SaaS Investment Criteria

April 30, 2019
by a professional from San Jose State University in Redwood City, CA, USA
For those looking to acquire an early-stage, SaaS company, what's your acquisition criteria?
What are your Minimum Requirements?
Monthly re-occurring revenues (MRR)
Number of Customers / Accounts
EBITDA
How would you arrive at your offer price?
Minimal sales team
Able to close most deals via marketing automation and sales Zoom demo
Solid Intellectual Property
Automation built into the DNA of the operations: Sales, Marketing, Accounting / AR
Tracking sales data and dashboards in real-time
Well-architected APIs to connect to other large enterprise platforms
Lean start-up. Minimal engineering headcount.
Close to break-even. They can become cash flow positive without outside investors.
Low debt
/ startup costs
Growing MRR
Reasonable customer acquisition cost
Low customer churn rate
Below market sales, marketing and s/w engineering costs
Very stylish UI / UX
from Northwestern University in Minneapolis, MN, USA
Profitwell is one of the best tools for tracking SaaS metrics: https://www.profitwell.com. They also have lots of articles and guides on the SaaS business model. I’d highly recommend poking around their site.
Also, the SaaS CFO site has a lot of great insight into SaaS metrics: https://www.thesaascfo.com
from Harvard University in Boston, MA, USA