. . . . . . .Early-stage CEOs are practically taught to not even put a financial model in any of their fundraising decks until they get to their Series B. It’s all about building product in the early stages right? You don’t need to worry about figuring out a business since it’s all about growth in the early stages, right? Wrong.
Every CEO needs to fully understand the cost of doing business before deciding to raise any outside capital. You don’t want your burn rate to get ridiculous in the early days, so force yourself to put something basic together, even if it’s out of your comfort zone.
For those of you short on time, I decided to put something together very basic for you (see original article for link), which will at least give you a start in understanding how much you need to raise to get to your next milestone. I used Gumroad to share the link – you don’t need to pay anything to download the model – just donate “$0.” A few notes about my template are below.
This is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Think about customizing this in the context of your business. As an example, some companies may want to get a lot more granular about sales expenses to see if it makes sense to build an enterprise sales team. In order to analyze those costs, you will need to, as an addendum to this, add a lot of details on the quotas of individual salespeople, seasonality, ramp time, and numerous other factors. My model, simplistically looks at the fully loaded cost of salespeople if they hit their quota. . . . . .
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