Rick Blyth sold Merch Wizard as a multi-six-figure lump, not a named price

The story

Rick Blyth’s public money essay is explicit about ballparks and quiet about a buyer’s check. Writing in January 2023, after first publishing on his own site, he said he would share figures on what Merch Wizard and KDP Wizard made, how the income arrived, and how the lump-sum exit outran all the subscription years combined. He does not print a sale price. He prints a category: a multi-six-figure exit that was life-changing for his family. That is the ceiling this record should keep. A catalog line that wants a precise six-figure integer has to wait for a number he did not give.

The career that preceded the extensions is the setup, not a metric. He was a twenty-year developer who had climbed to tech director and found the top chaotic and unfulfilling. Rich Dad Poor Dad pushed him toward income outside the job. Amazon FBA was a brief miss. Merch by Amazon was the accident that mattered: upload a design, list it on print-on-demand products, collect royalties. Early Merch UI was clunky. Managing a portfolio across marketplaces was slow. He realized he could write Chrome extensions for that community because he was already in it.

He started with free extensions, often in exchange for an email address. Then came the first paid tool, Merch Batch Editor, ugly on purpose, priced at a one-time $12.99, with no ads, only organic traffic. He expected little. The extension, built in a weekend, generated over $3,000 in sales. He calls that the stepping stone: trust in a niche, proof that a terrible-looking tool could still be bought. The $3,000 is cumulative sales on a cheap SKU, not MRR, and not Merch Wizard yet.

Merch Wizard arrived as a dog-walk idea: combine the earlier tools with a way to organize an unmanageable Merch catalog. He shipped an MVP in under three months, emailed users of the free tools, and posted in Facebook groups. In a longer Starter Story account he said he had promised himself a 90-day ship, cut the must-have list until it fit, and at day 60 showed a prototype to beta testers from prior power users. Launch went well enough that feature requests kept him building through commute, lunch, evenings, and weekends. After a strong Black Friday, he quit the corporate job to work on it full time.

KDP Wizard was the sequel users asked for: similar workflow for Kindle Direct Publishing. He said Merch users begged for it. After several months of development it launched into that community. On Starter Story he added that the KDP launch, using only organic traffic, was a multi-five-figure launch. That phrase is a launch-week or launch-period sales claim in his voice, not a second MRR line, and not a named dollar total.

The subscription stack is the figure later writers flatten into “the business.” For both extensions he built monthly recurring customers plus discounted annual plans in seasonal sales. He also sold lifetime deals from $249 up to $699, and he pasted the $699 as a sweet email. He warns that lifetime deals are a short-term high and a lifetime support obligation that hurts an exit. All in, he wrote, total monthly recurring revenue was around $10,000 a month. Extensions ran locally, so server costs barely rose with users. Organic traffic meant, in his estimate, 70 to 80 percent of that income was profit. Around $10,000 is a combined MRR claim for both apps, founder-reported, not a bank screenshot in the essay.

The exit paragraph is larger than the subscriptions and still unpriced. The lump sum was larger than all subscription income combined. He points readers to a separate piece on how to value and sell a micro SaaS. The worked example in the money essay is hypothetical: $5,000 monthly net profit times a 40x to 60x multiple, illustrated at 50x as $250,000. Then he answers the title. He earned multiple six figures in subscription income across the years. On the exit he achieved a 57x multiplier because KPIs were trending up. He still does not name the sale price. In the Starter Story interview he said he was shocked when the apps sold at full asking price within five hours of going live.

That five-hour close is process color, not a valuation. He had put groundwork into metrics so the listing would not look messy. After the sale he wrote a handbook and started YouTube, presenting himself as someone who had gone from an unhappy director role to quitting, then to an exit. The Starter Story piece, dated April 2022, already used $10,000 MRR and the five-hour full-ask sale. The January 2023 essay adds the 57x line and the profit-margin range. Together they describe a sale event. Neither is an audited closing statement.

What the two first-person sources refuse is a fake precision. There is over $3,000 on a $12.99 weekend tool. There is about $10,000 combined MRR. There is a multi-six-figure lump and a 57x multiple he stated. There is a five-hour full-price listing. There is no buyer name in these texts, no dollar price, and no independent confirmation of the multiple. A later third-party page that invents a round number is doing work Blyth declined to do on the page.

For operators the sequence is niche-first: live the broken UI, give away small extensions, charge a tiny one-off, then assemble a subscription flagship, add the adjacent platform users already begged for, and keep books in a business account if an exit is the point. He said as much on Starter Story: payments into a personal account can vanish from a valuation. The editorial duty is simpler still. Call the exit multi-six-figure because he did. Do not upgrade it to a specific check.