Runway doesn’t save startups. Alignment does.

Key Takeaways

The biggest mistake I ever made as a startup founder was here. We had raised a preede round and we were closing our seed round. I was following what an investor had told me which is I had to raise for 18 months of runway and I did. So we took our funding and we spent a bit every month on on growth, right? Aiming for this money to last about 18 months. And so about 12 months in or about 6 months from running out of money, I went to my investors again and told them, "Hey, we're we're ready. We're ready for our next round. We're ready for series A." And what they said was, "Well, you're not a series A company yet." Our revenue at the time was about a million dollars a year, but you need about $2 million a year to get in front of series A investors. So, we got stuck. We got stuck in this valley of death between seed and series A. And it almost killed our company. There's another value of debt that founders often get caught up in between preede and seed, which is when you launch a product, maybe you bootstrap it, but you don't have enough money to get [music] real traction to prove that this product is something that the market wants. Now, those values of death kill companies. [music] What saved ours back then was this spreadsheet actually that one of our investors had given me where I was able to budget basically a path to profitability. Right now, revenue was still growing, but we needed to figure out what expenses we [music] could cut without affecting that revenue that would allow us to catch up, right? For the revenue to catch up to our expenses [music] so that we became profitable. And we did. And it wasn't easy. It was very painful. We had to let a lot of people go. But that spreadsheet by all means saved [music] our asses. We have that spreadsheet for download for free in our in our website. And and I have a full video on how we used it to survive.