This is not clickbait.
In this video, we are going to review the full financials of Slidebean for our most
important year: the year when we raised our first $250,000, the year when we grew our
subscriptions by 800%.
As much as we are open and transparent about many things, we can't release detailed financials
for our current company stage- but 2015 was a while ago, so we are OK with you digging
in through our numbers- I will be linking this spreadsheet in the video description.
We'd like you to pay close attention to: How a financial model looks.
How a startup distributes its expenses.
How much money is required to get a company off the ground.
A reality check, on the struggles you will have to endure as you start your first company.
Without further due, here's Startup Financial Model: Slidebean's 2015 financials.
Just in case you are new here, I co-founded Slidebean with these guys back in 2013.
Slidebean is a pitch deck platform for startups.
We have an AI design platform that designs your slides for you, or if you are looking
for more advanced, human help, we can also get involved in writing the slides for your
deck.
Alright, so we got together, bought the slidebean.com domain on May 2013 and started working on
the platform.
We held part-time jobs and managed other projects between 2013 and 2014 to pay our bills.
In 2014 we got accepted in Startup Chile, an accelerator in Santiago that gave us $35,000
and allowed us to dedicate all of our time to the platform.
Later that year, we also went to Dreamit Ventures, an accelerator in NYC.
We leveraged the Dreamit Network heavily to get into investor conversations.
The presence in New York was also crucial towards getting the launch of the platform
covered by the startup press...
Finally, we joined 500 Startups in the winter of 2014, raised $75,000 from them and closed
an additional $250,000 from a mix of investors in New York and San Jose.
Our financials at that time were... complex, and indeed not well documented.
Some money came from consulting projects we took, which were unrelated to Slidebean, so
it's not necessarily a great example for you.
If you haven't done so, you should look into our founder's agreement video, to get an idea
of how to manage money at such an early stage.
But again, by February 2015, we had money in the bank, and we could start spending more
aggressively- so here's the breakdown.
We started the year with $1,178 in subscriptions, and we closed it with $16,197.
We generated a total of $113,535 in revenue and spent $313,685.
Yeah, that's why startups raise money, because turning a profit your first year is hard.
Before we dig deeper into the document, let me explain briefly how a startup financial or any business financial
model works.
A financial model is usually split into SG&A (Selling, General, and Administrative Expenses),
COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), Revenue, and CAPEX (Capital Expenditure).
In our case, COGS: holds all of our server costs essential
to the business.
This includes AWS as well as any other platform or tool that the Slidebean platform needs
to operate correctly.
CAPEX: we use mostly for equipment: office furnishing and computers.
When you buy a company laptop, you are not spending the money but putting it into an
asset, so for financial purposes, this works somewhat differently.
There's depreciation and a few other things that get calculated here.
SG&A has all of the other expenses, including team, marketing costs, rent, insurance, and
services the organization needs to execute its tasks.
Finally, the Revenue sheet not only has our final revenue metrics for the month but our
financial projections.
We have iterated over different formulas to calculate our future revenue.
As a SaaS business, we can somewhat accurately predict how much renewal revenue we are going to make
on a given month, based on historical retention rates or churn.
For future months we estimate our revenue based on that and on our marketing spend.
We have a formula that estimates the dollars earned in revenue per dollar spent in marketing,
including team, ads and so on... if on the SG&A sheet we scale the marketing budget,
we see that reflected in the future estimated revenue.
This formula assumes, of course, that you can scale your marketing budget with the same
efficiency.
It would be a bold statement to say that you can triple your spend in marketing and see that reflected
in your revenue proportionally- but you can make small, percentual monthly increases while adding a variable
to predict that more spend will be less efficient.
Or your cost of acquisition will go higher.
Another formula we use is the support staff required depending on the number of customers.
You can estimate that you will need to hire a new support person for every 1,000 new active
customers you have on the platform.
So as your subscriber base scales (based on your predicted increase in marketing spend)
so will your estimate expenses to support that user base.
You can apply a similar formula to server costs and other platforms and all the stuff in the financial model.
Calculating all this is rather complex, and every business will need a different formula,
but estimating this correctly will allow you to spend your budget more efficiently.
Knowing what will happen or being able to estimate it accurately, in the next few months lets you choose when and how to scale your
team and your growth efforts without endangering the company.
Now, back to our own financials.
We closed $170,000 of funding in February 2015.
Thanks to the fact this was a convertible note (go watch our video in convertible notes), we collected the first $170,000 in February
and an additional $80,000 in May.
Yes, at this point I had never seen so much money on a bank account I had access to.
Let's start with SG&A.
We spent around $146,000 in payroll that year;
which includes wages and payroll taxes.
Founder salaries were close to $93,000 for the year.
You can quickly guess that we allocated about $2,500/mo per founder, or around $30,000/yr.
Figuring out founder salaries is hard, and negotiating them with your investors is hard
as well.
The wage of a founder needs to be enough, so you don't have to spend time worrying about
your salary.
It's also important to understand that this should be good enough to get by, but not to
save money.
Your 'savings' as a founder are the stock you own in the company, and it increases in
value based on the effort you put in.
During this time we were partially based in Costa Rica and partly based in California
and New York (we were exiting the 500 Startups accelerator).
If it works as a reference, the minimum wage in Costa Rica at that time was around $700/mo.
Whenever we had to spend time in expensive cities, we had a small adjustment to cover
the extra cost of staying in the city.
Being based in Costa Rica has been, by far, one of the core reasons for our success.
We have been able to attract great talent at a fraction of the cost of hosting those
teams in the US.
They are not an outsourced or remote team, but fully embedded in our company culture
thanks to our local office.
It was only until late 2015 when we were able to scale our organization.
Our logic behind this was that we wanted to prove our ability to scale our user base,
and we did.
Once we projected good revenue for the months to come, we allowed ourselves to hire new
team members.
If you look at the financial model doc, you'll also find team members that made more money
than me.
That is totally fine at this stage.
You, founder, are betting it all on this company to grow and you have the upside of being a
majority shareholder.
If you want to attract talented people, you are going to have to pay them market salaries.
We spent about $83,000 on paid marketing, plus an additional $4,000 on platforms or
tools directly related to marketing.
We separate those tools from the rest of the services we use to calculate a full cost of
acquisition for the month.
While we track the effectiveness of each campaign individually, it's essential to know the average
cost of a lead and a customer, taking into account everything from the ad cost, to the
team executing the ads and the tools they used to work.
Not a lot to add there, you'll find pretty standard business expenses.
You'll see some legal costs in the model, mostly related to the documents needed to
close the round.
Equipment is another highlight worth mentioning.
We, founders, had to upgrade our laptops in the process, and spending $2,500 on a new
MacBook Pro was an unjustified company expense when we could have gotten along with a cheaper
version.
So the company bought the laptops, but we paid the company back in monthly installments.
If you are an e-commerce platform, the cost of the things you sell would be calculated here.
Since we are a software platform, we only include server costs, which allows us to calculate
a gross margin for the cost of running the platform vs the revenue we get.
This is not a real gross margin since the platform also needs human beings to operate, to provide
support, and so on... but you can calculate an adjusted margin if you include the cost
of the support team and the marketing costs.
You'll find a lot of KPIs on this sheet, most of them are quite specific to SaaS, or are
used as part of our formula to estimate revenue.
A lot of this data comes from ChartMogul or from Baremetrics- so Excel is mostly for monitoring
and a future revenue prediction tool. Some points worth mentioning:
Days in the month: when you are making $5,000 a day, it makes a difference if the month
has 30 or 31 days- or you know, 28.
Another useful metrics is the 3, 6, and 12-month trends, which are another good way to determine how things are moving forward
and to implement those numbers in your future projections.
Alright- once again, you can download our 2015 financial model on the link in the description.
As always, if you are one of the first 25 people to sign up to the platform,
you will get 3 months free on Slidebean on any plan.
Finally, a new feature is: we are going to be holding weekly live sessions answering the questions that we're getting through the week.
Subscribe. Leave any other questions you have in the comments and we'll see you next week.