Tools / I Measurement
Cash flow projection: cohort payback and the cash cost of growth.
Model cohort payback and how much cash your growth rate needs. It runs in your browser and nothing gets uploaded.
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About this tool
What Cash Flow Projection calculates.
Cash Flow Projection simulates what growth does to your cash. You lose money acquiring a customer up front and earn it back through repeat purchases, so growing faster digs a deeper hole before payback arrives. The tool builds the full cohort-by-month grid and shows how deep the hole gets, when you break even and the fastest growth rate your cash ceiling can support.
- The formula
- Each month acquires a cohort sized by your month-1 spend, CPA and compounding monthly growth rate. Every customer buys once in the month they're acquired. After that, the share of the cohort reordering each month follows a 12-month repeat-rate curve. Two presets ship with the tool. The DTC e-commerce curve starts at 25% in the second month and decays to 2.5% by month 13, and the subscription curve is higher and flatter, starting at 68%. You can blend the two by your subscription attach rate. Cash in each cell is gross margin minus acquisition cost. The grid gives each cohort's payback month, the account's cumulative break-even month, the peak cash deficit and when it hits, and an LTV buildup with LTV to CAC. A binary search finds the fastest monthly growth rate whose peak deficit still fits inside your cash ceiling. Optional toggles model CPA escalation compounding per cohort and untracked lift discounting your blended CPA.
- Expected input
- No CSV needed. Enter AOV, blended new-customer CPA, gross margin, month-1 ad spend, monthly growth rate, projection length (6 to 24 months) and your maximum cash outlay. All 12 monthly repeat rates are editable, you can split first-order AOV and margin from repeat, and the LTV Analysis tool can prefill everything from your own order data. The copied link saves your scenario.
- Assumptions and limits
- Cash is gross margin only. There are no fixed costs, refunds or payment-timing effects, and cash lands in the month the order happens. Repeat behavior ends after the 12-entry curve, so cohorts older than 13 months contribute nothing in longer projections. Each customer orders at most once a month, and cohort sizes round to whole customers. LTV to CAC compares the month-1 cohort's curve against each later month's escalated CPA.
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Next
- 01MER AnalysisSee why a falling MER can still mean more profit, then test what happens if you scale.Measurement
- 02LTV AnalysisCohort lifetime value, retention curves and revenue projections from an order CSV.Measurement
- 03UGC Brief BuilderBuild a creator brief and copy it in a few minutes.Production
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