Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. It doesn’t take a financial genius to recognize that you need to keep your burn rate low. Cash flow out equates to burn rate, and the runway depends on your reserves.

Burn Rate 120

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Startup Salary 120

Up and Running

APRIL 6, 2020

This can be a daunting task, but the best place to start is understanding and calculating your cash burn rate and your cash runway. How do you calculate the burn rate? This total number is your Gross Burn Rate. Gross burn rate = (Total variable expenses + Total fixed expenses).

Burn Rate 100

Burn Rate Forecast SBA Cash Position 100

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

The questions every startup or small business CEO needs to ask now are: What’s my Burn Rate and Runway? Burn Rate and Runway. To answer the first question, take stock of your current gross burn rate i.e. how much cash are you spending each month. What does your new business model look like? How do you know?

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 16, 2023

Yet every business requires revenue and volumes, as certainly as it requires a product to sell. There is no black magic involved in predicting the future, if you use these four simple steps, with my basic rules of thumb to keep you on the right track: Determine your margin on sales. Forecast sales-volume expectations.

Forecast 290

Forecast Burn Rate Widget Business Plan 290

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

CEO – “Well, we’ve missed our sales numbers for the last six months.” What does this have to do with missing your sales plan? CEO – “Well our VP of Sales isn’t making the sales plan and he says it’s a marketing problem, and he’s a really senior guy.”. The CEO asks the VP of Sales to join us in the conference room.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 2, 2019

In SaaS the main benchmarks being measured are revenue growth, sales efficiency (unit economics), churn and burn rate. Example of Baremetrics revenue per user benchmarks. Part of the challenge in deep tech is getting to revenue and scaling it. Software as a Service (Saas) benchmarks.

B2C 141

B2C Technical Review Startup Retention 141

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Marketing and capital expenses (new factory, high R&D expense) were predicated on consumer-scale sales. In addition, they’ve created an entirely new $85+ billion subscription business model; the App Store, iTunes, Apple Care, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple TV.

Search 256

Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 256

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2013

Otherwise, sales, marketing, and operational costs will kill you. Next comes sales volume by channel. Your “burn rate” or net cash flow out is usually the single most important survival parameter to a startup. The holy grail is break-even, when revenues first catch up with the outflow. Cash flow is king.

Forecast 238

Forecast Business Plan Burn Rate .Net 238

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 5, 2021

Yet every business requires revenue and volumes, as certainly as it requires a product to sell. There is no black magic involved in predicting the future, if you use these four simple steps, with my basic rules of thumb to keep you on the right track: Determine your margin on sales. Forecast sales-volume expectations.

Forecast 369

Forecast Burn Rate Startup Widget 369

YoungUpstarts

MAY 19, 2016

by Gadiel Morantes , chief revenue officer at Early Growth Financial Services. Use burn rate as an example. If you don’t understand how much money your company is burning through each month, how can you expect to intelligently talk about your fiscal health? A Jenga tower is a precariously built one.

Technical Review 109

Technical Review Burn Rate IP Intellectual Property 109

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

Three reasons: There is a relative valuation between the price a VC pays and their expectations of what it will exit for in an IPO or trade sale. Also, it’s harder to pay a $30 million pre-money value on an unproved company when you see public companies with $100 million in sales trading for less than $20 million.

Burn Rate 263

Burn Rate Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Private Equity 263

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 9, 2012

Otherwise, sales, marketing, and operational costs will kill you. Next comes sales volume by channel. Your “burn rate” or net cash flow out is usually the single most important survival parameter to a startup. The holy grail is break-even, when revenues first catch up with the outflow. Cash flow is king.

Forecast 238

Forecast Burn Rate .Net Business Model 238

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

And I can even imagine cases where it might burn more cash than a traditional startup. The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Let’s take your revenue line. Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever. Don’t know the running rate for engineers? Or lower revenue assumptions.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Up and Running

APRIL 30, 2020

.” It’s been a favorite management tool of mine since my time as VP for a market research firm, and it’s a method I used for decades growing a software company from zero to well over $10 million in annual sales. Impact on sales: If sales go down 30%? What is a scenario analysis? Will businesses open slowly?

Forecast 120

Forecast Balance Sheet Burn Rate Software Review 120

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 22, 2011

Otherwise, sales, marketing, and operational costs will kill you. Next comes sales volume by channel. Your “burn rate” or net cash flow out is usually the single most important survival parameter to a startup. The holy grail is break-even, when revenues first catch up with the outflow. Cash flow is king.

Forecast 230

Forecast Burn Rate Startup .Net 230

Up and Running

APRIL 22, 2020

Maintaining your business through the coronavirus crisis has likely led you to cut costs, revise your sales projections, and potentially seek out a loan to help you stay afloat. Many startups are small, local businesses with hopes of eventually rapidly scaling—but they’re still establishing a track record.

SBA 139

SBA Forecast Software Review Business Plan 139

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

With a little help from a friend, you can handle expenses, revenue, and payroll, with QuickBooks or a similar package. These steps alone can reduce your monthly burn rate by at least $10K. Social media facilitates marketing and sales. Use the cloud and subscriptions for computing technology.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. You would think that would be enough to get wrong, but entrepreneurs and investors compound this problem by assuming that all startups grow and scale by executing the Revenue Plan.

Revenue 230

Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 230

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

If you’re running a subscription business , you’ll want to track churn rate, monthly recurring revenue, lifetime value, and so on. However, there are a number of metrics that every business owner should know, including cash flow, accounts payable, accounts receivable, direct costs, operating margin, net profit, and cash burn rate.

Metrics 60

Metrics Burn Rate .Net Churn Rate 60

Berkonomics

AUGUST 10, 2017

Fixed overhead for salaries, rent, equipment leases and more make up the majority of the “burn rate” (monthly expenses) for most companies. Since this number is budgeted and pre-authorized, managers tend to focus upon other things such as sales, marketing and product development issues.

Silicon Valley 97

Silicon Valley Burn Rate Angel Investor Down Round 97

Up and Running

OCTOBER 7, 2019

Think of them like this: If you have a critical sales milestone your company needs to meet by the end of the year, KPIs should deliver incremental evidence that you’re either headed in the right direction, or you’re not. . Activation rate: measures how many visitors are engaging with your website or app. Marketing KPIs.

Founder 71

Founder Retention Metrics Technical Review 71

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 25, 2010

Otherwise, sales, marketing, and operational costs will kill you. Next comes sales volume by channel. Your “burn rate” or net cash flow out is usually the single most important survival parameter to a startup. The holy grail is break-even, when revenues first catch up with the outflow. Cash flow is king.

Forecast 151

Forecast Startup Burn Rate .Net 151

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. No one wants to sit next to the VP of Sales.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

David Teten

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

Sean Colrock, Director of Client Partnerships at Wiss & Company , suggests at a minimum you track: cash on hand; fume date; and burn rate. The next most important set of metrics are sales by category; working capital (cash and other current assets, less current liabilities); EBITA; and gross margin.

Agile 60

Agile Management Forecast Silicon Valley 60

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

He asked each sales / biz dev person to call customers and tell them they had to change their contracts. I just knew that our sales sucked wind and we were burning through tons of cash. I advocated LOUDLY at the board that we needed to cut our burn rate. A new and experiened CEO was brought in and cleared house.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 16, 2013

The company with no revenue and a $150k burn rate that raised $2.5 I often wonder why they didn’t find a way to bring in some revenue to cover costs. Newsflash – if you had $75k revenue / month you’d have 8 months cash left in stead of 4. I see this weekly. million and has 4 months cash left.

Burn Rate 412

Burn Rate Dilution Revenue Valuation 412

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 11, 2017

With these, if you can paint a positive picture for your new venture, I assure you that investors will sit up and take notice, and you will also know how to drive yourself and your team: Determine your gross margin on sales. This should ideally be a “bottoms-up” commitment from your sales team, not your own optimistic guess.

Burn Rate 144

Burn Rate Forecast Angel Investor Revenue 144

K9 Ventures

MAY 28, 2015

At K9 we invest in companies which have a clear/direct revenue model and typically don’t invest in companies that follow the Ubiquity first Revenue Later (URL) revenue model made famous by Eric Schmidt in 2007. I call this Revenue Development and have written about it before. >$0/month. 10K/month. .

Revenue 48

Revenue Startup Burn Rate Cofounder 48

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 senior sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business 6 months. They don’t want high burn rates but they will never fund slow growth.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption. Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. Albert Einstein. Ritualized Crises.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

This means that your cash spending is less than the amount of cash you received from your customers, new loans or investment in your business, or sales of assets that you owned. When you have negative cash flow, you should also keep track of your burn rate and runway. The key to successful cash flow management.

Burn Rate 83

Burn Rate Forecast Cash Position Employee 83

Berkonomics

APRIL 16, 2020

Rent and other fixed costs continue, even when revenues have dried up – a fatal combination. FINANCIAL: Do you have twelve to eighteen months of cash to cover your “burn rate” now and as you recover? Are you salespeople making few if any sales because your prospective customers are distracted by their own problems?

SBA 87

SBA Burn Rate Salary Stock 87

Berkonomics

MARCH 30, 2010

Fixed overhead for salaries, rent, equipment leases and more make up the majority of the “burn rate” (monthly expenses) for most companies. What most managers miss is that every month cut from the time it takes to perform such tasks cuts the cost by the value of a month’s worth of fixed overhead or burn.

Silicon Valley 85

Silicon Valley Burn Rate Angel Investor Down Round 85

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 27, 2012

In this section, you need to be passionate about recurring revenue, profit margin, and volume growth. Marketing, sales, and partners. Describe marketing strategy, sales plan, licensing, and partnership plans. Describe marketing strategy, sales plan, licensing, and partnership plans. Competition and sustainable advantage.

Exit Strategy 247

Exit Strategy Elevator Pitch Burn Rate Merger 247

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2014

With a little help from a friend, you can handle expenses, revenue, and payroll, with QuickBooks or a similar package. These steps alone can reduce your monthly burn rate by at least $10K. Social media facilitates marketing and sales. Use the cloud and subscriptions for computing technology.

Entrepreneur 260

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media LLC 260

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 27, 2011

For a more elaborate explanation of the deal, please read my blog post 1M/1M: Alternative Financing For Startups Using A Sales Channel Partner. I have discussed at length why revenue sharing channel deals may serve as perfectly fine alternatives to raising equity (or even complements) because of their non-dilutive nature.

Dilution 114

Dilution Revenue Finance Entrepreneur 114