ETA is half investing, half operating, and the investing half means you're expected to put actual capital into a deal, not just your time. Before anything else, that means having a real answer to what businesses in this space actually cost, and how much of that price you personally need to cover versus finance.
What the acquisition itself is likely to cost
The purchase price isn't a flat number tied to revenue. It's quoted as a multiple of the business's SDE, profit plus whatever the owner personally draws from the business, and that multiple moves quite a bit depending on the specific business's quality: the monetization model, the industry, the stability of the cash flow, how owner-dependent it is, how concentrated its revenue is, how it's grown. See what actually drives a multiple up or down for the specific factors, since two businesses with identical earnings can be priced very differently.
Online business listings themselves span an enormous range. You'll find sites asking a few thousand dollars for a small, early-stage content site right alongside listings for established e-commerce brands or SaaS products asking several million, before you're into deal sizes large enough to draw serious interest from private equity and search funds competing for the same target. Where you land in that range determines everything else: your financing structure, and how much of your own capital actually needs to be available upfront.
You need capital, but not necessarily to cover the entire asking price
Once a deal is large enough, six figures and up, leverage becomes the norm rather than the exception: a loan, a seller note, or both cover a significant portion of the purchase price, and your own cash only needs to fill the remainder. That's the entire premise behind financing an acquisition instead of buying outright, and it's what makes deals possible at prices well above what any individual buyer could pay in cash alone. See SBA 7(a) loans for buying an online business for what that actually looks like, since lenders have their own practical minimums (a loan too small isn't worth their underwriting cost), which is a big part of why smaller acquisitions, the low five-figure content sites and starter stores, are just as often bought outright in cash instead.
Leverage cuts both ways, though. Debt doesn't care how the business performs. Whatever you borrow gets repaid on schedule regardless of whether the business has a slow quarter, and an SBA loan almost always comes with a personal guarantee, meaning your personal assets, not just the business, are on the hook if it can't cover its own debt service. The more of the price you finance, the smaller your cash outlay, but also the less room the business has to underperform before that debt service becomes a real problem.
Some marketing around ETA leans hard on "buy a business with no money down," and structures that get close to that do exist, usually a seller willing to carry an unusually large note. Treat that as the exception, not the rule. For most buyers, some personal capital in the deal isn't optional, and underwriting your search around the assumption that it will be is how promising searches stall out at the finish line instead of the start. Lenders and investors expect it too: a buyer with none of their own money in the deal has nothing to lose if it goes sideways, and that lack of skin in the game is exactly what a lender's equity injection requirement and an investor's own capital contribution are designed to rule out. See what "no money down" actually means in practice for the real structures and where the pitch oversells it, and the Financing section more broadly for the financing options actually available for a small online business acquisition.
What the search itself costs
Traditional search fund advice spends most of its time on this part, and for good reason: buying a local business usually means quitting your job, searching full-time, and covering 6-18 months of living costs while you look. For an online business, that entire cost bucket mostly disappears. The whole point of an online business is that sourcing, diligence, and eventually running it can happen remotely, on your own schedule, which is exactly why most online searchers keep their job or other income going throughout the search rather than treating it as a full-time commitment.
What's left is small. Even before you sign a letter of intent, most of your early screening is doable with free or low-cost tools and your own reconciliation work against the seller's raw numbers, see quality of earnings 101 for what that self-directed version actually looks like. A paid third-party review only really earns its cost once the deal is large enough that the fee is small relative to the price, and even then, expect to pay for preliminary due diligence (accountant reviews, basic legal review) on more than one deal that ultimately falls through, a sunk cost of searching, not a sign you did something wrong. Whichever way you go, the diligence itself stays your responsibility as the buyer - paying someone else to help doesn't transfer that.
Most online searchers get through the entire search for little to no money, and it's entirely possible to do it for close to $0 if you stick to free tools, self-directed diligence, and skip paid professional reviews until you're actually under a letter of intent on a specific deal. Even searchers who do pay for some of this rarely go past a few thousand dollars total, and none of it touches a dedicated living-expenses budget. Only if you decide to search full-time does the calculus change, since you're now replacing an income, not just covering tooling and professional fees, and the low-to-mid five figures traditional search fund guidance quotes becomes the more realistic floor.
The takeaway
Size your acquisition budget first, since that's the number that actually determines what you need: how much cash for the equity injection, and what financing covers the rest. Treat search costs as a much smaller, separate line item, real for an online search, but rarely large enough to be what stops you. We'll see in the Finding a Business pillar how to turn your available capital and target SDE into an actual search, rather than browsing listings with no filter.
That covers the basics of ETA. From here, you're ready to actually start the search phase.