Spent the last few years watching side-project deals get made and broken. The pattern is almost always the same on the ones that fail:

1. Buyer never verified revenue independently. Screenshots get faked. Ask for read-only access to Stripe or the payment processor, always.

2. No clarity on why the founder is selling. "No time" is sometimes true. Sometimes it means growth flatlined 4 months ago and they know it. Ask for the full revenue chart, not just last month.

3. Handshake deals with no paper trail. Even a one-page asset purchase agreement protects both sides. Skipping this because "it's just a small project" is how people get burned on $2K deals just as often as $200K ones.

4. Underestimating the maintenance burden. A project doing $500 MRR on a codebase that needs a rewrite is not a $500 MRR asset — it's a liability with a subscription attached.

If you're building or buying in this space, the deals that actually close cleanly are the ones where both sides treat it like a real acquisition, not a Craigslist trade. That's exactly what we built the Deal Room for — verified listings, real conversations, and a course that walks you through vetting before you ever send money.