Well the reason we got this far is because we spent the last decade of our lives working extremely hard to make products that people in our industry want. That is all we did. No networking, no events, etc. If we needed money we either figured out a way to make do or we took pay cuts. An exit never occurred to us because we were too busy doing what we do.
We're definitely green as far as this stuff goes but that's because we've existed in our niche bubble for the last 5-10 years and never really had much reason to go speak to anyone besides our general counsel and CPA. None of us have any business training beyond what we've picked up along the way.
We've received plenty of advice from advisors, but I wanted to get a perspective from someone who'd been exactly in our shoes before - not from the guys that helped them through it.
Getting a lot of the same questions so I just want to address them.
1) We will not receive another offer, there are no other offers possible. I can't fully explain this without blowing my cover, but suffice it to say we're very confident in this. It revolves around our extremely niche market.
2) A huge part of the reason we're afraid of blowing this deal is what I just stated in #1, since there are really no other exits for us.
What makes us different than another tech startup is that we really are only interesting to a very very few, and this company is the only one who can afford us :)
Just to address this, we will not receive another offer. Period. It's annoying that I can't fully explain that without blowing our cover, but you'll just have to take my word on it :)