This looks like a series on how to build a relatively straightforward operating model with a focus on cash balance and "founder value" (I guess that's attributable equity to the founder)
The article explicitly, repeatedly says templates are a bad idea. If you disagree, it'd be interesting to see your reasoning, rather than links to free templates.
It’s interesting to see the proliferation of tools focused on tackling these business needs. This post reminded me of http://usesummit.com which allows to create financial forecasting models
> Google sheets is convenient for making changes and having multiple people editing, but sending an investor a model in Google sheets signals that you are not financially savvy.
I do wonder how many of these 'signals' there are, and what weight they really carry for investors.
This may have been true in 2016, but since then, I’ve seen CEOs raising multimillion dollar rounds using Google Sheets, financial modeling software, and Excel alike.
There’s certainly still some preference towards Excel in 2020, but in no way using sheets will mean that you’re not “financially savvy.”
This is a good point. It started off with a bit of a "toy spreadsheet" reputation (fair or not) and that may have biased some people for a while. It shouldn't matter now.
Yep, this is where I switched off. If the advice is to "look good" to investors based on the type of spreadsheet program you use you've got bigger problems.
There's a bigger issue here, apart from the outdated advice.
It's just BAD advice to begin with.
What it signals is lack of tech savvy in the investors. It does not in any way shape or form signal any lack of financial savvy on the part of the founder.
If you're starting a tech company, do you REALLY want to work with an investor who can't open a cloud spreadsheet ffs?
This particular one is outdated advice. I’ve seen many financings the past few years, and many really sophisticated google sheets models. It’s a total no-op what you use as long as it can model what you need it to.
Is it useful to have a startup financial model if you're still at the early stages?
I've analyzed over 480 founder interviews (mostly for their acquisition channels [1]) and there's 1 adjective that defines their growth: "messy". They pitched a bunch of journalists, did a trial & error for 100s of ads on FB/Google, had search traffic after 6 months of trying (but 0 before that) and so on.
There's a sub-headline in the article that says "Why Should Founders Care about Building a Financial Model?"...I think a more important question is "WHEN"?
Yes. It’s almost never too early to build a financial model. As noted in the original article, your model will always be wrong. However, the exercise of creating the model and using it to build out strawman scenarios is enormously helpful to let you understand how internal burn rates, customer acquisition costs, COGS, recurring revenues, etc all interact and how those could line up to different fundraising timelines. I’m not sure how you can reasonably start working full time on a business or idea without at least a rough model to play with.
Perhaps "fiction" is the wrong way to look at it, because the exercise has value.
I think of it this way: every business's financial model is a collection of numbers, some empirical (and hopefully correct) and some estimated.
The thing about a startup is that there are few empirical numbers (but they are critical, you have to understand your burn rate and what affects it) and the estimated numbers are poor estimates. The evolution of the size of the error bars on those estimates is probably more important than the size itself. If you are very early on, you should be using these to help you focus information gathering on the most impactful areas.
My frustration comes from personal experience. I've worked in a few startups where the "size of the error bars" never changes. It is very, very frustrating to see the same optimistic, almost delusional thinking used 3 or 4 years in. Some founders are very, very stubborn and won't listen or look at previous results.
That's fair enough. I think a good measure of how an early stage startup is doing is to see how the thinking is evolving.
If your CEO is doing the same hand-waving in year 3 that sold the seed round, I agree something has probably gone wrong, and may indicate time to think about a change.
It's definitionally never too early if you consider "???" as a valid business model.
I often tell people that Facebook's early business was an "underpants gnomes model". ie, it was:
Step 1: Acquire lots of users
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
But that this model was actually enormously useful to Facebook because it brought alignment over what to focus on and what not to focus on and where there were areas of high certainty and where there was, intentionally, areas of low certainty.
A business model of "???" is a valid and useful business model because it tells people that we know that we do not know anything about the business model yet and this is an intentional choice and we are aware of it. The key is, even if it is "???", you still need to write it down and have everyone agree that this is, indeed, the business model right now.
Most startups have a financial model before they start doing business, because most startups aren't in tech.
Tech is the only market where you have the luxury to not know what your revenue model is, or even what your product is, for months or years after you have "launched."
Given the high rate of failure with tech startups, more financial modeling in the early stages would probably have resulted in more meaningful attempts at creating value, rather than the constant copycatting you currently see.
As long as you don't mix the meaning of "tech" with "informatics", yes, that seems correct.
When you do stuff that nobody ever tried you both get some leeway on experimenting how to interact with the market and is unable to predict how the market will react to it. If you are doing the same thing everybody does, you are expected to know beforehand what is your product.
That is true whether you do those things in a computer or not.
But you are pointing on some confusion of investors that think they are getting into a tech company when the company is actually just a copy of something else. That may be widespread for all that I know (I still somewhat doubt it), but most product development does consist on copying nearly everything of another existing one, this does not make it any less tech.
The saying goes: "Plans are useless but Planning is invaluable" - and it goes well with "No business plan survives first contact with the customers" (which was adapted from IIRC Churchil's "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy", even though customers shouldn't in general be regarded as enemies)
Adding a +1 for building your first models by hand, before using something "on rails". Perhaps until say $5M ARR for B2B SaaS.
My experience was that I have a much better command of the important levers in my business -- and can more easily scenario plan -- with a robust model that I built myself. Much easier to derive key metrics out of it too. And once you have a starting point, it's easy to iterate and expand it as the business grows.
My limited experience with the "financial model as a service" apps are that they make a bunch of assumptions for you and make it a lot harder to ad hoc plan. i.e. What if we delayed our hiring round of 5 headcount 2 months? What's the impact on ending cash balance? What's the impact if I move part of my ARR pricing into an up-front setup cost? What if we offer quarterly payments instead of annual pre-paid, and 30% of our clients opt for that (where does that leave cash)? etc. These are things that you could do in Excel in about 10 minutes with even a basic model, but would be challenging to do in another person's app.
IMO an early-stage SaaS startup's initial model should be focused on ARR/cash burn, looked at Monthly, with true planning cycles quarterly or maybe every 6-months if progress is more or less on plan.
I don't think I was asked in a single board meeting until $4M ARR or so about Revenue. ARR and cash are king.
The model is an idea. The spreadsheet is an implementation. Don't confuse the two.
You should be able to describe your model on paper or a slide or two. The spreadsheet as a working version of the model is necessarily more complicated. Having both allows anyone to verify that the model is working as intended.
"I can't explain it" is not the same as "You wouldn't understand it."
My late business attorney would have said the same thing. The act of building a business financial model includes questions about the specific business. You can have assumptions about expenses, but how you create revenue is likely highly unique. The balance between these items can only be constructed through conversations, not plugging numbers in a template.
He is refusing to share the financial model and requires to sit with the investor...? I understand that F2F is better when looking for investors. But this gives me the idea his documentation of the financial model is very poor or he is afraid people don't understand it (which indicates it can be improved).
I’m a seed stage VC. I give our founders the same advice as OP when raising their next round: If it’s more complicated than a basic pitch deck, walk through it with the VC, and optionally leave them a copy to play with.
Investors don’t have much time and can misconstrue stuff easily. When you walk through it, you get to answer questions in real-time and learn about any weaknesses they perceive in the modeling or the underlying biz.
Spreadsheets are non-linear. I would rather be given the chance to explore first on my own, and then have a chance to ask questions. The forced walk-through might be helpful to some people, but that can also be documented in the spreadsheet.
Also, formulas are what they are. You can try to tell me what they do, but the formula speaks the truth and I don't want noise when reading formulas for the first time. Again, you can comment any non-obvious formula, but let me read the formula on my own.
a financial model is a document that you spend weeks creating, which is then ignored in the countless pitches you will do in front of VCs, possibly shared with other companies they already invested in.
Next time you want to make a financial model, instead of spending weeks making it try out Finmark (YC S20). We want to make creating a model turbotax easy without forcing people to use a template. Instead, our modular approach allows every company to create their own unique model in under an hour.
This looks like a series on how to build a relatively straightforward operating model with a focus on cash balance and "founder value" (I guess that's attributable equity to the founder)
If you're interested in valuation, it's worth checking out Prof. Damodaran's work or an online resource such as Macabacus modeling guide: https://macabacus.com/operating-model/introduction