Sell your saas company business.

How subscription quality is actually underwritten

A SaaS company is a multi-tenant product with a subscription file—not a license book and not a studio. Buyers start with MRR or ARR composition: new logos versus expansion, logo churn versus dollar churn, and how much of recurring revenue sits in the top accounts. They will ask for net and gross retention as you actually calculate them. Inventing a prettier definition in the CIM is how trust dies in diligence.

Concentration is a metric, not a vibe. If a handful of tenants are the book, say the share. Usage that is declining while invoices are flat gets found when someone reads seats and login data. We would rather show the cohort table than a single “retention is strong” sentence.

Code, infra, and the data-processing file

Who can deploy, where production lives, and whether customer data processing is documented matter as much as the growth chart. SOC 2 or similar, if you claim it, has to match the report. Founder-only AWS roots and a single-region hope are transition work. So is a sales motion that is only you on a plane. Subprocessors, data-residency promises, and a status page that still pages your phone are the same file as the product—buyers will ask who gets the 2 a.m. page after you leave.

Implementation services bolted onto the product need their own margin. A “SaaS” P&L that is half custom work will be re-cut.

The diligence pack that survives a quality-of-earnings

Monthly recurring by cohort, churn with a written definition, a concentration list, and the contracts that actually auto-renew. Add who owns the IP and whether any customer has a source or most-favored clause. That is enough to tell you whether you have a product a successor can run or a founder-led book that still needs you in every QBR. Include how you treat paused tenants, annual prepay, and credits. Those items get restated if you bury them inside a single MRR cell.