Money, Pricing & Model

How do I figure out my unit economics before I have real customers?

A starting point

Build a simple model of what one sale costs you and what it earns you: price minus the cost to deliver it (COGS), minus what you spent to acquire that customer (CAC). Use honest estimates from comparable businesses and your own small experiments (a landing page, a few manual sales), not spreadsheet fantasy. The point isn't precision, it's catching the businesses where the math can never work before you sink a year into them.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Watch Read Use

Watch

▶️ Video

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it A YC group partner walks through unit economics the way you actually reason about them early on, per customer revenue minus the variable cost of serving that customer, before you have clean data to plug in. It is short and plain spoken, which is exactly what you want when you are estimating rather than reporting. Treat it as a way to sanity check your assumptions, not a promise about your real numbers.

Consumer Startup Metrics | Startup School

On Y Combinator Startup School by Tom Blomfield about 22 minutes

Unit economics is revenue per customer minus the variable cost of serving that customer, and scaling while that number is negative is the dangerous move.
Separate organic growth from paid growth early, because leaning on paid channels hides whether people actually want the product.
Look for the moment a user gets real value, since that magic moment is what makes the rest of your acquisition math hold up.

Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

✍️ Essay

✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the piece almost every other CAC and LTV explainer quietly borrows from, and it is still the clearest place to actually learn the ideas. Skok walks a first time founder through what it costs to win a customer, what that customer is worth over time, and why the gap between the two quietly kills companies. It is a starting point for building your own numbers, not a formula to memorize.

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition

From For Entrepreneurs by David Skok about 20 minute read

CAC is your full sales and marketing spend over a period divided by the customers you won in it, so it is easy to under count if you forget salaries.
LTV is the gross margin you expect from a customer over the whole relationship, not their first payment, and a rough LTV to CAC of about 3 to 1 is the sanity check.
Aim to earn your CAC back in under 12 months, because a longer payback means you need a lot more cash just to grow.

Open forentrepreneurs.com →

Use

📋 Template

✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it 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.

Startup Financial Model (SaaS) Excel Template

From The Startup Project by The Startup Project Excel and Google Sheets, multi tab

It ships free with no email required and opens in both Excel and Google Sheets, so there is nothing between you and pressure testing your numbers.
The unit economics tab already wires up CAC, LTV, payback period, contribution margin, and the LTV to CAC ratio, so you change assumptions instead of building formulas.
It is a comprehensive VC style model, which is more than a pre customer founder needs, so start in the unit economics section and leave the rest until you have real data.

Open startupproject.org →