How you plan to acquire customers is one of the most important questions your financial model should answer. Instead of merely guessing the number of potential buyers and sellers in your marketplace platform, our model estimates your customer base using the most popular marketplace strategies: Paid Marketing, Organic Marketing and Customer Referrals. This approach allows you to accurately forecast your potential customer base and boost your credibility with investors.

The model offers considerable flexibility in how you forecast orders and revenue for your marketplace store. It considers revenue obtained from two main sources: orders made on your platform—either via a fixed fee or a percentage commission per order—and revenue associated with subscriptions paid by buyers and/or sellers, if applicable.

Special emphasis is placed on the hiring plan, aiming to make it as flexible as possible. The model breaks down personnel projections by employee and categories (which you can customize): Management, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Support and Product. For each individual employee, you can set the start date, end date, the initial gross salary, as well as the % of tax and the % of benefits.

The model enables you to forecast your startup's expenses very accurately. It categorizes expenses into fixed (either recurrent or one-time) and variable types. Variable expenses are calculated based on several factors, including a percentage of revenue, the total number of orders, and the number of buyers, sellers, or employees (either overall or per employee category).

In the financials tab, you will find the projected monthly financial statements for your marketplace startup, spanning a period of up to five years. These include the Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. These financial statements are meticulously constructed in accordance with standard accounting principles.

Knowing your startup's break-even point is one of the most important metrics founders should be aware of, and it's a metric your investors are going to ask about. That's why the model calculates your startup's monthly and annual break-even points and how they evolve over time. Through the model, you can see how sensitive the break-even points are to changes in your assumptions.

The model tracks the evolution of the most important metrics that marketplace startups should care about: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), LTV (Lifetime Value), LTV/CAC ratio, Customer Retention Rate (CRR), Customer Acquisition Rate (CAR), buyer:seller ratio, cash burn rate, among others. These metrics offer valuable insights into your startup's financial health and highlight the robustness of your financial plan. More info.

The model helps you determine the amount of financing your startup requires. It provides a detailed monthly projection of your startup's cash balance over the next five years. The goal is straightforward: to assist you in planning your startup's future, ensuring that the financing you seek—whether equity, debt, or a combination of both—in your investment round is sufficient to maintain a positive cash balance throughout your target period.

The model calculates your startup's value using the Venture Capital Valuation Method, the most commonly used approach among venture capitalists and widely regarded as the standard for assessing a startup's value. This method determines your startup’s valuation based on a projected exit value in five years and the required return on investment. Additionally, the model includes a sensitivity analysis, offering insights into how various factors influence the valuation.

The model features an integrated multi-round cap table, essential for understanding the impact of financing rounds on equity ownership. It supports up to five financing rounds and includes equity investments, SAFEs/convertible bonds—which can be configured to account for interest, valuation discounts, and/or caps—and employee stock option pools. Designed to complement your financial model, it provides valuable insights into how the capital you raise influences your equity ownership.