Daily Prompt Pack: Burn Rate Planning – Three Prompts That Build a 12-Month Runway Model

Most founders know their bank balance and nothing else. This pack turns that single number into a usable 12-month runway model, a ranked cost-cut list, and a cash memo you can hand to investors without flinching.

[Claude]

You are a CFO building a 12-month runway model for a 6-person SaaS startup at $42k MRR, $71k monthly net burn, $840k in the bank. Using those inputs and a 3% monthly churn assumption, build a month-by-month table: month, cash in, cash out, net burn, ending cash, runway months. Add a break-even month column and flag the month cash drops under 3 months of cover. Output as a CSV-ready table only.

[ChatGPT]

Act as an operator doing a burn audit on this stack: $18k/mo engineering, $9k/mo cloud, $7k/mo sales tools and ads, $4k/mo office, $3k/mo contractors. For each line item, name one specific cut that saves at least 20% without breaking customer-facing quality, state the dollar savings, and note the risk. Rank by savings-per-risk. Output a table with columns: line item, cut, monthly savings, one-line risk.

[Cursor]

Write a Python script called runway.py that reads monthly net burn from a CSV column named net_burn and starting cash from a constant, then prints ending cash per month, runway in months, and the month cash goes negative. Include a CLI flag –scenario that multiplies burn by 1.0, 1.2, or 1.5. Add three assertions covering zero burn, negative burn, and burn that never depletes cash. Output the full file.

Full archive at aicofounderstack.com/tag/prompt-pack.