You’ve been writing code for six months. You have a product, three people on the team, and $2K in monthly recurring revenue. An investor wants to meet next week and you know they’re going to ask about your financial model.

You don’t have one. You’re not even sure what goes in one.

This is a normal place to be. Most technical founders haven’t built a financial model before. The problem isn’t intelligence — it’s that startup finance has its own vocabulary and conventions, and nobody teaches them to you until someone asks for a spreadsheet you don’t have.

Here’s how to go from zero to a credible financial model in a single afternoon.

Start with what you already know

Open Burncast and enter your current team: three people, their roles, their salaries. That’s it for now. You don’t need to project five years of hiring on the first screen.

Next, your revenue. You’re at $2K MRR (monthly recurring revenue — the amount customers pay you each month on a recurring basis). You expect that to grow. Pick a growth curve that matches your gut: maybe 15% month-over-month for the next year, tapering to 8% as the base gets larger. You can change these assumptions later without breaking anything.

Then your expenses beyond payroll. Hosting, software, that coworking space. Monthly amounts, start dates, expected increases. Straightforward.

You’ve just described your business in numbers. Took maybe 20 minutes.

Model your funding round without a finance degree

Here’s where most founders get stuck in spreadsheets. Funding rounds involve terms like pre-money valuation, dilution, and price per share — and they’re all different ways of saying related things.

Burncast lets you enter a funding round however you think about it. If your investor said “we’ll put in $1.5M for 20% of the company,” enter it as 20% dilution for $1.5M. That’s enough. The cap table (the ownership breakdown of your company) gets calculated from there.

You don’t need to know the pre-money valuation. Burncast figures it out: $1.5M for 20% means a $6M pre-money. But you didn’t need to calculate that yourself. It’s shown to you, in context, so you learn by doing.

The inline glossary changes everything

Every financial term in Burncast is explained where you encounter it. Hover over “burn rate” and you see: the amount of cash your company spends each month beyond what it earns. No switching to Google. No pretending you know what a term means during a board meeting.

After an afternoon of building your model, you’ll have picked up 10-15 finance terms through context. Not from a textbook. From seeing them applied to your own numbers.

Your model generates the hard stuff

Once your assumptions are in, Burncast produces the outputs investors actually want to see:

  • Income statement: Revenue minus expenses, month by month, for as far out as you’ve modeled. Shows when you become profitable.
  • Runway: At your current burn rate, you have X months of cash. After the round, you have Y months. This is the number investors care about most.
  • Cap table: Who owns what, before and after the round. Founders, investors, option pool — all laid out.

You didn’t write a single formula. You didn’t copy a template from someone’s blog and hope the cell references were right.

Now ask the real question: what if you raise less?

Create a second scenario. In Burncast, a scenario starts as a copy of your base model, but you only change what’s different. This is called delta-based modeling — each scenario stores just the differences, not a whole separate model.

Change the round to $1M at 15% dilution instead of $1.5M at 20%. Everything else stays the same.

Now compare. The $1.5M round gives you 18 months of runway and costs you 20% ownership. The $1M round gives you 13 months and costs 15%. Five extra months versus 5% more equity.

That’s a real conversation to have with your co-founders. And you can have it with actual numbers, not guesses.

What you walk away with

In one afternoon, you built a financial model, learned the vocabulary investors use, and ran two funding scenarios. You’re walking into that investor meeting with projections you understand — because you built them from your own assumptions, not from a spreadsheet someone else made.

That’s the point. A financial model isn’t a document you produce for someone else. It’s a tool for thinking about your business. And now you have one.