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A comment on Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by berkes on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @02:34AM (#30343763)
John Warrillow’s book Built to Sell has some good advise.

My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.

And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.

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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by philsnow on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @03:39AM (#30344100)
> first ensure the company is optimised for sellability

there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:

  - ensure the culture of the company doesn't require you to be there for it to function
  - make sure your incorporation structure is amenable to selling easily
  - separate out the accounts (both bank account and SaaS/PaaS/Iaas accounts) from day one, separate from any of your other projects
the Warrillow book goes into far more breadth and depth than this comment, but I just wanted to highlight that there are strong reasons to act now to shape things in a way that make it easy to sell, even if you don't currently intend to sell. being prepared to sell at any given time increases optionality / makes it so that in case you suddenly _need_ to sell, you don't have to put in 6 months of work before you can even put the thing up for sale.
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Re:Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish yo... by herodoturtle on Tuesday February 15, 2022 @07:33AM (#30345603)
> John Warrillow’s book Built to Sell has some good advise.

Just want to second this.

I've read several books on this topic. Warrillow's is easily the best.

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