What do I need before I list?
The short answer
Before listing you need twelve months of revenue you can evidence from your payment processor, an SDE calculation with defensible add-backs, a documented stack, a written list of every asset that transfers, and a business that runs without you. Missing any one of them costs price rather than time.
What does a listing actually need to contain?
A listing needs enough evidence for a serious operator to decide whether to spend a week on you, which in practice means numbers, sources and a straight account of the risks. At $50,000 to $150,000 the buyer is committing real capital and will read your listing the way an underwriter reads a file. Three sentences of enthusiasm and a screenshot is a listing that gets scrolled past. A short, plain listing with twelve months of revenue, a cost breakdown and a clear statement of how customers arrive gets read twice.
Write it as though the reader is sceptical and busy, because they are. Understating a strength costs you less than overstating one, since the overstatement gets found in diligence and takes your credibility with it.
What financial evidence do you need?
You need twelve full months of revenue that can be traced to the account where the money actually landed, plus a cost base itemised line by line. Memory, spreadsheets and annotated screenshots are a starting point rather than evidence. Buyers at this size expect to reach your payment processor in read-only form during diligence, so build your listing from those figures rather than from a version you will later have to reconcile.
From that, calculate seller's discretionary earnings: profit after the costs the business genuinely needs, with your own salary and personal spending added back. Add back only what the next owner will not have to pay. The most common overstatement is adding back a contractor the business cannot function without.
What has to exist as a document?
Five documents do most of the work in diligence, and each of them takes a founder a day at most.
| Document | What it contains | Why a buyer wants it |
|---|---|---|
| Profit and loss, twelve months | Revenue and costs by month | Establishes the trailing profit figure the price rests on |
| Asset schedule | Every domain, repository, service account and licence | Becomes the schedule in the purchase agreement |
| Operating documentation | How the business is run week to week | Shows the work is transferable, not in your head |
| Customer summary | Counts, plans, tenure, concentration | Lets a buyer judge retention and dependency |
| Traffic and acquisition summary | Where signups come from, by channel | Decides how much of the revenue survives you leaving |
None of these needs to be polished. They need to be true, current and quick to read. A buyer who receives all five in one folder on day one behaves very differently from one who extracts them over three weeks.
What state does the product need to be in?
The product needs to run without your involvement for at least a fortnight, and the infrastructure needs to sit in accounts that can be transferred rather than in your personal ones. Walk through the stack and find every place your own identity is load-bearing: a domain registered to your personal email, an API key tied to your name, a deployment that only works from your laptop. Each one is a handover risk, and buyers price handover risk cautiously because they cannot size it from outside.
Technical debt matters less than founders fear and documentation matters more. A buyer will forgive untidy code they can read. They will not forgive a deployment process nobody but you understands.
How do you know you are ready?
Work through this in order, and do not list until every line is true:
- Twelve months of revenue visible in the processor, matching your profit and loss to the pound.
- SDE calculated, with a one-line justification written beside every add-back.
- A price set from the conventional range for your asset type applied to trailing annual profit.
- Asset schedule complete, including anything a contractor built and anything registered in your own name.
- Operating documentation written, then tested by not touching the business for two weeks.
- Your answer to "why are you exiting" written down in one honest sentence.
- Concentration checked: no single customer or channel carrying more of the revenue than you would want to explain.
Point seven is the one founders skip. If one customer is a third of revenue or one channel brings nearly all the signups, a buyer will find it and price it, so put it in the listing yourself and frame it accurately.
What does preparation buy you?
Preparation moves the price, not just the timeline. A business producing $40,000 of trailing annual profit sits somewhere between $80,000 and $160,000 at the conventional micro-SaaS range of 2–4×, and where inside that spread it lands is decided almost entirely by evidence and transferability. The difference between the bottom and the middle of that range is around $40,000, which is a strong return on a fortnight of tidying.
The same preparation shortens diligence. A buyer who can answer their own questions from the material you supplied spends their energy deciding rather than extracting.
What can wait?
The purchase agreement, escrow arrangements and the detailed handover plan can all wait until there is an interested buyer. Drafting a full legal agreement before anyone has made an offer is effort spent on a document that will be rewritten. Keep a skeleton asset schedule ready, since that feeds straight into the agreement, and leave the rest.
Pricing can also be revisited, within reason. Listing high and cutting later signals something you would rather not signal, so set the number from trailing annual profit once and hold it while the evidence supports it.
Related: how-to-calculate-sde, do-i-need-to-show-stripe-data, what-buyers-check-before-making-an-offer
See what a business at this level is listed at.
Everything on sale between $50,000 and $150,000, on the same fields.