Guide · Layer 3

Revenue

Written for: seed / Series A scientist-founder

Set the cost of production against what you actually get paid:

• For a commodity you’re a price-taker — the levelized cost is the floor you have to beat, and the gap to the market price is your margin
• Anchor revenue to a real traded product — people don’t buy a leach solution or a bespoke intermediate. Pick the nearest standardized, priced form and back into your value from there
• Charge yourself for the downstream work regardless of who does it — if finishing costs $1/kg, you just get paid $1/kg less. That keeps the comparison apples-to-apples wherever you drew the boundary
• Keep gross and net side by side — a clean-hydrogen or carbon credit can rival the whole gross cost, and reporting only the net number hides how much of the result is policy rather than process. Policy is local, time-limited, and conditional

Keep this to the main product. If you have several co-products, valuing each one properly is its own piece of work — park it on the to-do list.

🧭 Coach’s Read

Watch for your biggest lever being one you don’t control. If the bar that swings your economics most is a commodity price, you’ve turned the business into a bet on the market — and an investor tends to discount that or walk. You’re not commodities traders: stay conservative on the market drivers, and make the case that what you do in the lab moves your economics more than the market does. When a controllable lever — a recovery, a loss, full-load hours — turns out to be the big one, that’s the one to put on top.