Pick a buyer type, study its last 5 deals, and start talking a year early

Josh Peleg… found in the market. When Google invested in Character.ai, this is one of the examples. This is kind of rare with consumer apps, because most consumer apps don't have, you know, category-leading technology that someone else couldn't build. I mean, most consumer apps that we know of, you can build them yourself if you really wanted to. So less relevant. I think for people listening to this that are really trying to think about their exit,

Josh Pelegthink about those first three: aggregators, strategics, private equity. And and think about the one that makes the most sense for you, and then try and build the story of your app for those people. Once you've decided which acquirer probably makes the most sense for your app, start building the network, start building the relationship maybe 12 months to 6 months in advance, because as the CEO or founder, your job is to make sure that there is a level of trust, there's a level of relationship building with the people about to buy your app. So what I would do, find your targets, read about their last five deals,

Josh Pelegtry and understand why they bought what they bought, do a little bit of Sherlock Holmes on it, try and be a detective there, and then once you have a good understanding of that, build the met- metric narrative that they want to see. I'll give you an example: Strava-Runna. What metric do we think Strava wanted to see with Runna? Now, I'm guessing, I wasn't part of the deal, this is like an educated guess here, but they probably want to see top of the funnel. They want to see how many new people that weren't runners or were kind of beginner runners are they is Runna able to onboard onto the app,

Josh Pelegand how many of those people actually graduate to the point of they're running a 5K and they're willing to move up to the level of of Strava, and start to be public about their runs?

Joseph ChoiThanks for being on the pod, Josh. What How can people find you?

Josh PelegSo people can always ping me an email, always very, very happy to chat. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I tend to reply to pretty much everything. So feel free to drop me a message. Like I said before, like if you're thinking about an exit, and it's not today, but it's in 12 months, some of my favorite deals I did with founders I knew for like 12 months, and we just exchanged messages for a long period of time and kind of built a relationship. So it's never too soon to reach out. It's going to be a very exciting year for BlueThrone, we got some very, very big plans. You can find me on on email or LinkedIn.

Joseph ChoiThanks so much.