook every founder can steal.

By David Mitchell, Founder of Ventura, SaaS M&A specialist · Published 2026-06-23 · 8 min read

Most founders believe value has to be built from nothing, one painful feature and one hard-won customer at a time. Tomer Tarsky believes most of the value is already there, sitting quietly inside businesses that nobody has bothered to optimize. He proved it in the most direct way possible: he bought a SaaS with a large, devoted audience and almost no revenue, made two unglamorous changes, and sold it for three times what he paid within seven months, closing within days of relisting it.

It is the kind of result that sounds like a fluke until you see the method behind it. Tomer is not a builder chasing a moonshot. He is an operator with an eye for dormant value, the gap between what a business currently earns and what it could earn with the right pricing and positioning. For any founder staring at their own product wondering why it is not worth more, his story is a blunt and useful lesson: you may already be sitting on a far more valuable company than your revenue suggests.

An Eye for What Others Overlook

Plenty of people scroll past underperforming software and see a failure. Tomer sees a mispriced asset. His skill is not writing code or inventing categories; it is spotting businesses where the hard part, building something people genuinely want and use, has already been done, and the easy part, charging properly for it, has been left untouched. That reframing is the whole game. It turns a sleepy, low-revenue product from a warning sign into an opportunity hiding in plain sight.

The Acquisition: 20,000 Users, Almost No Revenue

The business he bought had a striking profile. It was an AI tool with roughly twenty thousand users, a real and engaged audience, yet it was generating almost no revenue. To most buyers that looks like a contradiction, even a red flag. To Tomer it looked like a coiled spring. Twenty thousand people had already decided the product was worth their time. The only thing missing was a business model that matched the value they were clearly getting.

Engagement is the part you cannot fake or bolt on later. When users complain the moment a product goes down for even a day, you know the demand is real. Tomer was not buying potential; he was buying proven demand that had simply never been monetized. That distinction is what made the deal so attractive, and what made the upside so fast to capture.

Two Levers, Not a Rebuild

Here is the part that surprises people. He did not rewrite the product, add a dozen features, or pour money into ads. He pulled two levers. He rewrote the homepage copy so it actually communicated the value the product delivered, and he raised the prices to reflect that value. That was essentially it. Those two changes, positioning and pricing, immediately generated about two thousand dollars in additional monthly recurring revenue, even after some users churned at the higher price.

The churn is worth dwelling on, because it scares most founders away from raising prices. Some users left, and the revenue still went up sharply. That is the quiet truth about underpriced products: the customers who stay at a fair price are worth far more than a crowd paying nothing, and a business optimized for real revenue is worth far more to a buyer than one optimized for a vanity user count.

The Math Hiding in the User Base

Tomer summed up his whole thesis in a single line: he knew that if just one percent of those free users converted, the business would make a lot more money. That is not wishful thinking; it is arithmetic applied to an audience that already exists. When you have twenty thousand engaged users, you do not need a growth miracle. You need a small slice of them to start paying, and a price that reflects what the product is worth. The value was never absent. It was unconverted.

A Fast Relist and a Premium Exit

Once the revenue curve turned, the business became something entirely different in a buyer's eyes: a profitable product with proven demand and an obvious path to more. Tomer relisted it, and it sold within days, closing for three times his purchase price about seven months after he bought it. The speed was not luck. A business with engaged users, clean and rising revenue, and a clear monetization story removes the buyer's fear, and a fearless buyer moves fast.

The deeper point is that the multiple followed the readiness. He did not talk the price up; he made the business genuinely worth more and let the numbers do the arguing. A clean story, verifiable revenue, and demonstrable upside are what compress a sale from months of haggling into days of paperwork.

Aligning With the Right Buyer

As with the best operators, Tomer treated the sale as a matching problem, not just a price negotiation. The goal was a buyer who understood what they were getting and intended to keep growing it, not one looking to strip it for parts. Alignment makes deals close cleanly and removes the post-sale disputes that derail so many acquisitions. It is also simply the right way to hand off a product that real people depend on.

The Lesson Most Founders Miss

Strip Tomer's story to its core and it is not really about buying and selling at all. It is about the difference between what a business earns and what it is worth, and how small, deliberate moves on pricing and positioning can close that gap fast. He looks at other people's products and instantly sees the dormant value. The uncomfortable question for every founder is simple: what would a buyer like Tomer see in yours?

Because the same dormant value almost certainly exists in the company you are running right now. Underpriced plans. A homepage that undersells what you do. A loyal base of users you have never properly asked to pay. Most founders never see it, because they are too close to the business and too busy building the next thing to audit the value already sitting under their feet.

That is exactly the gap Ventura was built to expose. It gives founders an honest read on what their company is worth today and a specific, prioritized list of the moves, pricing, positioning, retention, and readiness, that would raise it. Tomer found a 3x flip because he could see the dormant value in someone else's product. The goal here is to show you exactly where it is hiding in your own.