Description

Project Aim is a CRM solution with a rich variety of features. It was built several years ago by a third-party firm and was for sale via acquire.com’s marketplace. A prospective buyer engaged us to help them vet the software.

Going in, our buyer knew the software was out-of-date but wanted to understand what level of technical investment would be required to update it. They were planning on adding their own developers to the project post-acquisition.

Both the buyer and seller were eager to complete the process so a well-scoped proposal and quick turnaround were a must.

Our Approach

We knew getting the software up-to-date was a key priority. A poor software supply chain can not only result in a poor user experience for customers (due to bugs), it’s also a huge liability since attackers often probe for out-of-date libraries that they can exploit.

We also knew that since our buyer would be bringing a development team that it was important for us to provide as much technical detail as we could to help ease the onboarding process. Getting developers up to speed faster means fewer dollars going to onboarding and more money flowing into productive investments: revenue-generating features and churn-reducing bugfixes.

Getting to ROI

We used elements of our playbook to get to work. We read lines of code, used the features of the software in our browsers, and sent commands to the server from our terminals.

During the course of these efforts we spotted broken UX styling, bugs, and bad code (not to worry, all software contains some of these). After a few days we were able to produce a report showing, among other things:

• a systematic scorecard for each of the technical components of the app
• which pieces of technical debt were the most crucial to address
• a curated list of technical “next steps” that the client could deliver to their developers
• recordings and screenshots of bugs we found while using the app that the client could use in further negotiation with the seller.

What good is all this? Well, report in hand, our client was able to negotiate a 2.5% reduction in price so they could use those funds to invest technical development. On an absolute basis, this reduction represented more than half of our fees.

Of course we were extremely pleased to hear this and can’t wait to hear about more success from this client.

Interested in technical diligence for your deal? Reach out today.