sutton020

Since I published  v2 of my SaaS Financial Plan a few days ago, two alert readers have kindly pointed out two formula errors in the Excel sheet. Sorry about that. Here's a corrected version . The Excel sheet that was linked from the original post has been corrected as well. In case you've started to modify the template already and want to keep working with the previous version, here are the two bugs that you need to correct: 1) Cell U124 on the Costs tab, i.e. the costs for external recruiters in December 2016, contained: =(W87-U87)*$E$124+X96 The +X96  part has been added accidentally and needs to be removed. So the correct version is: =(W87-U87)*$E$124 2) Row 55 on the Revenues tab, i.e. the CACs for the Pro plan, is completely wrong. It should be, for column I (with the other columns following analogously): =0,5*(Costs!J62+Costs!J96+Costs!J104+Costs!J112+Costs!J122)/I49 Once again, apologies for the inconvenience. If I or somebody else finds any other bugs, I will fix ...

Almost exactly four years ago I published a financial plan template for SaaS startups based on a model that I had created for Zendesk a few years earlier. I received a lot of great feedback on the template and the original post remains one of the most viewed posts on this blog up to this day. In the last few weeks I've finally found some time to create a "v2" of the template ... just in time for a little Easter gift to the SaaS community. ;-) I'd recommend that you read this post first since it includes some important notes, but if you prefer to check out the template right away click here to download the Excel sheet . The original v1 model was a very simple plan for early-stage SaaS startups with a low-touch sales model. As I wrote in the original post: It's a simple plan for an early-stage SaaS startup with a low-touch sales model – a company which markets a SaaS solution via its website, offers a 30 day free trial, gets most of its trial users organically an...

Judging from the number of Facebook likes and retweets, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere,  my last post resonated with quite a lot of people. Some people thought it was provocative though, and some chimed in with good feedback: @hunterwalk building ANY business is hard — Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 5, 2016 Therefore I thought it would be worth following up on the topic to make sure that my message is clear. The provocative sentence, I think, was this one: "Building a SaaS business with $1-2 million in ARR is not that hard and not that valuable." It's important to point out that I took it back in the next sentence ... "Let me rephrase that. Starting a new company is always hard and most SaaS startups never get to $1-2 million in ARR. Every founder who accomplishes this deserves a huge amount of respect." ... and tried to explain the real point I was trying to make in the next one: "The point is that getting to $1-2 million in ARR probably ...