Independent commercial diligence on B2B SaaS, for the buyers and investors behind the deal. Whether the potential is real. Whether the commercial engine works without the founder. What the market says when nobody is preparing the answer. And what a good operator would change from Monday.
None of these are lies. Most founders believe every one of them, and a good part of each is usually true. They are simply claims that nobody in the process has been asked to evidence.
Claims we hear in almost every process, and what sits underneath them once someone looks. These are recurring patterns rather than case studies: the exact number is different in every company, which is the whole reason it has to be tested rather than read.
Financial diligence confirms the earnings are real. Legal confirms the contracts. Technical diligence confirms the code. Then the commercial case, the one that actually decides whether this was a good purchase, gets answered by reading the management presentation more carefully than the last person did.
In an industrial business you could get away with that. You can count competitors, walk the floor, benchmark cost per unit. In a vertical SaaS company doing a few million in recurring revenue none of that exists. No analyst covers it. The competitive set is fuzzy. Market sizing is top-down and unfalsifiable. And “we are differentiated” cannot be judged by anyone who has never carried a number in enterprise software.
This is not about catching anyone out. Most sellers believe their own story, and a good part of it is usually true. The work is separating the part that holds from the part that was never tested, then saying how the thing should be selling instead.
Huge market, and we've barely scratched it.
The market reachable with this product, this price point and this motion, not the one in the top-down slide. Where growth would actually have to come from, and whether anything in the company today is capable of getting it.
We have a repeatable sales process.
Pipeline quality against pipeline size. Win rates by segment, sales cycle, discount discipline, what a renewal really costs to earn. And the question underneath all of them: does this sell without the founder in the room?
Customers love us. Here are three references.
Primary interviews: current customers, churned customers, lost deals, ex-sales staff, channel partners. References are prepared. Losses are not, and they tell you considerably more.
The main risk is execution.
The pricing move, the segment or the motion that changes the trajectory, sized, sequenced and costed. Not a list of risks and a wish for better execution, but the version of this company that a good operator would be running twelve months from now.
Two moments in a deal, and a different problem in each. The ladder rises with complexity, from a first read taken before you have a seat at the table to a year spent on the board.
Four layers, each one there because the layer beneath it can be wrong on its own. None of them decides anything alone.
