Top Startup Listings on Acquire.com: May 2025 Expert Review

Foreign.

We're going to go ahead and let everybody join the the webinar here. But super excited. We're gonna review some deals. What do you think, Kai?

Yeah, excited. Good to be back. And we haven't done one of these in a little bit, but it's always fun when we do.

I know. Back by, by popular demand. These are always fun because we get to go through just our best deals on acquire and just talk through our open and candid thoughts and you can ask questions, you can just get excited about the deals that we have and then if they're interesting, you can check them out afterwards. But as people are coming in, feel free to let me know where you are in the chat. That's something I always like to do is just see where's everybody based. I'll go ahead and, and start. I'm based here in San Mateo. Kai, you want to let people know where you're at?

Yes, sir. I'm out here in San Diego a little bit further south.

How's the weather out there today? Beautiful. San Diego, it's great.

Yeah. Always sun for the most part.

There we go. We got Dallas, we got Houston warming up. All right, so we'll go, we'll go ahead and kick this off in. We give it like one minute and then as always, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat. We'll do our best to get those, get to those towards the end of the webinar and yeah, we got some good content here. Kai, is there a particular deal you're most excited about?

I am. Save that for later. I'll, I'll reveal it when we get there. But there's a couple deals that I'm personally working with and we'll talk about that a little bit here in the call about how we help all of our sellers to support them.

Right on. All right, well, let's go ahead and kick this off. I'm going to go ahead and share little presentation that we have and we'll, we'll jump into the deal review. Okay, so today we're going to be going over our top startup listings for May quick agenda. We're going to do brief introductions. We're going to go over why are you here, what can you expect to learn? And then we're going to review some deals. We're going to go over some of the top businesses we have on acquire.com why we think they're exciting things. We recommend maybe looking out for just how to view them and then how to match with the best Services we provide@acquire.com how to configure your criteria. So you get these listings in your inbox every single day and every single week. And without further ado, if you're not familiar with acquire.com We've been in business about five years. We have over half a billion registered buyers. We've helped founders get acquired in 85 plus different countries, which has translated to over half a billion in closed transactions. Currently on the platform today, we have over 2,000 listings and we did over 500 acquisitions in 2024 alone. So lots of activity on both sides on the buy side and the sell side. It's a lot of fun serving entrepreneurs and a little bit, a little bit about me. My name is Andrew Gazdecki. I've helped thousands of founders get acquired. The main reason I started acquired.com was I previously started a couple software companies, had them acquired. Going through the process was a bit confusing. I didn't know necessarily anything about M and A and I thought there should be a better way for founders. So on this webinar, again, we're going to be going over, you know, some of our best deals, our thoughts on them, and hopefully give you guys some, some interesting businesses to look at. And I'll, I'll pass it over to you, Kai.

Yeah. Hello, everyone. My name's Kai. Good to be back here on one of our webinars. I work here in acquisition advising and I work with sellers at all points of the journey, early conversations on if it's the right time to sell, all the way through the thick of the deal. I also work with buyers as well, helping them understand what they're looking for. And sometimes if the deal fits, I'll be able to send them listings ahead of time based upon their search criteria. So helping them define kind of their buy box as well. But it's a great job, it's a great position and every acquisition is a journey because there's a little bit of nuance in every road.

Right on. And Kai, Kai's a legend@acquire.com he routinely closes multimillion dollar deals. What was your favorite one last month? Guy that you helped get acquired last?

Yeah, yeah. It's always hard, but I, I think specifically last month there was a seller who was on acquire back in 2021 and gave it a shot. It didn't work out and they came back to me over the course of this year and they were able to actually close at just a little bit over half a million dollars in about 71 days.

Right on that's life changing. It truly is. All right, so why are you here today? You're going to see the best deals and what makes them special. So I prepared a collection of some of our favorite deals on acquire.com it's going to be a mix agencies and different SaaS businesses. Free listing on acquire.com is vetted. These are going to be recommendations from our top advisors here at Acquire. And you're going to just see how we, how we think, what we look out for and concerns, what makes them awesome. What are some things that we would recommend possibly looking at a bit closer. And then at the end we'll do just an expert Q A. If you have any questions, put them in the chat. It can be anything related to acquisitions, whether you're maybe thinking about selling your business or you're thinking about acquiring a business, whatever it may be, put those in the chat. We'll get to them later in the webinar. And then in terms of how we ensure high quality deal flow@acquire.com right at the top is going to be expert support. So we have an in house M and a team where we just have a lot of experience helping businesses sell. We've seen just many different types of acquisitions and we understand what it takes to get deals across the finish line. We're also specialized in SaaS. So acquire.com, we like to pride ourselves on having the best SaaS businesses available for acquisition. And then we have a strict vetting process. So only 45% of startups get accepted onto acquire.com and we look at multiple different things from the quality of the revenue. We'll look at the P and L. We ID verify every single seller that comes through and submits their startup. And we do all this to ensure that the buyers that we work with are acquiring high quality businesses. And then our guided listing process. So really ensuring that every person that is listing a business is who they say they are. And we also ensure that the business is verified to ensure that it's a legit business. One other cool thing that we've recently done and acquired too is we've expanded to support every single type of profitable online business. So this would include mobile apps and shopify apps and e commerce businesses and newsletters and crypto businesses and AI companies. So if you're not looking for SaaS businesses, rest assured that we do have a ton of different types of businesses to check out. So make sure to check the marketplace periodically. We have new businesses going live every single day. All right, now over to the deal Review. Kai, should we hop into this?

Let's do it. Let's get started.

Okay, I'll kick this one off. Okay, so this is a SaaS business based in New York. It's going to be a white label no code membership that gamify community engagement and brand loyalty across platform. The asking price is 490,000. It is looking at a 8 point X times profit multiple or a 3.5 times revenue multiple. In terms of recent performance we have 140,000 in TTM revenue and 56,000 in TTM profit. I like to see the metrics connected so I can see the trend of the revenue. I can also click into customers and see how that is trending and also churn as well. They have website traffic connected which is Great. Founded in 2023 and it looks like they've raised a little bit of capital to start this business and the reason for selling is starting a new business. Kai, what are your initial thoughts on this one?

Yeah, I like this business specifically because the the use case what they do is they help businesses with their retention and if we were in a perfect world, every business would want to just hone in on their retention and have it just be spectacular. So I'm interested to understand what the retention is of this business that helps people with retention if you follow me there. The other thing that I am interested in is if you look at the asking price rationale, scrolling a little bit down, the seller mentions a lot of projected numbers. So 5 times projected profit revenue growth, additional MRR projected from existing and inbound contracts. So there's a lot of speculation on the future. What this means to me is that there's promise. But from a seller to a buyer you now need to validate that promise and hopefully be open to some sort of creative deal structures to mitigate the risk around the projection itself, which it seems like they are with that last sentence there. We're open to all competitive offers willing to negotiate around partial seller financing. So that's a good sign that this isn't someone basing their valuation on a projection and then expecting 100% all cash.

Yeah, I like that. I think this is a good business with, you know, good amount of product market fit. It's nice to see that it's profitable going to the revenue. I like to see that it's stable to a point where there are some dips, but there's also an increase. But what stood out to me most is the white labeled aspect. My previous business we white labeled a mobile app builder for agencies and that business model does really, really well in my opinion. I think there could be an opportunity for a growth minded entrepreneur to come in here that's focused on sales and figuring out who is the best customer for this platform and being able to sell that into businesses. So I think this one has a lot of growth potential. I like that the recent performance shows that there are a lot of happy paying customers. They are operating profitably. I think this could be a good acquisition. All right, Kai, should we go to the next one?

Yeah, let's go to the next one.

All right. You want to kick this one off?

Yeah. All right. So starting with this one we have another SaaS number one fastest growing AI sales agents on a mission to empower businesses to automate sales. So you can see the confidence right here in the seller with boasting the number one position. Validating that is always my next step is you want to validate your claims but you also want to be proud of what you built. So if we look at the numbers on this going for 7.5 million, 3.4 on the revenue and 7.4 on the profit, this itself is a business that's hit a few milestones when it comes to buyer's analysis. And what I mean by that is you look at the revenue where at 2.2 we even look at the profit and we've hit a million in profit. So there is a little bit of logic to saying once you've gotten big enough in as a business you then can command some of these more higher end multiples being upwards of three and maybe even justifying something around the seven. Kind of depends if we, if we dive into it. Looking at the customer metrics as well as we scroll down the listing you can see some of the new features here at Acquire like this wonderful bar chart. And Andrew, we just put this in recently, but I'm loving it. How are you feeling about the, the new metrics on Acquire?

I think it's amazing. I think anything we can do to give buyers just the best snapshot of the financial health of the business is great. And as you can see we have, you know, revenue expenses se and for businesses of this size what we'll do is we'll look at the P and L with the seller will pull out expenses that generally aren't going to be kept by a new buyer to give you just the best view into what the profitability of the business is going to be for new acquirer. So yeah, I think it's slick.

Yeah, absolutely. I like it a lot. It Just it allows an analysis to go much quicker. We scroll down a little bit and we see the customer count. We're, we're assessing for customer concentration. If I'm a buyer and between 500 and 1,000 customers is certainly a significant number. So I would explore this business. I'd want to talk to the seller and see how prepared they are. I know for a fact that this seller is prepared. They're working with some of our team here, so there's good confidence. As you can see, this one has one of those guided by M and A experts badges. So I just want to understand more. I want to understand customer acquisition, customer demographics and I kind of want to understand why this seller is selling now if the business is doing so well.

Yeah, those are good questions. So right at the bottom, exiting to launch a SaaS incubator. While this business already wildly scalable and mid surge continues a successful growing journey. I think what stands out for me about this business is number one, the retention rate and just the size of it. 3 million in recurring revenue, profitable, growing 200 year over year. This is an explosive market. Being AI sales agents, I've seen companies like this raising at just ridiculous valuations and large sums of capital. So for someone that, you know, sees this market opportunity as what it potentially could be, a 40 plus billion dollar market up, I think this could be a very, very interesting acquisition opportunity because this is like a market category that's being created today. It's not necessarily the most established market category, but it's one that, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of really, really large winners. And so to be able to, you know, essentially skip just years of development and years of learning the industry and being able to have a solution almost immediately, I think is really, really interesting. I would just want to know what customers are saying about the product comparative to maybe some of the competitors. But being able to do this while bootstrapping the business I think is extremely impressive compared to some of these larger funded competitors, which could mean the product is amazing where you know, they have to spend all their time listening to customers. They don't have necessarily the luxury to, you know, finance a huge team and finance things that necessarily aren't really moving the needle. This is a company that could maybe the best in the market and it could, you know, continue to grow at you know, these high, high, high percentages. So I love this one. I think this is a great business. Like Kai said, it's definitely a founder that's prepared for an acquisition. Tons of material available on this one. So yeah, I think this one's definitely going to be acquired pretty soon, if.

I had to guess. Yeah, I, I agree.

All right, let's move on to this next one here. So this is another SaaS business located in New York. This is an employee engagement and recognition platform for Slack and Microsoft Teams. I like to click the see more button and learn a little bit more about the business. I like to read here free for small teams under 25 employees. So it has a product led growth approach with attracting new customers. Asking price 849,000 Multiple 4.9 times profit 2.8 revenue. See the asking price reason? We're growing at nearly 100% growth for the past few years. High gross margins. I love platforms like this because it's at a good size where they've really proven out the product market fit with customers quite a bit and they're doing it extremely profitably. The numbers look great to me in terms of the TTM revenue and the TTM profit. I usually like to skip right over to look at this growth rate. Nice. So, so they were at 142,000 in April 2024 and that's trending all the way up. So it's essentially they've doubled in the past year. So they're definitely doing something right where there's clear customer demand. I, I'd be wanting to understand just more specifics on the customers. Are they different startups? Is there a specific type of business that they sell into? Been around since 2021. This is awesome. Kai, what do you think?

Yeah, and you can probably validate this more than I can, Andrew, but you want to sell. It's optimal to sell when you don't have to. And what I mean by that is when the business is doing well, that's probably the best time to sell rather than the business flatlining or the business declining. And this business is certainly doing well. You look at the last month's revenue even in comparison to the trailing revenue and there's a significant indicator that this growth rate is, you know, happening and you see it there in the chart mogul graph as well. So this is a nice business to explore. I think naturally some of the things to think about is being on a marketplace, not every buyer is the right buyer for your business. What I mean by that the use case of this offering is within workplace culture, dei, things like that and you know, certain opinions in the world of, you know, do you feel like this offering is going to last or are you an advocate for this offering? And if so, then you're that ideal buyer. So from a buyer standpoint, sometimes you, you say, hey, this is not a fit. That just could be a personal thing. From a seller standpoint, you always want to speak in your listing to your ideal buyer to let them know, hey, this is for you, and those are the buyers you want to talk to. So I feel this one's going to, going to get offered pretty soon too.

Yeah, 100%. And that's such great advice too. I was talking to this founder two days ago about his acquisition. He had a bunch of different offers on acquire.com and it was a an add on for an Excel spreadsheet tool. And he went with the offers from buyers that had a background in finance because they really understood the market, they understood the problem. He even turned down offers at higher valuations from others. I thought that was really smart. To your point, being able to really sell to an ideal buyer that's going to understand the business, I think is a great idea. And I think the same goes for this one too. And I think just as a buyer, you know, that makes a lot of sense as well because you want to be able to get behind whatever product that you're acquiring. And so I love solutions like this. I think if you have any experience using these competitors, if not, like the first thing I would do if I was looking to buy this, I would just try out the competitors and just see if I like using a product like this, if I see the value in it. Because when you have that enthusiasm as an entrepreneur, you could definitely grow this business quite a bit. There's clear customer demand. I think the main goal from here is just how do we continue this, this growth streak. And if this is acquired by a buyer that sees the value in the product, understands the market, gets excited about it, I could see this business, you know, 3, 4 Xing, you know, pretty quickly.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, let's move on to the next one. Kai, you want to kick this one off?

Sure, sure. I'll take this one. So this is a real estate kind of ecosystem for marketing. You can see there by the headline, it is a suite of tools, happens to be no code as well. And helping that whole, you know, civilization really of brokers, real estate agents, etc. Loan officers, coincidentally, I used to work in mortgage marketing, so I know a lot about that field. And the one thing I like most about this one is it's been around since 2011, so certainly not a startup, but we see the numbers and it's withstood the test of time. So the profit margin is quite phenomenal. The growth rate even at 78% over 10 years in business, you would maybe think it would have hit some sort of plateau. But this tells me that behind the scenes, if I'm to read the simulation of this business, there's probably some history of them innovating and advancing over time. You almost have to. If you started in 2011 and you're here in 2025 still with a growth rate of 78, you had to have innovated. So I want to learn more about that as an acquirer. I want to know kind of what they've done to the code base to have it evolve, see if there's any technical debt for me, maybe some light concerns as you open up this area right here. Andrew, they mentioned they have eight high profile enterprise accounts. One of those bullets there. We have eight very well known enterprise accounts. That's a great thing to have. Enterprise accounts is a great thing. Eight of them. I want to know how much of the revenue do they take up, what are their contracts look like and if this is a concern of, you know, losing some of the revenue if they were to churn out. But this is all natural, so it's not a red flag, it's just a natural analysis point to talk to the seller about. But what are your thoughts on this one? Andrew?

I think that's a great point. When I see enterprise accounts, I get typically excited about it because I want to know how did you acquire those customers? What does it take to service those customers so you can go and get more of them? Because most acquisitions you're going to be trying to grow the business. So if you're able to acquire a business where the customer lifetime value is in the thousands or tens of thousands, if you have a background in sales or potentially marketing or both, scaling the business is going to be a lot easier with those amounts. Meaning you only have to get another 10 or 20 customers to essentially double or triple the business. But I would also want to know is how long have they been with the company? What do the contracts look like? Are they on a yearly contract or is it month to month? So just understanding just the makeup of those customers would be great because you don't necessarily, you want to, you want to look out for a business where there's really, really high customer concentration because that does bring a risk. Where if one really really large customer leaves a business and that revenue leaves, then that could impact how the business is valued or your acquisition outcome. But overall, I Think you're right. This is a real estate focused tech business that has been around since 2011. The real estate market has changed quite a bit in that time period. So being able to, to be in business that long, I think really says a lot about this opportunity.

Yeah. And they offer a whole, whole suite of tools to the real estate ecosystem. So you have to imagine the business model is a little complex to understand. Maybe make, making or breaking this deal in the future is how organized and well presented this seller is. And that goes to anyone thinking about selling their businesses. You have to think from the buyer's shoes. You put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows zero knowledge of your business. Can you present your business to them in a clear and succinct way so they know the same value that you're trying to project?

Yeah, 100%. Also another bootstrap business. Love to see it.

Amazing to see.

All right, moving on to the next one. Okay, so I'll kick this one off. This is an AI job search tool for job seekers to accelerate job search process with AI resumes and cover letters. So right off the bat, I'm thinking, you know, this is a big market, a disruptive tool in the market of applicant tracking systems. Going down to the asking price, 3 million, 3.7 times profit multiple 1.9 revenue, recent performance, we're looking at 1.5 million in TTM revenue. That is awesome to see TTM profit 790,000. So this is a business that's, you know, it's, it's reaching scale, it's highly profitable. I love seeing margins like that. That means it's a very efficient business as well. But I'm, I'm thinking now just how big is this market? Given that this is a newer approach to ATS systems. So I think that's really interesting where the upside could be, could be pretty big on a business like this. Going to the annual snapshot, I get another picture in terms of the revenue, but also the expenses and the final sd, SDE number going down to the customer metrics, that is a lot of customers. A thousand to five thousand customers. I think to me that that probably signals a product LED motion where I don't think this business necessarily needs a sales team or a lot of hand holding to use the product. I love businesses like that. Only found in 2023. So achieving this growth in less than two years I think is really, really impressive. I think from here I'd want to know just how are they currently acquiring customers? What are the channels? Is it social Media, is it creating content? Is it something clever that maybe I haven't seen before? But that's, that's my initial thoughts. Kai, what do you think?

Yeah, I like this business a lot. They're priced well. We talk about fair market value, finding the sweet spot, they're definitely in there and they can probably attest to getting ample attention. A lot of buyers getting on their calendar. And that's what you want as a seller, is you want the opportunity to talk to buyers otherwise your business will never sell. I look at the use case of this and there's certainly a need, especially right now in the, you know, the job economy, there is a need for excellent resumes, excellent job search tools within that is kind of the counter thought of naturally a successful customer of this offering. Do they still need the tool after they've gotten their job? Maybe, maybe they built something into like the life cycle of a client that allows them to still use the product just for something different. So there might be some natural churn, some natural lifetime value that you see just because of the success of a customer means they might not need a resume written for a while. And then the other thing I like, if you go to the growth opportunities, as a seller goes through the onboarding process, every seller can write their growth opportunities. Some people stop at just checking the boxes, but I advocate against that. I really like the fact that the seller has taken the time to further define their growth opportunities. They're honest about their level of marketing, they're not leaning on it too much to say that we've done zero marketing and that's the value here. But they've written a nice couple paragraphs about what the opportunity is and I think that's really valuable to a buyer.

100% and I love seeing the competitors. I'll bring this up again. I think, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of buyers might think oh it's a crowded industry, etc. Etc. Which is true. Know no, no doubt on that. But the best part about startups entrepreneurship is you can come in 499th place and still do really, really well in a market. The key is just going after big markets where there's a, there's enough room for a lot of different businesses. And as I see all these different competitors, some of these are substantial businesses. And given this company is currently at 1.5 million in revenue, I think it's feasible to think with the right growth strategy in place, this, this can get to 3 million, 6 million, potentially more than that. So I, I like this Acquisition opportunity again, another bootstrap. Another bootstrap founder. Love to see it. Cool. All right, let's hop over to the next one. Kai, you want to kick this one off?

Absolutely. Okay, so we have scalable sales automation and lead generation platform with managed services. And then straight up front, love the transparency. 5050 on SaaS and services. I talked to quite a few sellers that fall into this bucket is they are not 100% SaaS, they're not 100% services. But it creates just a new hurdle to get through. Not an impossible hurdle, but a new hurdle is your business model. It can't necessarily directly be bucketed in a valuation range of 100% subscription business or 100% services businesses. So you kind of have to go like the hybrid route. The, as you're highlighting there, they're expecting to see growth in and what's. What's happening with the business, which is good. We are priced well from a revenue standpoint and they're identifying their sde. So that profit multiple you see right there is probably on net, not sde. So that's something to want to dive into. I would say. The one thing here is you look at the competitors and we see some really big names in the competitors. And so from a buyer standpoint, one of the things that pushes and pulls evaluation range is the competitive landscape. So I want to know, am I going to be competing directly with these big players or has this business developed a niche within the offering itself? And hopefully the latter scenario, because you're not always directly competing with the biggest players in the space, sometimes you found a nice pocket similar to what acquire does. Right. And so those are the things I want to know about this business. Those are my initial thoughts. Andrew, any. Any initial thoughts from you?

Yeah, I think this is an amazing acquisition opportunity because you're right, the, the profit multiple should be closer to forex because they're basing that on seller discretionary earnings. So less than four times profit for a really, really nice SaaS business. I think that's fantastic. So now I'm wondering why are they looking to sell? So I'll scroll down to the bottom. My cell change health reasons. So I think this could be another great acquisition opportunity because again, like you said with the competitors, there are a lot of big competitors here, but these are big markets. Sales law sold for, I believe, couple billion dollars. Outreach, they've raised several hundreds of millions of dollars. Mixmax, same thing. Apollo, same thing. So this is a great market, especially if your background is in sales, where you probably know all these tools inside and out. I personally have used Sales Loft and Outreach and Mixmax. So they're great tools. I know the use case. I'm guessing it's something in the line of connecting to your CRM and scheduling different emails to go out. So understanding, you know, what is that niche more specifically? Like why would you use this product over a competitor? Just to understand what is the opportunity for me where I could come in and do more of what's working. Because it sounds like this opportunity to me, Kai. It just needs new life breathed into it. Maybe the founders already moved on to something else. They are open to a creative deal structure. So I think if there's a growth minded entrepreneur on this call today, I think this one would be a good one to take a close look at. You could likely meet with the, the sellers and put a, an offer together that is at a very, very reasonable valuation. A structure that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I love this one. I love the market. I think this is a great opportunity that's absolutely going to get acquired. I think this one will see a number of offers soon.

Yeah, it's a good business for sure. From a preparation standpoint, maybe a little complex. You know, you want to show your retention from the SaaS side, you want to show your anonymized kind of customer profiles from the agency based side. But that's, that's all the best practices that we promote here is you want to prepare before you go out to market because otherwise you know, you're working from behind.

Yeah, like I was saying earlier too, just the size of these customers I think is, is great. So this one could scale really, really quickly with the, with the right buyer. So I like it. All right, moving on to this next one here. I'm, I'm very familiar with this business. Okay, so this is a SaaS business based in the UK. This is a leading global website builder platform for creators and artists to choose over Square and Wix. First thing I'm looking at is the asking price, 1.6 million. The multiple 3.6 times profit or 2.8 times revenue. So right off the bat I can definitely tell this is a high margin business, very efficient. I love the valuation on this. This is a very realistic valuation. Looking into the reasoning, award winning pretext SaaS generating around 600,000 in recurring revenue like the LTV 1.7 monthly churn. So this is a great business. 4300 active customers. Let's scroll down really quick. So we have profit of around 456,000 for the last 12 months found in 2015. So this business has great metrics, it has longevity in the market. It sounds like Churn is low on this business, so customers love the product. Also in big markets, square wix, I believe Squarespace is public. I know Wix is public. So again these are big markets where comparative of the revenue around 600000 TTM revenue. I think doubling this or tripling this is a very reasonable goal. It has everything you need where it has product, market fit, happy customers. Churn is low. So there's a lot here priced very realistic. So I'm always thinking too, why are they looking to sell? And this is where I like to just go down to the bottom and typically you'll have some good insight here. But the founders have tested and proven significant growth but believe a larger company with greater resources. So essentially what this is saying is the founders of this business love building companies. Maybe they don't necessarily love to scale businesses where you're just finding a repeatable growth strategy and just doing that over and over to grow the business. They just like building businesses potentially. So this is a great opportunity where we see this a lot at acquire where founders will come looking to sell their business. They've already started working on something else and they're able to sell that business to a potential buyer where they're focused on scaling the business and it becomes a win win exit for both sides. So that's, that's my initial thoughts. Kaia, what do you got on this one? I think this one is a fantastic acquisition opportunity.

Yeah, I like this one a lot. I'm working with this one directly and one of the things I like to advise is on the asking price rationale. You want to lead with data. Data gets deals done is what I like to say. So we see a lot of those high level metrics that aren't overly sensitive of putting out on the public side of the listing. But though they're super critical to getting a buyer's attention to having them come over to the other side. So I really like the asking price rationale that we have going on here. This one is one we snuck in here. It's actually under offer right now. And, and the reason we snuck it in here is to tell a little bit of a story. So we have had multiple offers on this. The buyer had to make a decision between a international sale and an international sale. So a UK buyer and a other country buyer to omit details. And so it kind of comes down to it's a seller's preference. You got to pick what's right for you. Is it a total valuation offer or are there logistics of the deal that would offset the valuation slightly because it's going to be smoother. So these are all things to always think about. These are always things to talk out ahead of signing with anyone because you never want to go through a deal and due diligence to hit a roadblock in asset transfer or anything like that in the road ahead. So always move a little bit methodically, still move with pace. But this one, we're hoping to get to the finish line soon.

Great business. I knew it. I knew someone was going to buy this one. Someone's going to acquire it. Yeah, we see this all the time on acquire.com too. Just these really interesting opportunities where with the right buyer, I think, I think that one's going to do great. Okay, Kai, you want to kick this one up?

Yeah. This is another one I'm working with. This is an agency. I think this is our first pure agency we've shown today. And just in case you didn't know, Acquire does sell a lot of agencies. So we're not just only SaaS. So if you have a nice agency, we'd love to talk to you about it. This is one of the most prime examples of an agency I've worked with to this point today. And it, it's great what it does. It's US based. It has a long standing history in the space here of about 22,009. Even so. So a long standing history and they are succeeding. The way they've built this machine is very impressive to where it's lean. They are using offshore support, so their expenses are minimal. So that's how they're kind of optimizing this. And the three founders of this business are in a position where their impact is minimal too. And I mean that in the best way. From a buying standpoint, when you're looking at an agency, you want to make sure that when the business is transferred, there's not a blip in the radar, that the relationships are not severed because the founder leaves or anything like that. So they've really built this to sell. And part of it is synergizing with acquirer and taking our advice. Another part of it is, you know, this founder has sold a business before, so they've been through the rodeo and they're leveraging their past experience. But I like this a lot. And you're highlighting there they have a breakdown of their revenue. They have some recurring revenue, which is always a benefit in an agency. But I really like this and we have several interested parties on this currently. Nothing signed yet, but it's a great opportunity.

I just love how this business is ran. I love the margins, the structure. I love the level of detail on this listing as well in terms of, you know, how is the revenue split and then just the consistency of the revenue. That's very impressive. So 1.5, 1.5, 1.5,. 1.6. That is great. So buying this business, you know what the next year is potentially going to look like, you have a high degree of certainty. I guess my, my main question would be is what does the customer makeup look like? Meaning are they selling to startups, Is it more brick and mortar small businesses? And I just ask that to get a deep understanding of the customers that they serve, who is an ideal customer, how you get more of those types of businesses to grow the company. I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow this business because they clearly have the right model, the right staff on hand, the right services. This is another opportunity I think will, will be acquired really fast on acquire. Yeah, this one's a great guy.

Absolutely. One thing I'll add to this, which is kind of an X factor in how you sell your business, is the sellers are very professional and it can't go unsaid that how you conduct yourself in a sale really matters. The relationships you build, the way you communicate, all this really adds to your ability to sell your business successfully. And so I just want to give a thumbs up to these sellers because.

They'Re doing it right, 100%. All right, this is the last one for this webinar. Kai, do you want me to kick this one off or do you want.

To go ahead and kick this one off? But I'll add some commentary for sure.

Okay, sounds good. So right off the bat, I, I think this is a great business as well. This is going to be a Shopify SaaS application, meaning it's an app in the Shopify app ecosystem. It's an appointment scheduling solution for Shopify merchants. With a 99% net retention rate and 21 active customers, it is asking 3.8 million with a 6 time, 6x profit multiple and 3.7 times revenue right off the bat. I just love solutions like this. They're absolutely mission critical and I think you see that in the retention rate. This is very, very rare for SaaS. I think anyone on the call that's running a SaaS business to have just 1% of your customers churn is hard to do, especially when you have 2,000 plus customers. So this is a very, very valuable business. I think the revenue numbers are, are incredible. A million million revenue. 620000 in TTM profit growing by 38 per year. And I love these customer numbers where it's in the thousands, meaning this is likely a product where people can sign up on their own, subscribe on their own. It doesn't have one to one demos or meetings that you have to schedule to to sign them up as a customer. So these businesses generally grow really, really fast. I also like seeing that this one is, it was founded in 2016 so that's nine years in business. I think that's amazing. I think the first thing I'd want to do is just dive in and understand the competitive landscape a little bit more. I'm not familiar with who their competitors are, what makes them better, what is the differentiation points for them. But overall this is another really high quality acquisition opportunity. What do you think?

K? Yeah, I like this one a lot. Obviously our first Shopify app shown today on the profit side we see the 6x some may say, you know, is this on the high side? I would argue it's not. Shopify tends to run very lean and also we've hit a certain size threshold here with a million in revenue, over 500,000 EBITDA. So you can get higher multiples, especially with 99% NRR. That, that's amazing. That's really what revenue multiple base buyers look at is revenue retention. If that's strong, that means there is that confidence that that revenue will stay. The other thing I like about this, it's very data driven. While you might not see it here behind the scenes, you're going to be able to dive into bare metrics and all the, all the data you want for days to really help you make a nice quantitative decision and then talk to the seller about more of the nuances between the business. So really strong business. This one actually just went live over the weekend. So it's fresh on the market. You can hop in there, get into the conversation with the seller.

Yeah, the level of detail on this opportunity is it's fantastic. So if you have any questions on really any of the metrics like Kai mentioned, there's a full barometrics dashboard to give you a good view into the financial health of the business. But I think if, if you're familiar with the Shopify app ecosystem, this could be an excellent acquisition. And that's, that's all the deals we got at this point. We'll go Ahead and do some Q and A. I think we have time for. I'm gonna. I'm gonna say maybe like five or six. So let's. Let's kick this off. Kai. I'm just going to read it, and then you want to take the. The first crack at the questions that we got.

Sure, let's do it.

Okay, so this is a good question. How do you know when your startup is ready to sell?

Yeah, it. I talk to sellers all over the place. So it could be like they're six months out, they want to sell immediately, next week, or their years out. I think the best answer here is you want to make sure you have a good control of who your customer is. Try to establish that product market fit. And then, of course, try to understand would it be easy to actually hand off this business and give the buyer minimal concerns? If you can kind of check those three boxes, it might be the time to sell. Obviously, there are other factors that could cause you not to want to sell, but if you want to simplify it down, you want to make sure that someone would actually want to buy what you're offering.

100%. I was talking to this founder the other day, and he had an offer at, I believe, four or five times net profit. And he was asking me if that's a fair valuation or if he should sell or not at all or just what to do. And I just asked him, would you be willing to run the business as it is today for the next four to five years to make essentially the same amount from the business? And he said no. He had started another company. He was looking to move on. He already had a foot out the door. So the perspective I'm trying to bring is if you've already started a company, if you're looking to move on and focus on that full time, you should sell. And if you have an offer like that in hand, I think that's great, because biggest downside you can have is you stop focusing on the business, it starts declining. And that four or five times net profit offer is starting to look really, really good. And I unfortunately, have seen that happen quite a bit. So, you know, there's kind of a personal question where, you know, if you've moved on and you have something else that you're working on, I think that's also, you know, a great time to consider selling.

Yeah.

All right, next question. What kind of financials do buyers typically want to see? You want to take a crack at that one again, Kai?

Yeah, I love this one. I'm a math guy. But you got to start with your P L. It's got to be as clean as possible. Monthly data usually in Excel or sheets form, trailing back at least 12 months and then if possible 36 months. Especially as buyers dive deeper, they're going to want to see historical data to see the trends within that. You want to break down your revenue. What's recurring, what's one time, what's service revenue, have add backs, all that stuff which we help with with we do recast now for businesses. And then if we're diving even deeper into data, you want those subscription cohort analysis. So showing and validating your churn and making sure that you can prove that your customers are liking what you're offering and sticking with you. But that's really where I would start.

For financial data 100 I got some really good advice a while ago from a mentor. He said hire a good VP of finance or a controller or just someone to manage your books because the goodwill that you'll create when you sell your business will offset whatever cost that is, even if it's a high salary. I'm not saying like spend a lot on, you know, this type of service, but I'm trying to illustrate just the value it can bring to an acquisition process. It really can be the difference between an amazing acquisition or no acquisition at all. So if you don't have someone managing your books, definitely try and get that in order. Next question. What red flags turn buyers away? I'm gonna toss that one. I'm just gonna toss all of them at you guys.

Okay. Okay. Well, I'll have you put some input as well because I know you know this just as well and better than I do. But it's messy data. Really messy data is the red flag that causes a buyer to come in and then hop out pretty quickly the archive your listing. If your data is messy, if you can't understand it, I would say other things that I would hope that are more common sense is like just unwillingness to communicate. Like turn on your camera when you get on a call with a buyer and communicate professionally. Those types of things transact amicably. Like those things are X factors that give a buyer or a seller a red flag to say maybe I don't want to transact on this deal.

I would say unrealistic valuation is the biggest one I see. I work with a lot of founders as you guy where you know the mindset is, oh, just take your revenue and multiply by 10. That's what all SaaS businesses are are valued at. Unfortunately, that's just not. Not reality from my perspective. So when you value too high, what you end up doing is you just scare away interest before you can even create it with buyers. So pricing realistically allows you to set up more buyer meetings, which could set up more offers from buyers. When you have more offers, you can negotiate on price and terms and you get deals done that way. So I think unrealistic expectations is a big one that I see.

Yeah.

All right, let's go. Let's go. Two more. Since we're passing time here at 11:45, what are common reasons deals fall through? I think this will probably be similar, but what do you think, Kai?

I think one that maybe doesn't always get talked about is looking at the transition plan ahead. So there are some typical sticking points when it comes to the purchase agreement or even the transition of assets that don't always get identified before you move forward into due diligence. And in the worst case scenario, you run into a situation where an asset actually can't be transferred for whatever reason, whether it's, you know, complications or technical complications, et cetera. If that happens, then the deal will fall through and there's nothing anyone can do about it. So why not talk about it ahead of time? So mapping out the road, I think, or failure to map out the road ahead is a pretty common reason why a deal might not make it all the way through.

100%. Yeah, I think just not being. Just not communicating. Sometimes I've seen deals fall through where, you know, just have a weekly check in every single week where you meet with the buyer, you ask if there's any updates, and if there's not, that's okay. But I think what can cause a lot of deals to fall through that isn't anticipated is you don't have a regular time to communicate an issue comes up. Rather than talk about it and work through it or have an opportunity to explain it, time just goes by. And, you know, once one small issue appears, well, you know, as a buyer, you're thinking, oh, what else am I going to find? So every little thing becomes amplified and then sometimes it just makes more sense to. To walk away when at the beginning, if you had just, you know, scheduled time to communicate, frequently, I think you can get ahead of a lot of these small issues because acquisitions can be fragile where, you know, there's a lot of risk on both sides. As founders, you're selling your business. As a buyer, you're potentially acquiring this asset and you're trying to determine if everything is as stated, like you thought it would be. So just communicate over. Communicate if you can. Oh, here's a fun one. All right, we'll end on this one right here. What's the biggest myth about getting acquired? I'll start on this. You want to start?

Yeah, yeah.

I think a lot of founders think in their head that you don't have to work for an acquisition at all. This is true for some businesses where Google shows up, they have this big life size check and they're like, you made it, you got acquired. And you're like, yeah, but acquisitions are a lot of work. You got to prepare. You have to meet with buyers, you have to run a process where you speak with multiple buyers, you have to negotiate, you have to go through due diligence. It's a long process and I think the perception of it being a lot easier and faster is held by a lot of founders and that's why we're here to help. So not necessarily a bad thing. That's just probably the most common myth I see. What do you see, Kai?

And I mean this with the utmost love, but I think the most common myth is that your tech is valuable enough. A lot of people will want to sell just the tech alone because it's proprietary, because no one else is doing it. But just the way the world has advanced, someone is probably building it or has already built it. You just don't know about it. And buyers really value the revenue and the customers that come with the tech. So a tech sale alone is really not that common at all. You really want the business to be full functioning. That starts with the tech that you built. But you got to have customers, you got to have revenue coming in too.

All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining the webinar. We're going to be doing this again soon, so let us know when you receive email or feedback. And if you're looking to acquire a business, go on. To acquire dot com. We have 2,000 plus listings that you can check out today. And, and as always, if you're looking to sell a business, we're here to help. Just feel free to reach out. Thanks everybody.