Forget the product — you are a pre-revenue startup. What is your runway, what does your cost base look like, and why should I believe you exist at my renewal date?

The full executive answer

Fair question, and I will answer the structure candidly even where I keep specific figures for a diligence setting. The cost base is deliberately shaped like software, not like an AI-era services company: a very small team leveraging an unusually automated build — the entire platform ships through a continuous-integration gate with no release engineering headcount — on serverless infrastructure that scales cost with usage rather than ahead of it, and AI compute that is metered per generation and structurally capped at roughly ten percent of any subscription we sell. There are no forward-deployed engineers, no data-centre commitments, no professional-services payroll. Burn at this stage is dominated by a small number of salaries, which is the most controllable cost structure a company can have.

Why believe we exist at renewal: first, the gross-margin architecture I have shown you means revenue converts to runway at software economics from the first customer — we do not need to raise money to serve customers, only to accelerate; second, the breakeven customer count at our price points is small — at a blended mid-tier price, low double-digit customers cover a lean team’s core burn, which is a survival bar measured in months of decent execution, not in venture miracles. In Rule of 40 language we are pre-growth by definition, so the only honest claim is about the margin half and the cost discipline — both of which are inspectable.

And because no young vendor should ask you to price their survival at zero risk: your downside is contractually contained. Monthly terms if you want them, full structured export of your data at any time, tested erasure, and — for enterprise agreements — I will negotiate source-code escrow with a business-continuity release trigger. Underwrite the counterparty risk with exit mechanics, not with my optimism.