GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), delivering you a startup idea that lets you buy businesses for $0 by scooping up their stranded clients.

Forget waiting for inspiration to strike. NTE Pro already caught 5,000+ lightning bolts.

NTE Zero to One is the workshop that takes your rough block of marble, hands you the right tools, and helps you carve out a statue the world can actually see.

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Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - Zero Dollar Acquisitions

• The Funeral Crashers

How To Buy Businesses Free

Inspired by the MFM Podcast

The One Liner

Buy businesses for $0 by keeping their clients.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

When a business shuts down, clients get stranded. You step in, take over, and share future revenue with the old owner. Zero-dollar M&A.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

Businesses shut down every day. Agencies burn out, gyms go bankrupt, SaaS tools quit. The owners walk away empty-handed, and the customers they spent years acquiring? They’re left stranded. Huge value just… evaporates. Traditional acquisitions focus on assets, leases, or equipment but the real goldmine is the client list. Nobody’s buying that.

The Solution
Flip the play. Forget assets, go after relationships. When a business announces it’s closing, you offer a lifeline:

• Transition their clients to your business seamlessly.

• Keep revenue flowing with almost no downtime.

• Cut the original owner into a revenue-share so they walk away with dignity (and mailbox money).

It’s basically zero-dollar M&A. You grow without capital, they get to exit gracefully, and clients don’t lose service. A rare triple-win.

How We’d Build It

Stage 1 (MVP Hustler):

• Stalk BizBuySell, GummySearch “Going out of business” posts, local Facebook groups.

• DM owners with a simple offer: “I’ll take care of your clients.”

• Track transitions in Airtable or Notion CRM.

Stage 2 (Operator Mode):

• Build a “closing business radar” using PhantomBuster or PromptLoop to scrape Yelp, LinkedIn, and Google Maps for “closing soon.”

• Run outreach campaigns with Clay + Smartlead.

• Automate client onboarding with Typeform + Zapier.

Stage 3 (Scale Play):

• Launch a marketplace: Distressed Client Exchange.

• Owners list their closing businesses, buyers sign up to adopt client bases.

• Contracts handled automatically via DocuSign API with built-in revenue-share templates.

• Growth hack: partner with accountants, bankruptcy lawyers, and brokers, they know who’s shutting down before the public does.

Why It Needs to Exist

Because most “business deaths” are silent tragedies. The owner walks away with nothing, the clients scramble, and competitors miss an easy layup. This flips the script: you get growth for $0, the owner gets a soft landing, and customers get continuity. It democratizes M&A, no PE firm, no millions in capital, just scrappy entrepreneurs picking up diamonds in the ashes.

How to Find Businesses on the Edge

A Message From Our Partner

If you want to scoop up clients from closing businesses, you need radar. Not another list of “for sale” companies, but the raw signals, the whispers before the doors shut.

That’s where GummySearch comes in. It pulls gold straight out of Reddit threads, niche forums, and community posts. Here’s how it makes the “zero-dollar acquisition” play actually doable:

1. Catch the goodbye notes. Owners announce they’re shutting down in subreddits or local groups before Yelp ever updates. GummySearch surfaces those posts so you can DM them first.

2. Watch the client cries. “My dog groomer just closed, anyone know a new one?” That’s literally a hand being raised for you.

3. See market waves. If ten people in a city are suddenly complaining about closed gyms, that’s not noise, it’s a signal to move.

4. Steal this for anything. Even if you never touch distressed acquisitions, the same playbook applies to every idea. Find complaints, validate demand, and step in with a better answer.

The punchline: GummySearch makes the internet’s messy chatter your personal deal flow. Whether it’s snagging clients from shuttered businesses or spotting your next SaaS idea, you’ll always be one step ahead of everyone scrolling blindly.

Sign Up For Free Today

The Funeral Crashers

Picture this: a small-town business funeral. The florist is shutting down after 30 years. Chairs lined up, “RIP Petals & Stems” sign in the window. A priest stands up to give the eulogy… and then in barges a scrappy entrepreneur with a pitch deck.

Entrepreneur: “Wait a second. Why are we burying the client list? These customers still need flowers. Their birthdays don’t stop. Their weddings won’t pause. We could transition them to my shop tomorrow. And hey, the owner here doesn’t have to walk away empty-handed, they can get a cut of the revenue. Isn’t that better than leaving everything to rot?”

Priest: “My child, have you no respect? This is sacred ground. The business is dead. Let it rest. Turning a closure into a feeding frenzy feels ghoulish.”

Entrepreneur: “Ghoulish? Or smart? Look, this isn’t vultures circling, it’s CPR. Clients aren’t stranded, the owner gets mailbox money, and I grow without spending a dime upfront. Everybody wins.”

Priest: “But motives matter. Are you saving the customers, or are you just chasing free growth? At some point, this stops looking like a lifeline and starts looking like exploitation.”

Entrepreneur: “Exploitation is letting loyal customers scramble. Exploitation is letting an owner walk away broke when they’ve spent decades building trust. What I’m offering is continuity. It’s a rescue mission disguised as a business hack.”

And that’s the tension. One side sees respect for the dead. The other sees opportunity among the ashes.

The Takeaway

Most businesses close with no plan for their customers. The loyalty, the goodwill, the recurring revenue, all of it just… disappears. But it doesn’t have to. You can either mourn the loss, or you can play funeral crasher and turn someone else’s ending into your beginning.

The Ideas They Don’t Want You to See

Some ideas are too spicy for the free feed. These are the ones we couldn’t stop debating inside NTE Pro:

🔥 The startup that saves divorces before they happen — AI that flags relationship red flags early and auto-nudges couples to course-correct before lawyers get involved.

🔥 The tool that makes every neighborhood its own micro-Wall Street — residents pool money into a local “fund” to invest in small businesses, housing, or even each other’s side hustles.

🔥 The app that kills résumés forever — one click pulls your work, skills, and projects into a living portfolio employers can’t ignore.

👉 Peek inside before someone else runs with them.

Sign Up For NTE Pro Today for only $99/year

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