The 14-Day Checklist Before You List Your App on Birexit

You do not need 12 months. You need 14 days.

The corporate M&A playbooks tell you to spend a year and a half "preparing for exit." That advice is built for $50M companies with five layers of management. You have a Stripe account, a Vercel project, and one repo. Your prep window is two weeks, max.

Here is exactly how to spend them. One deliverable per day. No filler.

The cheat sheet

• ·Days 1-3: Financial proof (Stripe screenshots, MRR chart, expense list)
• ·Days 4-7: The handover doc (one page, that is it)
• ·Days 8-10: Tech cleanup (rotate keys, scrub your name, document the deploy)
• ·Days 11-12: Write the listing copy
• ·Days 13-14: Screenshots, pricing, submit

Total time investment: about 30 focused hours across two weeks. If you are putting in more than 3 hours a day, you are overthinking it.

Days 1-3: Prove the money is real

Buyers do not believe you. They believe screenshots.

Day 1: Stripe dashboard exports. Go to your Stripe dashboard. Take three screenshots: the last 12 months of gross revenue, the last 12 months of net revenue after Stripe fees, and the current MRR view. Save them as PNGs. If you are on Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, or Polar, same drill.

Day 2: Build the MRR chart. Drop your monthly recurring revenue into a Google Sheet. One column for month, one for MRR. Make a basic line chart. Buyers want to see the slope. A boring flat line at $1,800 MRR sells. A line that just spiked from $400 to $1,800 in one month does not, because it screams launch bump.

Day 3: List your real expenses. Open a spreadsheet. List every fixed monthly cost: hosting ($20), domain ($15/year ÷ 12), email service ($29), database ($25), AI API ($80), and whatever else. Add it up. Subtract from MRR. That number is your real net profit, and it is the number a buyer values you on. Be honest. Buyers will find the Vercel invoice during diligence anyway.

Real Talk: If your expense total is more than 40% of your MRR, fix that before you list. Cancel the analytics tool you do not use. Move off the $99/mo database tier you do not need. Every $50 in monthly expenses you cut adds about $1,500 to your sale price at a 30x monthly multiple.

Days 4-7: The one-page handover doc

This is the document that closes deals. Most sellers skip it. Do not.

Day 4: Write the "what it does" paragraph. Three sentences. What the app does, who pays for it, why they pay. No fluff. Example: "AppName is a Chrome extension that auto-fills LinkedIn outreach templates. 312 active users pay $9/mo. They pay because manually personalizing 40 messages a day takes 2 hours and this takes 8 minutes."

Day 5: Document the customer acquisition channel. Where do users actually come from? Be specific. If 80% come from one Reddit post that ranked, say so. If you spend $200/mo on Google Ads with a 2.1x ROAS, write that. Buyers price differently based on whether your traffic is organic, paid, or a single viral fluke.

Day 6: List the integrations and accounts. Every third-party service, every account, every API key, every domain registrar. Just names: "Stripe, Vercel, Supabase, Resend, Cloudflare, Namecheap." This becomes the transfer checklist on closing day.

Day 7: Write the "what would I do next" section. Three bullets. What is the obvious next feature? What is the marketing channel you never tried? What is the price increase you have been scared to ship? Buyers love this section because it tells them where the easy wins are.

Days 8-10: Tech cleanup

This is where most indie sellers lose money. A messy codebase costs you 20-30% on price.

Day 8: Rotate every key. All of them. Stripe, OpenAI, database, third-party APIs. Generate fresh ones, deploy. Keep the old ones live until day 14 in case something breaks. The buyer is going to ask for fresh credentials at handover, so you might as well rotate now and confirm everything still works.

Day 9: Scrub your name from infrastructure. Your personal Gmail in the admin user? Change it to admin@yourdomain.com. Your face on the marketing site? Remove it or replace with the product. Your Twitter handle in the footer? Take it out. The buyer is not buying you, they are buying the asset. Make it transferable.

Day 10: Document the deploy. Open a fresh README. Write: "To deploy, push to main. Vercel auto-deploys. Env vars live in Vercel dashboard. Database migrations run with npm run migrate." That is it. If your deploy is more complicated than that, simplify it before you list.

Days 11-12: Write the listing

Day 11: Draft the headline and the financials block. Headline format that works on Birexit: [Category] · [MRR] · [Stack]. Example: "B2B Chrome Extension · $2,808 MRR · Next.js + Supabase". The financials block: ARR, MRR, gross profit margin, churn rate, customer count. Mono, tabular, no decoration.

Day 12: Write the founder's note. Three paragraphs. Why you built it, why you are selling, what you want the next owner to know. Sellers who write a real founder's note close 2-3x faster than sellers who let the listing be all financials. Buyers want to feel like they are taking the baton from a real person.

Days 13-14: Screenshots, price, submit

Day 13: Take five screenshots. The product working. The Stripe revenue chart. The MRR line chart. The expense breakdown. The customer count from your database. That is it. Do not stage 14 marketing-style images. Buyers want evidence, not a pitch deck.

Day 14: Set your price and hit submit. A reasonable starting multiple for an app with steady MRR and low churn is 28-36x monthly net profit. If you are at $1,800 MRR and $1,200 net profit, that is a list price of $34K-$43K. List at the top of the range. Buyers will negotiate down. They always do.

Two weeks. Submit. Now you wait for the first qualified offer, which on Birexit averages 9 days.