Secrets Behind 2024’s Biggest Exits | Webinar Replay

Foreign. Welcome everybody. I'm super excited for this webinar. We'll go ahead and kick off in just a bit. I always like to do this, but tell me where you're from in the webinar chat. We usually get a very global audience for these webinars. I'm in San Mateo, California. Let me know where you're at. What's up, Raj? Want to creek? Tampa, Florida. South Africa. Allen. Go Dodgers. Seattle, Washington. Washington. College Station, Texas. Brazil. Philly. Good luck in the Super Bowl. Dubai, Berlin, Spain, Colorado. All right. Yeah, we again have a truly global audience, which is awesome because we do help startups get acquired all across the globe. So we'll go ahead and get started in just a little bit here. San Diego, Toronto. All right, well, I think we're gonna have a pretty packed session here. So again, really excited to kick this off and as I go through this presentation, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the ch. I'll do my best to get to as many questions as I can. But without further ado, let's go ahead and kick this off. All right, let's go. So what I'm going to be going over today is the secrets behind 2024's biggest exits, how last year's founders found life changing deals. We had a fantastic year last year. We helped over 500 startup founders get acquired. And really my goal with this presentation is to help you understand how do we get to these multiples? What are startups currently selling for with Acquire. Com? How can you achieve the highest multiple? How do we help and everything in between. So as an agenda, I'm going to be going over a quick introduction of myself and acquire.com, if you're not familiar with us, and then really just go over the year that we had in review. It was essentially our best year we've ever had as a company. We expect a lot of that momentum to carry into 2025. And then really getting to the details, how do you get buyers excited? How do you maximize your acquisition with us? And sharing real case studies of acquisitions that we helped advise and what made them such a success? And then zooming out a little bit, what influenced M and a overall in 2024? What are the some of the marketplace trends? What are we seeing? What are we hearing from our buyers? And then towards the end, I'm going over a lot of different data that we've collected on what we call micro SaaS. So these would be SaaS, startups with less than a million in revenue. What are they currently being valued at and how can you leverage this information to your advantage and then just tips for success in 2025, how can you start thinking about your startup or your business today to really maximize your valuation when you go to get acquired? So brief introduction on myself. My name is Andrew Gazdecki, I'm the CEO and founder of Acquire.com Before Acquire.com, i previously was the CEO and founder of two different startups, a company called Business Apps which was a drag and drop mobile app development platform for small businesses. And then I also built a decentralized cryptocurrency exchan of those companies were fortunately acquired. And just going through those acquisition processes really is what led me to build this company here. And our goal is to build the world's most founder friendly startup acquisition marketplace in the world. And in terms of just our impact, over the last five years we've helped over 2,000 startup founders get acquired. That is translated to over half a billion in closed transactions currently today on the platform we have over half a million registered buyers. Of those buyers, we verified over 3 billion in funds with those buyers. So just bringing a lot of liquidity to startup founders and just making the process of selling your company and exiting a lot easier than what you traditionally see in the past on the platform. Today we have over 2,200 live listings worth over a billion in combined revenue. And then we've served over a hundred different countries. So when I say that acquire.com is truly a global company, I really mean that because we've helped facilitate acquisitions on literally every continent with the exception of Antarctica. And every single month we're helping startups get acquired all across the globe. So 2024 year interview how did last year go? Put simply, it was an amazing year for us. We had a record breaking year across the board. We helped over 500 startups get acquired and to get to that we had over 50,000 NDA signed, we had 5,000 letter of intents created. So just a ton of activity on our platform from buyers again in every country that you can possib imagine. And we, we see a lot of this momentum carrying into 2025 and essentially picking up. We're already seeing that in January across the board. So if you're thinking about selling, if you're on the fence, 2025 is looking like a fantastic year to buy an online business or sell an online business. And again we have a number of buyers every single day that are transacting on the platform. So all good signs for entrepreneurs worldwide. So what got buyers excited? A lot of these attributes for businesses will carry in to this year and really every single year kind of the, the summary here is just building a great business. So starting at the top is operating history. So a lot of buyers today want to see some form of of scale with businesses. That's not to say that if you don't have these attributes, your business isn't sellable. That's definitely not the case. We see startups selling for all sorts of sizes at different revenue marks. But once you hit over a million in your recurring reven revenue and you're seeing some form of profitable growth, that's when just a lot of buyers start leaning in. That's kind of the sweet spot for what we see on unacquire.com so operating history, at least three years of profitable growth with at least 1 million in recurring revenue. If you're able to hit that as a founder, your multiples typically increase, your buyer pool typically changes. You can expect, you know, just the maximum amount of interest from buyers, especially with the ones on our platform today. Also things like big brand clients. So having popular or well known brands as customers who've come to rely on the software. So this essentially means just a logo customers. If you have a set of customers that you're really proud to have, maybe you have them on large contracts that can really just get buyers interested because it shows how useful the product is that you built. And there are other businesses that are extremely reliant on your software. Another way to think about this is for larger businesses. Is your company software mission critical? Do they rely on it for day to day workflows? Do they have parts of their entire business running through what you built? These things definitely get get buyers excited and then customer concentration. This one essentially means that you aren't too reliant on one customer or a handful of customers. You aren't reliant on a third party ecosystem. And the reason that this is so important with buyers is essentially de risk the acquisition. When you have just a handful of really large customers and that's where all of your revenue comes from. If you have one customer that essentially cancels, then your business's value could drop pretty significantly and pretty quickly as well. So when we do see businesses that get the most interest from buyers, they do have again some form of revenue scale, typically over a million in your current revenue, well known low customers, and then the customer concentration doesn't exist. You have a lot of different customers of different sizes. And all this just really helps buyers get really comfortable with this being a business that is going to be around for the long term. And then also looking at performance metrics. So what is the profit margin look like? What is the growth rate? What is the customer lifetime value? What is the net revenue retention? So these are always going to be just key metrics that every buyer is going to be looking at. How profitable is the business? Is it growing, if at all? If it is growing, how fast is it growing? What is the customer lifetime value? Meaning can they find a way to predictably grow your business? Can they look at how much you're spending to acquire customers and say, hey, if we turn, you know, this channel up a little bit, we can predictably acquire more customers at a rate that would be profitable to grow the business. And then net revenue retention. This is a huge one, especially for SaaS. Companies, as you all know, just churn our customers canceling. Are they staying around for how long? Are they upgrading their accounts? What does that look like over a couple year period? Just really having these numbers dialed in always gets buyers extremely interested in potentially acquiring your business. And then just having proprietary technology. Do you have just a code base that isn't riddled with technical debt? Is it built on a piece of technology that's really old and antiquated and whoever buys the business is going to need to upgrade? That is what you build difficult or expensive to duplicate. Meaning is there some form of technology mode around the business? This one I think is probably depends on the buyer. But some buyers will specifically look to acquire businesses with a specific tech stack as an example. And these could be deal breakers as well. Again, if there's a lot of technical debt or things that you know can scare buyers away and then just market positioning. Is your startup a leader in a market category? Is there a lot of competition in your vertical? And I think when you think of market positioning, really establishing your company as maybe a leader within different reward based review companies like G2 Crowd. I love seeing those badges when there's just a lot of market validation from your customers that are saying your business is the best for XYZ category and you can point to a specific leaderboard that really validates what you're saying is true. So it's one thing to position your startup as the best in X, Y, Z category. Let's use, you know, invoicing as an example. If you're able to point to market reviews and market awards that can validate what you're saying is true, that can definitely get buyer's interest because that brand will carry over to make customer acquisition easier. It will allow you to really stand out from others in your market and your vertical. And all these things really add up to that high multiple that I know everyone is looking to get acquired for. So the best part about all of these attributes is you can definitely work on them like they're not things that aren't fixable or that you can't start planning for in advance. And the farther out that you're able to do that, the better exit that you're eventually going to have. All right, now moving over to some case studies. So these are real acquisitions that we facilitated@acquire.com and these are all going to be over a quarter million in what we call trailing 12 months revenue. So the first one would be an app or social media contest. This was a really fun acquisition that I personally had a chance to work on. Some attributes of this startup was 45% growth rate, 90% net profit margins operating since 2020, over 10,000 customers. Recurring revenue freemium pricing model. This was a awesome startup across a number of different categories. They originally listed as open offers to test market expectations and then eventually they put a listing price of 7.2 million. This startup got about 120 buyer conversations going and it was acquired for 7 million, all cash at closing. Another part of this one that was so fun to work on was aside from it just being a really, really high quality business, they were very firm on what they were looking to essentially sell the business for. Specifically the terms. They had some specific terms that would make this acquisition very tax advantageous. And they originally got a few offers below 7 million asking price. But they continued to let buyers know that they were firm on selling for at a minimum 7 million cash with some specific firms to help reduce the task liability that they would need to pay when they sold. And they were able to find that on acquired a common. It was a life changing transaction for the two founders. They were able to, you know, essentially walk away with a few million dollars. And that is definitely life changing as an entrepreneur. So this one was a ton of fun. And again I think it's just an example of when you have a really, really great business, you can attract these buyers to truly transact in the millions of dollars with us. And Then Case Study 2. This was a content site for taking quizzes. This was also a fun acquisition to work on as a very interesting business. Over 8 million in revenue, around 1 million in net profit annually. It was dominating its market. It was operating since 2016. The 2016 Part I One important attribute to point out because that is a long history of operating with millions in revenue. So that can give buyers a lot of confidence in acquiring the business knowing that the revenue isn't essentially going to go away overnight or anything like that. It had high customer lifetime value, meaning some customers had been using the product for many, many years and then over 5 million in monthly traffic. So a lot of traffic, a lot of different users using the product. Essentially the business was at Some sort scale 8 million revenue as we all know is not easy to achieve. Reaching 5 million monthly traffic is not easy to achieve. So these attributes got a ton of different buyers interested. We had secured over 110 interested conversations with buyers and actually received four different LOIs for this business. So there was a competitive process which is another key to maximizing your acquisition as well. Is what we do better than anything@acquire.com is we get a number of different buyers interested in your business all at the same time. And what that allows you to do is essentially maximize the conversations, get as many offers as you can for your potential business and then from there we can negotiate valuation or different terms and that allows you to raise the price or again sell for all cash or whatever is most important to you. So again, another really, really fun acquisition to work on. And again, as I'm going through this, feel free to ask any questions. I'm happy to answer these and I'll take questions in in just a second. And this one was a accounting SaaS. What I like about this acquisition story is this one had 23 Lois. So this is kind of the dream you go live on acquire.com, we have hundreds of buyers that reach out interested. A high number of those will great letter of intents for you to review to potentially acquire your startup. 23 Lois is a massive number that I think might be record breaking for us. So the stats on this one, 45% growth rate, 82% net profit margin, recurring revenue integration for a well known platform. Passive income, low maintenance. I think the standout one on this one is the minimum work involvement from the owner, not too much competition in the market that they were in and very high profit margin. So 82% net profit margin, passive income, low maintenance. This will attract a ton of different buyers and I think a lot of you probably have very similar businesses to this. We see these all day long@acquired.com and they get a number of different offers and these are probably some of my favorite to sell as well. Because again when you have a situation where you're seeing 23 different offers from 23 different buyers. That's how we truly create some of the best outcomes on acquire.com so this is where we're able to negotiate all cash at close. That's probably everyone's goal is to sell for all cash. You don't ideally want different closing conditions, but to set expectations, that's probably going to be included. But when you're able to get 20 plus Lois from 20 plus different buyers, that's when we have leverage to say, you know, hey, we like a mostly all cash deal or we'd like the final sale price to be just a little bit higher. So the last point here is the interest allowed us to drive up the valuation from 810,000 to over a million dollars. And you can see the multiples on each of these case studies being, you know, 4.7 to 4 and this one's 4.2 net profit. So just really great outcomes. And these are also great acquisitions. If anyone's a buyer on this call, these are the types of businesses that I think acquired.com excels at better than any company in the world. Because we have such a large market for these typ types of businesses where it's generating, you know, a few hundred thousand in net profit. It's being ran by either one individual or a handful of people. Very profitable business. Not necessarily a hundred hour a week role for the buyer or the current founder of the business. These startups are absolutely fantastic acquisition targets. And I think that's why this one saw so many different offers on Acquire. All right. And then this was kind of a larger multiple that we saw going back on what I said just a second ago. The main reason for that, based on what I saw, was low involvement from the CEO. So as businesses get larger in size, meaning the TTM revenue is going to go into the millions of dollars. Your buyer pool essentially changes when you're below a million. Essentially you're going to be selling to a pool of buyers that are going to be looking for certain attributes. And the same thing with larger businesses as well and having a talented team in especially in this example being the mobile app building software as a service company. I previously built a very similar company to this as well. So I knew this startup kind of in and out. We were able to get them in front of the right potential buyers because I essentially built and sold a very similar company. But the talented team in place, a low involvement from the CEO. The buyer of this startup was able to essentially retain one of the members and then promote them to CEO of the business. That was very attractive. They were the most profitable business that I've ever seen. That's because they were investing heavily in growth of the business, but because they were able to essentially have a team ready to stay on board, the buyer was interested in retaining them and then was more than comfortable paying a very healthy multiple in order to do so. So we saw over 100 interested buyers because of its large stable revenue and willingness of the team to stay on post close. So again, all of these, all of these deals right here are life changing acquisitions. And that's best part about running acquire.com and if you have a startup with these similar attributes or you're looking to potentially acquire a startup like this, we would love to chat and see how we could potentially help. So, moving on to M and a influences in 2024, we did see a lot of just different tailwinds in different directions that influence the overall environment of M and a in 2024. And I'm sure you've heard a lot of these different influences from inflation to interest rates to the buyer strategy. And really, I think the biggest shift we've seen in the past few years has been the flight from growth at all costs and large revenue multiples for every single business over to buyers really being more selective and looking at the most profitable businesses that they could potentially acquire. Because one thing to understand is when buyers are looking to acquire software companies, there's always the question of how am I going to see a return on investment and how long is that going to take? Is it going to take four years or five years? And understanding that not a lot of buyers are interested in acquiring businesses that are burning money, that have low growth, because in those situations, seeing return on the acquisition price is going to take more time, it's going to take more work. In those situations, you almost have to sell to a strategic buyer that can acquire your business, potentially cross sell your product or service to their tens of thousands or millions of customers. And those acquisitions are just extremely hard to get across the finish line. They definitely happen. But when you go to market, you want to be able to sell to a strategic buyer or a financial buyer or anyone in between to really maximize your acquisition. We see a lot of these Trends moving into 2025 as well, but we're already seeing again a lot of momentum pick up compared to 2023 and 2024. And I think that's a really exciting time if you're looking to potentially sell your startup. If I could just ask, you know, the crowd who is potentially looking to either buy or sell a startup in 2025. What's that looking like? One person's looking to buy. Cool. Looking to buy. Let me ask, what questions do you guys have? Let's turn this into a little bit of Q and A right now. I'll answer a few questions, then I'll go back to the presentation. I still have the marketplace trends and then also multiples that we're seeing on the marketplace. So I'll answer like five questions and I'll go back to the presentation, finish it out, and then answer more questions at, at the end. But one question. How did these case studies, how long did they take from closing from LOI to exit? That's a good question. It typically depends. Sometimes we'll see acquisitions take six months. Plus. That's on the very high end. One of the acquisitions had bank financing and that's where the timelines will carry over into five, six months. That's pretty rare. On average, I'd say from LOI to exit, a good expectation is two to three months. But this is something to also communicate with your buyers. Well, before you sign a letter of intent, you can ask them, you know, how long is this potentially going to take to go through due diligence and eventually close? Another question. How long was case study and three businesses? I think I just answered that. Any opinions on Alex Hormozi's acquisitions.com and how your company is different and better than summer companies? So Alex Hormozi's acquisitions.com is completely different from acquire.com he's essentially, I think of them as like a private equity fund where they invest in companies. The only thing we have in common is a similar name. We help companies exit, they help companies grow. What are some good sources for comparables that are relatively affordable as an individual? You know, if you go on the marketplace today, we have acquisition targets or 25,000, 50,000, hundreds of thousands and then also millions for obviously the most affordable ones. That's going to be lower on the price scale. Just go on the marketplace, enter in your criteria, and then you could find a business, I think that could, that could fit your buy box. Typically, what kind of deal structures do you see on your platform? That's a great question. We have a, actually a slide going over by percentage. How many have earnouts, how many have seller financing. But I'd say on average, we see those components in about 80% of the transactions we do to some degree. How much we see is going to be dependent on the business and the amount of buyer interest that we get but typically 80% of the transactions we do have some form of an earn out or seller financing. How many acquisitions are being financed through sba? Candidly, not too many. You know, I'd like to see more. We just have a lot of, you know, cash buyers and also SBA loans are typically very hard to secure for software companies. There's still a disconnect between banks and understanding specifically SaaS businesses. And securing SBA loan is just a very slow and cumbersome process. So we see some, but not as much as I would like to see a question. There's what sources of financing do you think are most common among buyers in the sub 5. This is the last question. I'll get back. Actually one more what sources of financing do you think are most common among buyers in the sub 5 million enterprise range? Typically all cash. Sometimes we see, you know, seller financing stock components but typically cash is, is the way to go for the sub 5 million enterprise value range. And like I've been mentioning previously, sometimes bank financing with the SBA loan. We used to have third party financing options but those have been harder to secure. So it feels like definitely a buyer's market or excuse me, a seller's market today. And that's where negotiating the cash offers I think has been as what we've been seeing. Do funded startups still sell in acquired.com you know, typically not, not generally too many. I think the problem with a lot of funded startups is they are typically losing money if they're not growing. It can be just a tough sell really for any buy, whether it's strategic or financial. Most of the startups that we sell on acquired.com are typically profitable, have, have not raised any form of outside capital. But that's not to say that we cannot sell those businesses. We definitely have and we definitely do. But the businesses that we see the most traction with our buyer network is definitely profitable and, and usually bootstrapped as well. All right, back to the presentation. Keep the questions coming. Those were, those are great. Okay, marketplace trends for 2024. This is pretty consistent across the whole life of acquire.com but in terms of the best selling category, definitely profitable SaaS. Like I was just mentioning earlier, almost all of the buyers on acquired.com are looking for profitable software as a service businesses. Over 68% of the transactions we do are profitable SaaS businesses. There's always exceptions to this number. We sell ones that are not profitable, losing money. We sell, you know, E commerce or mobile apps or other marketplaces. But predominantly what we see transact on acquire.com is is profitable SaaS buyer available capital capital. On average our buyers have around 800,000 in verified funds with us. The total pool of capital that we verified in aggregate is going to be over $3 billion. So that means if you list a startup on acquire.com we have over $3 billion in readily available capital from our buyers. So that number is always increasing every single month. But on average each buyer has around $800,000. Some have as much as, you know, $50 million, sometimes more. We don't verify the crazy amounts for example if they have like a billion or something like that. But again lots of liquidity on the platform marketplace activities. So this would be all interactions NDA signed Lois created buyer messaging back and forth that is up 15% year over year and that already is looking to be trending up in 2025 as as well and then micro SaaS review. So this is aggregate data on all the SaaS transactions that we've done@acquire.com for the past year. One thing to note, these, these multiples that I'm about to share in these data points are specifically for SaaS businesses with less than a million in revenue. If you're more than a million in revenue, that's going to be more of a nuanced valuation. And and these multiples just to to make it clear is for the the micro SaaS segment. We're going to be releasing this in more detail with a full report with more texture on all these numbers but thought this was fun to share. So these are confirmed purchase price profit multiples for 2004. Typically we see these transaction ranges for all the profitable SaaS of these sizes. So 3.55, 4.35 between a hundred thousand and one million and trailing twelve months revenue. Again we see higher. We also see lower. These are the averages. So if your startup does have attributes that a lot of buyers will be very interested, you can expect the higher range of the multiple. And if there's things that can be improved in the business, you can expect the lower range of the multiples. And there's always exceptions as well. Every startup is different. There could be factors such as growth rate, there could be factors such as novelty and the IP that's been developed and a whole list. But this is just a good snapshot of what we've been seeing in the market average profit margin of listings over time as you can see is the startups on Aquart. Com have been getting more and more profitable. The profit margin is increasing and I think this really says to me, this is an illustration of how the market is speaking about the businesses that they are most interested in acquiring. In 2022, when the market really shifted from growth at all costs to more of, you know, default alive, get profitable, that's when we really started to see a massive shift. And that has been trending ever since, going from 61% profit margin in 2022 to 67% in 2023 and 71% in 2024. So these are some very profitable SaaS businesses which make extremely good acquisition targets. And that's why they see Most interest on acquire.com these are interested buyers by net profit margin. The story here is the more profitable the business is, the more interest you're going to see from buyers by a pretty large factor. You can see if the profit margin is under 20%, you can expect around 28 buyers to be interested. And if it's 61 to 80%, we're seeing almost 32 buyers. So again, this really illustrates what buyers are looking for on acquire.com, which is profitable SaaS businesses. And that's what tends to get acquired more than any other category. Someone was asking this earlier in terms of the types of conditions that we see for these types of businesses. We see seller financing in 13% of the deals, holdbacks or earnouts, and 14% of the transactions, and then other conditions in 41% of the acquisition. So other conditions, meaning not all cash at close is going to be in around 70% of the acquisitions that we do at acquire.com and you may be asking, you know, why even have these terms? Why do buyers need to have them? It's really to de risk acquisitions. It's to align the seller with the buyer's goal, which is to acquire the business with the least amount of risk as possible, ensure that what they're acquiring isn't going to tank in revenue 2 months post close or something like that. And then also getting creative with, you know, a seller might have a certain expectation on price, let's say it's $2 million. And to really to bridge that gap as a buyer, you can offer things like seller financing where it allows you to put less cash at closing to help you have more funds available to grow the business and pay the seller back with funds from the business over a period of time. So it just, it creates a win win transaction for everybody involved. So you may not be able to find an all cash buyer at $2 million, but utilizing things like an earn out or seller financing or other conditions helps Bridge that gap and creates a win win acquisition. So some, some tips on how to succeed in 2025. How can you get that, you know, 10x multiple? How can you maximize the acquisition that you're looking to have this year? Becoming a 10x business includes maximizing profit and lifetime value, maximizing recurring revenue, accelerating organic growth, outshining your competitors, having just unique and scalable ip, minimizing customer concentration. So again, you don't want to have just a small handful of really, really large customers that take up the whole proportion of your revenue. You want to minimize churn and customer acquisition costs. So getting really creative about how you are acquiring customers, not being reliant on just a paid channel. So that can mean having a really killer social strategy, having a huge brand that stands out, being able to have a word of mouth flywheel. All these things drive down your customer acquisition costs. Being able to win big brands of customers. This is again hugely important because big brands are typically looking at a number of different software companies. So if you're able to say XYZ big brand chose my company for XYZ problem to solve, that can give buyers a ton of confidence that your software isn't easily replicated and you have some longevity in the market. Also, one huge tip, if you're looking to sell in 2025, start documenting your business SOPS now. This is just a great pract. This, even if you're not looking to sell, take inventory of what processes do you have? How do they work? If someone is going to step into the business and into your role as the founder tomorrow, would they be able to do it? Do you have anything documented? Just writing down your SOPs can make everything so much easier to run in your business. And then if you ever go to sell it, it's going to be just the operating manual that buyers are going to essentially need to make sure that they're successful post close. And then I think this is a big theme that we've all been hearing for a few years now is driving efficiency and just cutting waste. Making sure that every dollar within your business is being allocated properly and you're really maximizing how profitable your business can be. All these things are going to set you up for success in 2025. So that's all I have for the slides. I'm going to go ahead and take see how many questions I can get through. How was that? Can I get some feedback on the presentation? What did everybody think? Good info. All right. Excellent presentation. Okay, let's get to some more questions. I'll Try to get to as as many questions as I, I can. And I appreciate just the interactiveness of all this. Any interesting red flags that are not obvious that have pushed people away? Good question, Josh. You know, this one is a little more subtle, but I think when founders are really combative during a sale process, I always say, you know, you can't do a good deal with a bad person. That's a great Warren Buffett quote. But a lot of times I've seen some deals fall apart just from the buyer and sellers just can't get along for one reason or another. So when you go to sell your business, understand that it is a sale process. Whoever you're selling to is every interaction is an opportunity for them to get more information on your business. And you know, I think one red flag is when, you know, founders just can't seem to agree on what the sale price should be, what the term should be, when closing should be. So just being on the same page I think is a huge aspect. Is there a partner or affiliate program for acquire.com I run a newsletter and would like to qualify and connect founders with acquire.com Absolutely. Yeah. If you could reach out to me, Andrew, @acquire.com I'd be happy to tell you more about our referral program. We're actually in the process of launching it more publicly right now, but I'd be happy to share details with you early. Thank you. Hi. Often you receive offers to buy aquare.com and what, what we'll make you sell it. I don't think I'm ever going to sell this company, if I'm being candid. I, I love running this company. I love helping entrepreneurs. I think, you know, the case study slides that I just went over, you know, they're, they're four different businesses. Sure. But you know, having the opportunity to really like change the, the lives of other entrepreneurs and founders I think is the coolest thing you could possibly do. So I hope I can help more of you. But just being able to have that privilege is, it means everything to me. So I don't think I'll ever sell it. If I do, you know, I think we'll have to list it on acquire.com so we can sell acquire.com acquired.com all right. Do you ever see multiple target roll ups into one deal? Yeah, we've kind of seen everything and everything on acquire.com. one of my favorite roll up strategies recently was Shopify apps. We saw a lot of that. It's kind of died down a little bit, but I Thought that was a great, a great role of strategy. My team is making fun of me for the acquire.com joke. Your positioning and focus seems very focused on founder sellers. How are you helping buyers? Good question. We'd love to chat with you. If you're a buyer, we'd love to learn about what are you looking to acquire. Can we help you find more of these businesses on acquire.com us getting to know you in advance of an acquisition is huge. So we have a buyer concierge program where we really lean into how we can help you. Is it it with different legal tools? Is it with sourcing different companies that figure buy box? Because once we find a business that fits, we'd love to bring that directly to you. So reach out if you're a buyer and you'd love to connect with our team. We'd love to learn more. What are interest rates for seller financing terms currently? Usually it's whatever market interest rates are. So I believe they're at 8, 9% in between that. But this is going to be negotiable with the seller. So sometimes it's zero, sometimes it's five, sometimes it's 30. I've never seen 30, but it can be high or low based on how you negotiate in your transaction. How much negotiation on deal structure happens before the loi? Quite a bit. Again, I think it's going to come down to who is doing the transaction, but in a competitive situation, a lot because the seller is going to have feedback on potential deal structures from a number of different buyers. And typically at the start of a negotiation you're going to have kind of like a napkin idea such as, hey, John the seller, I'm looking to do a transaction for 2 million with 80% cash on close, 20% seller financing. And then John goes, hey, that's amazing. Thank you. Could you do 90% cash on close? And then you go back and forth a little bit and then the LOI is issued. Sometimes Lois just come before that and that's the start of a negotiation. So whatever makes the most sense. Do you folks focus on SaaS businesses primarily or do you help hardware startups get acquired? What are the splits between SaaS and software and hardware? Pretty much 80% of what we do is going to be in SaaS. Very rarely do we help hardware startups, and that's not to say we can't. We just haven't had the opportunity to help very many. Our Expertise is in SaaS. We previously have built SaaS, companies, sold SaaS, companies, scaled SaaS, companies that's just what we understand better than any company in the market. So that's our main focus. But we'd love to hear more and see if we could possibly help you get acquired. Any insights, some statistics on how sold businesses fare after some time? Six months, one year, two years. We have some great, you know, this is, this could be a great webinar. Next is more buyer success stories. I had a great conversation with a woman who acquired a business with us for I believe $20,000 and then she saw a 18x return on that within 11 months. We'll have that story out probably within the next couple weeks. But we have so many case studies like that where someone has acquired a this for XYZ and 10x did, and they're still running it today or they resold it for 20 times what they paid for it. Those stories may seem like outliers, but we see that pretty often, which is really, really cool to see. What percentages of businesses have been around three to five years versus less? You know, with the, the rise of AI, we've, we've seen a lot of businesses that are. Have a much shorter lifetime than we have in the past because it's become. So you can just scale up these businesses so much faster than you have in the past. But I'd say about like 50, 50. I don't have that set off the top of my head, but we see a lot of businesses that are more established than obviously some of the newer ones. Do you know of any lenders that specialize in SaaS? There are some banks, but not many to be honest. That's definitely a big hole in the market in my opinion. All right, there are a lot of questions. Roger, you can stop. Like, Roger on the back end is putting out a bunch of questions. I'm going to answer maybe 10 more questions and then we'll call it. What do you guys think on the next webinar? Doing one more buyer focused where we can service some success stories of people buying and scaling businesses with us. All right, looks like. Okay, we can do that next. All right, you got it. Okay, back to questions. What if a startup has raised capital and is looking for exit? Are those attractive to buyers? Yeah, you know, it's really not about if the startup has raised capital or not raised capital. What's going to be most attractive to buyers are those attributes that I went over and I'll pull those up again. But just having essentially a business that is profitable, is growing organically, that has happy customers load, churn a brand with a Ton of glowing reviews, has all of its expenses optimized. Typically with a venture backed startup, you're going to see see, you know, a larger team, you're going to see the startup typically burning capital. You're going to see it's just not in a state that is ready to to be acquired. So you can definitely adjust those things and I highly recommend doing before going to market because it'll just help you maximize your exit. How do I position my SaaS business for M and A when we are only at beta launch phase? How long before buyers will look at my solution? Good question. I would say when you go to market you want to have a lot of traction with as many customers as you possibly can. It's really hard to sell a startup that is pre revenue, that hasn't really proven that they have product market fit. Because the first question is is anybody going to buy this? So proving that out as much as possible, ideally over a period of many, many years is the way to go. What percentage of seller financing transactions do you typically observe on your platform? Usually about 20% of the transactions. We do have seller financing. All right, can you give me more creative ideas for deal structure? You mentioned earn out and seller financing? What else have you seen? Those are the two big buckets. Seller financing earnouts, conditional holdbacks. That means there's some condition it needs to be met and then a payment will be released. That seems to be the biggest buckets of deal structures that we see. I struggle to value my current startup. Any tips on buying a business that has already established another country or do you want to buy part of the business? If you're struggling with, you know, evaluation of a startup that you're running, feel free to reach out to our team. We also have evaluations tool on a board dot com. Check that out and if we can help further, just let us know. What multiples do you see for distressed or unprofitable companies? It's going to be much lower than what we see for profitable companies and ones that are operating efficiently. Everything is a case by case basis. So it's hard to to know the full story of a distressed company or if it is unprofitable. For example, is it growing? Is there, you know, some interesting IP attached to it? Who is the potential buyer? Without knowing those, I can't, I can't give too good of evaluation. Here's a good question. What percentage of deals that go under loi don't close? What's the biggest reason for the fallout? So I'd say there's there's two worlds here. One is, you know, are we advising on, on the acquisition? If the acquire.com team is advising on the acquisition, not many deals will fall out under loi and I'll tell you why before we. When we're working directly with a founder to help sell their business, before we recommend signing loi, our team will actually speak to buyers on your behalf. We'll set up a phone call with the buyer. And really what we're looking to do is do what I call a pre due diligence call. That's where we're going to ask the buyer a few questions to ensure if we do sign this loi, how can we maximize the probability that this deal is going to close? So the first thing I like to ask is how are you going to finance this acquisition? Where are the funds coming from? Are there any investors involved? Do you have the capital on hand? Is there any sort of third party financing we should know about? The second one is, do you have a due diligence schedule? And what that means is I'm looking to see the experience level of the potential buyer to give me some indication that once this LOI is signed, there's some form of a plan in place, meaning the first week, what are we expected to do? Are we going to go over finances or the code base or, you know, anything in between that? So how are you going to finance it? And then what is the plan? If we do sign, what is the due diligence schedule look like? And we do that on behalf of sellers and it, it works out really well. We're not always right and things do happen. But without just that simple step with buyers, you know, Lois can fall out pretty frequently, as high as 30, 40% if I had the ballpark. We like to prevent that a lot more so with our team. And this is another part of acquire.com that a lot of people may not be aware of, but we have a full bench of M and A buyers, advisors to help with every single step of the way. Especially this very, very critical point where you're looking to sign an loi, you're wondering if the buyer's legit, you don't want to sign in, the deal falls through either do we, and we help with every aspect of that. But the biggest reason for not going through is typically inexperience on both sides. It's you sign LOI and you find out the buyer doesn't have capital or you sign LOI and two weeks later there's not really anything going on. Essentially just inexperience on both sides, and that's really where the, you know, acquire team can really step in and help ensure that you do successfully get to the finish line. All right. Well, that was a ton of fun. Again, I hope you all enjoyed this. We will have the slides available. Definitely. Keep your eyes peeled for our multiples report for the micro SaaS startups that we work with. If you are a SaaS business and you're looking to potentially get acquired this year, please reach out to our team. We would be happy to set up a call whether you're looking to sell in the next couple months or in a year from now. That's really what we know better than anybody in the whole market is how do we help your business get acquired at the highest possible multiple. So, again, thank you everybody for joining and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Cheers, everyone.