A financial modeling bootcamp
for startup founders

This is the lesson where your model becomes real. You move from structure to execution, deciding how long your cash lasts, what you can afford to build, and whether your plan actually gets you to the next milestone without killing the company.

Curriculum:

• Use milestones and runway as the starting point for every budgeting decision
• Build the model in the correct order so cash, timing, and priorities are always visible
• Understand why team costs are the single biggest driver of burn
• Budget roles and hiring timing so growth doesn’t outpace cash
• Separate what it costs to deliver the product from what it costs to run the company
• See how this split directly impacts margins and survival
• Know when something is an expense versus an asset
• Model equipment and inventory in a way that doesn’t distort cash or profits
• Add funding at the right moment in the model, not as an afterthought
• Understand how loans and equity affect cash, runway, and risk
• Internalize the rule that revenue is an effect, not a cause
• Stop typing revenue guesses and start thinking in drivers

Cause and effect is the foundation of every model that actually works. This lesson is where you stop treating revenue as a guess and start seeing your business as a system, one where every result is driven by clear, logical actions.

Curriculum:

• Understand why every number in a financial model must be the result of a prior action
• Learn how to think in cause-and-effect chains instead of isolated metrics
• Walk through different model maps to see how growth is structured across business types
• See how user acquisition, conversion, and monetization connect in a SaaS model
• Understand how installs, engagement, and monetization drive mobile app economics
• Break down traffic, conversion rates, and order value in an eCommerce model
• See how audience growth turns into revenue in a media business
• Understand how supply and demand interact inside a marketplace model
• Build your own model map and convert it into variables you can plug directly into a spreadsheet

This is where the spreadsheet stops being static and starts responding to reality. In this lesson, you turn assumptions into logic, logic into formulas, and formulas into a model that scales as the business scales.

Curriculum:

• Use the assumptions sheet as the control center for the entire model
• Understand why assumptions, not hardcoded numbers, drive flexibility and clarity
• Build your first formula and see how inputs flow through the model
• Learn how budgets scale over time and why linear vs. exponential growth changes everything
• Build a conversion flow that turns activity into outcomes
• Model monthly subscriptions so recurring revenue behaves correctly over time
• Model non-monthly subscriptions and understand how timing affects revenue recognition

In this final lesson, the focus shifts from building a forecast to operating a real-world financial model using historical data. You will learn how to responsibly override reported numbers, extract meaningful KPIs, and use an Actuals sheet to keep the model accurate, auditable, and ready for ongoing updates or investor review.

Curriculum:

• When and why to override historical data, including best practices and common pitfalls
• How to implement overrides cleanly while preserving transparency and auditability
• Extracting core KPIs from historicals, including growth rates, margins, and efficiency metrics
• Structuring and maintaining an Actuals sheet that ties cleanly into the model
• Reconciling historicals with forecasts to keep outputs reliable over time