7 Ways To Extend Your Runway (Without Reducing Headcount)

How to reduce burn and keep growing

Hey y’all 👋

Budgets are being slashed, companies are announcing layoffs in every industry, and the venture markets have reset (but founders are still adjusting).

As a founder, you’re probably spending more time thinking about finances, extending your runway, and metrics like burn multiple than usual.

There are two main drivers to decreasing your burn and extending your runway:

1. Reduce expenses

2. Grow or retain revenue

Most advice on how to decrease burn focuses on reducing expenses, but below I’ve outlined 7 helpful tactics for both paths (that don’t involve reducing headcount) 👇

Read time: 5 minutes

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️ How to Cut Burn and Extend Your Runway

Important callout: if your startup is in a dire situation, you may have no option but to cut headcount. Founders can sometimes wait too long to do this — don’t let that happen to your startup.

With that said, layoffs should be a last resort. Here are 7 things you can do before it gets to that point:

Temporarily Cancel All Corporate Credit Cards

Your startup is probably paying for various subscriptions it isn’t actively using or planning to use anytime soon. This is a bit of a hack to remove all of that spend (though your team may not like it).

Simultaneously cancel all of your corporate cards (including your own). Then, issue new cards to everyone on the team who had one before. Everyone will need to migrate over all of their subscriptions. You’ll find that they only actually do it for the ones they use

It’ll cost you some time and productivity, but at a fast moving startup it can be hard to get everyone on the team to manually go through their expenses and identify what can be cut. This is a way around that.

If you do this, I recommend giving your team a heads up ahead of time so they can flag any critical expenses that you won’t want to risk pausing (i.e. infrastructure, paid acquisition channels, etc).