Modelling your Business in a Spreadsheet in Just 30 Minutes

Since 2023, as software businesses aim for profitability and growth at all costs is no longer viable, there is a pressing need to ruthlessly prioritise and identify the most promising revenue-generating opportunities.

Data Analysts play a crucial role in helping business leaders identify and evaluate the best opportunities. They are now expected to develop tools that facilitate informed business and product tradeoff decisions.

Given these macro-economic changes, Data Analysts must adapt their skills to align closely with business value. They must now support business leaders by identifying and sizing the best opportunities, and one key competency they need to develop is linking any initiative to business outcomes. This includes performing "what if" scenarios and sensitivity analyses to enable effective business and product tradeoff decisions.In this presentation, we will walk through the step-by-step process of building a “Growth Model,” a powerful tool for understanding business mechanics and determining where to allocate resources for growth. We will demonstrate an example model for a B2B SaaS business, sharing lessons from our experience at Dashlane.

We will emphasise that the process of building the tool is as important as the final output. It involves figuring out how all metrics interconnect to produce sensible results, tracking down baseline rates for each assumption, and applying excellent business judgment. To develop this tool, one must have an intuitive sense of the company’s strategy, be an unbiased observer, understand the business at a molecular level, and be capable of obtaining accurate data for each input.For analysts, developing this tool will deepen their understanding of the business at a granular level, positioning them as a top strategic resource within their company.

By the end of the presentation, Data Analysts will have a clear vision of the type of data products they should learn to build to advance their analytics career, transitioning from a tactical role to a strategic advisor with data expertise.