All articles by The Startup Station

For any early-stage startup founder, there are several key moments that mark the trajectory of the company’s growth and serve as a testament to the founding team’s hard work. To name a few, there are the MPV launch, your first customer, and, of course, your first term sheet. Raising money is a daunting and outright scary task for any first-time entrepreneur, and thus getting that first term sheet from a professional investor is an incredible validation of your vision, product quality, and persistence.

A financial model is a quantitative representation of the company’s business plan. In a way, it is the company’s brain, demonstrating how its strategic decisions affect different functions and translate into financial results. For that brain to work properly, we need to correctly create the step by step instructions of what happens with the company as a result of its strategic decisions, or financial model assumptions. The process of creating such assumptions and logic is the expertise of The Startup Station and the crux of our unique methodology. The final step is the implementation of this logic, and this requires knowledge of Excel. In this article we discuss four most useful Excel tricks you can use for modeling a variety of business scenarios.

This year The Startup Station is celebrating its ten year anniversary. When I reflect on the past decade, I am very proud of the growth journey The Startup Station and I have been on. What started as a strategic and financial consultancy became a strategic finance hub spanning activities across multiple areas all making a difference for many entrepreneurs around the world.

One of the most frequent complaints I hear from investors is that founders don’t communicate regularly with them, and even when they communicate they don’t give investors the information they are looking for. Here are six tips on how to effectively structure regular investor updates.

A Board of Advisors is a little different from Board of Directors. It is created in order to help the company’s executives make better decisions and execute the company’s strategy faster and more efficiently – in short, it supports the company and the vision of the company executives, and is not beholden to the whims of the shareholders.

“Why create financial projections when it is all a guess?” That is a question I hear all too often. Many entrepreneurs and small business owners have trouble making estimates and reducing the uncertainty in which they operate to a limited set of variables within a structured model.

There are two valuation methodologies for early-stage startups: qualitative and quantitative. All qualitative approaches are based on some sort of scorecard. Quantitative Approach allows you to assess the financial feasibility of your business plan and represents a more accurate value of your company. Learn more in the article.

One of the most confusing concepts to understand for entrepreneurs with no finance background is the difference between cash and income. In this article we discuss the three reasons that drive the discrepancy.

It is very exciting when your company has raised a round of capital or has enough operating capital, and finally can spread its wings and fly. Invest in marketing, hire people, tell the world about the amazing product you’ve created and, of course, drive sales.

Competitive research is integral to any startup business plan. It demonstrates that there is a demand for the product or service to be launched and that other existing solutions meet this demand inadequately. Deep understanding of the competitive landscape enables a startup to really hone in on its unique value proposition as well as formulate its own go-to-market strategy.