Startup Resources

Deliveroo started in London in 2013, delivering meals from just a handful of restaurants. Over the following years, it raised money from investors including Index Ventures, Accel and Amazon as it expanded into new markets. By the time it went public in 2021, the company had grown into a business valued at billions of pounds. The London Stock Exchange's IPO case study tells part of that story. Behind every major funding round is a question that matters to founders long before they reach the stock market: how much of the business do you still own after bringing in investors? When a startup raises money by issuing new shares, existing shareholders can see their ownership per…

Startup Valuation Template and Calculator This free Startup Valuation Template and Calculator helps you estimate what your startup could be worth using different valuation methods. Use the template to assess your annual recurring revenue (ARR), other revenue, business traction and future milestones. The built-in calculator combines applicable valuation methods to help you develop an indicative estimate of your startup's potential value. What's included ✅ A Revenue Multiplier Method to estimate value using revenue and selected multiples ✅ A By Stage section to assess revenue and business traction ✅ A Future Valuation Method based on projected revenue and future milestones…

Profit & Loss Statement for Startups: From Revenue to Net ProfitA business can attract more customers, increase sales and still struggle to make a profit. The money coming in looks promising, but once salaries, stock, marketing and other expenses are paid, there may be very little left. That's why understanding your numbers matters just as much as growing your business. Take Monzo, the UK digital bank. In its 2024 financial year, the company reported £15.4 million in profit before tax, following a £116.3 million loss the previous year. Its FY2024 annual report shows how a growing business can move towards profitability while continuing to expand. The lesson for founde…

Cash Flow Forecast: How to Create One for Your StartupMADE.com and Webvan show why ambitious growth needs sound financial planning. Strong sales or expansion plans don't guarantee a sustainable cash position In 2021, British online furniture retailer MADE.com was valued at around £775 million when it floated on the stock market. Just over a year later, it was fighting for survival. Rising costs, weaker consumer demand and high stock levels put pressure on the business. In November 2022, MADE.com entered administration (read the announcement from its administrators). Another cautionary tale is Webvan, a US online grocery startup that planned to expand into 28 major metropo…

Cap Table Model Template with Funding Calculator This free Cap Table Model Template with Calculator and Worked Example helps you organise your startup’s ownership structure and understand how fundraising affects equity. Use the template to record shareholders, calculate ownership percentages, estimate pre-money and post-money valuations, and work out how many shares to issue in a funding round. The built-in calculator also helps you model investor ownership and founder dilution, including option pool adjustments. What’s included ✅ An editable cap table model for recording shareholders and shares ✅ A built-in funding calculator for valuations and investor share issuance ✅…

Profit & Loss Template This free Profit & Loss and 5-Year Financial Projections Template helps you organise your business finances and plan for long-term growth in one spreadsheet. Use the template to forecast your revenue, cost of sales, operating expenses and profitability over five years. It can help you estimate future performance, understand how costs may change as your business grows and assess whether your business model is financially sustainable. What's included ✅ A structured profit and loss statement ✅ Five-year financial projections to support business planning ✅ Revenue, cost and expense categories ✅ Profit calculations to help assess financial perfo…

Cash Flow Forecast Template This free Cash Flow Forecast Template gives you a practical, editable spreadsheet for planning your expected income, tracking payments and managing your cash position over the next 12 months. Use the template to estimate money coming in and going out, monitor your projected cash balance, and identify potential shortfalls before they become bigger problems. It can help you plan spending, prepare for upcoming bills and make more informed decisions about your business finances. What's included ✅ A 12-month cash flow forecasting framework ✅ Sections for expected cash receipts and business payments ✅ Automatic calculations for net cash flow and clo…

When Melanie Perkins was teaching design software to university students, she noticed a problem. The tools were so complicated that students could spend a long time learning how to use them before they could focus on the actual design work. She saw an opportunity to make design simpler and more accessible, helping inspire the idea behind Canva. Read Canva's account of its early beginnings. It's a useful reminder for anyone building a business. Customers don't always need more features, more options or a lower price. Sometimes, they need someone to understand what's making an ordinary task unnecessarily difficult. But how do you uncover those frustrations before you build …

A customer tells you your idea sounds great. They say they can see themselves using it, explain why it would be useful, maybe even ask when they can try it. You leave the conversation feeling pretty good. But that conversation might tell you almost nothing about whether you have a viable business. Steve Blank's story about Ardent is a useful example. While working on the company, Blank spent considerable time learning about customers and their needs. The conversations gave him plenty of information, but he later realised he'd missed a more important question: did customers actually have a problem they wanted to solve badly enough to change their behaviour and pay for a so…

Blockbuster knew who its competitors were. The bigger problem was that the way people rented and watched films was changing. Netflix started with DVDs by mail, giving customers a different way to rent films without visiting a shop. It then moved further into convenience, recommendations and eventually streaming. The interesting lesson isn't simply that one company replaced another. It's that the competitive landscape changed, along with what customers expected from the experience. That's the part of competitor research that's easy to miss. You can know who your biggest competitors are, what they charge and what features they offer, yet still miss the bigger picture. Custo…

Customer Empathy Map Canvas Want to understand your customers beyond basic demographics and assumptions? This free Customer Empathy Map Template gives you a practical, visual framework for exploring your target customers' behaviours, experiences, needs and motivations. Use the template to organise what customers say, think, do and hear, identify their pains and gains, and build a clearer picture of what matters to them. It can help you challenge assumptions, recognise unmet needs and uncover opportunities to improve your product, service or customer experience. What's included ✅ Sections for customer thoughts, feelings, actions and influences ✅ Space to identify custome…

Customer Empathy Map Canvas Want to understand your customers beyond basic demographics and assumptions? This free Customer Empathy Map Template gives you a practical, visual framework for exploring your target customers' behaviours, experiences, needs and motivations. Use the template to organise what customers say, think, do and hear, identify their pains and gains, and build a clearer picture of what matters to them. It can help you challenge assumptions, recognise unmet needs and uncover opportunities to improve your product, service or customer experience. What's included ✅ Editable Customer Empathy Map Template ✅ Sections for customer thoughts, feelings, actions an…

A customer can visit your website, browse your prices, ask a question and leave without buying anything. You might assume they were never interested. But what if they simply couldn't find the information they needed? That's the kind of problem a customer journey map can help uncover. Consider Tesco. Its published privacy policy explains how it uses shopping habits, website and app behaviour, and purchase information to understand customers and personalise aspects of their experience. This shows how customer information can inform business decisions, though it doesn't establish that Tesco uses any particular internal journey-mapping process. Read Tesco's privacy policy. S…

Customer Journey Map Canvas Want to understand your customers’ experience from their first interaction with your business to becoming a loyal customer? This free Customer Journey Map Canvas gives you a practical, visual framework for mapping customer stages, touchpoints, needs, emotions and friction points so you can see where the experience works well and where it needs improvement. Use the canvas to understand what customers do at each stage, identify moments of confusion or frustration, uncover opportunities to improve their experience and turn your findings into practical next steps. What’s included ✅ Editable customer journey map canvas covering six key stages ✅ Cus…

Customer Interview Questions & Discovery Worksheet Need a better way to learn what your customers actually need before you build? This free Customer Interview Questions & Discovery Worksheet gives you a practical structure for planning, running and analysing customer interviews without leading the conversation or relying on polite feedback. Use the worksheet to define what you want to learn, identify assumptions worth testing, choose useful questions, record customer behaviour and separate real evidence from your own interpretation. It also helps you spot patterns across multiple interviews and turn what you learn into clearer decisions. What’s included ✅ Intervi…

Competitor Research Template 📁 Understanding your competitors is about more than collecting company names, prices and website links. This free Competitor Research Template gives you a simple way to compare competitors, understand their offers, spot gaps and record useful insights as you research your market. What’s included✅ Easy-to-use competitor research spreadsheet ✅ Completely free to download ✅ Suitable for founders, students, startups and small businesses ✅ Compare competitors, pricing, business models, marketing and potential gaps Start with 3–5 relevant competitors rather than trying to research everyone in the market. Use the findings to make better decisions ab…

A business idea can sound brilliant when you are the person who came up with it. The harder question is whether anyone else thinks it is worth paying for. Juicero learned this the expensive way. The Silicon Valley startup raised around $120 million for an internet-connected juicing machine that initially sold for $700 before the price was reduced to $400. In 2017, Bloomberg reported that customers could squeeze the company's juice packs by hand without using the machine. Four months later, Juicero suspended sales and offered refunds. Read the Bloomberg report on Juicero. The lesson is bigger than building an expensive product. Founders need to understand what customers ac…

A startup can be incredibly busy and still be moving in the wrong direction. Webvan is a useful example. During the dot-com boom, the online grocery company pursued an ambitious expansion strategy, investing heavily in technology, warehouses and distribution infrastructure while aiming to enter 28 major metropolitan markets. Stanford's case study of Webvan documents how aggressively the company planned to expand and highlights the challenge of scaling its grocery model. Stanford's Webvan case study The problem was not a lack of activity. Webvan was doing plenty. The bigger issue was whether the business was proving its assumptions quickly enough before committing more mon…

Market Research Template Not sure whether your business idea is actually worth building? This free Market Research Template gives you a practical framework for turning scattered research into a clear, evidence-based decision, not another spreadsheet full of information nobody uses. Instead of researching everything, the template helps you start with one decision you need to make, then work through the areas that actually matter: your customer, the problem, demand, competitors, pricing and market size. Use it to define your research objective, map your target customer and their pains, record competitor and pricing research, build a realistic bottom-up market size estimate…

Your Product Might Not Be the Thing Customers ValueYou have built the feature. You have spent weeks improving it. You can explain exactly how it works. It can reveal something important. You may know your product inside out while still not knowing what matters to the person you are trying to sell it to. This applies whether you are a university student testing your first idea, a small business owner adding a new service, or a founder a year into building something bigger. It's a common enough moment that it comes up regularly in the Startup Networks forum, with founders explaining a feature in detail only to realise the customer was never confused about what it does. The…

30-60-90 Day Startup Plan Need a clearer way to decide what your startup should focus on over the next three months? This free 30-60-90 Day Startup Plan Template gives you a practical framework for turning your next 90 days into clear priorities, measurable progress and useful evidence. Instead of creating a long list of tasks, the template helps you define one key question your startup needs to answer, then work through three stages: Validate, Build & Test, and Measure & Decide. Use it to set your 90-day objective, identify key actions, assign owners, track metrics, record assumptions and review what you've learned at Days 30, 60 and 90. Whether you're testing a…

Value Proposition Canvas Need a clearer way to understand what your customers actually want and why they would choose your product or service? This free Value Proposition Canvas Template gives you a practical framework for mapping your customer's needs against the value your business provides. Use it to identify Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains, then connect them to your Products & Services, Pain Relievers and Gain Creators. Whether you are developing a new business idea, testing a product, improving an existing offer, studying business strategy or preparing for customer interviews, this template gives you a simple starting point for thinking about customer value. What…

There is a particular question that can make a founder suddenly question how well they actually understand their own business. "So, what's the plan?" You might have spent months talking to customers, testing an idea, building a product and trying to get those first sales. You probably know your business better than anyone else in the room. But when someone asks how you will make money, who you will sell to, what it will cost to grow and where the business is heading, having those answers in your head is not the same as having them written down. That's usually the moment founders realise a plan isn't red tape. It's the thing that would have caught the problem before it cos…

Can You Explain Your Entire Business on One Page?You have a business idea. You can explain it to a friend. You may even have a pitch deck. But can you explain how the business actually makes money, reaches customers and delivers its value on one page? This is something I see quite often when founders introduce their startups in the Startup Networks forum. They understandably want to talk about the product first. What it does, how it works and why they believe it is different. But a product is only one part of the story. There is much more to a business than what it sells. This is where the Business Model Canvas can help. Created by Alexander Osterwalder, it gives you a si…

One question comes up quite often when talking to founders in the Startup Networks Forum. Most founders know their strengths. Maybe you are good at sales, marketing, product development or building relationships with customers. These are the areas where you feel confident, so naturally, you spend more time on them. I know this from my own experience. Sales and marketing are strengths of mine. Financial management is not. I know where I am comfortable, but looking honestly at my weaknesses is much harder. And I think that is true for many founders. We are happy to talk about our strengths, but weaknesses and threats are easier to push into the back of our minds. Maybe you…

SWOT Analysis Template Need a simple way to understand what is working in your business and what could be holding you back? This free SWOT Analysis Template includes a one-page guide followed by a printable SWOT worksheet, giving you a clear structure for assessing your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Use the guide to understand how SWOT analysis works, then complete the printable template to step back from your business, identify your key advantages, recognise areas that need improvement, explore potential opportunities and consider external threats that could affect your progress. Whether you are developing a business idea, planning your next stage …

LinkedIn Isn’t Just for Job Seekers AnymoreRemember when LinkedIn was just an online CV graveyard? A place where hopeful job hunters lurked and recruiters roamed like lions on the savannah? Well, that era is over. LinkedIn’s had a glow-up. Here’s the big question: Is your B2B startup getting left behind? If your company's LinkedIn page is a digital cobweb and your employees’ profiles look like they were last updated during the industrial revolution, we need to talk. Why LinkedIn is Your Startup’s Secret Growth WeaponLet’s be real, LinkedIn is the world’s most trusted professional networking platform. Where else can you pitch a COO, get feedback from a thought leader and …