How StartupForecast.app Began

Startup Forecast came out of something we didn’t expect.

Tom and I were deep into building PlanAnything. I’ve spent 17 years building products, including time at Microsoft, and Tom is a very experienced engineer. Between us, we’ve built a lot of things.

But as we started taking PlanAnything seriously, we had to sit down and run the numbers properly.

Not just rough estimates. Proper forecasts. Cash flow, runway, different scenarios.

And that’s where things got uncomfortable.

Even with experience, it was harder than it should have been to answer simple questions clearly. What needs to be true for this to work? When do we run out of money? What happens if growth slows?

We tried spreadsheets. They got messy fast. Hard to trust, hard to explain.

So we built something simple for ourselves.

Along the way, we sanity checked it with a friend who works in finance. That helped shape it further, making sure it wasn’t just useful for us, but actually grounded in how people think about these things properly.

What started as an internal tool while building PlanAnything turned into something we realised a lot of founders need.

That became Startup Forecast.