Startups live and die by financial projections — yet we tend to suck at creating them!

That's because we're so busy trying to create the "perfect" financial statements, when in fact what we should be working on is identifying what key assumptions will drive our projections at all!

Assumptions are the raw materials that make up our financial statements and tell us whether we're headed toward gross profit or total disaster! Here we'll be taking a beginning inventory of the 3 most important financial assumptions that tend to drive most startup company projections.

Assumption #1: "How Many Customers Will We Acquire?"

Our first step is to construct a series of assumptions that tell us how many paying customers we will get through the door. All of th...