We’re looking for an unfinished or neglected online business and trying to turn it into something valuable — starting with just £800.
What if you didn’t need thousands of pounds to buy an online business?
What if you could find something that had already been started, had potential, but had been badly marketed, poorly finished or simply abandoned — and turn it around?
That’s the question we’re going to try to answer.
At Ninetwo Holdings, we’re starting a new experiment.
We’re giving ourselves a maximum budget of £800 and looking for an online business or digital asset that we believe can be improved.
Not a perfect business.
Not something already making a fortune.
And definitely not something where we’re paying thousands of pounds for somebody else’s success story.
We’re looking for something that needs work.
The idea
There are thousands of websites, small online businesses, SaaS projects and digital assets that have been started but never properly developed.
Some have good ideas behind them.
Some have customers but terrible marketing.
Some have decent websites but nobody knows they exist.
Others may simply have been abandoned by their original owner because they didn’t have the time, knowledge or motivation to finish what they started.
That’s the type of opportunity we’re interested in.
Our challenge is simple:
Find something with potential for £800 or less and see if we can turn it into something better.
We’re not looking for a bargain just because it’s cheap
This is probably the most important part of the challenge.
A cheap business isn’t necessarily a good business.
If something costs £300 but has no customers, no useful asset, no demand and no realistic way of making money, then £300 is still too much.
We’re going to look for evidence of potential.
That could mean an existing website.
A functioning product.
A useful piece of software.
A brandable domain.
Existing traffic.
Previous customers.
An email list.
A good idea that was never marketed properly.
Or simply a business that has been started but never finished.
The key is finding something we can improve.
What will we look at?
Every opportunity will be put through the same basic process.
1. What are we actually buying?
Before looking at the money, we need to understand the asset.
Is it a website?
A SaaS product?
An ecommerce store?
A digital service?
A content site?
A domain?
Something else?
We need to know exactly what would be transferred to us.
2. Why hasn’t it worked?
This is where things get interesting.
If a business has failed, we want to understand why.
Was there no marketing?
Was the website poor?
Was the owner simply too busy?
Was the product difficult to understand?
Was the pricing wrong?
Was there no SEO?
Or is the underlying idea simply bad?
We need to separate a bad business from a good business that was badly executed.
3. Is there evidence that people want it?
We’re not going to buy something simply because we like the idea.
We’ll look for evidence.
Search demand.
Existing traffic.
Previous sales.
Customers.
Competitors.
Reviews.
Social engagement.
Whatever evidence is available.
The more evidence we can find, the better.
4. Can we improve it without spending a fortune?
This is crucial.
We have a maximum starting budget of £800.
That doesn’t mean we have to spend £800.
In fact, we’d rather spend £300 on something with potential than £800 on something that looks impressive but has nowhere to go.
Our preference is to find something where improvements can be made through better marketing, positioning, content, SEO, outreach and presentation rather than throwing large amounts of money at development.
The Ninetwo rule
We’re going to try something slightly different.
We’re going to document the process honestly.
If we find something brilliant, we’ll say so.
If we find something terrible, we’ll say so.
If we make an offer and it gets rejected, we’ll document it.
If we buy something and make mistakes, we’ll document those too.
And if we eventually lose money?
We’ll document that as well.
Because the real experiment isn’t:
“Can we buy a business for £800?”
It’s:
“Can an ordinary person find an overlooked digital asset, improve it with limited money and turn it into something more valuable?”
That’s the experiment.
What happens next?
The search starts now.
We’re going to look across marketplaces and other sources for businesses and digital assets costing £800 or less.
Every potential acquisition will be assessed before we spend anything.
We’ll score things such as:
Potential
Existing traffic
Revenue
Product quality
Marketing
Competition
Growth opportunities
Work required
Asking price
Risk
Then we’ll create a shortlist.
From that shortlist, we’ll investigate the strongest opportunities in much more detail.
Eventually, one of two things will happen.
We’ll find something worth buying.
Or we’ll discover that our £800 isn’t enough and learn what we’d actually need to make the strategy work.
Either way, we’ll have learned something.
And that’s what Ninetwo Insights is about.
Building businesses. Testing ideas. And documenting what happens along the way.
The challenge starts here.
£800.
One opportunity.
Let’s see what we can do with it.