Exodus —Trying to visualise the thin line between success and failure in an early-stage SaaS startup
One month ago my SaaS business Grape.io died. After spending eight years in the business messaging market, we couldn’t keep up against Microsoft and I had to file for insolvency after a soft landing failed.
I was quite unhappy. So my girlfriend Maggie and I moved to the woods and started renovating an old nun’s retreat in the mountains south of lower Austria. Up there, in the cold foggy winter nights, I could look at the last decade of entrepreneurship from a healthy distance.
One day I was browsing through some old notes to find the best learnings from all the adventures of my eight-year-journey. That was when I stumbled upon “Exodus”.
Exodus was an unfinished Google Spreadsheet I made for early-stage startups to solve the big problem many founders face during fundraising: Present an optimistic business plan to investors while also not dying in the short term.
I finished and polished it, creating an easy-to-use spreadsheet that allows inputs for the upcoming years but shows you a blood-red wall of death that creeps closer with every month of runway that you sacrifice.
Memento Mori
I’m sure that you will make it long-term — it’s the short term that I’m so terribly concerned about!
— my dad (when I was in high school)
It is important to understand when the party is over but it‘s even more crucial to act before it’s too late. Especially in times of Covid, more and more business owners around me have to make very unpleasant decisions. But their (usually commendable) unwavering optimism stands in the way of making the hard-but-right decisions.
If you are looking for venture capital it’s even more complicated. You have to paint this bright picture of a product that with that one investment can blast off to the moon. At the same time, you are dead in less than three months — both can be true at the same time. You have to be a high-functioning Schizophrenic to perfectly incorporate both those extremes in your planning and still be able to sleep at night.
That’s where this Spreadsheet might come in handy. Enter a few data points and get all the important KPIs an investor would ask for. Add some data from your business plan and boom, you have an optimistic view on your company‘s opportunity with the most pessimistic outlook on the short-term future.
The cool thing is that you can change your outlook on the fly, by altering the MRR of a month or by cutting down costs by x% with one click, seeing the wall of death moving farther away with every hard decision you make.
KPIs
To demystify your encounters with investors, I’ve added some calculations to answer some of the most common questions an investor might ask you:
- ARPA,
- Customer Churn,
- CLV,
- CAC,
- Gross margin,
- Months to recover CAC,
- CAC-to-LTV Ratio
Everything is available to you once you’ve filled out the first page.
Downloads
Click on this link and select “make a copy” from the file menu.
For a complete breakdown I’ve added a video here:
I hope that this can be a beacon of honest business planning. May the fruits of my years with Grape carry you to new heights of success.
Love,
Felix.
