Buying Paperweight: the full story (price, diligence, first 90 days)

Two acquisitions so far, Paperweight (from Colm) is the story I can tell fully. Price: 3.2x SDE, minus key-man adjustment (Colm stayed 6 months, adjustment halved), plus runbook premium (his docs added 0.5x, documented above). Diligence: 3 weeks, analytics-first (trusted data, fast yes), code review by my infra friend (boring stack, green flags), customer calls: 8 (all 8 renewed, strongest signal).

First 90 days: changed nothing customer-facing (rule one of buying: do no harm for a quarter), fixed the backup restores (they were theoretical, now calendar), raised prices 15% with Svenja's letter shape (2% churn, funded the earnout).

Sellers: clean data sells. Runbooks multiply. Staying 6 months de-risks and pays. Buyers: change nothing for 90 days. The restraint is the strategy.

Seller confirmation, all of it, including the arguing (free, ongoing). The 90-days-of-nothing was the smartest thing Anders did: customers never felt the sale. Slipway inherited trust instead of rebuilding it. Sell to buyers who wait.

Ex-co-founder fine-and-confirming: the customer-calls diligence (8 for 8 renewals) is what I tell everyone. Numbers can be staged, customers cannot. Eight calls beat eighty spreadsheet rows.

Student-founder diligence notes: "clean data sells" + "runbooks multiply" = my new checklist for Notedrop from day one. Building sellable from the start, even if I never sell. Sellable is just documented.