Runway – Cash planning tool for startups | Hacker News Reader

Runway – Cash planning tool for startups

startuprunway.io

130 pointseries42 comments

Hey guys, I’m the developer at LTSE that built Runway, a free tool to help you build your runway model. I built it for founders like me, who aren’t the biggest fan of spreadsheets, but want to build a sound financial model for my company. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This is fantastic!

I was pleasantly surprised how fast I went from signup to actionable data/graphs (roughly 2 minutes). Based on your landing page I was expecting to have to spend considerable more time on it.

Perhaps you could include a demo to show how quick it is to get setup and have something useful?

Demo is a great idea! It's easy enough to record myself going through it. Like you said, it takes just a couple minutes to get going so it would help to highlight that :)

You can combine your demo and onboarding process into one thing. My favorite example of this is NewsBlur: https://newsblur.com/ (Hit the "Try out NewsBlur" button)

Basically, drop them into a demo of the product with pre-filled data. They can make changes all they want, and if they want to save it, they'll need to register an account.

Ohhh yeah, we do this for captable.io. Would be great to have something similar for Runway as well.

This is great! Just came here to say thank you!

oh wow, thank you!! :D

The website looks great. Very eye catching. Congrats.

Do you have an ebook that explains all the terminology involved? Burnrate, runway, cash out etc.

Ooh.. we do have a few articles published. You can find them on the landing page. Let me know if I can point you to more resources beyond that. Happy to help :D

Thank you! This looks very helpful, I'll be using this!

thanks! let me know if I can be helpful :)

Interesting, it's a free to use service and the value to LTSE is that if you need a certain amount of financing, they can help you figure out how much / when and promote their services. It's kind of like a Credit Karma or Mint model but I assume it will promote their own products instead.

If we were a financing company/bank, that would be a great idea, but we are a tools company that build tools to help founders. Check out Captable.io, too, if you get the chance! But I don't think a tool such as Runway, where we are helping cash-conscious founders save money, should charge money :)

Cool, we're in the market for something like this. My next question was obviously "well what about the 409As" and then I saw Fast409A.io.

I'll take a look, thanks!

hahaha that's awesome. let me know if I can help :)

Played around for a few minutes and really like it. One suggestion - if you are going to prefill data, such as positions, don't pop up a bootstrap modal on every delete. Either just nuke it without confirmation (my preference) or do something quick like change the button to a "Really?" and make them click it twice (Zapier does this and I really like it). Having the whole workflow interrupted with the modal is really difficult, especially as it scrolls the whole page.

It's also quite slow in FF, not sure why.

Great idea. Some minor UX and it could be amazing!

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, someone else mentioned this issue as well and we were thinking a simple "no need for template" checkbox would solve it. Thoughts?

Love "cash planning tool for startups"

But Runway has a huge "spend other people's money" connotation to me.

This may be great for us bootstrappers, but my initial assumption is that it's not made for me.

It's easy to jump and take a look around, or you can read our articles to give you a "tour". I'd love to know what your use case is and how we can better fit you.

Quick feedback:

- Get rid of the confirmation box for password on creation.

- Add OAuth signin via Google Apps / GitHub / etc. One click account creation is a must for something like this to take off.

Ah, yes, we did what was quickest, but adding OAuth signin is definitely coming up. And ok on the confirmation box, thanks for the feedback!

Nice work, this is an awesome tool. As a founder would love to be able to share it with my co-founders--any account sharing on the horizon?

we're getting request for collaboration. how do you see account sharing working in your opinion?

Just literally account sharing but with a log of changes and ownsership of different scenarios.

Plus you can charge $25 a month per additional user and that'd be a very fair price.

ohh gotcha. that makes sense! Not sure we want to charge for this product, but duly noted :)

If projects were shareable then that would be nice, so I could share a report with a cofounder or advisor. Also having edit/view permission for people would be good to control who can edit the budget. And if you're going to do sharable reports, then live edit would also be amazing.

ah great ideas! Totally makes sense - added to our todo list :)

I'd love something like this for personal finance, especially catering to these two things:

- Paying off debt (especially student loans)

- Saving for retirement

Totally possible to use it for personal finance!

Can you tell us a bit about LTSE's vision and business model? Are you planning on aggregating data on your services to get a bird's eye view of early business ecosystem? Maybe learn how to pick potential winners, etc.??

While that sounds like a cool idea, that's not why we're building our tools. With our team made up of previous entrepreneurs, we're just happy to build tools that make us think "if I had that in my previous startup, it would have been so helpful!"

Just a quick point on this, the "new scenario" page came up with an error (I think?) for me:

https://puu.sh/wylE1/21197650ef.png

No, that's right - you just don't have any Scenarios built yet :)

Puzzled: don't all the people who care about this do their work in spreadsheets? They're also extremely averse to having their financial data on someone else's computer/network ime.

What we found was that it's not true for everyone. Many are not fond of using Excel and prefer to have a tool like this help them jump in and quickly answer questions. We are hearing that founders are able to set up their whole runway plan in less than 2 minutes with Runway.

Absolutely not true for me, this tool saves me so much hassle!

good to hear! :D

Ugh that screenshot is cringeworthy. Comp-wise, you're saying execs > engineers > PMs > designers. At least make the ICs equivalent.

Also kinda sucks that execs get more. They have the most equity and the most pay, seems like a terrible deal for everyone else.

I'm sure you didn't do this intentionally.

Or maybe a passive-agressive dig from their designer?

hahaha no this was totally unintentional - but great point about the signal we're sending!

Nice, we built the same thing 20 years ago at brixx.com

awesome! nice to meet you and would love any guidance/feedback :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com