何时出售SaaS业务：如何获得5倍更好的报价

So, I'm going to talk to you about when you should sell your B2B SAS business. And I actually get asked this a fair bit. Uh, which makes sense because basically selling your SAS business is really the most efficient way to extract value, the value that you created and put it in your pocket. And number two, everybody sells eventually. May maybe except like 37 signals, but fundamentally everyone sells. So, I'm going to start off with just some useless advice.

I'm sure you've heard this before, and this will be a trend actually some of my slides you may have seen earlier today. Um, the number one point you hear often from VCs is that honestly it's the equivalent of saying like you shouldn't worry about when you should sell your SAS business because startups are bought. They're not sold, didn't you know? Um, which to me is always slightly ridiculous. It's a little bit like, oh, I want to find a date, but I'm not going to go on dating apps.

I'm not going to go to bars. I'm not going to talk to anybody. they're just going to come to my house and knock on the door and that's how I'm going to find a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Um, so I think that's completely useless. The other point I'm starting to hear now is like SAS is dead, guys. Didn't you know? So like don't even worry about it. What you have is worthless. Moving on. Actually useful advice for you. Number one, you should sell your SAS to whomever pays the most at its most valuable and don't [ __ ] it up.

Talk over. dive in it. Sell to whomever pays the most. So what does that mean? Okay, so the key key thing to understand about B2B uh SAS market when it comes to buying and selling B2B SAS businesses is that extremely an extremely opaque market. Now if you come to sell your house and you find a world-class realtor, they might be able to move the market like move the price for you 5 10 15%. Right? That's an amazing realtor.

That's a that's a huge jump for them to do. In B2B SAS, the difference between only showing your business to value buyers and people that don't want to pay very well versus the people that do pay very well can be as much as 5x. I have seen multiple times that folks get offers for the same business at 5 million and $25 million. And the the other thing that you should understand is that there's a whole industry out there, billions of dollars, that their entire alpha, their business model is what they call proprietary deal flow.

And what that means is they're going to do cold email. They're going to come to conferences like this. I see some of you here. Um, and they're going to find offmarket deals and buy them for cheap. That's the entire business model. And they're pretty open about it. If you get access to the decks that they give out to their investors, they will say that we are looking to find offmarket deals for cheap and that's how we're going to make our money.

The problem for founders is it's not easy to distinguish some between somebody willing to pay 10 million and somebody willing to pay $30 million because say you get an email from somebody, right? Comes in your inbox, hey, super excited about your space. Let's get together. Let's chitchat. Let's talk about what we're seeing in the market. and you go, "Oh, it's so and so capital." And you go to their website and it's blah blah Capital or so and so partners and they all say the same thing.

This is super strategic for us. We're very founder friendly. Blah blah blah blah blah. And and on top of that, the fact that it's extremely opaque to you, it's very hard to know whether this is the kind of buyer that will pay top dollar or who will never pay more than 1x ARR is that even when you're talking to folks that are strategic or are able to pay a lot more, they're not going to pay a lot more just because they're strategic.

It's not like, oh, here comes a Fortune 500 company and because they're strategic, they'll definitely pay 20x. No, they'll pay as little as possible. That's what corpde dev people at these buyers get paid to do is to pay as little as possible. All right, the other thing to know is there's basically a hierarchy of buyers out there. And actually, I'm I'm sort of faulting my designer a little bit here. I wish he would have spaced it out a bit more.

It's sort of at the top. Oh, and before I start with this, like just you understand the sort of breakdown of the buyer universe up to about 20 million of ARR. It's about 20% strategics, like true strategics, like Fortune 500 companies, about 70% private equity, and about 20% other like other stuff. And the the people that pay the most are strategic buyers or growth focused private equity. People always seem to assume that private equity is just one big blob that all, you know, are the sort of the same and it's like a it's like a Springsteen song, you know, everything goes to hell.

They're going to fire everybody and then, you know, shut down everything. But that's not actually true. You have to understand that private equity has very many different kinds of strategies that will definitely impact u you know how much they're willing to pay for your business. So there's a very big difference between a growth focused private equity fund and a value focused private equity fund. All righty. But the other thing to understand too is like why why do some people why do some buyers uh pay more and or why can they pay more?

And the reason basically is because it's worth more to them. it's worth more to them even than they might be to you, right? Because imagine if you have a SAS business and it happens to to do the one bit of functionality that this big Fortune 500 company is missing, right? To them, if they can just buy you effectively off the shelf, not have to build it themselves, they can then, you know, sell that. Maybe they're able to land a ton more deals because they have this functionality.

They maybe already have branding, marketing power that you have nowhere near, right? Like if you have a Fortune 500 company, they may even have an entire enterprise sales division that could just plug in and start selling your your SAS at a scale that you could only dream of as an independent SAS business. So that's basically the reason why. All right, let's talk about at its most valuable. So this comes down to like optimization.

You're thinking about like, okay, fine, there are different kinds of buyers, the market's opaque, but what can I do? Like how do I think about how to optimize the value of my SAS business? And really the four key things that impact valuation in order for a B2B SAS business are growth exclamation point ARR or revenue churn and profit. And you can argue about this the two or three at the bottom which order they go in but fundamentally these are the four pieces.

Um let's take them in reverse order.

Hey Rob Walling here. If you're watching this and thinking I wish I could be in the room for talks like this. You can and you should. So much of the magic at our events happen in the hallway track. That's where you connect with two to 300 like-minded founders who are trying to solve many of the same problems you are. I hope you'll join us at our next event. Head to micromp.com/events to grab your ticket. Our next one is in Iceland in September of 2026 and then we'll be in Austin in April of 2027.

How profit impacts valuation. I mean obviously more profit more better. like obviously um but the key thing to understand is there's sort of a breaking point right around uh break even. So if you're going to go to market, if you're going to sell your business and you've taken some investment and that because of that you're burning money, you should think about getting yourself to at least break even because there are a class of buyers, a a large number of buyers that will just disqualify themselves from being interested if you're burning money.

And [snorts] so if there are fewer buyers, the value will probably go down. Um the second part of that is just natu

原文超出正文长度上限，此处截断——上游还有内容，完整版见上方「原文 ↗」。