The numbers behind the story.
A live model, not a spreadsheet screenshot. Every input below is editable; the tables and the chart follow. Two presets: what we think will happen, and what happens if it works.
The round.
$1M
Pre-seed, post-money SAFE
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Months of runway on the base case
Where this sits: the median post-money SAFE cap for pre-seed rounds of $250k–$500k was $10M in mid-2025 (Carta, State of Pre-Seed Q2 2025), and larger rounds usually carry higher caps. We are not asking a premium. $1M at that cap is 10%. It pays for the App Store launch, the first paying cohort in Tokyo, the rest of Japan, and a Series A conversation on real cohorts, with one more hire in year one and a real launch budget. The runway figure above comes straight from the base case below; change an input and it moves.
What we assume.
Three inputs do almost all the work: how many visitors we reach, how many of them buy a week, and how many locals subscribe. Change any number and everything below recomputes.
Three years.
Year 1 starts at App Store launch. Cities are counted as "Tokyo-equivalents" of reachable visitors; Osaka and Kyoto together are about one Tokyo.
Month by month.
Revenue after Apple against total spend, and the cash line with this round in the bank. Where the cash line crosses zero is when the next round has to be closed.
Net revenue / monthSpend / monthCash
One customer.
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Contribution from one Trip Pass, after Apple and model cost
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Lifetime contribution from one vibe+ subscriber
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Gross margin on a paying user
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Marketing spend per paying customer in year 1
What the money does.
The product is built. The money buys reach: creators and inbound partners, the first paying cohort in Tokyo, and the next two cities.
60% growth — creators, inbound partners, the first paid cohort30% engineering — one hire, infra, App Store work10% venues — partnerships and the private-access tier
By month 3App Store live with Trip Pass and vibe+ on sale. Osaka built.
By month 6First 1,000 paid trips. Kyoto live.
By month 9Three cities live. Retention curve flat at six months for subscribers.
By month 12$30–50k a month in revenue, a Series A conversation on real cohorts, Hong Kong built.
What could go wrong.
GoogleAsk Maps reached Japan in August 2026, in English and Japanese. It answers from the same reviews people trust half as much as they did five years ago. If Google builds a real taste layer and a friends layer, our window narrows. Our answer is the corpus and the community, not the chat box.
Conversion is unprovenWe are pre-revenue. Every paid number here is a benchmark, not a cohort. Lifestyle apps convert 2–9% of active users to paid (Strava, Duolingo). At these prices the base case assumes 2% of local installs subscribe and 2% of visitor installs buy a pass. The first three months after launch tell us which end we are at.
FreshnessA written corpus goes stale. Closures, moves and menu changes are caught by a weekly sweep and by people who go; keeping 1,700 places true is a standing cost, not a one-off.
If it works.
What a $1M cheque at a $10M cap looks like in three cases. Multiples are on ownership at the cap, before later dilution.
It doesn’tLaunch lands, conversion sits under 2%, we don’t reach a Series A. Capital is lost; the corpus and the brand have some acqui-hire value to a booking rail or a map.
ComparablesLetterboxd — the taste-community model this is built on — sold 60% at a $50–60M valuation in 2023 with 10M members, and was in sale talks at around $250M in 2026 with 30M. Corner raised $3.75M then filed for a further $8.4M for a US-first social map with about 55k users. Amex paid $400M for Tock. Taste plus a booking rail is where the exits have been.