All stages
🧠Stage 12
Founder Wellness & Mindset
Sustain high performance and leadership.
6 lessons12 operating guides
Lessons
Expand any topic for concept, action steps, and pro tips.
Concept
Preventing & Managing Burnout: finance is the language of survival. Runway, unit economics, and pricing discipline decide whether you get to keep playing.
Why it matters
Companies die when cash hits zero with no plan. Clarity here is founder oxygen.
Action steps
- 1Build a 13-week cash forecast (inflows and outflows).
- 2Compute burn and runway weekly; include realistic founder pay.
- 3Separate one-time revenue from recurring.
- 4Estimate CAC and LTV with stated assumptions.
- 5Review pricing against customer ROI every month.
- 6Set a default-alive plan if fundraising slips.
Done when
You can answer runway, burn, and unit economics in under a minute with a single source of truth.
Metrics
- · Runway months
- · Net burn
- · Gross margin
- · LTV:CAC
Anti-patterns
- · Ignoring personal burn
- · Calling services revenue SaaS MRR
Operator tip
Default alive beats default dead. Design costs so you can survive without a round.
Tools
StripeSpreadsheetBookkeeperNotion
Stage quiz
leadership readiness (fundamentals baseline)
5 questions · pass at 70%
1.A startup is best described as:
2.The best early focus is usually:
3.Co-founder equity should typically include:
4.An MVP primarily tests:
5.A strong PMF signal is:
Answer all questions to score.