Financial Model

Also called Financial Projections

A spreadsheet that projects a company's future revenue, costs, cash, and headcount based on assumptions about growth and spending. The map of where the business is headed.

Why it matters

A model forces you to make your assumptions explicit and stress-test them, which is where the real thinking happens, more than the forecast itself. Investors expect one, and building it teaches you your own business.

For example

A founder builds a spreadsheet projecting headcount, revenue, and burn for 24 months, and stress-tests it by halving the growth assumption to see when cash runs out.

Worth your time

Startup Financial Model (SaaS) Excel Template The Startup Project · article Reading about CAC and LTV only gets you so far, at some point you have to put your own guesses in a cell and watch what breaks. This model is genuinely free with no email wall, works in Excel or Google Sheets, and has a dedicated unit economics section with CAC by channel, LTV, payback, and contribution margin. Fair warning: it is a full financial model, so ignore the parts you do not need yet and live in the unit economics tab. Open startupproject.org →

Related terms

Runway Burn Rate Unit Economics

Go deeper

See how founders actually handle this on Money, pricing and metrics, part of the Starting Up hub.

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