Every month, Hacker News runs a thread that functions like an unpriced, chaotic app store: "Ask HN: What are you working on?" In February 2026, that single thread pulled over 1,100 comments — builders dropping live products, links, pricing, repos, and raw user feedback in the replies.
Hundreds of micro-SaaS products and side projects. Shipped. Live. Public. And virtually none of them are listed on any acquisition marketplace.
HeistMiner is a B2B data product that turns that chaotic feed into a structured stream of acquisition targets, partnership leads, and distribution-arbitrage plays — then sells the stream to the people who already buy, roll up, or scale tiny software.
No vibe coding MVP. No venture funding required. One strong builder with a scraper and a thesis.
The Market: Flow Is the Bottleneck
Small SaaS deals under $10M in enterprise value are closing constantly. Acquire.com's January 2026 biannual report confirms the sub-$10M bracket is where most SaaS acquisitions happen, with median profit multiples holding steady at 3.9x across both 2024 and 2025. Profitable listings reported average margins climbing from 67% (2023) to 71% (2024), holding steady through 2025. Most deals closed within 90 days, averaging 81 days on market.
Real capital. Real buyer appetite. The bottleneck isn't demand. It's flow — finding the right assets before they hit marketplaces where every buyer and broker already compete for the same inventory.
Ask HN and adjacent builder communities are the pre-market layer, where founders are still shipping, experimenting, and decidedly not selling. Main marketplaces like Acquire.com and Flippa focus on properties with verifiable financials and explicit intent to sell. They aren't systematically ingesting "just shipped my side project" noise from community threads. Nobody has productized this gap. The space between "builder posting a side project" and "listing on Acquire.com" is where HeistMiner lives.
Why "Scraper + Tags" Gets You Killed
The first instinct: scrape the threads, run them through an LLM for categorization, tag everything, ship it. You'll get copied in a weekend. The HTML is public and trivial to parse.
The defensible play is the feedback loop. Your asset becomes a deal graph:
- A buyer defines a thesis ("Shopify ops tools under $5K MRR")
- HeistMiner surfaces matching projects from community threads
- The buyer pursues (or passes)
- Over time, behavioral data on what gets pursued, what closes, what flops improves matching and scoring
You start as a newsletter. You end as the intelligence backbone for a specific slice of the M&A market.
The Real Moat: A Credit Bureau for Side Projects
Everyone can scrape next month's Ask HN thread. Almost nobody can answer the harder question: which types of Ask HN and Show HN launches historically turn into durable businesses?
That question is your compounding advantage. The moat is a longitudinal dataset that functions like credit history for weird internet products:
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