Inspection ledger · method and aggregates

Will it sell?

Every business-for-sale ask is priced against something. Usually it's the seller's own story. We price it against what its category actually trades at — and we publish the method, the counts and the error bars rather than the seller's arithmetic.

The score

Six dimensions, weighted. Every dimension is tagged with its evidence tier: observed, seller-stated or proxy. A verdict on a proxy is labelled as one.

1. 25%

   Comps

   Three or more siblings in the same category and revenue band. No comps, no verdict above slow.

2. 20%

   Claim consistency

   Does revenue × margin × multiple reconcile to the ask. The gaps are where listings fall apart.

3. 15%

   Concentration

   Single client, single channel, single algorithm. Named in the listing or inferred from it.

4. 15%

   Durability

   Recurring vs one-off, traffic source, whether the revenue is trailing or run-rate.

5. 15%

   Transferability

   Owner hours, founder dependency, licensure, whatever does not survive the sale.

6. 10%

   Price sanity

   Ask multiple against the category median. A premium needs a stated reason.

What the corpus says

Implied multiple = asking price ÷ stated profit. Live listings only; the count excludes rows whose ask or profit is prose rather than a number.

Model	n	median ask
SaaS	45	4.22×
Comparison	17	3.90×
Marketplace	12	3.62×
Media	33	3.45×
Reviews	36	3.39×
Newsletter	11	3.10×
Course	31	3.06×
Leads	12	2.94×
DTC	10	2.84×

What that means, honestly

The market is roughly evenly priced. Most asks land within sight of their comps, which is the opposite of what the pitch for a product like this usually claims. The value is not in declaring every listing overpriced. It is in the tail: a handful of asks are priced three, five, ten times what their category supports, they tend to be the largest and best-marketed listings, and the arithmetic that shows it takes a comp set rather than an opinion.

One resolved listing closed at 28.5× its stated profit, in a category whose median ask is 4.2×. If it closed near that multiple it is the strongest counterexample to this whole method, and the transaction price isn't published anywhere, so it sits here as a contradiction rather than a conclusion.

What is public, and what isn't

Method, rubrics, aggregate counts and the error bars are public — that's this page. Individual inspections are commissioned: a buyer, a broker or a lender names a listing and gets the comp sheet, the verdict and the conditions attached to it, privately. We don't republish a seller's financials to make a point.

• Never a number that isn't in the source, or an n/a filled with a guess.
• Never a score without the comps that produced it.
• Never a forecast of what the business will earn.
• Never a seller's figures republished to market the product.

Limits

• Profit and revenue are seller-stated. The verdict rests on the multiple, which survives a ±20% error in profit.
• Resolved rows record the ask at resolution, not the transaction price.
• Comps are only as broad as the corpus: 243 priced listings across nine models, ten at the DTC end.
• A wrong call gets corrected in the place it was made.

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