Phase 0 runs from month 1 to month 6 while the product is built and no locations are live yet. Onboarding begins in month 7, cash bottoms out at $68,263 around month 20, and the company closes month 24 holding $136K without ever running out of runway.

The model funds the company with $1.5M across two rounds. Revenue of $2.5M over the same period covers the rest. COGS is the largest single cost at $0.8M of everything deployed, mostly cloud hosting, third-party integrations, and customer support that scale with the number of locations on the platform.

Revenue compounds from $0.6M to $6.5M as new locations onboard and existing accounts add scheduled employees. EBITDA margin settles at 43% once support costs and a flat overhead base are absorbed.

No locations are onboarded during Phase 0. Phase 1 runs from month 7 to month 18 and brings on the first 200. Growth compounds from there, with scheduled employees growing faster than locations as each account adds more of its workforce to the platform.

Revenue is 100% subscription, billed per location at $6 per scheduled employee, per month. There is no commission, booking, or membership revenue, just a simple fee that scales with the workforce each location schedules.

CAC rises while the customer base is bought, peaks at $1,100 in month 25, then falls to $141 as partner and referral channels carry more of the acquisition. LTV to CAC follows it, reaching 7x by month 60.

Year 1 margin is thin because fixed hosting and support costs are spread across a small subscriber base. As locations scale, incremental cost per additional account falls and gross margin settles at 69.9%.

Nearly all of COGS is cloud hosting, third-party integrations, and customer support. Onboarding and setup is a one-off cost per location and falls as the platform matures.

Marketing spend stays close to flat from year 2 onward. Because referrals and channel partnerships carry more of the acquisition, revenue grows 11x while marketing spend rises only modestly, so marketing falls to 15.7% of revenue by year 5.

Direct spend dominates the marketing budget. Most of it funds paid search and demand-gen campaigns aimed at multi-location retail and restaurant operators, alongside a modest events and content budget. A single marketing hire carries the salary line.

Overheads are flat from year 2 at $0.03M. Year 1 carries a one-off setup and incorporation cost. By year 5 the whole base is 0.4% of revenue, which is what a lean, product-led SaaS operation should look like.

Development costs are front-loaded into Phase 0, when there is no revenue and the core scheduling and forecasting platform is being built. From year 2 the line settles into salaries plus a steady $12K of costs.

Revenue per employee grows as headcount scales against a compounding subscriber base, reaching roughly $76K per employee by year 5 on $6.5M of revenue and 85 people, with the ratio improving as locations scale ahead of new hires.