Acquire.com's defining feature for a buyer is direct founder contact. That is genuinely valuable, because you can ask questions no listing format anticipates. It also means diligence tends to happen in conversation, where claims are easy to accept and hard to reconstruct later.
TL;DR: Acquire.com puts buyers in direct contact with founders, which makes diligence conversational rather than documentary. Here is what to ask for and the traps specific to founder-sold SaaS.
Startup marketplace, founder-to-buyer, mostly small startup and SaaS deals. That shape determines what a buyer can expect to be given and what has to be requested, which is most of what changes between one acquisition channel and another.
Listings are prepared by founders, typically with revenue and growth figures, a description of the product and the customer base, and whatever supporting material the founder chose to assemble. Because the marketplace is oriented around founder-to-buyer contact, much of the substantive information arrives in messages and calls rather than in the listing.
Because the process is conversational, there is often no single document that states the retention claim precisely. Renewal calendars, concentration analysis on parent entities, and the recurring-versus-one-time split are usually absent from the listing and only partially covered in conversation. Founder dependency, which at this end of the market is frequently the largest single risk, is almost never quantified.
A number given on a call is not a number you can go back to. Confirm every material claim in writing, in the founder's own words, and specifically ask for the formula behind any churn or retention figure. This is not adversarial; it is the only way to discover a definitional difference before it becomes a disagreement.
Founder-sold startups frequently run on the founder's audience, network and accumulated product knowledge. Ask for acquisition source by month and check what share arrives through channels attributable to a person. Ask what the founder actually did in the last four weeks.
Startup listings emphasise trajectory, and a strong recent trend over twelve months can rest on a handful of months. Rebuild the MRR series yourself and decompose it into new, expansion, contraction and churn, because a rising line constrains retention not at all.
In a founder-run business the biggest customers are often retained by a relationship rather than by a contract. Cross-check the top accounts against tenure and contract status, and ask to speak to them before close rather than after.
In order, and stopping early if any step produces a blocker:
Getting a usable export is its own problem, and the request wording that works differs by billing platform. The export guides cover eighteen platforms with the exact wording to send and the status values that mislead on each. Once you have the file, the seller-claims pages give the arithmetic for each specific claim, and the 23-point checklist is the short version of the whole process.
Acquire.com: https://acquire.com/
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Every check on this page can be run by hand in a spreadsheet, and if you have the time you should. If you would rather not: send us the target's subscription export and we run the full human-reviewed analysis — logo churn, revenue churn, customer concentration, annual-plan decay, zombie MRR and an A–F revenue-quality grade. The free Starter tier covers one CSV per month, which is enough to check a single deal.
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The retention claim and its formula in writing, a complete subscription export including cancellations, the MRR decomposition into new, expansion, contraction and churn, and the founder-attributable share of customer acquisition. The last of those is usually the biggest gap between the business the founder runs and the business you would receive.
Look for the founder in the data rather than in their stated hours. Acquisition source by month shows whether customers arrive through a system or a person. Tenure and contract status on the largest accounts show whether revenue is held by the product or by a relationship. Support volume against documented process shows whether low hours mean systematised or absorbed.
Where revenue is concentrated or relationships are long-standing, yes, and before close rather than after. It is a normal request in a deal of any size, usually handled late in the process under confidentiality. A seller's willingness to arrange it is informative in itself.