Many startups ago… I built my first fundraising model. I had toiled for years in M&A so knew something about modeling, but man… what I built still wasn’t really useful and it distracted me from when I should have been executing, pushing sales, tracking my marketing KPIs etc. Darn.
Fast forward many years and I’ve learnt a thing or two. I’ve raised for myself and many others. For my startups and for others I’ve done fundraising for, I’ve built a number of models. They were all solid, but they weren’t mind-blowing (in my opinion). A founder reached out to me for an eCommerce model when I was studying data science by the beautiful beaches in Bali and I thought, screw it. Let’s make something cool.
Over the course of a month, I pulled all the cool stuff I had coded before, analysed the models I had, studied the pros and built this model. Figuring out how to do some of the calculations was almost enough to make me quit… Founders seemed to like this model, so I built others such as for SaaS. I took the learnings and improvements from those models and fed them back into here.
I don’t make that many models because they take so much time! Look at my models and you can see why! I kept getting harassed by founders for a marketplace model, so I said screw it, let’s do it.
I looked around to see if there was anything I could copy, any logic I could apply and nada. There is no model around worth paying attention to. I had to figure out everything from scratch.
It’s taken a month but it’s done. The full marketplace model is one of the largest models that I’ve made as I had to figure out how to give you a lot of flexibility on both the demand and supply side.
I get a lot of founders who just want a simpler model or something that matches their bank balance, so I’ve started making smaller versions of the models. This is the first one I have made
Whether you’re raising for your marketplace startup, or needing to develop an operational plan to understand how you are going to grow and not run out of cash, you need an Excel model. The problem is that they’re really hard to build. You don’t have time to spend 2 months building one, you need to be executing like I wish I had. Sure, maybe you have an expensive, smart CFO, but they’re still running your company, and the ROI on their time to replicate what I am doing is ignorant. For the cost of an hour of their time (or mine), you skip months of development and get straight into inputting your actuals and forecasts. This is a no brainer.
Resent buying a model, and feel better paying someone to build a model for you? Sure, paying someone smart to build something sort of usable can cost $10k+. You won’t even get what you want. I’ve seen the models ex-bankers build. They don’t get startups. They think like bankers.
Want to find a free one? Sure. I found around 5 others which weren’t bad, but just really limited in terms of functionality. These don’t solve the problem of just having something which just works and gets you back to building your GMV (Which actually matters).
This is the model I wish existed. I literally built it for you. I only build new things which add value to founders, not copy others.
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