Marketplaces, brokers, strategic buyers, private equity, direct to a holding company. Each one takes a different cut, moves at a different speed, and leaves you carrying a different amount of risk. Set your revenue and the comparison below recalculates in real dollars.
Fees are only part of the cost. The rest is time at a stage of your life when time is the scarce thing, and the risk that a process runs for eight months and ends in nothing.
Reach. A queue of buyers you'd never have found, in exchange for your company becoming a public listing that customers and staff can stumble across.
A run process and competitive tension. Someone else does the outreach, manages the data room and pushes the buyers, and on a genuinely contested deal that can more than pay for itself.
A full auction with institutional buyers. Worth it above roughly $10M in enterprise value and rarely worth it below, because the retainer is due whether or not anything closes.
The highest likely price, because they're buying something worth more to them than to you. Slowest diligence, most conditions, and the outcome for your product is usually absorption.
One buyer, cash on the balance sheet, no listing and no intermediary. You give up the price tension a process creates and you get certainty and speed in exchange.
We're one of the five routes, so read this knowing that. We've written the case for the other four the way we'd want someone to write ours.
When your company is under about $2M in revenue, you can tolerate the listing being visible, and you'd rather have twenty conversations than two.
When you believe several buyers will genuinely compete, and the premium a contested process creates will exceed the ten percent you're paying for it. On a one-buyer deal you're paying a lot for introductions you could have made.
Above roughly $10M in enterprise value, where institutional buyers expect an institutional process and the retainer is small next to the price difference a proper auction produces.
When one specific company would obviously be worth more owning you than not. Name them, approach them directly, and be ready for a long diligence and a product outcome you don't control.
When certainty, speed and confidentiality beat squeezing the last turn out of the price. Also the right route when your situation is messy enough that a public process would be unkind to the team.
A listing is public. A broker process means dozens of parties under NDA, which is not the same as nobody knowing. A direct conversation is two companies and a document.
This matters more than the fee difference for most founders we talk to, and it never appears in a comparison table.
An enterprise customer who hears you're for sale will slow-walk their renewal until they know who they'll be buying from. That shows up in your numbers during diligence, at exactly the wrong moment.
The fastest way for a competitor to weaken you is to call your two best engineers the week your listing goes up. It costs them nothing to try.
People should hear it from you. A listing, a broker's teaser or a buyer's careless reference call takes that choice away, and you can't get it back.
If a public process ends without a sale, the next buyer knows. A direct conversation that goes nowhere leaves no trace and costs you a few weeks.
Five realistic routes: an online marketplace, a business broker, an investment bank, directly to a strategic acquirer, or directly to a holding company. Below about $2M in revenue, marketplaces do most of the volume. Between $2M and $10M, direct and broker routes dominate.
Curious is a long-term holding company that buys and grows software companies with empathy.
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