Use cases
Founder’s Engine — where it earns its place
On Founder’s Engine — Streams → Experiments → Runway. Revenue streams feed your runway math.
Founder's Engine is for the operator who wants runway and revenue on the same page — literally. Three tabs, wired together: revenue Streams feed the Experiments that shape them, and both feed the Runway math that tells you how long the fire keeps burning.
The solo founder tracking two products at once
You have a SaaS at $1,400 MRR and a consulting stream at $6k/month. Every subscription tool wants you to model these as separate accounts, separate charts, separate exports. Founder's Engine holds them as two rows in Streams — churn on one, seasonal on the other — and the Runway tab already knows.
Change a number; the whole picture shifts. No sync, no lag, no dashboard to build.
The pre-revenue builder running experiments
Before there is anything to forecast there are bets: pricing tests, cold-outbound weeks, three landing pages against each other. Log them in Experiments with a hypothesis, a cost, and what you learned. The tab is a graveyard of small facts — which is the only thing that turns a founder into a good one.
When one experiment starts producing money, promote it into Streams. The same file, the same afternoon.
The bootstrapper who needs runway math without a spreadsheet
You know how much is in the bank. You know roughly what goes out. What you don't know — until you sit down with a calculator you don't trust — is how the two lines actually cross. Runway does that math the moment you open the tab, and updates the second you touch Streams.
It is not a forecast. It is the same arithmetic you would do on paper, faster, and always with today's numbers.
Signals it fits
- You are one to three people, not fifty.The Engine assumes you already know your business; it does not roleplay a CFO.
- You want the math visible, not hidden behind charts.Every number is editable, every formula is a cell you can see.
- You keep your books elsewhere.This is a decision surface, not accounting. It sits beside your ledger, not on top of it.
Questions people ask
Is this a replacement for QuickBooks or Xero?
No. Those are accounting systems of record for the taxman. Founder's Engine is a thinking surface for the founder — runway, bets, streams — the numbers you look at every Monday, not the ones you file in April.
Can I forecast multiple scenarios?
Duplicate the file. Rename one 'aggressive-2026', one 'careful-2026'. Compare in two browser tabs. It is one HTML file — copy it as many times as you have futures to model.
What about my team?
Founder's Engine assumes an operator, not a committee. If two people need to look at the same numbers, one of you is the source of truth and the other is looking over a shoulder. That is on purpose.
If your job is to keep the fire burning, this is the one page that shows you how long the wood lasts.