As an early-stage company, you have one goal: to earn your existence by finding product-market fit (PMF).

To get to PMF you’ll need a compelling vision and a talented team to bring it to life, by relentlessly iterating on the product and the target market. Some companies have PMF right out of the gate, but most don’t — it took Uber 1 year, Airbnb 2 years, and Thumbtack didn’t get there until year 5.

Each of these journeys is unique, but they all have one common thread: they didn’t run out of money.

At Seed you might have $2–5m in the bank and be burning $500k–$1m per year with a team of 5–10. At Series A this might go up to $10–20m, burning $3m–7m per year with a team of 20–40.

These numbers aren’t small, and without someone staying on top of them, you might find out at EOY that you spent $500k more than you intended, or discover that your runway is 6 months shorter than you thought. And these aren’t edge-cases — they’re first-hand accounts I’ve heard from good companies run by smart people. It’s surprisingly easy to accidentally run out of money!

At Seed/Series A you might not be ready for a full-time finance hire, but someone should be accountable for basic financial planning and hygiene — tracking expenses and burn, accurately forecasting runway based on your revenue and hiring plan, and sharing these with the CEO, team, and investors every month.

Today we’re announcing Causal for Startups — the product that puts your finances on autopilot so you can find PMF without accidentally running out of money.

How it works

1 min: Create a Causal account and connect to your accounting + HR systems (e.g. Quickbooks/Xero + HiBob)

2 mins: See a breakdown of your revenue, expenses, and burn over time, and drill down to see the underlying transactions that make up each number.

5 mins: Customise key assumptions to see an accurate view of your runway and share interactive dashboards with your team and investors.

10 mins: Explore multiple scenarios for different hiring and growth plans.

30–60 mins: Use our templates to build a detailed financial model for your company, with our best practices to guide you.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a video showing these steps in real-time:

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