phase1-breakeven-plan

The Phase-1 break-even plan for Mysterium, built on the real all-hands numbers. Phase 1 = break even first; Phase 2 (soar) waits (wave-map holds the moonshots). Companion to infra-assessment (the numbers) and questions-to-excavate (the open inputs). Confidence marks carried from source: [confirmed] all-hands data, [estimate] reasoning on unconfirmed inputs.

The one equation

Break-even is monthly revenue ≥ monthly burn. Nothing else. Everything below is about moving those two lines until they touch.

• Revenue today: ~$75.6k/mo [confirmed] — VPN ~$67.6k (89%, declining −10.2%/mo) + GoProxies ~$8.07k (11%, growing, in-house).
• Burn today: unknown — the missing input. Estimate ~$150–250k/mo for ~40 people [estimate]. This is the number that decides everything, and only Ro/Šaras hold it.

So the gap is somewhere between ~$74k and ~$174k/mo. That range is too wide to plan a single path — but the structure of the plan holds across all of it, and it points straight at which numbers to extract.

The brutal fact the numbers force

VPN is 89% of revenue and it is melting at −10.2%/mo. Compounded, unmanaged:

Read the last row. Even if GoProxies grows at a punishing 15%/mo compounded for a full year (5.3× — very hard to sustain), total revenue in 12 months is still lower than today — because the 89% base bleeds faster than the 11% line can grow. Proxy growth spends its first year running just to stay in place. The decline outruns the growth arithmetically; VPN is 8× bigger, so a 10% VPN loss erases more dollars than a 15% proxy gain adds, month after month, until the crossover around month 12–15.

This is the whole strategic problem in one sentence: you cannot grow your way to break-even against a base that halves every ~7 months. Which makes two things true.

The three levers, ranked by certainty

Lever 1 — Cut burn. Fastest, most certain, fully in MN's control. Every $1 cut lands on the break-even line immediately, with zero market risk and zero sales cycle. It is the only lever that doesn't depend on customers, competitors, or a 12-month compounding curve. It is also insufficient alone: if burn is ~$200k and revenue is ~$75k, cutting to break-even means gutting 62% of the company — which kills the GoProxies sales engine that is the entire future. So cut is the floor-setter, not the finisher: it shrinks the gap the other levers must close, and it buys runway. Extract first: the burn breakdown — fixed vs. variable, headcount by function, what's cuttable without touching the proxy sales motion.

Lever 2 — Stabilize VPN. Highest dollar-value, but gated by one diagnosis. VPN is $67.6k of the $75.6k. Saving even half its decline is worth more than any realistic proxy growth in year one. But you only spend to save it if the decline is fixable. That is the master question:

Is the VPN decline fixable or secular? - Fixable = a specific, addressable cause: payment/billing failures, a broken renewal flow, an app-store or platform issue, a botched price change, a competitor promo pulling churn. If churn is concentrated and explained, you fix it and stabilize the $67.6k base. - Secular = MN is losing a commoditized consumer-VPN race it structurally can't win (Nord/Surfshark on brand+spend; the censorship-resistance version lost to HAPP/Reality — wave-map WC-2). No product reason for users to stay. Then you do NOT spend to save it — you harvest it.

Run the cheap diagnosis before betting either way: churn reasons, payment-failure rate, cohort retention curves, cancellation survey. That's a data pull, not a strategy debate — and it's the highest-leverage hour anyone can spend on this account.

Lever 3 — Scale GoProxies. The future core, but it can't carry Phase 1 alone. Capacity is not the constraint — break-even volume is ~5–8% of what the network already moves; the network can physically support a $30M+/yr proxy business it just can't sell yet (infra-assessment). So this is pure GTM: scale an existing, growing, in-house sales motion ($8k/mo, "2nd best month"), not build from zero. But the table above shows it's a 12-month-plus lever, not a survival lever. Extract: what drove the "2nd best month" — is it repeatable, and what's the constraint on GoProxies' sales team (leads, headcount, product, price)?

The plan: one no-regret move, then a fork

The no-regret move (do regardless of the VPN verdict, start now): 1. Get the burn breakdown and cut to the minimum that preserves core ops + the GoProxies sales engine. This is fully controllable, has the fastest impact, and is correct under every scenario. Set the cut target at: the lowest burn that still funds the proxy motion. 2. Run the VPN churn diagnosis (cheap data pull) — this resolves the fork below. 3. Protect and feed GoProxies — it's the only growing line and the on-values, on-trend future (wave-map CZ-1). Proxy investment is right in both branches.

Then the fork, set by the diagnosis:

• If VPN is FIXABLE → stabilize the base at ~$75k, cut burn toward ~$75–90k, and let proxy growth become the profit engine on top of a held floor. Break-even plausibly 6–12 months, company stays roughly its current size. [estimate]
• If VPN is SECULAR → controlled contraction into a proxy company. Cut burn to a proxy-reachable floor (~$40–60k/mo), treat the melting VPN base as an ice cube whose cash funds the transition runway, and rebuild MN as a smaller, profitable, GoProxies-centered business. Break-even 12–18 months at a smaller size. [estimate] This is not defeat — it's converting a declining 89% into runway to grow the 11% that's actually on-trend.

Either way, the sequence is the same: cut to a floor, diagnose the base, scale the proxy. The diagnosis just decides whether you also spend to defend VPN or only to harvest it.

What this plan needs to finalize (the extraction list)

Ranked by how much each one moves the answer. All live in questions-to-excavate:

1. Real monthly burn + breakdown. Collapses the gap from a $74–174k range to a single number. Most decisive.
2. VPN decline: fixable or secular? (+ the churn data behind it.) Sets the entire fork.
3. What's cuttable without hitting the GoProxies motion. Sizes Lever 1.
4. What drove GoProxies' "2nd best month" — repeatable? Sizes Lever 3.
5. What funds ~40 people below break-even today — treasury, fresh capital, or GoProxies cash? Sets the runway clock.

Bring those five back and this parametric plan collapses into a single dated break-even path with a burn-cut target, a VPN decision, and a proxy ramp goal.