From listing to LOI: How Startups Get Acquired

Foreign. Well, let's go ahead and get started. But without further ado. This webinar is about how startups get acquired and really the importance of documentation when you're meeting with buyers. And let me be going over a number of different things, what to include, why is it important, all that fun stuff. Without further ado, if you don't know me, my name is Andrew Gazdecki. I have helped thousands of different founders get acquired through acquire.com literally we've helped over a thousand startups get acquired, which is one of the most amazing jobs I could have possibly ever asked for. Getting to help founders truly is an honor. In the past, before acquire.com I built and sold multiple different startups. One of them was a mobile app builder that I bootstrapped to about 10 million annual current revenue and that was sold to a private equity firm. And going through that process really is the reason I started acquire.com, it was just so difficult to find a buyer understanding due diligence, illegal docs, everything needed to sell your business. I figured there needed to be a better way. So that is acquire.com and my job today is helping founders exit smoothly with right buyers. And today's webinar is going to be how to close more deals by building trust through better documentation, listings and buyer communication. And this may seem like a small detail, but these documents can literally be the difference between selling your business and not selling your business. More specifically, today I'm going to be going over why documents build trust, what do they actually do in terms of if you're a buyer, why are these so important? Why do you need them? I'm also going over the most important docs by category. I'm going to share some some cool stories and also some not good story about when creating documentation has really helped in the acquisition process and maybe an example of why or things you don't want to do. So some good lessons there, what to avoid sharing and then tips for buyers as well. How to request a docs if you're speaking with the founder, maybe you need more information. How do you make these requests, what should you be asking for? And then if you're a founder on the call, I'm also going to be sharing just a one week action plan as well. Because a lot of this stuff isn't difficult, it's just generally overlooked. It's not necessarily things you have to have when you're building your business, but when you're nearing the end of your founder journey and you're looking to sell your Business, you do need to have these types of docs ready. So starting off with the reality check, listings don't sell themselves. Buyers don't fall in love with the price tag. They fall in love with clarity, traction and documentation. And too many listings don't give them reason to stay after NDA. So I think the story here is you have a listing on acquired.com, buyers sign NDAs and they ghost you. There's the reason for that is there's no reason for them to stick around. You haven't provided them with the information they need to really make an assessment on if your business is worth acquiring. And there's just that information gap. Whereas a buyer, they're looking to de risk and an acquisition, and the gap that you've created is just too big, meaning you have messy financials, there's no transition plan, they're not really sure why you're selling. These are all questions looming in their mind. And you can absolutely address these with clear documentation. But what instead most buyers do is they simply go onto another business. They see all this amazing documentation and that's what really captures their attention because there's just so much more to learn about the business. And that that gap in terms of risk in the eyes of a buyer is much, much smaller. So they're going to be focusing on that and unfortunately skip over the business that you're looking to sell. Even if it's an amazing business, it's priced well, it's growing nicely, it has really sticky customers, the product is amazing. But if you compare that opportunity to one side by side, where maybe it's similar, but the documentation is really there to give buyers everything they need to make a decision. They're going to focus on the ones with documentation all day long. So in terms of a story, this is a really common scenario we see@acquire.com we call it the ghost town listing. So in this example, this was a B2B SaaS company doing about 130,000 in month recurring revenue. They launched on acquire.com, they had over 50 NDAs signed, but no messages from buyers. And when we dug further, the data room had nothing. It was just a stripe screenshot that was labeled screenshot. 429 wasn't clearly labeled as a revenue screenshot. And so after speaking with acquire.com team, we had some suggestions on how they can improve their listing. Upload more documentation, create things like a product walkthrough video, going over the opportunity. How does the product work? Who is it for? What problem does it solve what? A1 page why I'm selling document. And also including a transition guide outlining what services are used to run the company, what employees are needed to absolutely maintain the current traction that they have as a company. And how does that all work for a new buyer? Who's going to stay on? What can they expect from the founder? And so in this document they outline things like I'm willing to stay on for three, four months with, you know, five, six hours a week to make sure that the product is transitioned well. The customers are updated on the change of ownership. They uploaded metric stock with their churn and LTV. You can also connect your metrics@acquire.com so you can connect your stripe directly and show beautiful monthly recurring revenue graph. And then they followed up with all buyers. They said, I've added a quick data room to show how we operate. Do you want access to. And just by doing this, they were able to immediately spark interest with a number of different buyers. And that was four buyer calls, two LOIs and the deal closed within 28 days. And we see this all the time at acquired.com, we usually will give this advice upfront, but sometimes founders are reluctant or they need to learn this directly from buyers. But this is a very real scenario where by just adding this type of documentation, it makes a night and day difference with buyers that you're speaking with. Because again, buyers need this information to make a decision. It's not a nice to have. It's not something that, well, if you have it, it'd be great. This is literally needed. A product walkthrough video is huge, really. Explaining why you're selling, connecting your metrics and having a true view in the financial health of your business. And a transition guide outlining how does, how will things work post acquisition? What support is there? And again, what you're doing is you're de risking the acquisition. So you're closing the gap on the perceived risk that a buyer could be taking on. So why docs change everything? Every doc helps answer a doubt. Documentation equals buyer momentum. Buyers typically ask, is this real? Is it running smoothly? Will I be able to operate it? Are there hidden risks? Because again, buyers are very. They're looking at each acquisition in terms of risk. Is this something that's going to fall apart? Am I able to acquire this and transition over smoothly? Am I going to acquire this? And it simply blows up. There is a lot of risk in buying businesses and the more you can de risk the opportunity for a buyer, the better experience you're going to have selling your business, the more offers you're going to get, the more interest you're going to have, and all of that leads to a higher valuation. So it's absolutely in everyone's best interest to document everything that's needed or requested by buyers. At the bottom here I have. That's why sellers who document early move faster, get better multiples and waste less time. And that is absolutely true. These documents literally can be the difference between selling and not selling. I'm going to keep reiterating that multiple times because it's absolutely true. So here's what every listing should have and this is really just a baseline. If you have additional documents, upload them. There's no downside. If there's information on how marketing should run or customer support could run. If it feels like there's a book on how to operate your business, buyers are going to absolutely love that and it's going to be in your best interest. But right at the top, we have screenshots of key metrics. Revenue, traffic, ads, Churn. Anything that you feel is a metric that you track as a founder on a regular basis. Upload that for buyers to wrap their heads around and if needed, help explain how you measure the performance of the business as well. But absolutely upload the obvious key metrics. Profitability, revenue, churn. Those items are absolutely required. You can have a mini why I'm selling letter just describing what about what is happening in your life that's making you want to sell. Maybe you're looking to cash in your chips. The business is doing really, really well. Maybe you built another startup and this business is getting as much attention as it should and you feel a new owner could breathe some new life into the business. Maybe you're just burned out and you'd like to sell the business because you've taken as far as you can go. There's so many different reasons to sell. But this is also one of the first questions that every single buyer is thinking when they view your listing and your opportunity. So answering that head on is great. Have clear file names, no screenshot 2025 pink. Make it really easy for buyers to understand what documentations you have. How are they relevant? So if you're uploading screenshots of key metrics, label them revenue or traffic or conversion rates or HubSpot, dashboard or pipeline. So it's easy to understand these items. And then I also love this one at the end I think is probably the biggest one that every founder can do is a quick intro video for buyers. In this video you can go over again how the product works. You can go over your acquire.com listing, you can go over the data room, you can go through your Stripe dashboard, you can go through your metrics dashboard that maybe you use on a regular basis. You can talk about the transition items. This is where you can really capture everything in a 5, 10 minute video and just address every single question or every part about your business. That's awesome. And what customers are amazing and what feedback you always hear. Basically, why should a buyer get excited about this business? Why did you build it? These videos can make all the difference because this is a lot of the questions that most buyers will ask you on a first call. So that allows you to skip over the high level questions that most buyers are going to ask on a first call and only speak with buyers that are super interested because they've already learned basically the high level details of what you're looking to get acquired. And then at the bottom, buyers love clarity. Don't make them dig again. Name of the game here is making buyers lives easier and really de risking that opportunity by closing the information gap. They have these questions, you're providing clear documentation. It just makes every acquisition go much, much smoother. And then another story. This one's called the Fixer. This would be a newsletter at 25,000 in month recurring revenue. Initial feedback was looks cool, but I have no idea if this is growing. And the seller quickly added subscriber growth charts. Six months, three customer testimonials, a simple faq, how do I monetize the list? Essentially answering the question how's the business doing and how do they generate revenue? And what are some opportunities for a new buyer? As a founder, you know so much about the business in terms of things that you would improve or new opportunities for a buyer. So definitely highlight those. Really outline what is the opportunity here for a new buyer to grow the business. Because that's going to be every buyer's thought is I could buy this business and grow it further. And if you had, you know, an extra few hundred thousand to invest in the business or a million to invest in the business, where would that go? These insights are absolute gold for buyers and also gets them super interested in potentially buying your business. And the result of doing this, buyer interest went from zero to three book calls in a week, which is significant. These could all be the buyer of your business. I always like to say pretend that each buyer is the buyer until they prove they are not. Meaning they say I'm no longer interested and hey, here's Some feedback, but it's not for me. Every single buyer that you're able to convert from not interested or maybe they're ghosting you over to a booked call with you that is a clear opportunity to potentially sell your business that individual. And this is another scenario. We see this literally every day at Acquire where just a few simple tweaks goes from no interest to a ton of interest all the time. And if you have specific questions, maybe you're seeing a lack of interest, maybe you've seen buyer interest kind of wane off. We always have suggestions like this and it's usually this feedback is usually the first thing we look at is what sort of documentation have you uploaded and then if you did upload it, did you go back to buyers and let them know that this new information is available. These are also the best follow ups with buyers as well saying hey, I was chatting with some other buyers and they had a ton of questions on our subscriber growth revenue. So I uploaded some charts that address that question. Feel free to check it out. Here's my calendar. That is such a good follow up compared to hi, are you interested? Let me know because you're adding additional value with the follow up and you're also letting them know that you're speaking with other buyers and you're giving them something new to look at, which could be something that again makes all the difference. So moving on to metrics, first proof over claims. What buyers want to see, they want to see Stripe, Shopify, dashboard screenshots, Google Analytics or Search Console traffic. Again you can connect these metrics so it looks absolutely beautiful on your listing on acquired.com any sort of paid advertising campaigns as you do, what is the conversions? How much are you spending? If you have conversions through other sources, that is also great to show. Let's say you have really strong organic conversions and you can say we don't run any paid ad campaigns. Being able to really outline how customers are going to continue purchasing your product post acquisition is going to be huge because then a buyer can see that if they acquire the business and don't invest as much in paid channels then the new revenue growth is still going to be there. Having an expense overview, I see a lot of PNLs that are super confusing where it's just revenue expenses and that's kind of it. Having an outline of what does it take to operate the business? Where is expenses? Are there any large expenses that maybe a new buyer doesn't necessarily need to keep with the business or expenses that you would recommend Removing so the business becomes more profitable. A pro tip here. Include your logo, business name and screenshots helps validate Just putting time into the data package that you're putting together can really make all the difference. And all of this data really helps tell the story of your business rather than saying it's fast growing or it's really profitable. Being able to really prove that with metric screenshots or connecting your metrics, uploading a detailed P L is absolutely crucial. And again, if you haven't done this yet, you can always upload it. Reach back out to buyers, let them know that you've added these materials based on feedback from other buyers. And again, 100 buyers will be interested when you really paint the story clearly for them by showing proof over claims. So this is just a high level overview on what you should absolutely include. And if you haven't already, I strongly suggest including these types of documents make your product tangible. Docs you can add here is a product screenshot or a loom demo. I think Loom is one of the best tools when you're selling your business. Just outlining, you know, again, how does the product work? What are some amazing features that you have? Why do people buy your product over your competitors? What is the most requested piece of feedback? What are some new features that you've recently built? Because in a buyer's shoes, a buyer isn't going to spend hours and hours going through all of all the details of your business. They're not going to look at every page on your website and try the product and look at reviews online that comes down later in the funnel, meaning you've had a call with them or maybe before call, but your job is to get them interested where they're scrolling through the marketplace, they see a business they like, they sign the NDA, they and when they go into that data room on acquire.com you want to show them how does the product work, explain it to them, make it super easy to close that information gap. You want to outline the tech stack. How is the product built? What server is this on? Is it AWS? Is it Google Cloud? Is it. Did you use AI to build it? Is it OpenAI or Claude? So just outlining how is it built? How does it work? And then finally a transition, transition plan where who handles post sale. So with software products you can't necessarily just take it over you. You can, but it makes it so much easier. If there is a clearly outlined document that says I'm going to reduce the risk on this, I'm going to Be available if you have any questions. I'm going to help you do xyz. A lot of times what I see with buyers too is they'll have some additional requests for the product. They'll say, hey, I'd love it if you added XYZ feature. So in this you can say I'm going to be available to work on the product for a period of time if that's of interest to you and you're able to. I see that a ton. Where a buyer may see potential in the product. Maybe they're serving a specific type of customer, but their startup serves a different customer. Or maybe they need to integrate the product into their product and just saying, hey, I'd help with that process makes all the difference because that's where the value is. The value is in going after a different customer with a different feature. This isn't always the case, but my point is being flexible with this transition plan goes from a really risky acquisition to a not so risky. Because you're essentially saying that I'm going to do what I can to make this really successful. And then at the bottom I have even non technical buyers want to feel confident about the back end. So whether they're super technical and they may not need a lot of your help and then obviously if they're non technical, they're definitely going to need your help. So just outlining and spelling that out clearly makes all the difference where you're saying, again, if you acquire this business, I'm going to be around to make it successful. And that's a good tagline to put in your heads as well when you're looking to sell is you want the acquisition to be wildly successful for the buyer just as as much as it's going to be for yourself. Because no buyer is going to be interested in acquisition where once the money hits the bank account, the deal closes, they can't get a hold of the seller. You see acquisitions like that, sure. But to get a deal done, you need to be in part with the buyer. In terms of our goal of making this a success is aligned. So easy wins here, record a video, outline your tech stack, and outline a transition plan as well. And ChatGPT is a great resource for stuff like this. If you're unsure of what a good transition plan is, you can just go and chat to UT. Hey, I'm looking to sell on acquired.com, i'm looking to create a transition plan. This is something we didn't necessarily do two years ago or even one year ago, but Try it out yourself. You'll get some great suggestions on what a great transition plan you can customize it to. Say, I can only do, you know, four or five hours a week. I'm looking to de risk an acquisition for buyers. How should I position it? So there's really no reason you shouldn't have these documentations, these docs together, given how easy it is to create them. It just takes, you know, a couple hours of your time. Now moving on to the why I'm selling letter, one honest paragraph can do more than a pitch deck. Be real, not dramatic, not vague. An example here would be after running this app solo for three years, I'm ready to take a full time job and want to pass it to someone who can scale it further. Revenue is strong, but I'm not investing in growth anymore. I think these are important because again, moving towards, moving back towards what buyers are really looking to do. They're not looking to buy the riskiest startup possible. And every little piece adds up to that. So if you're vague with why you're selling and it doesn't really seem too honest, or there's something else going on, buyers are going to assume the worst. They're going to assume this thing just got disrupted. Or maybe customers are secretly saying that I'm not going to renew next month or you know, something really much worse than probably what you're articulating. So just having a simple reason for why you're selling that outlines specific reasons can make all the difference. Again, you're, you're looking to build trust with buyers and at the bottom I put buyers will feel your honesty and show up better questions. So sometimes I see startup founders say the business is highly profitable. I've automated essentially the whole business. It's a great cash flowing company, but I'm looking to use the proceeds of a sale to invest in XYZ or to build a new startup. Sometimes I see, you know, I've already started working on a startup and this is a great business, but it doesn't really get the attention it deserves. Here's a link to my new startup. Check it out. That is really a fair question from buyers and a fair reason for looking to sell from a founder. I was speaking with a founder last night on our podcast and he was just saying I'm a builder, I love to build applications and once I get it to a certain point where there's some revenue coming in and users using the application, I completely lose interest. That's another very valid reason to sell. So just being Real about it. Why are you looking to sell? Address is one of the main questions that literally every buyer will ask you when you're looking to sell your business. Again, for good reason. They're looking to understand is there anything essentially bad going on with the product or the company you've built? So addressing that head on is key. Now, here's another story that pivot another B2B SaaS. It was doing around 75,000 monthly recurring revenue. Buyers are asking, why are you selling? How does the product work? There really wasn't a lot of information on the listing. The founder wasn't essentially giving them what buyers need to see. And the seller added a five minute video explaining the product metrics outlining the opportunity going through. How did the product work? What is the landscape of the market that they're in? How do they win deals over their competitors? What's the opportunity to grow the business further? And that literally took a ton of different buyers from being sort of interested, but not really to, we're definitely interested, we want to meet with you. And this business was ultimately acquired because they were able to get buyers interested by simply telling them more about the business and closing that information gap. Because buyers can't just necessarily guess on these questions. They can't just assume that everything is going well. And I'm going to get excited about this business and this opportunity because that works sometimes. But when you're selling your business, you are in sales. You are in sales. It's your job to outline why this is awesome, why you built it, why you're looking to sell it, how could you grow it further? What is the huge reason where buyers cannot pass up on this opportunity compared to the hundred other businesses that they've looked at this month? What makes your business special? And do not leave that to the buyers to make up things. Answer to those questions on their own, because your answers are going to be much better. They're going to have much more reason and logic to them. And again, it just helps you stand out and get a deal done at the bottom. Truth builds trust. That's absolutely true. There's a lot of trust in acquisitions. There's a saying that we always like to say@acquire.com, which is you can't do a good deal with a bad person. So being upfront about even the bad parts of your business. In this example, you could say, you know, I'm a terrible marketer and you know, that's why growth has slowed down. We were doing paid ads before. Huge opportunity to figure out sales and marketing. I see that frequently as well. But it's just the honesty and understanding that buyers are going to discover anything that's wrong, quote unquote with the startup or essentially things that you can improve on in the business. Because every startup has, you know, bumps and bruises and that sort of thing. And when you're truthful and upfront about even the bad stuff, that builds a lot of trust with buyers. The docs that answer the next five questions, every buyer asks what support will I get Post close. How do you handle customer service? What's the next growth lever? How passive is this really? Answer once, put it in your file section. Use templates, short, clear and honest. I think this one right here just to touch a bit more on it. This is also, you know, you can think of each one of these as a doc where what support will I get with post close? Well, that's the transition doc. How do you handle customer service? This is going to be your customer service sop. What's the next growth lever? You can title this, you know, potential growth opportunities. How passive is this really? Put that under financials and general operations. And again, you're basically creating like a book on everything that they would possibly want to know. How does this work? Post close? How does the customer service work? How does marketing work? How does engineering work? If you're doing everything yourself as a founder, well, you're going to need to pass those things over to the new owner. There's no one to carry over, do that work for them. So they're absolutely going to need to know next growth levers. Meaning if you were going to grow this business further, what's the easiest way to do that? What's a low hanging fruit? What have you tried that didn't work? Work? Those insights are also huge as well because if you've gone down a road for months or potentially years and it didn't work out, I think you could save a buyer a lot of time. But you're really, I've been saying this a lot but you're closing that information gap where these are all questions that every buyer asks. And when you spell it out like this, it really starts to make this into an interesting opportunity where at the first question, if I'm seeing you'll be around for, you know, three, four months post close. Okay, well I know the product is going to be stable. I'm going to get help in case there's any questions that I'm not sure of or I miss things during doing due diligence, that happens. So it's good to know. How do you handle customer service? Oh, it seems like that's under control. Great. Next growth levers. Oh, I'm a marketer, I'm in sales. I think I could execute on that. And then how profitable, how passive is the business? All of this together really starts putting together the pieces of a good acquisition opportunity. Let's see. I'm going to quickly just answer some of the questions in the chat for all of you. Is there a replay for this? Absolutely. I get new clients by hardcore marketing by meeting and visiting at their stores and no idea how to show that. I think just showing that in your revenue metrics, I think that would be just fine. If you're going through a rough patch of your business, would you recommend to attempt to sell or I'll spend more time making it work and then try it out. You know, I think when you look to sell a business it's a really personal question. So it depends on you. I think if you're burnt out and you think you've taken the business as far as you can go, I think that's a great time to sell a business. If you know you built amazing business and you're just looking at cash in your chips, I think that's a great time to sell. If it's something in between that, I think that's also a good time to sell. I personally sold my last startup for a mixture of both. We had reached a significant revenue milestone but I was also super burnt out. So I think all of those are completely valid. So there's no specific right answer when you should sell. I think it really depends on do you want to sell. Would you be excited if you sold? Okay, I'll answer more questions in just a little bit, but let's get back to the slide here. Real story the instant confidence win. This was a Chrome extension at 120000 monthly during revenue. Initial buyer concerned seems super custom coded, worried about handoff. Then the seller added a tech stack summary, a transition plan for 30 day support, SOP on weekly ops. Result deal size didn't change but dime to close was cut in half. I think one of the main points I want to get across here is when you speak with buyers, let's say you have a meeting. Remember all the questions. If they have 10 really good questions, put that in a doc, put that in your data room and share it with all the other buyers because all the other buyers probably have the exact same questions and if they don't, they'll appreciate that you addressed it. Up front. Another thing you can do if you're chatting with buyers because usually a buyer will sign a Yay. And they'll send a few upfront questions before scheduling a call. Put those questions in a doc and then share those with all the other buyers. That's a We have a document called a living Q and A. That's where it's a living document where you're adding questions and answers from all the other buyers. And what that does is that gives it buyers a ton of really good detailed questions that might be specific or only going to be asked by one buyer. But by sharing all of those questions again to all the other buyers, you get all of them interested. You answer a ton of questions for them and you show that there's other parties interested in this opportunity to really keep things moving. So again you can just see the difference. We're on the left hand side. It's not really clear. The right hand side really speaks to this is a serious acquisition offer. You are serious about selling. You have your ducks in order to and these are the things that really get buyers interested. So again, very overlooked part of acquisitions but absolutely crucial. Whatever your listing should have, include screenshots of testimonials. If customers have said great things about your business, let them speak for you. That could be on G2 or Capterra or Trustpilot or Shopify emails really showing that the excitement that your customers have for the product or service can speak volumes. And you know the number one most common way of showing what customers think about your business is obviously going to be through the revenue and the metrics of your business. But seeing those words specifically from bot excuse me, from customers this huge and you should put that in a PDF, upload it in your data room. Super easy to do. Net promoter score if you have it. Again, you're really just trying to show how much is your product love how what do customers think about your business and how is it different than others in the market? If you have a newsletter, things like your most open newsletter could be search traffic, it could be conversion rates. Anything that really shows how amazing your business is. It could be other wins, it could be awards, it could be tech press mentions. Anything that gets you excited as the founder about your business. Great to share with buyers. And then in the bottom right corner I would say everyone should do this quick intro note for buyers. Record a video, summarize all these different items, outline all the things that they should check out. Going over the product again, the financials. You can pull up the P L that 5, 10 minutes is the best use of your time when you're looking to get acquired. And at the bottom, this is emotional proof and it's powerful. Absolutely true. And this is especially true for content newsletter sellers. We've been helping a number of different newsletters sell@acquire.com for years now, but we recently formally opened the category. It's also a great asset. If you're a buyer with a SaaS business, 100% recommend you look at those. If you're in say the security market and you find a newsletter that's targeted towards other security founders or in your market, I think that's a great way to grow your business. But things you should include as a newsletter Seller List size your open rate Screenshots Most clicked Forwarded newsletters Monetization Methods how are you how does your newsletter make money? Refund rates if any other things you can include is how do you create the content? How could a new buyer create the same type of content? Are you able to use AI to speed up this content creation? What tools are you using to create the content? Where do you get your inspiration? Because again you got to think in the buyer shoes where if I'm acquiring a newsletter, how am I going to keep the newsletter going? It's not like a SaaS business where you just have the product and people sign up and keep paying you. But this all helps buyers estimate growth and engagement risk. So again all of this really comes together and helps get deals done. Make your finances buyer friendly. Don't drop a raw ledger. Instead of include things like revenue breakdown by product or channel, have a traffic pie chart, organic paid referral, summary of top expenses, cohorts or retention graphs. You can format this for easy viewing not complexity. So you don't need to have a crazy Excel spreadsheet for all these things. Sometimes just a summary for capturing buyers interest quickly can be great. I recommend including both. I think the more data you can share the better. But every buyer is going to ask you know you have top line revenue, Is there multiple products? What's the breakdown? If it's a SaaS business and you have a service offering, you're definitely going to want to outline what percentage goes to the product versus service in terms of organic paid referral. How are you acquiring customers? What is the breakdown? And then tying into expenses. How much are you spending on marketing? Spending on support, spending on product development? Again your job here is to help buyers sit in the seat of this is how I operate the business. These are all the things that are needed because all this also can, you know, start painting out different opportunities. Maybe they see a product that is a small line on your revenue breakdown and they think, you know, hey, we could grow, that we can increase prices, we could invest more in paid marketing. There's so many growth levers available to businesses and just outlining what are those levers is massive. And then cohort of retention graphs. This is a huge one for SaaS businesses also e commerce, really any business, but definitely SaaS where what's your churn? How often are customers coming back? What percentage of your revenue has been around for more than a year? Stuff like that. And again, if you have any questions about this, feel free to to reach out to us at Acquire. So you upload a bunch of documents. It's really important to really outline as much as you possibly can for buyers. But there's things that definitely not upload as well. There's some things you definitely do not want to share with buyers, such as your full customer list or your full source code, your full supplier contact list, logins to key platforms like Shopify or Amazon or your full product roadmap, stuff like that where it's, you know, a buyer could essentially take it without buying the business and it could hurt you in some way. So you do not have to upload items like this. And if you're not sure, feel free to reach out to the acquire.com team or again shout out to chat GBT. You can just say, hey, buyer requested these information pre due diligence or pre letter of intent. How should I handle that? Is this normal? Chad, we actually made an inquire AI bot trained on all the information that we've ever created on acquisitions. I'll see if we can share it on this webinar. But if you have any questions on what's okay to share, what's not okay to share, we are here to help you. But generally it's anything that has a large number of pieces of sensitive information like your customer list, your source code, if you're E commerce, the supplier, contact, stuff like that. Instead you want to use summaries, redacted screenshots. You can blur them out. You can always say it's available post loi. So you're only sharing it with the buyer that's potentially going to be buying your business. You are going to need to share all this information at some point, but that's almost always with the buyer that's giving you an offer and you're moving towards close. An example story buy a red flag avoided. This was The E commerce business at 15,000 mrr, the seller uploaded a full supplier contact sheet and then the buyer skipped an LOI and went direct. They went to their supplier, had a similar product built. This didn't actually happen, but it's still it could happen if you did that. So absolutely be careful about the information that you're sharing if it's something that's very, very key to operating the business, specifically the contacts for E commerce or software code access if you're a SaaS business. And the lesson here is to share relationships, not the contacts. So being somewhat vague, meaning we source and develop the product in China with this type of firm, that should be more than enough, especially if you haven't received a LOI from the buyer. Buyers don't just say more info please. So this is some tips for buyers as well. We speak with buyers all day long@acquire.com and our job is to connect both sides. So if you're a buyer listening to this webinar, be very specific about the information that you need to see from founders. For example, say stripe screenshot of trailing six months. Can you upload your tech stack plus customer support setup? Do you have a short SOP or faq? When you're really specific with founders, it shows that you're serious about the business and you're not. Just copy and pasting questions to every business that you're looking at and this is going to lead to just better conversations and again, showing founders that you are serious and potentially acquiring their business and this specific information can really reflect that. It also shows that you've taken some time to look through the data room and you have assessed what information is there and which information is not there because there's nothing we don't like seeing it acquire. Where maybe a buyer clearly skips over docs. It happens for sure. But take some time, look through the listing, look through the data room and then have really pointed questions and that will lead to faster replies and then fewer ghosted threads. So moving on to action items. So if you're a founder and you have been listening to this webinar, number one, I hope it was helpful. I hope this gives you some insight into how buyers think and why you need to create so many documents. It's not to make you run laps and create a bunch of work for you and stress you out. It's to help you sell your business. And it's 100 required. So here's how to 3 extra listing quality by next week. So if you're looking to go live on acquire.com and you want to start getting ready now. This is just good stuff to have together. Create some screenshots today. Stripe, Google Analytics, Shopify, etc any sort of metric that you think would put your business in a good light. And if it doesn't put in a good like light, you're going to need to upload it anyways. So start putting together a small data room of key financial metrics. Write a short why I'm selling letter create a buyer FAQ 3 to 5 questions you keep getting Upload a transition plan doc created, clean up file names and add an intro video. Don't overthink it, just get started. Because the more you have in your data room again, the more buyer interest you're going to get. The more buyer interest you get, the more offers you're going to see. And when you receive multiple offers, that's generally how you receive the highest valuation when you're selling your business. So it's in everyone's best interest to do this. Your docs are doing the work when you're not. A polished data room creates trust before the first message. It keeps buyers moving. It signals you run a clean ship. No one closes from a mystery. Clarity closes deals. Let your docs do the heavy lifting. There's so much truth to this, so I hope this was helpful in terms of the direction you need to go. If you're unsure of which stocks, you need to really capture interest from buyers. And as always, if you're ready to make your exit, you can instantly benchmark your valuation with us. You can access real buyers on demand. You can get deal ready with support from people who've been there. We've helped thousands of startups get acquired. If that's you, reach out acquire.com we'd love to speak with you. We've been seeing a nice uptick in acquisitions closing, specifically deal sizes rising. So if we can help in any way, feel free to reach out and I'll take a minute here. That's the end of the whole presentation. If anybody has any questions before we hit the 45 minute mark, I'll be sure to answer those. How was that by the way? Feel free to drop some feedback as well. I hope that was helpful to know with some specific action items that you can accomplish now as a founder. All right, well, definitely appreciate all of you being here. Thanks so much for everything you do. It means a lot that you're taking the time to join this webinar. And as always, if you have any questions about how to get acquired, reach out to us at Acquire. We'd be happy to help. Cheers, everybody.