Show HN: Funded.io rapid prototype

by bottompair • 13 years ago

167 58 13 years ago

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Struggling with maintaining 25 versions of financial projection spreadsheets for a tiered SKU based SaaS startup. I decided to spin this up as quickly as possible (and learn a little AngularJS along the way).

The result - after ~30 hours it's usable enough to show. Obviously needs more flexibility around the variety of revenue models and expense categories. But really it's just for rough estimates at this point.

seivan• 13 years ago

~30 hours? You deserve the funding you can get :)

f_salmon• 13 years ago

That's nothing. I once did 5 such projects on a Sunday morning :)

primitivesuave• 13 years ago

This is excellent and a great demonstration of rapid development in Angular.

cstrat2• 13 years ago

very impressive effort for a quick side project. bookmarked, i will come back and try it with some legit data when I get a chance!

icambron3• 13 years ago

As a piece of technology, this is really cool. But I guess I don't get how it's different from a nice Excel model. How is it that this allows you to capture 25 different use cases in a way that the a spreadsheet can't?

jotato• 13 years ago

In my mind the difference is that I don't have to build it! Using this I can just plug in my numbers and go instead of spending time building a spreadsheet.

bottompair14• 13 years ago

A few things I was thinking:

- Spreadsheets are prone to fat-fingering and messing up formulas. For example, if you built a spreadsheet with three product SKU's and wanted to add a fourth, it's not so easy. Especially if you have visualizations tied to specific ranges of cells, etc. With this app I can validate data once and not worry about some random missing formula screwing it up down the road.

- When creating models for comparison the typical pattern is Save As -> New. Before you know it, you've got 8 or 10 different spreadsheets with different variations on the numbers. Now add a new expense category to the model in spreadsheet #10. If you want to compare backwards to the rest you'll need to do that work over and over (this is the pattern I was stuck in).

- Longer-term I wanted to be able to overlay models - sort of an A/B test given different configuration

- During the past few months I've met with countless entrepreneurs trying to launch startups pre-money. Most of them are trying to build models from scratch (or a template they found) and it's been a clear pain point for them

- I can share models in a service like this easily. I've already used it several times when someone's asked me to help validate their business model. I create the model in the app and send them a link. They can tweak it and show me their ideas. It's crude right now, but collaboration between founders on something like this might be worthwhile.

- Even longer-term I'd like to add in more templates to support startups beyond the initial financial model. Basically I looked at my last several years' worth of operational spreadsheets from helping run SaaS companies and thought "there ought to be an app for this".

jqueryin• 13 years ago

I like it. Nice work and welcome to the land of Angular!

Minor spelling issue I noticed that was bugging me all over the place:

s/Reccuring/Recurring/

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Ouch. Fixed.

avighnay• 13 years ago

I too have been trying to capture this in excel, thank you for making it available in this format.

labaraka2• 13 years ago

This is absolutely fantastic. I would pay real money for something similar tailored to product sales model (vs recurring SaaS).

jamiecollinson• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, what would be the major changes required?

labaraka2• 13 years ago

Mostly the accounting for COGS

endlessvoid94• 13 years ago

Definitely unit economics and everything that needs to go above the line. Would be KILLER to have those.

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Totally with you. Would love to build out several different cost/revenue models including one completely based on web site visits and paid customer conversion rate. Sprinkle in some correlation with marketing spend and you've got something passable for a B2C company.

yeldarb• 13 years ago

One of our local tech mentors here in Des Moines released a free Excel file for these sorts of projections (an accompanying book to explain the models, etc is also available from Amazon).

You can download here: http://www.startupmodels.com/download/

I haven't used it myself but I know that it has helped quite a few companies work through their financial projections around here. It's at least a decent starting point.

(More info: http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2011/10/startup-models-see... )

aktary• 13 years ago

Impressive! Are you going to develop this further for the community? I'd love to use it and be able to save, print, export, etc...

prawn• 13 years ago

Could make it a viable side project by charging a fee to enable easy exporting, then be able to reinvest that money in improving the project.

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Yep, planning to keep rolling with it if there's interest. I mentioned this in previous responses, but the data is actually being saved. The unique Url generated when you first start will get you back to the settings for the model you're working on.

It's a stop-gap feature so that I didn't need to implement a login/authorization system in the MVP.

davidbanham• 13 years ago

I have spent more hours than I'm comfortable contemplating slaving over Excel spreadsheets creating projections. I went into one funding round with perfect eyesight and came out needing reading glasses.

This tool is fantastic.

I'd love to be able to modify it for non-MRR companies though. What license are you releasing the code under?

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Hadn't thought about open-sourcing the project yet. Initially just something to remove the pain I was feeling in my current role. It allows me to share models with founders and collaborate as well. Data is persisted (MongoDB) and the unique Url for each model created will work if you navigate directly back to it.

rrhyne• 13 years ago

Don't release it, turn it into a business!

narzero• 13 years ago

Fantastic tool! Like aktary, I'd love to see a save, print and export options.

shekyboy• 13 years ago

Awesome work! Export to Excel please

immad• 13 years ago

Would be cool if you could export to Excel. That way you could lay the fundamentals in place here and do custom things offline.

dshankar• 13 years ago

Alternatively, import from Excel to simplify onboarding.

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Plan to do this eventually. However, this fundamentally doesn't solve the core problem (for me at least). Versioning nightmares happen when you've got one model that you customized to have three products and your new model has four. To compare to your previous model(s) you've got to keep updating all spreadsheets.

An app like this would hopefully remove some of that rework and eventually allow A/B testing of different fundraising scenarios, or different revenue models with similar fundraising, etc.

ilaksh• 13 years ago

That's awesome. Can you make one thats for 'lifestyle' businesses, i.e. bootstrapped startups with a sustainable model?

For starters, with my business model, the monthly expenses depend on the number of customers directly. Every time I get a customer, I automatically deploy a VM. And I am charging them a few more bucks than the VM costs, so my revenue is directly tied to the number of customers also.

Maybe I just need a spreadsheet. But really its pretty simple. I plan to launch something that I can support alone. Within a month or so, I need to have enough profit to hire a guy from oDesk to help with support.

The other part is charging for support, which I plan to make separate from the servers. So you can pay as low as $5 if you want minimal support, up to $500 if you are a business and want to prepay for up to half a day of consulting each month.

So what I want is a spreadsheet that I can change that has a projection chart off to the side that is automatically connected to the spreadsheet.

With template spreadsheets/charts that I can configure.

Maybe use something like Google Spreadsheets or http://stoic.com/formula/index.html

bottompair14• 13 years ago

Great suggestions. This initial pass was meant to solve one specific use case I happened to have, but I'd love to add more modeling capabilities.

The addition of one-time costs or revenue based on customer acquisition is important and something that will be there eventually (training is a good example in Saas).

ing33k• 13 years ago

cool , please add export to excel or google docs..

pla3rhat3r• 13 years ago

Very cool! Add some secure features and exporting tools and you're onto something.

tomkinson2• 13 years ago

I will use this extensively tonight(spend about 1-2 hrs beta testing) and come back with suggestions/comments and input, IF you can add ways to save the data and/or export to CSV/excel after. On a brief look, it looks great, well done.

bottompair14• 13 years ago

The data is actually being persisted (MongoDB). Notice a unique Url is created when you click through the initial landing page. If you save that Url somewhere and come back to it your data will be there.

Thanks for taking some time on it - feedback is most welcome as I'll continue to hack on it over the next few months - time permitting.

tomkinson2• 13 years ago

Yes noticed that. Well done. It does still seem that A LOT if not most of the comments here are as well asking for a download/export feature. Everyone wants to know they are covered after investing a few hrs into working on something. No one really knows how long that URL would be active for. Anyway, I am a founder and have some real number so will dive in tonight. Export would still be welcome. Again, great job. Looks tight.

toast762• 13 years ago

Love it. The only issue I have is the SKU slider is a little bit "fuzzy". Would be great to actually be able to plug some real sales estimates.

Also the slider seems to be capped out at some really low number (like 30 new customers a month or something?)... not sure if I'm doing something wrong?

bottompair14• 13 years ago

True, for lower priced products the SKU slider is limited. I struggled with this on my Excel worksheets as well. In mid-market SaaS ($200-$1500 MRR range) growth tends to slow down the higher the price goes. In addition, growth increases over time as the company grows, but the higher priced SKU's grow slower.

The sliders are only one possible solution to visualizing the rate of growth per price tier. Most other things I've tried involve math fiddling that I haven't managed to translate well to a user experience.

Open to suggestions or examples if you have ideas!

toast762• 13 years ago

The difficulty possibly stems from starting at 0 and trying to get a growth function to suit over 1-5 years (ideally it's exponential in the early days, but likely logarithmic over a longer period of time). Problem is if you're going to investors, you don't want a chart that shows growth slowing down over time (certainly not in the first 24 months anyway).

Early on you have an idea of what sort of traffic you're able to generate and a likely conversion rate, and therefore estimate a sign up rate using real(ish) numbers. It's only the growth beyond that that you're really guessing at.

You may just want a text box with a gross # of new customers/month based on what you think you can bring in, and then have the slider work on top of that, in effect creating an adjustable polynomial function for growth? Just spitballing here...

martialmartian• 13 years ago

for those who can't use excel...

bottompair14• 13 years ago

As posted higher up, the spreadsheet I created and based the application on:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxgh-9Z9zd40ZExtRnYyZVhWU2s...

Feature development on the app will be faster (and reach a broader audience) than the spreadsheet, however. And I wanted to learn AngularJS ;)

budgetyzer2• 13 years ago

Hi all, i created a similar tool a wile ago. You can take a look at: app.budgetyzer.com

It could load a bit slow. You can only log in with your Google account ATM.

Currious If you all like it...

Tim

tomasien• 13 years ago

I did a quick model with this tonight after a full day of investor pitches, and even though I'm exhausted I got about a 70% accurate model done in about 5 minutes. I know how to use Excel, but I just wouldn't have gotten that done in 5 minutes with Excel. It was helpful, that's the best thing I can say about anything.

cordie• 13 years ago

I'll add a vote for the "bootstrappers" version of this. Although I was able to make it work for my situation. Great work though. Definitely a useful tool!

notastartup• 13 years ago

half of those accounting terms scare me. I'm more than happy to just keep selling software and not leverage myself to appease some rich guy who doesn't respect the art of software and just wants a ridiculous return.

kfk• 13 years ago

What’s your current pain in dealing with financial projections? What kind of help could benefit you from a finance controller expert remotely? Would you be willing to share finance/spreadsheet knowledge with some coding mentoring?

jaimefjorge• 13 years ago

This is definitely useful. Export/import to/from excel could be a great feature.

budgetyzer2• 13 years ago

Check: App.budgetyzer.com Similar tool more advanced.

Show HN: Funded.io rapid prototype

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