Show HN: 스타트업을 판매하는 데 4년이 걸렸습니다. 그에 관한 책을 썼습니다.
Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it
요약
저자는 스타트업을 매각하는 4년간의 여정을 회고하며, 인수 과정에서 겪었던 실수와 어려움을 상세히 담은 책을 출간했습니다. "The Toughest Sell A Founder's Guide to Startup Exits"라는 제목의 이 책은 초기 문의부터 최종 협상까지 모든 과정을 다루며, 비슷한 매각을 경험하는 다른 창업자들을 위한 가이드 역할을 목표로 합니다.
댓글 (21)
"Now should you hire a banker when there is no actionable inbound interest and you have no prior relationships? I would recommend no, as in such a case bankers would typically rely on their network of Corp Devs and present your company to a laundry list of potential companies that likely have nothing to do with your space or business or you have no interest working for."
..is not how a great banker that actually does deals in the revenue size and market you're in would act. I can see how a "too large" a bank where you're small fry, would do this, but eg in my space ($2-20M ARR), the key job of your banker is to reach out to whomever would pay the most for your business, not just their corp dev buddies they happen to have existing relationships with.
That's not easy - there are 1000+ repeat software buyers with various portfolios and all kinds of timing constraints, and that's even before considering true strategics (in my range, the buyer mix is 70% PE or PE owned, 20% strategics and 10% other).
Typically, for a proper process, you'd want to see 100-150 (well sourced and properly targeted) potential acquirers. If they're just sending you to a handful of corp devs then they're not taking your business seriously and you should get another banker.
I agree that good bankers are hard to come by and unfortunately most simply forward decks to a broad list, and they won’t get founders the outcome they deserve. My point was more about readiness for a sale. Having gone through it, I’ve come to believe there are certain prerequisites for even kicking off a process, primarily business fundamentals and pre-existing relationships.
In my experience, a banker can amplify an existing market, but they can’t create one from scratch (at least not easily).
For example, in our case we had roughly six serious inbound inquiries before engaging bankers. While our bankers (and they are great) ran a broad discovery process and put us in front of many potential acquirers, the eventual buyer was one that reached out to us unsolicitedly rather than being introduced through the process.
BUT...
If you use this tool I just vibe-coded with our good friend Claude: https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/
And point it at the repository: https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo...
It will give you an ePub with all the chapters, including a bit of styling etc.
The code is MIT licensed, so do with it as you wish.
Dear ChatGPT, please rephrase these bulletpoints into a chapter of my book: ...
Pray tell why may we not just read the bulletpoints instead?
Sold your own company, but unable to use your own words?
In a sense, "I wrote a book about it" is disingenuous and I agree the author's bullet list would probably be more interesting and would save us a lot of time.
It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in one sitting.
I didn't realize how poignant of a criticism this could be. Holy hell that hit hard.