Every founder I talk to eventually asks some version of the same question. What do buyers actually want?

It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is annoying: they want everything. Great retention, no customer concentration, smooth cash flow, high gross margins, and a product people would riot over if you shut it down. Nobody has all of that. If you did, you wouldn’t be reading this, you’d be fielding inbound from Thoma Bravo.

What’s more useful is understanding the actual checklist. Not because you need to ace it, but because it’s the language every buyer speaks, and knowing where you land on each item tells you a lot about who your buyer is and what they’ll pay.

None of these matter more than the others. They all get weighed together, and a weakness in one place can get offset by strength somewhere else. That’s the whole game.

The three retention numbers

People throw around “retention” like it’s one number. It’s three, and they tell you different things.

Gross revenue retention is what you keep before any upsells. Start the year with $1M from a cohort, end with $900K from that same group, that’s 90% GRR. It tells a buyer how fast the bucket leaks. Above 90% is good. Below 85% means you’re running to stand still.

Net revenue retention adds expansion back in. Same cohort goes from $1M to $1.05M after upsells, that’s 105%. This is the number that gets founders excited, and for good reason, because it means your customers are growing with you. It’s also the number that can hide problems, which brings us to the third one.

Logo retention is just: how many customers stuck around? You can post 115% NRR because one enterprise account tripled while you quietly lost 25% of your logos. The revenue math looks great. The business underneath is a lot shakier than it appears. Buyers check all three for exactly this reason.

Customer concentration, the deal killer

This is the one that ends conversations. A buyer can live with slow growth, thin margins, even some churn. What they can’t live with is finding out on page 12 of the data room that one customer is 30% of revenue.

The question a buyer is asking is simple. If that customer leaves, what’s left? If the answer is “not much,” they’ll either walk or price the deal like that customer already churned.

Rough guide: no single customer above 10%, ideally under 5%, and your top 10 under 30% of total revenue.

Smooth cash flow beats big cash flow

Most people think about cash flow as a number. Buyers think about it as a shape.

A business doing $100K a month, every month, is a different animal than one doing $1.2M a year that all lands in two lumps around renewal season. Same annual total. Completely different risk profile. One of them can miss a month and be fine. The other one has two months a year where everything has to go right.

This is mostly a billing question. Monthly billing smooths the curve but churn is easier, because canceling a $500 monthly subscription takes about four clicks. Annual billing locks people in for twelve months and usually shows up as better retention, but your cash flow chart starts looking like a heart monitor.

Neither is wrong. Most companies are a mix anyway. What buyers want is to understand the mix, because a business that’s 80% annual with 90% renewals models very differently than one that’s 70% monthly with 8% monthly churn, even if last year’s cash flow looks identical.

Self-serve or managed services?

There’s a tidy way people categorize software companies. Self-serve on one side, credit card signup, no humans involved. Implementation-heavy on the other, six-week onboarding, solutions engineers, a Gantt chart somewhere.

Almost nobody actually lives at either end. Most companies have a self-serve tier that drives logo count and an enterprise tier that drives revenue. Or they have a product that’s technically self-serve but every new customer needs hand-holding for the first month, which is implementation with extra steps.

Buyers care because it shows up in gross margin. Pure self-serve tends to run 80% or better. Add services and it compresses. The public SaaS median sat at 73% in 1Q26, with the top end above 87%.

A business that’s 80% self-serve SaaS and 20% recurring services is completely fine. What buyers want is for you to know that’s what you are, and to be able to explain it without getting defensive about it.

There’s no single buyer

Here’s the part that gets lost. “What buyers want” implies buyers are one group with one preference. They’re not.

A strategic acquirer wants a product that plugs into what they already have. They’ll pay up for fit and forgive a lot of financial mess if it fills a gap. A PE firm wants clean unit economics and a visible path to margin expansion. A permanent holder like us wants a business that works today and has room to grow without a five-year sprint attached.

Same company, three different prices, three different structures. Which is why the goal isn’t to be perfect. It’s to know your profile well enough to find the buyer built for it.

Where we sit

We look at software companies all day at Curious. Almost none of them check every box. Perfect NRR, zero concentration, flat cash flow, 90% margins, all at once? That company doesn’t exist outside of a pitch deck.

We’ve bought businesses with customer concentration. With mixed billing. With services revenue sitting next to the SaaS. Messy is normal, and messy is usually fixable.

But knowing the checklist is still worth it. When you understand where you’re strong and where you’re not, you stop guessing about what your business is worth and you stop wasting time with buyers who were never going to be the right fit.

If you’re thinking about what comes next, we’re happy to talk.

Sourcing note: Market figures (deal volume, median multiples, gross margin benchmarks) from Software Equity Group, 1Q26 Quarterly SaaS Report.