The First Buyer Vanished After 6 Months of Due Diligence. A Year Later, Baremetrics Sold for $4M Cash
Josh Pigford, founder of SaaS analytics tool Baremetrics, spent 6 months of due diligence and $20K in legal fees on his first acquisition talks — only for the buyer to disappear. A year later, in November 2020, he sold to PE firm Xenon Partners for $4M in cash. $3.7M to him, $300K to his team of 10 — he published the full breakdown himself.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
(Yen figures below are approximate conversions at ¥150/USD.)
The Timeline
| Period | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 2013 | Pigford founds the company as an MRR analytics tool for Stripe. Becomes a central figure in the “Open Startup” movement of publishing your dashboard |
| Around 2019 | First acquisition talks. After 6 months of due diligence and roughly $20,000 in legal fees, the buyer goes silent |
| November 2020 | Sold to Xenon Partners (PE) for $4M in cash. $3.7M to Pigford, $300K to the team of 10 |
Inside the Deal
The $4M price was about 2.5x the ARR at the time (publicly around $1.5M), landing within the standard multiple range for SaaS. What made it distinctive was that Pigford wrote it all up on his blog — the breakdown, the emotions, even the regrets. Having always published his revenue dashboard, he closed out the “Open Startup” era by disclosing the numbers of the sale itself.
Reading Between the Numbers
“Vanishing buyers” are a real risk in M&A, and the only defense is running processes in parallel. The first negotiation, which cost 6 months plus $20K, was an exclusive deal dependent on a single party. Together with Fin vs Fin collecting 10 LOIs in 3 weeks and DashThis surviving two collapsed deals, the principle holds here too: always have multiple buyers, and treat broken deals as part of the process.
A brand built on transparency converted into due-diligence trust at sale time. A company that has published its revenue for years can hardly be suspected of cooking the numbers. In exact contrast to Zen Arbitrage, which took a price cut over a churn-rate calculation error, everyday disclosure is the strongest possible due-diligence preparation.
Selling to PE worked as a “founder’s graduation.” Hand a product you’ve run for 7 years — and lost passion for — to professional operators, and move on. Pigford has gone on to launch new products in succession, the same “exit → next challenge” pattern as the Usersnap founders.
Further Reading
Sources
- Josh Pigford氏による公式ブログ「Selling a $4M SaaS: Inside the Baremetrics Acquisition」
- They Got Acquired「A year after a failed acquisition, this SaaS founder landed a $4 million exit」
This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.