Excellent insight guys! I fully agree with the mindset of always being ready to sell and setting up your business, so that a trade sale captures as much value as possible.
That being said, however, I'd caution against this way of thinking for startups in the early stages of discovery and product building. There, the priority should be on figuring out how to create value for the target market (product discovery) and how to build a product that delivers that value.
Strong validation and even stronger revenue growth will make your business more attractive for acquisition anyway.
Prioritizing integration and optimizing for strategic fit into a larger player's ecosystem should come after the business already delivers value through its core offerings and has strong traction.
This will be true even if you're building a product for a specific ecosystem, e.g. a calendar planner for Notion or an email responder for ClickUp.
This one was fire
Excellent insight guys! I fully agree with the mindset of always being ready to sell and setting up your business, so that a trade sale captures as much value as possible.
That being said, however, I'd caution against this way of thinking for startups in the early stages of discovery and product building. There, the priority should be on figuring out how to create value for the target market (product discovery) and how to build a product that delivers that value.
Strong validation and even stronger revenue growth will make your business more attractive for acquisition anyway.
Prioritizing integration and optimizing for strategic fit into a larger player's ecosystem should come after the business already delivers value through its core offerings and has strong traction.
This will be true even if you're building a product for a specific ecosystem, e.g. a calendar planner for Notion or an email responder for ClickUp.