Secured £120k seed funding for an Aberdeen app developer
We rebuilt the founder's financial model from scratch to show a realistic 18-month growth path. Investors cited the clarity of the model as a key reason for signing.
Northmark Software had a solid app but their spreadsheets were a mess. We cleaned up the numbers to show local investors exactly how a £120k injection would be used over 18 months.
The challenge
By February 2024, the founders had been rejected by two local investment groups. Their existing financial sheet was just one tab with 14 months of historical spending and no clear plan for the future. They couldn't explain their monthly burn rate of £8,400 or justify why they needed exactly £120k.
The team had 11 months of runway left and was terrified of running out of cash before their next major update. They needed a way to prove to skeptical board members that they knew their cost per user and their path to breaking even.
Our approach
We started with a 4-hour audit of every bank statement from the previous year to find the true cost of their operations. Our team of 3 analysts spent the first two weeks of March 2024 stripping out non-essential software subscriptions that were costing the firm £310 a month.
We then held three workshops every Tuesday with the CEO, Callum, to map out a realistic hiring plan. We didn't use fancy projections. Instead, we looked at local Aberdeen salary data for senior developers and calculated the exact National Insurance and pension costs for 5 new staff members.
The solution
We built a three-tab financial model in Google Sheets that the Northmark team could actually manage themselves. It included a month-by-month cash flow tracker and a hiring roadmap that showed how adding a new developer in month 4 would impact their delivery speed.
We also produced a 6-page investment summary that translated their technical goals into plain English. We focused on the 18-month growth path, showing exactly how the seed money would buy them the time needed to reach 4,500 active users. This removed the guesswork for the investors and made the due diligence process move much faster.
Results
The seed round closed in June 2024, only 14 weeks after we started. The investors mentioned that the clarity of the hiring roadmap was what finally gave them the confidence to sign the deal.
Timeline
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March 2024Audit of 14 months of bank statements and spending
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April 2024Weekly workshops to build the 18-month hiring plan
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May 2024Final Google Sheets model and investment deck delivered
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June 2024Seed round closed with 4 local Aberdeen investors
"We knew the tech, but the numbers were fuzzy. Onbelai didn't just fix the spreadsheet; they helped us understand our own costs. Investors stopped asking about our math and started asking about our growth."