Garage to IPO

What Garage to IPO actually simulates

Garage to IPO is a free browser-based startup simulator that models the financial life of a technology company from its first month in a garage to a public listing and the quarters that follow it. Every month you choose how much to spend on engineering, sales and marketing, what to charge, who to hire, and whether to raise outside capital or fund growth from revenue. The simulation then runs the month and reports what those choices did to cash, headcount, product quality, growth rate and ownership.

It is written for founders, operators, students and anyone who wants to understand startup finance by making the decisions rather than reading about them. No account is required to play, and progress is saved in your browser.

How the model works

The engine runs on a monthly cycle. Revenue is driven by the number of customers you have acquired and the price you charge them, reduced by churn. Costs are the sum of salaries, infrastructure and the marketing budget you set. The difference is net burn, and cash divided by burn is your runway — the single number that decides how much time you have left to find product-market fit.

Fundraising is negotiated, not scripted. The terms you are offered depend on growth rate, gross margin, retention and how much cash you have left; a company raising from strength gets a higher valuation and gives away less of itself than one raising three months from zero. Each round dilutes the founder and the existing shareholders, which is why the ownership number on your dashboard usually matters more at the end than the valuation headline did at the time.

Random events interrupt the plan the way they do in reality: a competitor ships your roadmap, an engineer is poached, a post goes viral, a reporter calls. Each one is a decision with a cost and a consequence rather than a message to dismiss. A macro layer shifts the funding environment between boom and downturn, so the same strategy does not work in every run.

The five stages

• Garage — no funding, no salary, one product bet and whatever cash you started with.
• Seed — the first outside money, the first hires, and the first month where payroll is larger than you are comfortable with.
• Growth — repeatable acquisition, real unit economics, and the point where spending more can either compound or destroy value.
• Late stage — board seats, governance, and pressure to show the margin profile a public market will accept.
• Public — pricing the offering, then living with quarterly guidance, buybacks, dividends and a share price that reacts to every miss.

You can also reach a listing without ever raising a round. A bootstrapped company that reaches a billion dollars of value can ring the bell on its own terms, and the run scores differently because of it.

Read before you play

Alongside the simulator we publish an original written library on how startup finance works in practice — cap tables and dilution, term sheet clauses, SAFEs and convertible notes, burn and runway, unit economics, pricing, hiring, acquisitions and the IPO process itself. Every article is written for this site and updated as the material changes.

• Guides — long-form explanations across fundraising, equity, finance, growth, operating and exits.
• Blog — articles on starting up, funding, growth, money and operations, and exits.
• Glossary — plain-language definitions of the terms the simulation uses.
• About — who makes this, how the model is built, and how to get in touch.