How TripTrix Used Forecastr to Plan Runway, Stress-Test Scenarios, and Prepare for Fundraising
Upgrade an existing financial model
Plan intentional growth with foresight
Partner with financial
planning experts
Teemu Kolehmainen, founder and CEO of TripTrix, is building a product for a very specific kind of customer – frequent travelers who want to stay connected without sacrificing their privacy.
TripTrix is a private communication platform for trips, designed to keep travel updates in trusted circles. Within the app, travelers can share different levels of detail with different groups, such as their close family, who might see exact location data, and friends, who could get flight updates. In contrast, others can react to photos and trip highlights. Everything lives inside the context of a trip, and everything stays private. No ads, no data sales, no third-party tracking.
As Teemu puts it, the goal is to help travelers stay connected while remaining “incognito as far as the rest of the world is concerned.”
But while the product vision was crystal clear, the financial side of the business wasn’t. TripTrix was still pre-revenue, preparing to raise its first round of capital, and Teemu knew that a rough spreadsheet wouldn’t be enough to convince investors.
triptrix.co |
Location: Austin, TX |
When Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough
Before partnering with Forecastr, Teemu was relying on an Excel model he built himself. It worked, but only up to a point.
“That financial model was an attempt using Excel, which I am not an expert at, but I know how to use,” he said. “It gave me high-level information, but it was very complicated to manipulate to get different kinds of results and see impacts. It certainly did not get into the level of detail and granularity that I truly need to be able to plan and forecast for a business.”
His spreadsheet could answer one early question: Can this company survive under basic assumptions?
TripTrix website
But it started to fall apart as soon as the business became more complex. Modeling headcount, marketing spend, churn, acquisition rates, and burn simultaneously was exhausting. Scenario planning became a chore. And every new tab or formula tweak created yet another chance for something to break.
Teemu knew that wasn’t a sustainable foundation. “If you don’t have a basis, you don’t have a plan,” he said. “And if you don’t have a plan, you’re just winging it. As much as I like to travel, you don’t want to wing it with business.”
Discovering Forecastr and a Team That “Gets It”
Teemu first encountered Forecastr the way a lot of founders discover tools they end up loving: through the algorithm.
“That old, funny old tool called LinkedIn,” he joked. “Somehow, through that algorithm, it decided to show it to me; somehow, given the fact that Forecastr is a very valuable tool for startups and early-stage companies, it came to light.”
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CEO Profile |
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Home: Austin, TX |
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A quick conversation with Logan Burchett led to a live demo, and that’s where everything clicked.
“I just liked the feel of the tool when I went through the demo,” Teemu said. “Logan gave me a walkthrough and answered my questions. That interactive session was very important.”
After the demo, Teemu looped in his CFO to evaluate the platform from a financial leadership perspective.
“Eventually, I brought my CFO, had him check it out, and now we’re fully on board and very excited to utilize it for our purposes.”
But for Teemu, the product itself wasn’t only part of the story; the team behind it mattered just as much.
“The team at Forecastr is excellent at support – not only in the pre-sales cycle, but also post-sales, the onboarding, and thereafter,” he said. “When we’ve had challenges, you’ve been very responsive. Sometimes it’s, ‘Thank you for the feedback, we’ll take a look at it,’ and that’s good enough for me – my voice has been heard. But in most cases, the problems are solved on the spot or the next day.”
Building a Runway Strategy That’s Pragmatic and Investor-Ready
One of the biggest ways Forecastr has supported TripTrix is by bringing clarity and control to their runway management and scenario planning. Instead of relying on a single static model, Teemu now works with several live scenarios inside Forecastr – each designed to answer different strategic questions.
“I have probably, right now, four active scenarios I’m playing with,” he said. “I have a primary, our sort of truth, what our real goal is, and what we believe, but I have tweaked versions of it just to see different scenarios.”
That flexibility has given him a sharper, more grounded view of risk, probability, and buffer.
Forecastr's financial modeling platform
“What’s done really gives me a very, very focused view on the probabilities of success given scenarios,” Teemu explained. He’s modeled everything from extreme downside cases, like starting with his target investment and generating zero revenue, to more practical paths that factor in revenue and churn.
Now, he has complete clarity on how long the company can operate under various revenue assumptions, what the burn rate looks like across best-case, expected-case, and conservative scenarios, exactly where to cut costs if performance dips, and where to invest more if the company exceeds expectations.
“It really allows you to get realistic and pragmatic about your planning,” he said. “I’ve been able to plan a runway that is very achievable. We have a lean, pragmatic, and realistic goal for success, and we know what our buffer is in any direction.”
This modeling rigor isn’t just giving Teemu internal confidence; it’s becoming a core part of TripTrix’s fundraising strategy. As a pre-revenue startup preparing to raise capital, he sees his Forecastr model as one of the most important pieces of his pitch.
“It’s the last piece,” he said. “It’s almost the most important one, because at the end of the day, yes, I believe in my business and the idea, that’s all important. But this is the way to ensure I’m not in dreamland. It puts reality into it.”
Forecastr also makes it dramatically easier for him to communicate that story to investors. Instead of walking through messy spreadsheets or static assumptions in a deck, he can share clean visual outputs or even provide direct dashboard access.
“One of the things that attracted me as well was the capability to be able to share a dashboard with investors on demand,” he said. “Instead of me having to go and find time for it, I just say, ‘Here’s the link. Go look at it yourself at your leisure. If you have questions, let’s schedule some time.”
For Teemu, it’s the combination of expert financial support, rigorous scenario modeling, and clear, investor-ready visuals that gives both him and his investors real confidence in the path ahead.
Planning People and Spend with Less Friction and More Focus
The second major advantage TripTrix has seen with Forecastr is a huge boost in operational efficiency, especially when it comes to planning resources.
“The key to operational efficiency is really on the planning side,” Teemu said. “Resource planning is probably the biggest aspect of it – being able to plot out when we would need people, what kind of people we would need, and how to allocate them.”
With Forecastr, he can map the timing and cost of specific roles, such as marketing, partner sales, and other key hires, and immediately see how those decisions affect runway and cash flow over time.
“You put in a cost, you put in when you want to add it, and if you need to flex it, you know when you can and when you should – pull it in, push it out, whatever,” he said.
The tool has also fundamentally changed how long detailed planning takes and how painful it feels.
“All this could have probably been done on a spreadsheet,” Teemu admitted. “But it would have been painful. When we talk about operational efficiency, you’re also talking about people getting frustrated and just taking half a day off because they’re done staring at the screen. With Forecastr, it’s actually pretty easy. You make a change, and you see what happens.”
His favorite part is how fast he can turn complex numbers into something he can actually use for actionable insights.
“There’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of numbers, and numbers… some people are really good at just looking at the numbers and visualizing them in their head. I’m not,” he said. “I need something that acts as the interpreter.”
Forecastr fills those gaps perfectly. “Being able to so quickly see a visual representation of changes is incredibly helpful for somebody in my position,” Teemu said. “It lets me make clear-headed decisions on hiring timing, marketing expenditures, and so forth, with an easy-to-understand graphic interpretation of it.”
Behind the scenes, the Forecastr team has made that efficiency possible by adapting to TripTrix’s specific needs.
“Anybody we’ve interacted with has been able to grasp what we’re trying to achieve and what our constraints are,” Teemu said. “They’re able to pivot into our world really quickly and understand what we’re trying to do and then deliver on the things that are most important in our part of the journey.”
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- Teemu Kolehmainen |
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A Tool Teemu Actively Recommends
Even before TripTrix officially launches or completes its fundraising round, Teemu already sees Forecastr as a crucial part of his process, and he’s been eager to spread the word. He’s shown the platform to other founders and even finance professionals.
“I was literally talking to a CPA in a coffee shop,” he said. “I showed him what I was working on, and he said, ‘I’m going to show this to the team.’ It doesn’t take much. I literally showed them, and they were like, ‘This is interesting. This is kind of fun.’”
For Teemu, Forecastr doesn’t have to be perfect to be the right choice; it just has to materially improve the way founders plan and make decisions. And it does.
“It’s not perfect, nothing’s perfect,” he said. “But it will help you as a startup founder or CFO.”
What matters most is that he now has a clear, visual, and flexible financial model for TripTrix – one that gives him confidence in every strategic decision. With Forecastr, he can understand and manage his runway and burn rate, allocate resources with clarity, set realistic growth targets, and walk into investor conversations with the confidence of having finance experts on their team.
Forecastr provides him with a financial foundation that not only supports smarter planning today but also positions TripTrix for successful capital raising and long-term operational efficiency.
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