A note on this story: this is an illustrative composite of a deal shape this market sees regularly, published to establish the format for this archive. Real exits published here name the business and the seller, with their permission, or they don't get published.
Ledgerly was a recurring-invoice tool for freelance designers. Two founders, both employed full-time elsewhere, eighteen months from first commit to sale. It never had a landing page redesign, never ran an ad, and never had more than 220 paying customers.
The numbers
Metric | At sale |
|---|---|
MRR | $4,100 |
Monthly profit (SDE) | $3,480 |
Paying customers | 218 |
Average revenue per customer | $18.80 |
Monthly churn | 2.4% |
Largest customer | 1.4% of revenue |
Support load | ~11 tickets/month |
Founder time | ~4 hours/week |
Four times annual SDE is above the typical range for a business this size. Three things earned the premium, and they're worth being specific about.
Why it went above the range
1. The churn was genuinely low, and verifiable
2.4% monthly, consistent across cohorts for fourteen months, with no cliff in month one. Freelancers who set up recurring invoices don't move — the switching cost is that every client relationship has to be re-entered.
Crucially, the buyer didn't have to take that on faith. Revenue came through a connected processor, so the month-by-month figures were pulled at source rather than described.
2. Nothing depended on the founders
Both had day jobs, which meant the business had been built from the start to survive their absence. Support was templated. Deploys were a single command. There was an operations document — an actual one, written before the sale was ever contemplated, because they needed it for themselves.
3. Acquisition was boring and durable
Roughly 60% of signups came from a single, unglamorous integration listing in a design-tool directory, and had done for over a year. Concentrated, yes — but stable, not owned by an algorithm, and free.
What nearly killed it
In week three, the buyer discovered that the payment processor account could not be transferred in the sellers' jurisdiction. Every one of the 218 customers would have to re-enter a card.
This is the most common technical deal-killer in small SaaS, and it very nearly ended this one. Realistic re-subscription rates on a forced card migration run anywhere from 60% to 90%, and at the low end that's a third of the value of the business gone in the first month of ownership.
How they solved it
The sellers ran the migration before close, while they still had the customer relationship and the credibility to ask.
They gave 30 days' notice, explained it plainly as a change of ownership, and offered two months free to anyone who re-subscribed in the first fortnight.
The price was restructured: $140,000 at close, and $28,000 held back against a re-subscription target of 85% measured at day 60.
94% re-subscribed. The holdback paid in full.
The timeline
Day | Event |
|---|---|
1 | Listed, with revenue and traffic verified at source |
6 | First offer, below asking |
9 | Second offer at asking, from the eventual buyer |
12 | Diligence begins |
19 | Processor transfer problem discovered |
24 | Restructured terms agreed with the holdback |
27 | Customer migration announced |
34 | Funds into escrow, asset transfer begins |
41 | Buyer confirms, escrow releases |
What the sellers would do differently
Establish the processor transfer policy before listing. One email, weeks earlier, would have removed the only genuine crisis in the deal.
Raise prices once. $18.80 average revenue per customer for a tool people used weekly was under-priced, and both founders said so afterwards. The buyer raised it 20% in month four with no measurable churn.
Not apologise for the concentration. They led with the 60% directory dependency as a weakness. The buyer, correctly, saw a free, stable channel and priced it as a strength.
What the buyer said
I looked at about thirty listings. This was the only one where I could check every number myself in an afternoon. That's what I paid the extra half-turn for — not the churn, the fact that I didn't have to take anyone's word for the churn.