When acquirers start emailing

If you're running anything with visible traction, you get the emails. Private equity associates, corp dev at a larger company in your space, aggregators, brokers, and a long tail of people whose role is unclear.

I ignored these for the first two years on the theory that I wasn't selling. That was a mistake — not because I should have been selling, but because the emails are information and I was throwing it away.

What they usually are#

Most of these are not interest in you. They're a pipeline job. Someone is paid to contact every company in a category and produce conversations, and you are one row in a list. The email is warm and specific enough to feel personal, which is a skill they've developed for exactly this reason.

The tell is what happens when you reply. Genuine interest asks about your business. Pipeline work asks for your numbers immediately, on a call, with nothing offered in return.

What the real ones look like#

The ones worth anything have a few properties in common:

They already know things. They've used the product, or they've talked to merchants, or they can describe your position in the market accurately without asking. Somebody spent time before reaching out.

They have a thesis about why you specifically. Not "we're acquisitive in ecommerce SaaS." An actual reason this asset fits something they're building.

They tell you what they are. Strategic buyer, private equity, aggregator — each of these wants a different thing and values you differently, and the serious ones don't obscure which they are.

They're comfortable with you not selling. Because they're trying to build a relationship that might matter in two years, and pressure works against that.

Why I take them now#

I'm not running a process. But I take a call every so often, and here's what it's worth even with no intention to sell:

You find out how you're valued and on what basis. Different buyer types anchor on completely different things — some on revenue multiple, some on the team, some on the customer list, some on whether you'd plug a hole in their product. Learning which parts of your business the market cares about is genuinely useful information for running it.

You learn what would disqualify you. Every conversation surfaces something — customer concentration, a dependency, a metric they'd want to see structured differently. Those are things you can fix over a year if you know about them, and cannot fix in the ninety days after you decide to sell.

You build a relationship before you need one. If there's ever a moment when selling is the right move, the worst position is starting from zero with a deadline. Having had four conversations over two years with people who already understand the business is a completely different starting point.

It calibrates you. Founders carry a private number for what their company is worth and it's usually assembled from press releases about other companies. Talking to actual buyers replaces that with something real, which is occasionally humbling and always better than the fantasy.

The cost, which is real#

It eats time and it eats attention in a way that's out of proportion to the hours. A conversation about selling your company sits in your head afterward, and it competes with the work.

There's also a version of this where you start running the company for the buyer instead of the customer, and that's a genuine trap — optimizing metrics because you've learned they're what gets valued, rather than because they're what makes the business good. I don't have a clean defense against that other than noticing it.

So: take some of the calls, don't take all of them, and don't let the frame of "what is this worth" replace the frame of "is this good." One of those is a permanent question and the other one only matters on a single day that may never come.