Before You Talk to a Buyer: The App Founder's Pre-Sale Checklist
Most app founders start preparing for a sale on the day a buyer emails. By then, everything below becomes a scramble under someone else's clock. Here is the list to have done before that first conversation, in the order a buyer's diligence will actually ask for it. None of it is exotic. All of it takes longer than it looks.
1. Reconcile the money to its source
Your revenue needs to trace, line by line, from the dashboard to the bank. For a subscription app that means RevenueCat or your own backend, then App Store Connect and Google Play payout reports, then the deposits. For an ad-monetized app it means AdMob or your mediation layer, then the payments. Buyers rebuild this in the first week, and every gap they find gets applied as a discount to everything they cannot check. Then separate the app's finances from your personal ones: a dedicated business account, expenses categorized, a monthly profit and loss that ties out for at least the last twenty-four months, platform fees shown the same way every month. Gross versus net is a favorite place for buyers to find a surprise. Do not leave one there.
2. Export the data a buyer will actually price
Cohort retention by monthly signup cohort, at least twelve months back. Trial-to-paid conversion. Churn by plan. Refund rate. Renewal rate on annual plans, which is the number most founders have never looked at and most buyers ask for first. These should be exports a buyer can rerun, not screenshots of a dashboard. Alongside them, the acquisition picture: installs split organic versus paid, by channel, with blended and paid acquisition cost and payback period. If most of the growth is paid, show the unit economics that make it repeatable without you, because a buyer will assume it is not until proven otherwise.
3. Prove you own what you are selling
The Apple and Google developer accounts should be in the business's name, with you as the account holder, and transferable. Every contractor who touched the code, the design, or the brand needs a signed agreement with an intellectual property assignment — the freelancer who built version one and the designer who drew the icon both count. If the name matters, the trademark should be filed. The domain, the social handles, and the analytics accounts should all be held by the entity, not a personal email. Then run the inventory founders skip: every SDK, API, and third-party service the app depends on, with its license terms. Anything on a personal free tier, or under a license that forbids assignment, is a closing problem that is much cheaper to fix now.
4. Reduce what only you know
A buyer is underwriting the app after you leave, so the question is how much of it lives in your head. Write the documentation you never needed: build instructions, environment setup, where the keys and certificates live, the release process, how a store rejection gets handled. The test is whether a competent stranger could ship a build within a day. Do the same for operations — who answers reviews and support tickets, how refunds are handled, what happens when a policy change lands. Where the honest answer is "me," write the procedure down and, wherever you can, hand a piece of it to someone else before the buyer asks. Keep crash rate and review velocity monitored and current while you do it; a buyer will pull both.
5. Get the story and the compliance straight
The privacy policy should be current and truthful about what the app collects, the App Store privacy labels should match what the code actually does, and consent should be handled wherever the law requires it. A buyer's counsel checks these before almost anything else, and a mismatch stalls a deal fast. Finally, write the one page a buyer reads first: what the app does, who pays, the key metrics, why you are selling, and what you will do in the transition. Be honest about the soft spots. A weakness disclosed on page one is a fact the buyer prices once. The same weakness discovered in week four of diligence reprices the whole deal.
The takeaway
None of this raises a multiple by itself. What it does is remove the reasons a buyer gives for lowering one. Founders who finish this list before the first conversation run shorter diligence, hold their price through it, and keep the leverage that comes from being genuinely ready to walk away. Start with the money reconciliation. It takes the longest, and everything else sits on top of it.
Wondering what your app could be worth? Request a free, confidential app valuation from AppBusinessBrokers.com, or book an intro conversation with Eric Owens. No hype, no obligation — a straight read on where you stand.
