How do I build a basic financial model for my D2C brand from scratch?
The short answer
Start with one connected sheet: traffic → conversion → AOV → revenue on top, COGS/shipping/payment/RTO/ad-spend underneath, rolling up to a monthly cash position. Don't buy a tool before you've built this by hand once - the discipline of filling every cell is where you discover the costs you'd been ignoring. Free templates get you 80% of the way; the last 20% is your own SKU-level, channel-level detail.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
Why we picked it
The clearest walk-through of how a real DTC model connects operational levers - ad spend, conversion, CAC, retention - to the income statement, cash flow and balance sheet as one system, not three disconnected tabs.
Why we picked it
A build-along from an operator, not a template vendor - useful precisely because it shows the reasoning behind each assumption instead of just handing you a locked spreadsheet.
Why we picked it
A genuinely free, editable Excel/Sheets starting scaffold with a built-in runway calculation - the fastest way to get a working model open in front of you rather than staring at a blank sheet.
Why we picked it
For founders who want structured, certificate-backed training rather than piecing it together from blog posts - CFI's course is built specifically around ecommerce/startup modeling and valuation mechanics.
