Show HN: Review my startup idea – financial forecasting for small businesses

3 points by jconn 11 years ago | 2 comments

HN,

I've founded www.investable.io creating a web app for small businesses who need a financial/operational forecast for the purpose of pitching to investors.

Right now I just have a prototype working and trying to get my first paying customers.

Was hoping to get some feedback from those of you who have used something like this before or have done work in the space.

Any feedback on my landing page or pricing would be hugely helpful. Right now I just have a basic forecasting tool so charging a flat fee, but looking to get into a monthly revenue model once I have some other functionality built in.

If any of you are interested in trying it out, just mention to me that you heard about it on HN and I'll hook you up with a discount.

rahimnathwani 11 years ago |

It's not clear to me whether you're building a financial model in Excel, which will then be automatically updated with actual data (for periods which have been completed), or whether Excel is just a way for you to gather the initial data.

You're solving a worthwhile problem, as most businesses could do with planning better and thinking more about the key drivers of cash flow.

If you are targeting businesses that are looking for investment, then presumably you'll need to output an Excel-based model that investors can inspect (for correctness) and play with (to test the impact of different assumptions). It sounds hard to automate that unless you create a bunch of templates for different types of business with different growth drivers and revenue/cost structures. You could probably build one which could be used by most SaaS businesses, for instance, and another for restaurants and cafes etc.

I've found that getting people to explain to you how their business will work is the hard part. Building the Excel model once you have complete answers is the easy bit. Updating it for an ongoing business, and integrating actuals alongside projections, is a little more tricky.

jconn 11 years ago | |

Thanks Rahim,

Right now we're using Excel to gather the initial data, but we're working on building it out so that all of the data gathering happens in our web app. We're working on building a sort of 'wizard' interface similar to TurboTax etc. where it will ask questions to narrow down what information is needed.

Definitely getting the output formatted as something investors can play with and double check will be big for us. We're working on developing a method to generate an Excel-based model from the app, but that's definitely one of the more technical challenges we're facing right now.