daniilkhanin

Hi, I'm Daniel — the author. Happy to answer any questions.

Quick context: I wrote a book on unit economics (foreword by Ash Maurya), then spent 9 years proving I can't fix my own. ueCalc is a financial modeling tool for startups — the product works, but I never figured out how to sell it.

The article has all the numbers: conversion funnel, LTV, revenue breakdown, what I tried and why it failed.

I'm now running a public experiment to find a new model. Would love to hear from anyone who's been in a similar spot — working product, no paying customers.

then I don't understand, in 10 years I have interacted with more than 3000 startups, collected and analyzed their problems and offered a solution, how do I talk about it? any post of mine about it gets a ban, I get accused of promoting myself? what am I doing wrong?

That is, you can only share ideas by replying to other people's posts, and if you write a post yourself, you don't listen and get banned. And then posts can only be with questions, did I hear you right?

and how do you tell the world about ideas? :)

How does listening help spread new ideas? Akio Morita used to say that you can't ask people what they don't know. I want to tell the world new things, how do I do that?

how do you tell the world what's important in a case like this?

Indeed, I have moved a bit further away from just comparing LTV and CAC and propose a concept that allows you to manage business processes using approaches such as unit economics, goldratt's theory of constraints and metrics tree. In general, if I manage to tell people about it, they see the benefit, but I don't understand how to tell them.

Often entrepreneurs, after learning about the power of unit economics and seeing the magic of the tool, start to heavily weigh everything with metrics, measure, collect data and completely forget about what kind of business they were doing and why they needed unit economics. That's why it's important to put your tasks and processes first, and unit economics is just a tool to help you make decisions.

Besides, like any tool, unit economics has a cost of use, and if you spend more on the tool than you get benefits, it is not right and it is better not to use such a tool.

If we can imagine a metaphor to describe the unit-economy, a conveyor belt of customer service and revenue generation would be the best fit.

In fact, the unit economics at the input receives potential customers who came from scaling channels, and further going through the looms of business processes such as conversion, sales, costs, retention - bring profit to the business.

And if this is the case, then as with any conveyor belt, you can apply optimization tools, such as Goldratt's theory of constraints, which will allow you to find points of business growth.

Everyone knows that there is a unit economics and that it is extremely useful in business, IT startups study it in gas pedals, traders on marketplaces listen to courses about it. But few people in general understand what it is and how it can be used in business.

And so unit economics is a manager's tool for making managerial decisions, which allows to evaluate these decisions from the point of view of economic effect, and the evaluation is carried out through the measurement of business processes, and therefore through the effectiveness of specific people in the team.

For this purpose unit economics uses the approach of estimating contribution margin in business, where we compare the gross profit (LTV) from a scaling unit and the cost of obtaining this scaling unit from the market (LTC).

Exactly! Instead of relying on historical data, ueCalc focuses on what your team can execute today. You define how you acquire leads, convert customers, and retain them. The model then projects realistic growth based on unit economics and the Theory of Constraints. This makes it especially useful for early-stage startups testing their go-to-market strategy.

One of the biggest investor red flags is when a startup can’t clearly explain its numbers. We’ve seen founders tweak financial models to fit investor expectations rather than reality. Instead, we designed ueCalc to help startups justify their projections based on actual team execution capacity. Have you ever had an investor push back on your financial model? What was their concern?

A surprising insight we found: many early-stage startups don’t account for experimentation time in their financial models. They assume a straight growth trajectory, but in reality, optimizing acquisition and conversion takes multiple iterations. With ueCalc, we tried to reflect this by making modeling more adaptive. How do you handle this in your financial planning?

Great question! ueCalc doesn’t provide predefined benchmarks because every startup operates differently. Instead, it helps you structure your financial model based on your team’s real execution capabilities—lead generation, conversion, and retention. This makes the projections much more reliable than generic industry benchmarks.

One thing we noticed while building ueCalc: most founders don’t struggle with spreadsheets—they struggle with knowing what to put in them. Financial models often feel like a black box, and many startups either overestimate their revenue or underestimate their costs. We wanted to change that by focusing on real execution potential. Curious—what’s been your biggest challenge in financial modeling?

Automatic P&L plan making from unit-economics in cohorts. Converting cohort unit-economics representation to month by month in P&L.

Thx