Three questions every founder should be able to answer in under a minute:
- What if we raise 50% less than we want?
- What if we double our growth rate?
- What if we hire 3 more engineers?
These are not hypothetical exercises. They come up in board meetings, investor calls, and late-night planning sessions. But answering them usually means opening a dialog, changing a number, saving, waiting for projections to recalculate, and then undoing everything because you were just exploring. Or worse, if you are using a spreadsheet: changing a cell, scanning downstream formulas for breakage, and hoping you did not miss one three tabs over. Most founders skip it.
Burncast now has interactive levers: sliders that sit right on your Dashboard and update your entire financial model in real time as you drag them.
What if we raise 50% less?
Let’s walk through the first question using Meridian, a demo B2B SaaS company. Meridian is planning a $4M Series A. That round funds two critical growth engines: a marketing campaign that drives self-serve signups, and a team of Account Executives who close enterprise deals. Both are set up as percentage-of-funding allocations, meaning their budgets scale automatically with the round size.
We open the lever panel and see the funding amount lever already set up on the Series A, sitting at its baseline of $4M (we cover how to set up levers later in the post).
The lever card shows the Series A amount at $4M with the slider ready to drag:
We drag the slider from $4M down to $2M.
The KPI cards update instantly: End Cash drops from $169.7M to $84.4M. Because the marketing budget and AE hiring are both set up as percentage-of-funding allocations, the cascade is automatic: the marketing budget gets cut in half, so fewer self-serve subscribers come through the door. The AE team shrinks from 4 hires to 2, which means fewer enterprise contracts. One slider change, and every downstream number adjusts.
Scrolling down, the charts make the cascade visible. The original projection appears in blue, the lever-modified projection in green. Cash flow diverges after the round closes, and the gap widens as reduced customer acquisition compounds month over month.
The good news: Meridian is still profitable and cash-positive even with a smaller round. Raising $2M instead of $4M cuts end cash roughly in half, but the business still works. That is a very different conversation from “we need exactly $4M or we fail,” and you got there in about three seconds.
What if churn spikes?
Now let’s look at a different kind of risk using Petal, a demo SaaS company with a subscription product. Petal has three pre-created levers: churn rate and annual price on the Pro Plan, plus monthly cost on the AI API. The cost lever is disabled for now (we are focused on revenue).
We drag the churn rate from 3% to 15%. The KPI cards update immediately: End Cash drops from $4.9M to $2.8M. The impact is visible before we even scroll to the charts.
Scrolling down, the four Dashboard charts show the original projection in blue and the lever-modified projection in green. Cash flow diverges sharply around Year 3, and monthly spend stays flat (churn doesn’t affect fixed costs).
Now the natural follow-up: can a price increase compensate? We move the annual price slider and the charts update again, layering both changes together.
This is the workflow interactive levers are built for: start with one assumption, see the impact, then layer in a second assumption to explore whether it offsets the first. When the two lines diverge, you know the lever is having a material impact. When they overlap, that assumption does not move the needle.
Nothing is saved until you say so
Slider values are ephemeral. You can drag churn from 3% to 15%, see the impact, drag it back, and nothing has changed. Your data is untouched.
When you find a combination worth keeping, you have two options:
Save Values writes the slider-modified values directly to your entities. In a scenario, this creates overrides against the base (your base model stays untouched). In the base scenario, it updates the entities directly.
Save Lever Values as Scenario creates a new scenario with all your slider changes baked in as overrides. Your current scenario is untouched. This is useful when you want to capture a specific combination of assumptions for later comparison.
Setting up levers
Click Add Lever in the lever panel. Burncast analyzes your model and suggests up to three levers, ranked by which fields have the most impact on your projections. Each suggestion shows a preview card that looks like the real lever card you will see on the Dashboard: the lever name, current value, slider range, and an impact label.
By default, suggestions are ranked by impact on end-of-period cash balance. You can switch to runway, revenue, or burn rate using the radio buttons above the cards. Toggle off any suggestions you do not want, then click Add Selected to create them all at once.
If you want more control, scroll past the suggestions to the manual creation form. Three dropdowns cascade: pick the entity type (Funding Round, Revenue Source, Cost Item, or Team Member), then the specific entity, then the field you want to control.
The dialog shows the entity’s current value so you can set an appropriate slider range. For rate fields (like churn), the default range is 0 to 100%. For amount fields (like salary or price), it defaults to 0 to 3x the current value. For funding round dates, the range is clamped so rounds cannot overlap with neighboring rounds. You can adjust min, max, and step size to match how you think about the number.
Each entity and field combination can have one lever. If you want to explore both price and churn rate on the same revenue source, create two levers. They stack naturally on the Dashboard.
Why we built this
The gap between “I wonder what would happen if…” and actually seeing the answer should be zero. Interactive levers close that gap. You think “what if churn spikes?” and in the same second you see how cash flow, runway, and break-even shift.
There is a second benefit that is harder to quantify: intuition. Financial models are full of assumptions, and most founders have a rough sense of which ones matter. But “rough” is not the same as “tested.” Dragging a churn slider from 3% to 15% and watching end cash drop by $2M gives you something a static model never will: a visceral feel for how sensitive your business is to each variable. Over a few minutes of exploration, you develop a working mental map of which levers actually move the needle and which ones you can stop worrying about.
This is especially valuable during board meetings, investor conversations, and team planning sessions. Instead of saying “let me go back and model that,” you drag a slider.
Try it yourself
You can explore interactive levers right now on our demo companies:
- Meridian: funding amount lever on the Series A round
- Petal: three levers on churn rate, annual price, and API cost
Drag the sliders and watch the KPIs and charts update. Nothing you do is saved.
Available on the Growth plan
Interactive levers are available on the Growth plan. If you are on a Core plan, you will see the Interactive button disabled with a note about upgrading.
If you are already on Growth, open your Dashboard and click Interactive to get started. Your first lever takes about 30 seconds to set up.