Asking Price Is a Guess. An Exit Bid Is an Answer.

You are about to sell your SaaS, your content site, your app. The first thing everyone tells you to do is “set an asking price.” So you open a valuation calculator, punch in your revenue, get a multiple, and write a number on the listing. Then you wait.

Here is the uncomfortable part nobody says out loud: that number is a guess. A well-researched guess, maybe. But it's a price you invented, about a business only you are selling, in a market of buyers you haven't met yet. The one group whose opinion actually decides the sale — the buyers — had no say in it.

The 15% the asking price hides

The gap isn't theoretical. Studies of thousands of business sales show the final sale price lands, on average, at about 85% of the asking price — roughly a 15% haircut. Recent broker medians tell the same story: an asking price near $350,000 against a sale price near $329,000. The asking price was never the number the market paid. It was the opening position.

And that's the average outcome, for reasonably-priced listings. Set the number too high and it doesn't just get negotiated down — it removes buyers entirely. A serious buyer scanning listings can't tell how far you'll come off an inflated price, so they skip it. Overpricing gets you fewer offers, not a higher sale — and fewer offers is the exact opposite of what pushes the final number up.

The tell: which direction the number travels

Every number attached to a business sale is either travelling toward the market or from it. That direction is the whole difference.

A valuation and an asking price both travel toward the market, carrying your hopes with them. An exit bid travels the other way — it comes from the market, carrying money. It's the only number in the whole process produced by the side that actually pays. That's why an asking price is a guess and an exit bid is an answer.

Why sellers guess in the first place

Not because they're lazy — because for a small digital business, no one ever handed them the answer. A big company checks the market before it sells: an investment bank runs a structured auction, solicits competing bids, and the board learns the real price before committing. That's a market check, and it costs six figures and starts at deals in the tens of millions.

Below roughly $1M, that machine doesn't exist as a product. So the founder does the only thing available: pick a number and wait. The guess isn't a mistake — it's the absence of a better instrument. The whole point of the exit-bid idea is to give small digital businesses the instrument the big ones already have.

What the answer looks like

The answer to “how much will it actually sell for” is a market exit bid: the price the market will actually pay for a digital business at exit, discovered through competing bids under one deadline, not estimated by a formula. One bid tells you what one buyer thinks. Competing bids under a shared clock tell you what the market thinks — and that number is the one you actually get to keep.

You don't have to commit money or a listing to see it. You can run your business through a free demo auction first, watch real buyers place demo bids, and read the number the market gives back — before you ever pay to list for real. It's the difference between guessing your price alone and letting the people who pay it tell you.

Frequently asked questions

Written by Alexander Deno

Alexander writes about how digital businesses are actually priced and sold — the mechanics of exit bids, temporary markets, and The ExitBid Format.