Financial Modeling for Startups & Small businesses [Updated]

Learn the best practices for building practical financial models for your startup or business.

Reasons why you should create a financial model for your startup or small business. A good financial model can help you:

Test your assumptions and verify key drivers of your business
Compare and contrast different business choices, like pricing models
Calculate the ACTUAL amount of capital you need to startup
Calculate your burn rate
Model out your user growth
Model out your expenses
Be more prepared talking to potential investors
And loads more.
Building a financial model isn't just a vanity exercise. When done right, it could help you better understand your business, whether it's a startup or an existing business you're growing.

But it's not easy and there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

Even if you have little to no finance background, if you're going to be starting or running a business, this is a skill you need to have.

But financial modeling requires the right tools and the right approach.

We're going to show you how to do that with a wide variety of examples and exercises. But we'll also be teaching general best practices that will help you, no matter what you'll be building your financial models for in the future.

Why learn from us?

By signing up with us, you will be learning from two highly rated instructors that have a combined student count of over 120,000 students and 8,000 review!

Check out our profiles and see that we take care of your students and deliver the goods.

Evan has extensive startup experience and previously worked as a venture capitalist, where he evaluated 100's of startups that trying to convince him to invest in them.

Symon also has startup experience in both tech and brick & mortar businesses. Previously he built tons of models while working in mergers and acquisitions as well as in private equity. And he's helped dozens of startups build financial models across a dozen different business models and industries.

Together, we pull directly from our experience and put it in this course–in fact, two of the case studies use the ACTUAL financial models used to raise funding. The other case studies are inspired by well known startups you're sure to recognize.

How is this different from Symon's Intro to Financial Modeling Course?

The Intro to Financial Modeling course taught by Symon He and Brandon Young is an introductory course on financial modeling that presents a general overview covering the topic and is more relevant to those who wish to explore finance as a career option or those who want to understand financial modeling in a corporate context.

This course is all about financial modeling for startup businesses so it's more geared towards entrepreneurs or small business owners who want to better understand the key drivers of a new or growing business.

There is almost zero overlap. Even though both courses introduce a lemonade stand as an example, those examples and models are quite different as they serve very different purposes.