Blog
Practical thinking on financial clarity, fundraising, and running a business with numbers you can trust.
Get investor-ready before your next raise — talk to 8cast. Investors read a lot of financials. By the time they’re looking at yours, they’ve built pattern recognition for what a healthy set of numbers looks like versus what a shaky one looks like — often within the first few minutes. Here’s what they’re actually checking […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 19, 2026
See if a fractional CFO fits your stage—explore 8cast. “Fractional CFO” is one of those titles that sounds self-explanatory and isn’t. Part-time CFO, sure—but part-time doing what exactly? The honest answer is that the role flexes depending on what a company actually needs, which is both the appeal and the source of confusion. Here’s what […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 19, 2026
Get a rolling cash flow forecast built—talk to 8cast. Profitable companies run out of cash all the time. That sentence sounds like a contradiction, but it’s one of the most common ways startups get into trouble, and it comes down to a single distinction founders often miss: profit and cash are not the same thing, […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 19, 2026
Book a capital readiness assessment with 8cast. Every pitch deck has a revenue projection slide, and every investor has seen a thousand of them go straight up and to the right with no explanation for why. That slide is often where credibility is won or lost — not because the numbers are wrong, but because […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 19, 2026
Want to make sure your numbers are telling you the truth? Book a free 15-minute startup financial health check. Burn rate gets described a lot of ways — “how fast you’re losing money,” “your monthly cash outflow” — and most of those descriptions are close enough to be useful and vague enough to cause problems. […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 17, 2026
How to Calculate Runway Get your runway calculated properly—talk to 8cast. Runway is the most important number in your company that almost nobody calculates correctly. Not because the math is hard. It’s genuinely one division problem: cash on hand divided by net burn. The mistakes happen in what founders plug into those two variables — […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 17, 2026
Startup Financial Planning: Burn Rate, Cash Flow, Runway, Revenue Projections Talk to 8cast about getting a real handle on your numbers. Most founders don’t have a financial planning problem. They have a financial vocabulary problem. Burn rate, cash flow, runway, revenue projections — these get thrown around in board meetings and investor updates like everyone’s […]
Benjamin Abiade
September 17, 2026
5 Signs Your Startup Has Outgrown Its Bookkeeper—and What to Do Next Your bookkeeper keeps your financial records accurate. But they can’t tell you whether to hire two engineers now or wait another six months. That gap could be costing your startup more than you realize. Most founders don’t realize they’ve outgrown basic bookkeeping […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 5, 2026
Pitch Deck Financial Projections: What to Include, What to Avoid, and How to Make Investors Believe You Most founders either over-engineer their pitch deck financial projections or reduce them to a single revenue line. Both send the same message to investors: you haven’t fully thought through the financial side of the business. The financials […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 5, 2026
There are differences between what works in pre-seed versus seed. Once you reach the seed stage , you will require simplicity, which is what will keep you from losing visibility over cash and mixing personal and business costs. By seed, investors and board members start expecting structured reporting. You must have a financial model that […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 5, 2026
When a seed investor opens your financial model, here’s what they check first, and it’s not your revenue projections. They’re looking for evidence that you understand your business. Four tabs tell them almost everything they need to know. If those tabs are missing, incomplete, or built on assumptions that don’t hold up, the meeting gets […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 3, 2026
You’ve received a term sheet. The investor says they want to see financial statements covering 18 months, and your stomach sinks. Chances are your accounting records aren’t as organized as they should be. This happens more often than most founders realize. The good news is that it can be fixed. The catch is that you […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 2, 2026
An investor asked me about my burn rate. I gave them the wrong number. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happens when founders are running businesses without understanding the financial language investors use. Burn rate and runway aren’t just accounting terms; they are what investors use to determine whether you’re in control of your business. […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 2, 2026
Most founders either use the wrong financial tools for their stage of growth or don’t use any at all. No judgment intended. No one hands you a financial toolkit when you start a business. However, the difference becomes obvious almost immediately during investor meetings, during tax season, and when you need to make a quick […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 2, 2026
What’s the real cost of hiring a fractional CFO? It’s one of the most common questions founders have during the fundraising process, but many hesitate to ask it during a discovery call. Let’s be honest. Here’s what founders typically pay. The monthly salary structure for fractional CFO services for startups typically ranges from $2,000 to […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 1, 2026
The numbers tell a clear story: underrepresented founders receive only a small share of venture capital funding compared with other founder groups. As an underrepresented founder yourself, I’ve felt that disconnect firsthand. However, there are ways you can still raise capital in 2025 by focusing on the levers YOU have full control over. I’ve broken […]
Benjamin Abiade
August 1, 2026
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been helping founders prepare investor pitch decks; a well-designed deck can often be the difference between raising capital and not getting funds. So we were very surprised to discover that our investor interest dropped significantly once the conversation turned to our financials. We started digging deep into this problem […]
Benjamin Abiade
July 31, 2026
Do you know your gross margin right now? Not roughly—exactly? Most business owners can’t answer that. Many business owners don’t actually know how much cash runway they have. Instead of relying on a proper financial plan or cash flow forecast, they simply check their bank balance, guess wheher it’ll cover next month’s operating expenses, and […]
Benjamin Abiade
July 30, 2026
Hiring a full-time CFO often comes with a $200k+ price tag that doesn’t make sense for many growing businesses. But when stakeholders ask tough questions about cash flow and runway, your bookkeeper may not have the answers you need. Discover the three stages of financial growth and why a fractional CFO — not a full-time hire — could be the strategic partner your business needs.
Sam Sunmonu
June 17, 2026