What to put in a data room when you sell an app

Buyers decide how much to trust you in the first ten minutes of looking at your files. A tidy room with dates on everything says the project is run properly. A room where half the files are screenshots, and the rest say “will share later”, makes a buyer offer less or walk away.

It also saves you time. Every question the room answers is a question you don't have to answer on a call at 11pm while the generator is running.

Start with revenue, straight from where the money lands. For most Nigerian apps that's an export from Paystack or Flutterwave covering at least the last 12 months, or a Stripe export if you sell abroad. Add your bank statements for the same months, so the buyer can match payouts to deposits. Our guide to checking revenue before you buy shows what a careful buyer does with these.

Next, a monthly profit and loss. It doesn't need an accountant's letterhead. A spreadsheet with revenue, each cost and what's left is enough, as long as the numbers agree with the exports. List every cost line by line: hosting, domains, email, paid APIs, the SMS provider, app store fees, any freelancer you pay monthly.

Then users. How many signed up each month, how many came back the next month and the month after, and how many pay. A simple cohort table beats a big total. Add traffic numbers if the app gets users through search or ads.

Record a walkthrough video of 10 to 15 minutes. Show sign-up, the main features, the admin side and how you handle a refund or a support request. Buyers watch it more than once.

For the tech, write a one-page overview: the stack, where it's hosted, the main services it depends on and what each costs. Include a list of every account that comes with the sale.

Last, the paperwork. Your CAC documents if the app sits in a company, tax filings if you have them, the written assignment from anyone who built part of the code, and any contract with a supplier or a big customer.

A live dashboard is harder to fake than a PDF, and buyers know it. Google Analytics lets you add someone as a Viewer, which lets them see the reports without changing anything.¹ You can also switch on its restrictions so a person can't see revenue or cost metrics, which helps if you want to show traffic before showing money.¹

Paystack has no plain view-only role among its defaults.² Its help centre says you can create a custom role from the Team tab and pick exactly what it can see, so make one that can view transactions and nothing else.² Remove the buyer the day talks end, whichever way they end.

A repo invite feels harmless, but GitHub's Read role still lets a person pull and fork the repository.³ In plain terms, they walk away with a copy. So hold full code access back until there's a signed agreement and money in escrow.

Before then, show the code without handing it over. Share your screen on a call and scroll through it. Send the overview, the list of packages it depends on and the open bugs. If a technical buyer needs more, give them one module or a short recorded tour.

Your users trusted you with their names, phone numbers and emails, not the buyer. The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 says personal data should be limited to the minimum necessary for the purpose it was collected for, and kept secure.⁴ A buyer checking your numbers needs counts, not people.

So share totals, cohort tables and charts. If a buyer wants to see what a customer record looks like, blank out the names and numbers first. The full user database moves at handover, under the sale agreement, and not a day before. The handover guide covers that part.

Never put passwords, API keys or 2FA codes in the room. Those go across one account at a time when the deal closes.

Number the folders so they open in order: 01 Revenue, 02 Profit and loss, 03 Users, 04 Product, 05 Tech, 06 Legal. Put a short index at the top that says what's in each folder and the date it covers. Name files plainly, like “Paystack export Jan to Dec 2026”, not “final_final2.csv”.

Update it every month while the listing is live. A room that stops in June makes a buyer in November ask what happened since.

On Prow: Every listing on Prow has a data room. You upload PDFs, spreadsheets, documents, images and videos up to 50 MB each, and a checklist shows which of the usual files you've covered, with verified revenue counting towards it. Each file can be NDA-only or open to every signed-in buyer. Buyers who sign your NDA get 14 days of access, and file links expire after two minutes. For code, you leave a note saying how you'll share it, and no access is shared automatically. Posting a project and proving revenue are free. Listing it for sale is a one-off fee, from ₦10,000 for Early-stage, and when it sells you and the buyer each pay 1.5%, at least ₦5,000 each, and EscrowPay's own fee is split between you. Deal money is held in escrow with EscrowPay, never by Prow.

• Revenue exports from the payment provider, with bank statements that match.
• A monthly profit and loss and a full list of costs.
• User numbers by month, not just a total.
• A 10 to 15 minute walkthrough video and a one-page tech overview.
• CAC papers, tax filings and code assignments.
• No customer details, passwords or full code access until the deal is agreed.