You don't need a CFO. You need a clear picture of your numbers.
At the MVP stage, investors don't expect audited accounts or complex financial models. But they do expect you to know your numbers. "I don't really track that yet" is one of the most damaging things a founder can say in a fundraising meeting — even at early stage.
The good news: the financials you need at this stage are simple.
This is how much money your company spends each month. Add up everything: salaries (including your own if you're paying yourself), software subscriptions, contractors, office costs, marketing spend. That's your burn. Know it to the nearest hundred pounds.
Divide your current cash balance by your monthly burn. That's how many months you have left. Investors will ask this directly. Know the answer before you walk into any meeting.
If you're generating revenue, know your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), what it was three months ago, and what it is now. The trend matters as much as the number. Growing from £500 to £2,000 MRR in three months is a better story than being stuck at £5,000 for six months.
If you're selling something, what does it cost you to deliver it? For a SaaS product this might be hosting costs. For a service, it might be contractor time. This is the foundation of your gross margin, which investors will ask about as you grow. Our unit economics guide covers this in more detail.
This doesn't need to be complex. A spreadsheet showing expected monthly revenue, costs, and cash balance for the next 18 months is enough. Build it bottom-up: how many customers do you expect to add each month, at what price, with what churn rate? Your forecast will be wrong — everyone's is. But building it forces you to think through your assumptions, and those assumptions are what investors are really evaluating.
You don't need full P&L statements, DCF valuation models, or five-year projections. These are Series A concerns. Keep it simple.
A well-organised spreadsheet works fine at this stage. Tools like Xero or QuickBooks handle your accounting, and Stripe or Paddle give you clean revenue data if you're selling online. Don't over-engineer your finance stack before you have meaningful revenue.
Not knowing your burn rate. Confusing revenue with cash in the bank. Building a financial model that assumes everything goes right. And the most common one: not updating your numbers before a fundraising meeting, so you're working from three-month-old figures when an investor asks a live question.
Once your financials are in order and you're ready to raise, it's worth understanding how early-stage deals are typically structured. SAFEs and convertible notes are the most common instruments at pre-seed — they let you raise without setting a valuation upfront.
A founder who says: "Our monthly burn is £6,500. We have nine months of runway. We're at £1,800 MRR, up from £400 three months ago. Our forecast shows us reaching £8k MRR by month 12, assuming we convert 15% of our current pipeline." That's a founder in control of their business.
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Try the funding finder →This is general information, not financial or legal advice. Always do your own research and seek independent professional advice.