How I sold my SaaS company - twice.

Just like the title said, I am in a very weird club of selling getting 2 exits from one product, within 12 months. Here's how that happened.

In 2020 I started ESG Analytics, which was a tool that leverages NLP and sentiment analysis to create real time scoring of companies ESG (environmental, social and governance) performance. The field had some high priced enterprise players, and I figured I had the background and skills to turn it into a SaaS.

I'll save the full story for another time, but the short version is I raised a small amount from family and friends, built the thing solo at first then with a dev I hired and we made the thing, which was valuable data.

I always wanted to sell from day one, that was the goal - so I was always hunting for potential M&A opportunities.

A quasi competitor one day signed up for the product, and their CEO followed me on LinkedIn and we began a conversation, and I straight up asked if they were open to M&A opportunities - which she was, it was a private equity backed company, and she was on the hunt for deals herself.

So we chatted, and I met the CTO, and CRO and CPO and it all made sense. Really great strategic fit as they did reputation analysis, and were exploring ESG within that.

We drew up the documents after going back and forth between an asset sale and share sale (another post on that sometime!), and ultimately the asset sale made sense - and was easier. I flew from Toronto to Boston for them to 'see the whites of my eyes' before closing the deal (we were fully remote, whole thing built in my boxers on the couch).

One day the deal closed, with about a 15X multiple which was great (end of 2022). I paid out my investors, I still owned 92% of the company, so kept the lions share :) I requested mostly cash and got a bit of stock too.

Then came the start of the weird part.

They acquired me and gave me a really good salary, but then they didn't really put full effort into integrating, and also they ended up going through their own businesses issues.

Suddenly the CTO left. Then the CPO. Then the CEO! This was about 6 months after.

Now we were like this entity in the firm nobody really knew what to do with, since the people who wanted us there were gone. So eventually the day came where they say us down and told us that they would terminate the relationship, which was fine with me.

But then they said one more thing: "we'll give you your business back, because we don't know how to run it".

I kinda LOL'd to be honest. So here I was, back to having my SaaS, and fresh capital in the bank. So I simultaneously started two paths - 1) scaling up the business with a more defined marketing strategy + brought someone on for outreach and 2) Listed on Microacquire to see what the response would be

We ended up getting 3 parties, all who gave term sheets within a month. The price was around an 11X multiple.

We ended up finding a really great fit with a alternative data provider that makes trading signals, and our data fits in really nicely, and they have a great team. They've been awesome about making things cohesive, and have kept us on (me and my marketing guy) as consultants.

So there you have it - one product, 2 exits, within 1 year.

Now I'm building lancr.co - which is a freelancer management and payment platform that saves tons of fees and keeps things simple and easy!

Follow the rest of my journey at https://twitter.com/@qayyumrajan