October 2026
Dear founder,
I first built a version of this product a couple of years ago. It read a startup's numbers, kept the runway honest and helped write the investor update. Founders liked it. Very few of them paid for it. So I put it down.
I spent the time since on the other side of the table, as an angel investor, reading updates. Here is what I saw. Every founder calculates monthly revenue a little differently. Every update arrives in a different shape. Every investor rebuilds the same spreadsheet to compare them. Founders pay for that in hours. Investors pay for it in attention. And the whole ecosystem pays in decisions made on numbers nobody quite trusts.
That is why founders never paid. A messy number does not cost the person who writes it. It costs the people who read it. Charging founders was charging the wrong person.
Creamsoda is free for founders, for good. Accelerators and investors pay, because they are the ones who gain when every company reports the same way.
That is not a trial, and it is not a hook to upsell you later. It is the business model. The more founders use Creamsoda, the more every investor on the other side can trust what they read, and the more a portfolio view is worth paying for. Your side stays free so that side is worth something.
Three working theories
Convictions, open to revision.
- 01
A metric should change your next move.
A dashboard is only the beginning. The question I care about is whether software can help you decide, delegate and actually do the work. Creamsoda reads the numbers, drafts the update and flags the customer who just went quiet. You make the call.
- 02
Giving up control is how a standard gains scale.
When every founder interprets the same metrics differently, the whole ecosystem pays. A shared definition of revenue, burn and runway, read straight from the source, makes the foundation stronger for everyone building on it. A standard only spreads if it costs nothing to adopt. So it costs nothing.
- 03
Build at the edges.
The next great company might be in Nairobi, Lagos or a town you have never heard of, waiting for better tools. Investor-grade reporting should not depend on being in the right room, on the right continent, or being able to afford a finance team.
Why now
Tools like Claude changed what one person can build. If you write software, you could probably build a rough version of this in a weekend. I would rather you spent that weekend on your own product. So the bar I hold Creamsoda to is simple: so good, and so pleasant to use, that you would rather use it than build it. Free means the question of whether it is worth it never comes up.
It is also meant to be fun. Reporting is the part of company building everyone puts off, so we made it feel more like a toy than a chore: numbers that fizz, a runway you can pour, and the Arena, where startups race other startups in leagues decided by verified numbers for the perks accelerators and partners already hand out. Being early should be rewarded, and it should be decided by the work, not by who you know.
What I ask in return
Use it. Tell me what is wrong with it. And the next time an investor asks for your numbers, send them a Pulse Snapshot instead of a deck.
Brian