How Founders Get Their Company Ready to Sell.

Every founder daydreams about the acquisition offer. Fewer think about what happens in the 90 days after it lands. That's when due diligence begins, and that's where most deals get smaller, slower, or quieter. Designli's free SaaS Acquisition Checklist gives you a clear way to prepare for that moment before an acquirer ever shows up.

The thing about due diligence is that it surfaces problems your team has been working around for years. Undocumented architecture. A contractor who never signed an IP assignment. Customer contracts buried in someone's inbox. A churn metric that looks great in the deck and questionable in the data warehouse. None of these issues are deal-breakers on their own. Stacked together, they're exactly how a "great" acquisition offer gets repriced, delayed, or quietly withdrawn.

The Get Acquired Checklist walks you through the categories acquirers actually scrutinize, in plain language:

• Financial readiness: MRR, churn, gross margin, unit economics, and whether your numbers reconcile cleanly across QuickBooks, Stripe, and your CRM
• Legal and IP: Entity structure, cap table hygiene, IP assignments, customer contracts, employee and contractor agreements
• Technical health: Code ownership, architecture, security posture, third-party dependencies, and documentation a new team could actually pick up
• Customer and revenue: Contract terms, renewal rates, top-customer exposure, and how retention is calculated
• Team and operations: Key-person risk, role documentation, hiring pipeline, and what falls apart if the founder steps back

For each item, you'll get a quick yes or no, a short explanation of why acquirers care, and a flag for the gaps worth fixing now versus the ones you can address during the process. The output is a punch list you can use to prepare quietly, on your own timeline, instead of scrambling once a term sheet is on the table.

At Designli, we work with founders on both sides of this conversation: companies preparing for a strategic exit, and acquirers asking us to assess a target's technical foundation. The pattern is consistent. Founders who run through a checklist like this one a year out close better deals, faster, with fewer surprises. Try it free, and start tightening the gaps your future acquirer will absolutely look at.