At a net burn of $35,000 a month, your $300,000 lasts about 8.6 months. That is under the comfortable zone, so plan to cut burn or raise soon.
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Cash runway is how long your business can keep operating before it runs out of money. The formula is simple: current cash divided by net monthly burn, where net burn is your monthly expenses minus your monthly revenue. If you hold $300,000 and burn $35,000 a month after revenue, you have about 8.6 months of runway. The calculator above runs this math live as you type.
Start with the cash you actually have in the bank today, not committed-but-undrawn credit lines. Then work out your net monthly burn: add up everything you spend in a typical month, including payroll, software, rent and marketing, and subtract the revenue you collect that same month. The gap is your net burn.
Now divide. Cash divided by net burn gives you runway in months. Say you have $480,000 in the bank, $30,000 in monthly revenue and $70,000 in monthly expenses. Your net burn is $40,000, so your runway is 480,000 divided by 40,000, or 12 months. That single number tells you how much time you have to either reach profitability or close a raise. If your revenue already covers expenses, your net burn is zero, and your runway is effectively unlimited.
Most founders aim to keep 12 to 18 months of runway on hand. That range exists for a practical reason: raising a round or reaching a key milestone usually takes longer than people expect, and fundraising alone can eat three to six months. With 12 to 18 months in the tank, you negotiate from strength instead of taking the first term sheet that lands.
Under six months is the danger zone. At that point you are close enough to zero that every decision gets made under pressure, and investors can smell it. Six to 12 months is workable but worth fixing before it slips lower. Anything past 18 months is a comfortable cushion that lets you invest in slower, compounding growth without sweating the next raise.
You have exactly two levers: spend less or earn more. Cutting burn works immediately, but it is a one-time move and it usually means a smaller, slower company. Growing revenue is the better long-term lever because it compounds, and it directly shrinks the net-burn number in the runway formula.
The trap is buying that growth with paid ads, which raises your burn the moment you stop paying. Organic channels behave differently. Content and rankings you build keep producing leads month after month without per-click spend, so they lower your dependence on paid acquisition and stretch every dollar of cash further. That is the quiet way a strong SEO program extends runway: it turns marketing from a recurring cost into a compounding asset. If you want to see how much organic growth could lower your burn, book a free growth call and we will model it against your real numbers.
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