a single source, nothing corroborates it

Vet the acquirer before you let them vet you

Run your own diligence the moment someone makes contact: find their full legal name in the terms of their other properties, search for complaints, and follow the acquirers in your niche years before you want to sell. Listening through a long archive of seller interviews tells you which questions matter.

The method

1. 01

   Run your own due diligence on the acquirer before theirs starts on you. Kahl and his cofounder vetted every party that approached FeedbackPanda this way.

2. 02

   Find the acquirer's whole portfolio by googling their full legal name, which appears in the terms and conditions shared across all their properties.

3. 03

   Search for complaints about the buyer and the individual contacting you, using a query that pairs the company name with the word problem alongside acquisition.

4. 04

   Track down the founders who previously sold to this buyer, whose names get scrubbed post acquisition, through old company blog posts, website source code, historical commits in public repositories and interviews about the sale.

5. 05

   Listen through the Built to Sell interview archive before your own process, because the repeated themes across hundreds of seller interviews tell you which questions to ask.

What it returned

• 2019

  FeedbackPanda sold to SureSwift Capital in 2019 after this vetting process turned up no problems

• John Warrillow's Built to Sell podcast has hundreds of episodes, and Kahl listened to almost all of them before his due diligence

Sources

• So You Got an Offer: How to Do Due Diligence on Your Potential Acquirer – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · 2020-01-09