What to Do before Selling Your SaaS Business
Are you thinking of selling your software as a service (SaaS) business? Remember, buyers most often buy SaaS businesses for financial or tactical reasons. Know what they want in an acquisition, and you will be in a better position to undergo the entire process without much difficulty.
Establish the Value of Your SaaS Business
It doesn’t matter if you are selling a SaaS business or a website; you need to find out the best price to sell your business. To know what you may receive in the market, you need to get a valuation of your SaaS business to be aware of what it’s worth. After that, start setting up your company’s prospectus, including the facts, figures, and numbers. Typically, this is done by computing the annual revenue generated by your SaaS business and doubling up that amount. Also, factor in the amount you’ll compensate the broker or marketplace you use to sell your SaaS business.
Put Your Books in Order
Recurring proceeds is one of the highest draws to a SaaS business. Nevertheless, in terms of increasing revenue generation, a growing business doesn’t guarantee that buyers will pounce on your deal. Potential buyers are often not much intrigued by ‘what meets the eye’. Meaning, they would be more interested in finding out the fraction of your actually profitable earnings. For this reason, you need to compute costs, such as costs of acquiring customers, your rate of churn, your average growth rate, and more.
To put your books in order, you need to think about maximizing profits and minimizing expenses. Usually, it’s less costly to retain, serve, get existing clients to subscribe and renew than trying to attract new customers to swap the cash flow. Additionally, upgrade your systems time and again to help you lessen cancellations. One thoughtful way of minimizing costs is cutting down human assistance. Use tutorials, videos, and knowledge bases to reduce the need for interaction between humans.
Debug Your Source Code
It doesn’t matter your finances are in good shape. If your source code is disordered, jumbled up, or missing in documentation, potential buyers will be a bit skeptical about your business. In essence, your SaaS business source code ought to be clean, annotated, tested, and verified. It can be overwhelmingly difficult to sell your SaaS business if the source code doesn’t comply with the set standards and guidelines.
As well, a non-reliable, non-concise, overly complicated code can present you challenges as far as selling SaaS businesses is concerned. Being the business proprietor, you need to be familiar with all the entries and exits of your source code. For a reason, it will present fewer challenges to the buyer; in case they want to alter or upgrade the software. Aside from that, a well-documented source code lets the seller take over your business naturally.
Assess if You Need External Assistance to Sell Your SaaS Business
Note that, a reliable online business broker can help you get a valuation of your SaaS business. This is necessary so you are clear about what your business is worth. The good thing, you won’t need to meet your preferred business broker physically. Schedule time to chat with a reliable online business broker (website to advertise) to identify appropriate buyers. Of course, you need to have completed the valuation and prospectus before you start looking for buyers.
An extensively experienced online business broker can help you prepare and move you through the entire process of selling your SaaS company. More importantly, letting an expert online business broker negotiate the price with prospective customers on your behalf removes you from the equation. As a result, it eases the discomfort you might have when it comes to the actual transaction.
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