Median: The Cobrowsing SaaS Sold for "Just Under 300k" by the Founder's Own Account — But the Real Exit Was Two Perpetual Licenses Signed Before It

Acquisition write-ups almost always lead with the sale price. That number, though, is not necessarily the largest line of cash the business ever produced.

Appearing on the official Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire) podcast, Derek Homann, who bootstrapped the cobrowsing SaaS Median with co-founder Ben Stevinson, was asked what the company sold for. His answer: “Yeah, a little more than that. Just under 300k.”

Yet in the same conversation he also says that before the sale they had signed two “non-exclusive perpetual licensing deals,” each of which was “bigger than the acquisition price.” And that Median’s sale plus those licensing deals, all combined, came to “close to 2 million bucks.”

In other words, the published “sale price” accounts for roughly one-sixth of the value this business converted into cash. This article follows where the other five-sixths came from.

The business and the deals

Because it was built as a component, the same product could be sold repeatedly

The reason Median monetized its intellectual property three times over comes down to where the product sat.

Cobrowsing is not something a customer subscribes to on its own but a capability used in a support setting, “let me look at your screen with you and walk you through it”, and it always runs inside some other product. So Median was designed from the start as an integration into existing products like LiveChat, Intercom, and Zendesk, and sold as an add-on to them for $50 a month.

That design is precisely what made license sales possible. A finished service is hard for another company to resell under its own brand, because the UI, the pricing model, and the support all come attached. A function-level component, by contrast, can disappear inside the buyer’s product. Homann’s description captures it: of the two licensees, “one of which people were like, knew they were buying Median. And the other… they didn’t know that Median even existed.” For the latter, this was simply the transaction of sourcing one feature of their own product from outside.

The non-exclusive term matters too. An exclusive license can only be sold once, which makes it functionally equivalent to selling the business. Non-exclusive means the same codebase can be sold to multiple companies. That is the premise behind his saying each of the two licenses was “essentially an exit in and of themselves.” Among comparable integration plays, ChannelReply, the connector SaaS that pipes Amazon and eBay messages into helpdesks, shows the alternative path, where the connection itself grows into a substantial business. Median chose to slice the capability up instead of fattening it.

Why the final sale price ended at “just under 300k”

This is the other thing worth reading closely here.

Selling two non-exclusive perpetual licenses means eroding your own value in the eyes of a future acquirer. The licensees can offer the same capability under their own brands, and because the licenses are perpetual, no further payments follow. From an acquirer’s seat, you are buying an asset in a market where several parties already hold the same technology and where no future revenue will come from them.

So it is entirely plausible that the large early monetization through licensing and the modest final sale price of just under $300K are connected. These numbers should be read as a trade-off, not as “they licensed it and sold it high.”

The level of just under $300K is not itself out of line for micro-SaaS. It sits in nearly the same band as Potion, the Notion-to-website converter that sold to an individual buyer for $300K, and deals that beat the going rate, like the screenshot annotation tool InstaCap, are the exception. What is notable is not the amount but the sequence: twice before that, larger sums had already been drawn out of the same asset.

What didn’t work: aligning the two founders came last

The regret Homann names in retrospect is neither price nor negotiation. It is “knowing what you want.” They moved forward while still in a “what’s all this stuff?” state, and he says that if the two of them had worked those questions out between themselves in advance, it would have been somewhat easier.

This is a pitfall specific to co-founded SaaS. At the point of sale, four questions surface at once: price, transition period, whether you stay on with the buyer, and what you do next. A solo founder resolves those internally. Two founders face two layers of negotiation, with the co-founder negotiation sitting before the buyer negotiation. And that inner negotiation is hard to reopen once the outer one has started.

Median’s deal, in fact, moved very fast. An LOI arrived within a week and a half, due diligence ran three to four weeks, and a 60-day transition closed it out. A small SaaS sale does not budget you any time to deliberate. The practical meaning of this testimony is that the preparation has to be done before a buyer shows up.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

The piece another founder could actually reuse is the structure: keep the product at the level of a function and your exit stops being singular. Aim at a finished SaaS and the exit narrows toward acquisition alone. Build a component that embeds into other products and three forms of monetization line up on the same codebase — your own branded subscription, white-labeled delivery, and an outright sale. Median sold its IP three times because it chose that granularity.

The conditions that don’t reproduce are equally clear.

Licensing buyers are not something you go find. Median already sat inside the LiveChat and Intercom ecosystems, visible to companies that wanted to absorb cobrowsing. Being present in the marketplace of the products it plugged into was itself the sales channel. A product sold only from its own site, from a standing start, cannot expect white-label inquiries from large companies.

Perpetual licenses come in large amounts but only once, and the number of them cannot be counted on. Signing two was an outcome, not a plan. The cash-flow shape is fundamentally different from a SaaS that stacks up monthly recurring revenue and can plan against it.

There are also limits to verifying the figures. Both “just under 300k” and “close to $2M” are the founder’s own statements, not numbers checked against contracts or by a third party. The identification of Loup as the buyer and the late-October 2020 timing come from Silicon Prairie News’s reporting, where the price is likewise described as undisclosed. The names of the two licensees, the dates of those contracts, and their individual values are not public. What this case yields is less the numbers themselves than a framework for reading them: the sale price is not the whole exit.

When we measure the value of a business, we reach for the single number of the closing price. Median’s record suggests that outside that number, cash may have been accumulating that was never published and never made a headline. A small sale price and a small business are not the same thing.