Startup Readiness Checklist + Runway Projector

How this readiness checklist scores your startup

The 19 items are weighted by what actually kills seed-stage deals in diligence: cash runway, a product live in market, a repeatable acquisition channel, and a clean cap table are 4–5 points each. Entity formation and bookkeeping cadence are 3 points — table stakes that every serious business has. ICP clarity and pricing testing are 2 points — important, but not the difference between funded and not. Total: 62 weighted points. Check every item you can defend honestly and the score maps to a real-world band: 80%+ is fundable, 60–79% is operating, 40–59% is early, below 40% is pre-launch regardless of how long you've been working on it.

A worked example. A two-founder SaaS team with $180K in the bank, $18K MRR, and $42K in monthly expenses has 7.5 months of flat runway. They've formed a Delaware C-Corp, separated banking, reconcile monthly, and signed an MSA template. Product is live, 14 paying customers, 4.2% monthly churn. They've run one paid channel on Google Ads for 3 months producing 8–12 qualified leads a week. Their co-founder split is 60/40 with four-year vest, one-year cliff. On this checklist they score 38/62 points — 61%, "Operating." The gaps: under 12 months of runway, no dedicated delivery playbook, no formal ideal customer profile document. That's the honest diligence picture — a real business running real revenue, but not yet investable at a real seed valuation.

The five levers that actually move a seed-stage score

We tested this scoring against 47 companies we've advised over 2023–2025. Five items moved the score more than anything else, because they gate the items around them.

1. Product live and in active use. Until a customer uses your product without you in the room, none of the unit-economics items can be measured. Churn is hypothetical, retention is hypothetical, LTV is hypothetical. Ship a usable v1, however embarrassing. A B2B SaaS with 50 users and a daily retention of 35% beats a perfect mockup with zero users every single time.
2. Repeatable acquisition channel producing weekly leads.One channel that reliably generates 5–20 qualified conversations per week is worth more than six experimental channels. We've seen founders chase TikTok, LinkedIn, podcast sponsorships, SEO, and cold email in a single quarter — each for three weeks — and arrive at month-end with nothing measurable. Pick one. Commit 60 days. Measure CAC and conversion. Only then move to the second.
3. Twelve months of runway at current burn. Below 12 months and every other decision is contaminated by fundraising anxiety. Above 12, you can make product bets that take 6–9 months to pay off. The gap between 6 and 12 months is where strategic quality collapses.
4. Co-founder equity documented with vesting.The single most common cause of seed-stage implosion is unwritten founder agreements. Use Stripe Atlas or Clerky. Four-year vest, one-year cliff, in writing, signed. Vesting doesn't mean distrust — it means insurance for both of you when circumstances change.
5. LTV:CAC calculated and above 1:1 with real numbers. Not projections. Actual trailing revenue per customer divided by actual blended CAC including your time. Below 1:1, every customer is a net loss. Fix the pricing or the channel before scaling.

Gross burn versus net burn versus effective burn

Three burn numbers matter, and most founders only track one. Gross burn is total monthly operating expenses: payroll, rent, software, marketing, contractors. Net burn is gross burn minus monthly revenue — the actual cash leaving the bank account. Effective burnis net burn adjusted for seasonality and expected growth, typically what you use for forward-looking cash planning. A SaaS company with $85K gross burn, $42K MRR, and 6% monthly growth has $43K net burn this month but maybe $35K effective burn on a 3-month forward view. The runway projector in the tool above uses flat numbers deliberately — it's the safer planning basis. When cash flow gets tight, everyone overestimates next-quarter revenue. The flat projection is what keeps you honest.

When the 18-month rule fails (and when it doesn't)

Conventional seed-stage advice says raise enough to secure 18–24 months of runway. It's still the right default. But the rule breaks in two directions. First, in a hot capital market (like 2021) founders sometimes raise 36 months of runway at a rich valuation — great for dilution math, but the money burns on vanity hiring and the next round demands traction the team never built. Second, in a tight market (like 2023–2024) founders accept 12-month rounds at modest valuations because the alternative is no round at all. That's survival, not strategy. Either way, the psychological number is 18 months — below it, fundraising pressure distorts every other decision.

Cutting the burn when the score says you're not ready

If the checklist lands below 60% and runway is under 9 months, the right move is to cut burn and extend — not raise. Seed investors can smell a rushed raise, and a too-low valuation today cripples your future rounds. The cuts, in priority order: pause all new hiring (usually the single biggest lever), cancel every software subscription that isn't directly earning revenue, defer any non-critical contractors, shrink marketing to one repeatable channel, negotiate payment terms with the largest three suppliers. Most early-stage teams can extract 20–30% of monthly burn in under two weeks without touching headcount. Layoffs are a last resort — cut deep once, never twice.

Pair this checklist with the operating cadence

A readiness score is a snapshot. Run it monthly for the first six months of a startup, then quarterly. Pair it with the monthly cash flow projector for forward visibility, the MRR calculator for the revenue trajectory, the CLV calculator for unit economics, and the business loan calculatorif you're considering debt before equity. The checklist tells you where you are. The calculators tell you the math behind each answer.

What this tool deliberately doesn't score

Team quality, market size, moat, founder-market fit — all enormously important to seed investors, none of them scorable in a checklist. The readiness checklist is the tactical layer: the boring, concrete items that make the conversation about your startup possible. The strategic questions live upstream. If you can't pass the tactical bar, the strategic conversation never happens. If you can, the strategic conversation is where the round actually gets won.