Steppen sold to Alta: Co-founder Jake Carp shares five things he learned from selling his startup

Australian fitness app Steppen was last week acquired by Alta Global Group for an undisclosed sum. In this article, Jake Carp, who co-founded Steppen in late 2020 with Cara Davies and Dave Slutzkin, shares what he learnt from the sale process. 

We just sold Steppen and the deal process was one hell of a learning experience.

These are my five key takeaways and insights I wish I had known before. Most are quite obvious now in hindsight as everything usually is.

1. Don’t assume your smaller stakeholders will default to what your larger ones want. Treat every stakeholder independently unless told otherwise.

2. Legal and tax compliance is more complicated than you think, but less complicated than your lawyers and accountants will try to make it. Try to keep it simple and question why things need to be done a certain way.

3. Key communication should be via phone calls. Tone is hard to convey on email or Slack and can easily cause issues. The sale process will be intricate, so ensuring all parties are on the same page is essential. If something is wrong, call up and talk it through.

4. Your shareholders’ agreement is the best guide for what you can and can’t do without approval. Every key action you take should be supported by this agreement.

5. Patience is king. Deals take time irrespective of the size, and for someone impatient like me this was a struggle. From negotiations, to deal structuring, to getting relevant parties to sign all the docs in the right order. This shit takes time… don’t rush it, you’ll save time in the long run by doing it right.

To be clear, these insights purely reflect the areas I thought we as a business could have done better. Our investors, accountants, lawyers and acquirers were all fantastic during the sale process.

Jake Carp is the co-founder of Steppen. This article was first published on LinkedIn.