50+ responses to our QoE post a few weeks ago. Here's what we found.

A few weeks ago we posted asking for QoE recommendations. Got over 50 responses which was more than we expected, thank you to this amazing community! We've spent the last few weeks actually talking to a lot of them. Wanted to share a few honest observations in case it's useful to anyone going through this right now. The technical bar is high across the board. What ended up separating them wasn't skill, it was whether they were willing to work alongside someone looking at the commercial side of the business at the same time and actually share what they were finding. A lot of providers want to hand you a report at the end, which is useful. However, the ones we liked wanted to be in the conversation. The commercial questions, whether the revenue actually holds after the founder leaves, whether the customers are as sticky as they look, whether the sales motion survives a transition, are the ones that tend to fall through the cracks during diligence. Not because searchers aren't focused on these things themselves, but because there's a lot going on at that stage and something always gets deprioritized, and the nuances are incredibly easy to miss. We learned more from this process than we expected. If any of it would be helpful to share, feel free to DM me.