In my experience, Excel and Google Spreadsheets are two of the best tools startuppers could start with for analytics.

They are rather simple to use if you’re not going too deep with numbers. You actually don’t need to go deep at the start of a business if you don’t want to get in a muddle with complex metrics.

Many Excel templates for startups that I meet online are great and contain lots of useful stuff, but if I found them earlier, without a business background, I would have had no idea what all these complex metrics mean.

That’s why I’ve created my own Google Spreadsheet template, which has all metrics that startups need to track their analytics while staying really easy to understand without specific experience.

Push File →Make a copy to edit this spreadsheet.

Note: It’s always easier to customize a simple solution for your specific needs, then learn how to use a difficult one. I’ve added recommendations to make this process easier for you.

I wish I had this template ten years ago, but I didn’t. Now, I am sharing it for absolutely free because I want everybody to have the possibility to measure their data as effectively as possible. You can quickly adjust your own numbers instead of mine, and get financial models and dashboards in Excel for your startup.

In this post, I’ll not only provide templates you could download and quickly adjust to your needs, I’ll also explain basic metrics for startups, their nature, and importance.

Expenses

To keep things simple, our costs model will be pretty generic, but quite useful at the early stage of your startup.

The model looks the following way:

1 year or 4 quarters

Let’s assume we have 5 people in our startup. CEO and CTO at the beginning and two engineers plus a designer joining the team later on

We will include salaries for this team plus fringe benefits (9%)

Office rent

Legal costs related to company registration

Costs related to AWS

Other tools that are crucial to sustain the business

We assume that the startup has some cash in the form of founders’ savings or pre-seed round raised ($300,000)

We include average monthly burn rate and how many months you have before all cash will be burned. This is probably the most important part for each startup

Recommendations

Thoroughly think about all other expenses you might have and adjust numbers in the spreadsheet.

Add expenses in the special rows left blank if you have some more.

Adjust starting capital or pre-seed investments if applicable (note that in order to found a startup, significant capital is not the hard requirement. 😉 You could always start with investing time together with your co-founders and some tiny compulsory expenses to launch).

Earnings

Things are getting more interesting here, and I would strongly suggest you to think about earnings at the earliest. Since I totally agree that “startup = growth … and the best thing to measure the growth rate is revenue”, you’d better address this question.

Startups could have different business models in terms of revenue, and we will focus on the main two in this post — SaaS and e-commerce. We have adjusted burn rate for both models and placed it in the Costs sheet because we assume there is some income being generated.

SaaS (software as a service)

The SaaS business model is based on the idea that a user could use software by purchasing a subscription usually on a monthly or annual basis. A lot of SaaS companies provide their solution in the cloud, making time to deploy is significantly lower in this case: users just sign up and can start using the tool.

On the other hand, the value that this tool provides is not always clear from the beginning and the aims of users could be widely different, so there’s usually a trial period given. Users can test the product and decide whether it makes sense to purchase a subscription or not by the end of the trial.

Examples of SaaS include Slack, Intercom, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Shopify.

Let’s add some assumptions into our calculations. We will assume that monthly growth in subscriptions is 20%, average revenue per client is $50, monthly churn rate starts from 10% and decreases by 0.5% each month. Lastly, in our first month we acquire 20 first-time users.

At the early stage of building Statsbot, we came up with a solution to the question of how to automate failed charges in 2 hours.

I have included the following metrics in a separate sheet of our Excel file:

New customers, Lost customers (churn), Total number of active customers

New trials and trial-to-paid conversion rate

Churn rate, i.e. how many users unsubscribe each month

Monthly Recurring Revenue, or MRR, i.e. total amount of cash being generated with subscriptions

Lifetime revenue per client and Average lifetime of customer in months

Recommendations

Calculate your own average revenue per client. You might have several plans, so calculate the average between them for the beginning.

Ideally, you should know the % of how much MRR each plan generates.

Keep your eye on all the rows highlighted with blue.

If you know the CPA for each client, compare it with Lifetime revenue per client and check if the latter is higher.

If some users upgrade or downgrade between plans, add Expansion and Contraction MRR metrics yourself. It is actually the amount you earned or lost after a user has changed plans and it affects your MRR too.

E-Commerce

The e-commerce business model is based on the idea that you could sell something online. It’s usually pretty straightforward — there is no trial since goods being sold on the web or in mobile apps have a clear value. You purchase a product and get it delivered to your door or by email (e-books for example). However, in most cases you could make a return.

Examples of e-commerce include Warby Parker, Zappos, and Jet.com.

For an e-commerce model, our assumptions would be the following: we sell 5 products and all of them need to be delivered to clients’ doors. Pricing for each is different, however, sales are evenly distributed. Cost to produce one product is 60% of the price and the other 40% is margin.

TIP: If you plan to found an e-commerce startup, you need a really healthy margin that will bring velocity to your business. I would suggest you carefully study whether you can sell product with at least a 40% margin before starting.

In the spreadsheet I include such metrics:

Number of Sales and Sales growth MoM, %

Revenue

Total Cost to produce

Shipping costs

Transaction fee, 3% (it really depends, but let’s take this number as it seems like the average in the market)

Total costs

Net Margin and Net Income

Total revenue cumulative and Total Net income cumulative

Recommendations

Same as before, quickly adjust your numbers, and Excel will take care of the rest.

Thoroughly think about other expenses such as packaging, returns, and add costs for your warehouse if applicable.

Keep your eye on all the rows highlighted with blue.

If you know your CPA, add it to the Costs model and compare with Net income to see if you’re actually making money.

Analyze which product gives you the most sales and adjust your marketing accordingly.

We’ve also added revenue being generated in SaaS and e-commerce models to the Costs spreadsheet, so you can see Burn rate for these models. Burn rate has changed since you now have some cash flow.

Mixed model

Recently, we saw a big number of success stories with so-called mixed subscription and e-commerce models. You could start a subscription and get physical goods delivered to your door with a certain frequency of your choice — monthly, quarterly, etc.

There’s no trial, but quite often the price for the first order and delivery is either extremely low or just free. It removes a barrier, allowing users to easily give it a try.

Some well-known examples: Dollar Shave Club and Adore Me.

Recommendations