Money

Three questions. If you can answer all three from your own records, you are ahead of most founders at your stage. If you cannot answer them, no amount of capital fixes the underlying problem — it just funds it for longer.

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What does one unit cost you? How much cash do you need to fulfil your biggest realistic order? How many weeks until the money runs out?

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Unit economics

Per SKU or per service. This is the foundation of everything downstream.

Where each cost came from: [TBD]

Traceable to an invoice, a quote or a measured time — not to an estimate. A margin built on guessed costs is a guess with a percentage sign attached, and it is the number every investor tests first.

Costs that get forgotten and change the picture: freight both ways, payment gateway fees, the units you scrap, the warranty jobs you will service for free, your own time.

Costing at volume

Your cost per unit changes with scale, and the difference between the bands is the entire argument for growth.

If a buyer asks for a quote at 5,000 units and you calculate it in the meeting, you will get it wrong. Have the table.

Customer acquisition

If CAC is [TBD], that is the most urgent gap in this file — you cannot decide whether to spend more on marketing without it. It takes 30 days of tracked spend against tracked signups. Start today; it is not recoverable retrospectively.

A rough read on LTV : CAC — under 1:1 you lose money on every customer; around 3:1 is generally considered healthy; far above 3:1 often means you are underspending on growth. Treat these as orientation, not law, and weight them by how long your payback takes.

Working capital

The question that catches out companies that are selling well.

The largest order you can win is not the largest order you can afford. If you pay for materials on day 1 and get paid on day 90, an order that doubles your revenue can also be the thing that kills you.

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Ways through: advance payment or a deposit, milestone billing, purchase-order financing, negotiating supplier credit, or simply declining the order and saying why. All of them are better than accepting and failing to deliver.

Payment terms you actually offer: [TBD]

Deposit you actually collect: [TBD]

Monthly overheads

Include founder compensation even if you are not currently taking it. A business that only works because you are unpaid is not yet a business, and hiding that from yourself makes the arithmetic worse, not better.

Runway

Runway in weeks belongs on every weekly recap. It is the number that determines which of your other problems is actually the problem.

The decision points

[TBD]

Every founder eventually faces a hard decision. The ones who handle it well decided in advance what would trigger it; the ones who do not, discover the money is gone and then start thinking.

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Failure is not the worst outcome — you learn a great deal from it. Going broke without a plan is. Write the thresholds down now, while you are calm, and re-read them monthly.

Options worth naming explicitly rather than avoiding: cut overheads, raise on worse terms, take on services or consulting work to extend runway, sell, merge, go back to salaried work and run this on the side, or stop. All are real choices. Having thought about them is not pessimism — it is the thing that keeps the decision yours.

Projections

12 to 18 months. Monthly for the first six, quarterly after.

The three assumptions this is built on: [TBD]

State them. A projection is only as good as its assumptions, and the fastest way to lose credibility is a spreadsheet with a smooth growth curve nobody can explain. An investor will not check your arithmetic — they will check whether your growth rate is possible given your capacity and your CAC.

Sanity checks before you show this to anyone:

• Does the unit volume fit within your capacity ceiling in 06-operations?
• Does the customer growth fit your CAC and your marketing budget?
• Does the revenue reconcile with the SOM in 03-market?
• Does the headcount cost match the team plan in 01-company?

Books and tracking

Set up expense categories properly from the start — marketing, materials, salaries, overheads, capital — so that in six months you can answer "what are we actually spending on growth?" without reconstructing a year of receipts. Categorising as you go costs nothing; categorising backwards costs a weekend.

Allocating budget by percentage is a month-six question, not a month-one question. You cannot decide that marketing should be 20% of spend before you know what your spend does. Track for six months, then look at what actually produced results, then allocate.