How do I model my D2C unit economics in a spreadsheet, and how many orders do I need to break even?
The short answer
Build one row per order: net price after discount, minus COGS, shipping, packaging, payment fee, an RTO/returns allowance and allocated CAC - that gives CM3 per order. Break-even in orders is simply your monthly fixed costs divided by CM3 per order, so if fixed costs are ₹5 lakh and you make ₹250 CM3 per order, you need 2,000 orders a month just to stand still. Start in a Google Sheet before you buy any analytics tool; the discipline of filling every cell is where founders discover the costs they'd been ignoring.
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
Founder interviews that get into how Indian D2C brands actually structured their content and creator strategy, in their own words - a good listen for pattern-matching what a repurposing or founder-content system looks like once it's running, not just in theory.
Why we picked it
Goes one level deeper than a formula: it rebuilds the contribution-margin income statement for a real D2C P&L, so you can structure your own sheet the way a finance-literate operator would. The right reference once you're past the basics and want to model properly.
Why we picked it
A structured framework for CM1/CM2/contribution margin thinking that applies directly to a D2C brand regardless of market, the concepts are identical whether you're shipping from Mumbai or Miami.
Why we picked it
A free, downloadable contribution-margin calculator you can open straight as a Google Sheet and adapt to your own SKUs and costs - the fastest way to stop guessing and start modelling. Exactly the 'open a sheet before you buy a tool' starting point.
