Welcome to this week's episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. This week,

I have a conversation with an M&A advisor named David Newell. David is a senior advisor,

a quiet light. And according to his bio, he's an industry expert in the valuation and sale of

SaaS businesses. He's a former investment banker at City, which he did for three years before

moving into the online business space.

And he's advised on the sale of several well-known bootstrapped B2B apps, including in the sale

of Drip back when he worked for Effie International. And he also helped with sale of apps like

less accounting and Sifter and Coderee and Hittail as well,

which is another one that I had sold through FE back when David worked with them.

I've known David for several years, met him at a few conferences.

I believe he was at Rhodium weekend, Chris Yates' event in Vegas years ago.

And David just has a lot of experience, you know,

on the sell side and also working with buyers of SaaS apps. In our conversation, we talk about what

valuations look like today. And it's kind of fun because I threw out my rules of thumb and

he says, I think they're a little bit richer. He said, I think they've gone up. It's a little,

it's a little hotter. My evaluations are probably from, let's say, two, three years ago, and that's the beauty of

SaaS, right, is this stuff keeps going up into the right. So you can hear us back and forth,

kind of some rules of thumb valuations, both on the, hey, if you're going to sell for net profit

versus I'm going to sell for a revenue multiple, you know, at what point that transitions and in what instances you can sell for

profit versus revenue multiple. And we talk about things that sellers do really well and things

that some sellers do very poorly. So you can kind of mentally evaluate where you yourself might

fall, even if you never plan on selling or buying a SaaS company. There's still a lot of good

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