I was involved in some diligence when a prior company was considering an acquisition. The numbers they claimed vs the numbers we could trust from their various SaaSes were pretty fishy. It was a small deal - more like $1M. We didn't pursue them, they don't exist any longer.
The gap here was _huge_. If I was the JPM diligence team, I might have asked them for read-only access to their product analytics. They claimed something like 10K FAFSA applications/day. This should show up nicely in their analytics tools. Yes, they could fake these visits--but it would be much harder to fake that you're getting 10K visits from appropriate regions, at appropriate times of day, with appropriate dwell times, with appropriate distribution of completion rates.
The gap here was _huge_. If I was the JPM diligence team, I might have asked them for read-only access to their product analytics. They claimed something like 10K FAFSA applications/day. This should show up nicely in their analytics tools. Yes, they could fake these visits--but it would be much harder to fake that you're getting 10K visits from appropriate regions, at appropriate times of day, with appropriate dwell times, with appropriate distribution of completion rates.