Business Health Diagnostic

Purpose

Diagnose overall SaaS business health by analyzing growth, retention, unit economics, and capital efficiency metrics together. Use this to identify problems early, prioritize actions by urgency, and deliver a comprehensive health scorecard for board meetings, quarterly reviews, or fundraising preparation.

This is not a single-metric check, it's a holistic diagnostic that connects revenue, retention, economics, and efficiency to reveal systemic issues and opportunities.

Input

Works best with: Whatever business metrics you have access to, growth rate, NRR/GRR, CAC payback, burn multiple, runway. Partial data is fine; the diagnostic flags what's missing. Also useful: The occasion (board meeting, quarterly review, fundraise prep) and what you already suspect is wrong.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself, text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an appended ARGUMENTS: line, counts as answers already given. Use it and skip whatever it covers; don't re-ask.

Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The diagnostic opens by asking your company stage and which metric families you can pull.

Example invocation: Run a health check: $8M ARR, 60% YoY growth, NRR 96%, CAC payback 21 months, 14 months runway, board meeting in 3 weeks.

Key Concepts

The Business Health Framework

A SaaS business is healthy when four dimensions work together:

1. Growth & Retention, Are you growing and keeping customers?

   • Revenue growth rate
   • NRR (Net Revenue Retention)
   • Churn rate
   • Quick Ratio

2. Unit Economics, Is the business model profitable at the customer level?

   • CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
   • LTV (Lifetime Value)
   • LTV:CAC ratio
   • Payback period
   • Gross margin

3. Capital Efficiency, Are you using cash efficiently?

   • Burn rate
   • Runway
   • Rule of 40
   • Magic Number