Sword Health is reportedly buying Headspace for a fraction of what the meditation app was worth in 2021. It would be easy to read that as one more pandemic-era valuation deflating. I think it is more interesting than that — and the public numbers tell a fairly precise story about why standalone consumer wellness apps don’t hold venture-scale prices.
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Buying an app on Acquire.com sounds simple: find a listing, check the numbers, wire the money. However, I realized that in practice, roughly two-thirds of what’s listed wasn’t worth touching for me, and even the good third would hide problems that you won’t see until you start digging. In this post, I’ll explain how I built a simple acquisition pipeline to run this search, the legal timing challenge that almost stopped my first deal, a fraud signal I almost missed on another listing, and why the first deal fell through anyway.
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