Most founders design products for generic customers, but your real customer is the acquirer's customer base. Align your product and go-to-market strategy to what an acquirer's existing customers need, and you'll either get acquired or command a higher multiple.
Chapters
So let's go through the lifecycle. So you, you get into your product and you build a product based on a person, based on a customer that you have in mind. That customer then has an ideal customer profile of the business and a persona, which is the customer that works at the business that you're trying to sell to, because you sell to people, not companies, right? So let's say you have those things and then now you move into go-to-market and you start advertising to those same customers. That you have built up a list to, to try to get them to buy the product that you built specifically for them. Now you've acquired a whole bunch of customers and now you're trying to go out. You go through the whole process and you get to your exit strategy and you start talking to acquirers. And the first thing they're saying is, is there a match between my customers and your customer? And they're like, there's no match. Now what are you going to do? Are you just going to go out and try to find an acquirer out of the blue. Like, that's just, I mean, I don't even know how that, how you just go kind of find one and try to see if you have the same customer fit. The chances are you're not going to have the same customer fit, and because you don't have the same customer fit, you're not going to get an acquisition. And even if you find somebody that does have a customer fit, They're going to know the scenario you're in and your multiple's going to get dropped and your acquisition's going to be less money because they've got a handle on the leverage throttle, right? So they're like, yeah, this person's got no other routes in mind. Even if you have 3 routes in mind, if you haven't chosen the customer for the end result, it's just, I haven't seen it work. I mean, I've done this my whole life and I have never seen it work unless you choose the acquirer at the beginning and then back everything into that. Because really everybody says the customer's at the center, the customer's at the center, right? But the customer is the customer of your acquirer. And at the end of the day, the acquisition is your target. So it's really the customer at the center, or is it the acquirer's customer that's at the center? It's the acquirer's customer. It's the center. It's not Some customer that you randomly came up with. I talk about this so often. I just get so— it just seems, I don't understand why anybody doesn't just, it's so logical.
