Getting acquired is not a lottery you enter by building something good. It's outreach, and the founders who get bought are usually the ones who wrote the email. Here is what the email says, who it goes to, and what happens in the four weeks after you send it.
We read every inbound message. The ones answered the same day all look roughly like this, and the ones that sit unanswered usually share the same three problems.
Hi Andrew, I run Fieldnote, a scheduling tool for independent surveying firms. About 340 customers, $3.4M ARR, growing around 9% a year, net revenue retention at 96%.
Bootstrapped, six people, profitable-ish. I've been running it for seven years and I'm starting to think it needs an owner who wants the next seven.
Happy to send the P&L and a revenue export under NDA. If this isn't your kind of thing, no hard feelings, and I'd appreciate a pointer to who it might suit.
— Dana
ARR, retention, growth. Withholding revenue to force a call costs you a week and tells the buyer you haven't done this before. Any serious buyer can qualify you in one read.
What it does and who pays for it. Not the vision, not the market size. A buyer at this size is evaluating a business, not an opportunity.
Burnout, a co-founder leaving, a market shift, or just seven years. Honesty here shortens everything. It doesn't lower the price and it makes the buyer trust the rest.
An attachment slows the first reply. Send prose, and send the documents once someone asks and an NDA is signed.
An explicit invitation to decline gets you a fast honest answer and often a referral. Buyers avoid replying when the reply feels like a confrontation.
Not the same as what makes it a good company. These are the five things that make a buyer's decision easy, and four of the five are within your control this quarter.
Contracted, repeating, and verifiable from a billing export. This is the floor for a company sale rather than an asset sale.
Retention is the whole thesis for a long-term owner. A company that keeps its customers can be owned for decades.
If sales, support and deploys all route through you, the buyer is purchasing a job. A team that can run a week alone is worth real money.
Owned IP, assignable contracts, a cap table that reconciles. Rarely raises the price, frequently saves the deal.
Tell buyers the bad parts first. Every company has them, we'll find them anyway, and hearing them from you is the single fastest way to build trust.
Write directly to the buyers who fit your company. Most acquisitions under $10M start with an email from the founder, not with a banker or an inbound approach. Two to four well-targeted emails beat a broad campaign every time.
Curious is a long-term holding company that buys and grows software companies with empathy.
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