How Mainspring scaled finance, sales, and ops — with clarity, and speed

Will Simon, CFO at Mainspring, was tired of wrestling spreadsheets. Every time someone asked, “What if we hire more reps?” or “What happens if a deal slips?”, it meant digging through layers of Excel logic to rebuild the scenario.

With Runway, he set up the model just once — and could simulate changes instantly.

Mainspring’s sales team runs on commission — but they had no way to track how much they were earning, or where the revenue came from. Investor updates weren’t much better, with hours of spreadsheet wrangling just to pull the numbers together.

Will built each rep a Runway dashboard showing bonuses, residuals, and account-level revenue. He also created a real-time dashboard for the board. Everyone finally had visibility — and no one had to open Excel. The reactions surprised him:

Finance used to live across backend reports, spreadsheets, and manual CSV uploads. It technically worked — but syncing everything was slow, painful, and error-prone.

Now, Will pipes it all through a Google Sheet integration into Runway, where it powers commissions, revenue spreads, and forecasting. The model stays live and accurate — no rebuilds required.

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Will knew his way around Excel — but traditional modeling always felt fragile, tedious, and uninviting. “I was always working to get the model to a point where I could stop working on it.”

Runway was different. Once he wrapped his head around formulas and time series, he found himself iterating for the fun of it — grinding through models the way he used to grind through video games.

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