Your First Quarter as a Founder

The game opens by having you pick a country, a kind of startup and a cofounder. All of those touch the numbers and none can be undone — but what decides the first quarter is not the picks, it is how you spend afterwards.

What the first quarter asks for

The first quarterly target is $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue and 100 users. That sounds small, and it is — deliberately. Hitting it pays a cash reward, but the reward is not the point: the target is asking whether you managed to show, inside ninety days, that the product is useful to somebody.

The later quarters get hard quickly. The second asks for $10,000, the fourth for $150,000. So scraping past the first is not enough; what you built has to be the kind of thing that grows.

Three common mistakes

1. Hiring early. The salary starts on day one; the new person’s full output arrives after an onboarding period. Take on two engineers in month one and you lose your runway in month three.
2. Spending on ads before retention. A user acquired while the product still keeps nobody is water poured into a bucket faster than it drains. Churn first, growth second.
3. Ignoring crises. Every crisis has a deadline of two to seven days, and doing nothing is always available. But in expectation, ignoring a crisis always costs more than the cheap response does.

Which warnings to trust

The game tells you four things itself, and all four deserve to be taken seriously: when cash goes negative, when cash drops below twice the monthly wage bill, when monthly churn passes ten per cent, and when technical debt goes over sixty.

The second is the one most often missed. If that warning appears while the cash still looks positive, what you are holding is two payrolls — which means your hands are already tied for the next decision you make.

Technical debt is not an expense line; it is a multiplier on everything that comes after.

A reasonable plan for the first quarter

• —First thirty days: hire nobody. Work on the product and find the first users through small, organic routes.
• —Thirty to sixty: look at churn. Under ten per cent, start growing; above it, you still have a product problem.
• —Sixty to ninety: if users are staying, make the first hire and open the ad spend carefully. If runway is heading below six months, do neither.

This plan will not produce the best result. It does not need to — the point of a first run is not to win but to see which number chases which. You will play the second one differently anyway.

The cofounder and the country

The three opening choices affect the outcome, though not in the way people expect. The country sets the scale of the capital and the costs, which is why the grading is normalised against it — founding somewhere expensive does not automatically make you a worse founder.

The cofounder is where the first quarter is actually felt. A technical cofounder speeds the product and slows the selling; a commercial one does the reverse. Whichever you picked, the missing side is yours to cover over the first ninety days, and most players notice which side that is somewhere in month three.

What to change on the second run

When the first run ends, play it again changing exactly one thing. Not everything — one: the hiring date, or the ad budget, or how you answer crises. That is the only way to know where the difference between two runs came from.

Change everything at once and you may well get a better result without knowing why, which defeats the reason for playing in the first place. A good result tends to arrive on the third or fourth run anyway; the first two are for measuring.