Having been part of leadership teams through Layer3 TV's sale to T-Mobile and Frndly TV's acquisition by Roku, I've learned what acquirers actually look for when evaluating a consumer brand.
What Acquirers Actually Value
1. Clean Unit Economics Revenue growth is table stakes. What matters is the underlying unit economics—customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and the ratio between them. Both Layer3 TV and Frndly TV succeeded because we obsessed over these metrics.
2. Scalable Infrastructure Acquirers want to know they can 10x the business without 10x the cost. This means investing in automation, building robust data systems, and documenting your processes.
3. Defensible Competitive Advantages What makes you hard to replicate? For Frndly TV, it was our unique content positioning in family-friendly programming combined with proprietary subscriber acquisition systems.
The Marketing Leader's Role
As a marketing leader, your job in building exit value is threefold:
1. Build measurable, repeatable growth systems 2. Create detailed attribution models 3. Document everything