Surviving

What keeps a company alive when the plan stops working?

1. 01SourcedEvidence quality: high

   Default alive: knowing whether the company survives without new money

   Summarised in Aurygine's words from a publicly readable source, linked below.

   Extracted pattern

   • Every founder should be able to answer, without a spreadsheet session, whether the company reaches profitability on current cash and current growth.
   • Not knowing the answer is itself the finding.
   • Once the answer is no, the choices narrow to: grow faster, cut cost, or raise — and delay removes options.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Spending exceeds revenue and the founder is unsure how serious it is.
     Move. Compute months of runway at current burn, then ask whether current growth closes the gap before the cash runs out.
     Trade-off. Forces an uncomfortable conversation earlier than the founder would choose.
     Breaks when. Revenue is highly seasonal or lumpy, where a single month's burn misreads the year.

   Practical implication

   Keep the runway number visible and honest. The decision that matters is not 'are we doing well' but 'does the company survive on the cash it already has'.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Deep-tech and infrastructure companies are structurally default-dead for years by design; the measure there is milestone risk, not runway alone.

   Failure modes

   • Treating a funding conversation as a plan.
   • Cutting cost so late that the cut has to be twice as deep.

   What was measured

   months of runway · monthly burn · growth rate · gross margin

   Stage relevance

   First customers · Traction · Scaling · Turnaround

   Source

   Paul Graham · 2015-10-01 original
2. 02Aurygine synthesisEvidence quality: high

   Utilisation and price: the two levers a service business actually has

   Aurygine's own synthesis across observed practice. No single work is reproduced.

   Extracted pattern

   • A service business grows through sold hours and price per hour. Everything else is downstream of those two.
   • Raising price on new customers only is the lowest-risk experiment available.
   • Unsold capacity is a cost that never appears on an invoice.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Revenue is flat and the founder is already working full weeks.
     Move. Measure utilisation honestly, then raise price for new work by 10–15% and hold it for one quarter.
     Trade-off. Some prospects are lost; the ones lost were usually the least profitable.
     Breaks when. Utilisation is low because demand is weak — then the problem is acquisition, and a price rise makes it worse.

   Practical implication

   Check utilisation before you check marketing. High utilisation and flat revenue is a pricing problem; low utilisation is a demand problem. They need opposite moves.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Software businesses have near-zero marginal delivery cost, so utilisation thinking misleads them.

   Failure modes

   • Adding staff before price has been tested.
   • Counting booked hours instead of paid hours.

   What was measured

   utilisation % · average price per engagement · repeat rate · days to payment

   Stage relevance

   First customers · Traction · Mature

   Source

   Aurygine · 2026-03-05
3. 03Reference onlyEvidence quality: medium

   Deciding badly-informed: the founder's job when there is no good option

   We name the work that informed the idea and hold none of its content.

   Extracted pattern

   • Most consequential decisions are made with incomplete information; waiting for certainty is itself a decision.
   • Telling the team the truth early costs less than being found out late.
   • Deciding and communicating are the same act — a decision nobody understands has not been made.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Two options, both bad, and no data will arrive in time.
     Move. Name the decision criterion out loud, choose, communicate the reasoning, and set the date it will be reviewed.
     Trade-off. Committing early can be wrong; the review date is what makes it survivable.
     Breaks when. The decision is genuinely reversible cheaply — then just try one and learn.

   Practical implication

   Separate reversible from irreversible. Reversible: choose fast and learn. Irreversible: state the criterion, decide, explain it, and diarise the review.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • In low-stakes, reversible situations, deliberation is waste — run the experiment instead of holding the meeting.

   Failure modes

   • Softening bad news until people stop trusting the good news.
   • Reopening a decision every week without new information.

   What was measured

   time from problem identified to decision made · decisions revisited without new evidence

   Stage relevance

   Traction · Scaling · Turnaround

   Source

   Aurygine · 2014-03-01
4. 04Aurygine synthesisEvidence quality: high

   Customer-funded growth: making the buyer your investor

   Aurygine's own synthesis across observed practice. No single work is reproduced.

   Extracted pattern

   • A customer who pays before the thing exists has told you more than any survey could.
   • Deposits, pilots and prepaid pilots are financing instruments, not just revenue.
   • If nobody will pay in advance, the problem is usually urgency, not price.

   Decision pattern

   • Situation. Founder needs money to build, has no capital and no track record.
     Move. Sell a paid pilot to three buyers with a fixed scope and a delivery date, and build only what the pilot requires.
     Trade-off. The first version bends towards three specific buyers and may not generalise.
     Breaks when. The product needs heavy upfront infrastructure before any value exists, or the buyer cannot legally prepay.

   Practical implication

   Before raising or spending, test whether the problem is urgent enough to be prepaid. Prepayment is the cheapest validation instrument available to a founder and it funds the build at the same time.

   Counter-pattern / contradiction

   • Capital-intensive and deep-tech companies routinely cannot be customer-funded early; milestone financing fits better.

   Failure modes

   • Building for six months on savings, then discovering the urgency was imagined.
   • Discounting the pilot so heavily it proves willingness to try, not willingness to pay.

   What was measured

   prepaid pilots signed · cash collected before build · pilot-to-contract conversion

   Stage relevance

   Idea · Pre-revenue · First customers

   Source

   Aurygine · 2026-01-12