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Show HN: business plan forecasting (our new app)

app.profitably.com

71 pointsgsiener30 comments

Hey all,

At Profitably, we've been building a new tool for building out the numbers behind your business idea/forecast. Our initial approach was on analytics for your business -- but it turns out people aren't ready to understand customer profitability until they know what they should be looking for.

It would be an honor if you checked out our planning tool (forever free) and gave some pointed feedback. What do you like/hate? Would you consider recommending this to someone?

http://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead

Thanks in advance and I'm happy to answer questions here or via email -- graham.siener@profitably.com

Can you share some finished examples?

Great question -- here's a shot of the revenue forecast: http://cl.ly/9c99

And here's customer growth: http://cl.ly/9bLI

We just built this so we're still working out how to show some polished examples.

I guess I don't see the point of this tool. You have to make wild guesses for every single metrics in there. Is it a MBA thing? Do people really find this useful?

EDIT: Maybe I got confused by the 'business plan' part. Is it intended for an established business? or for someone putting together a business plan for starting a business?

Definitely NOT an MBA thing. :-) This is for startups and small businesses alike. Most people are modeling their businesses with an Excel file, and they are making the wild guesses in there. The problem is that it's tough to see the impact of changing any of these wild guesses in Excel, and it's a static document that can't link to actuals for comparison.

We want to help people plan/model their business, measure how they're doing, and then execute. (And the site could use a lot more of that verbiage within the app!)

Ok. I can see myself using this for my business, since I have some solid data for most metrics. I could then get a better sense of the kind of impact improving one metric or another would have. Still not sure of the usefulness when you start from scratch and make assumptions for everything though.

A lot of startups and small businesses wind up with a crazy Excel model where they model their assumptions around things like revenue forecast. We built this to track the relationships without worrying about broken formulas, typos, etc.

Edit: What Adam said

This site rendered my back button useless and trapped me on the site.

Yikes. Each step in the planning tool is a different "page" thanks to the hash in the url...were you clicking back through a bunch of stages to get off the site?

No, it just seems to have a redirect from plan_ahead to plan_ahead#dashboard that breaks the back button (at least on Firefox 3.6.20, Linux).

(I'm not sure what the original commenter's platform is though.)

Oh, yeah, I guess that's our Backbone redirect from the initial page to whatever the first "pane" would be. If we weren't using teh Ajax we'd do that, we'd use a 302 and then the browser history wouldn't get confused.

We'll figure out a fix for that. Thanks for the feedback.

Chrome on Windows 7

No matter how many times I pushed back I could not come back to the HackerNews article. I just cannot go backwards from the dashboard. This page = http://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead#dashboard

It does some kind of load/resolve thingy very quickly each time I press back. But nothing happens, still on Dash.

This is a neat little app. Went through the whole setup wizard in about 10 minutes, I could see myself playing with the different channels and adding more data as I have it for my startup. Integration with analytics and quickbooks would be great. Keep it up and I'd pay $49/mo for that.

Thanks so much! We built an existing product that integrated with QuickBooks, but it turns out looking back isn't as useful if you can't use that info to look forward. We're marrying the two models right now so look for budget vs actuals real soon now.

One more thing: Scenarios are coming in the next week or so.

Some basic line charts would add a nice visual I think as well.

I could see myself using this while trying to raise money ("oh, you think our customer acquisition cost is going to be $50 for that channel? Let's just change that....bam!"). Of course, it's something you could do in excel, but some people (myself included) aren't excel wizards.

That'd be pretty sweet, huh? Stay tuned!

You know what I want? Ad spending forecasting. If I spend a dollar more on display ads what am I going to get from it.

Actually you can pretty much do that -- define the cost of acquisition for ad spend and watch how it scales with customer growth, etc. Where do you have display ads right now?

Just through buysellads, but i spent a few hours trying to figure out what combination of CPM, CTR, and Conversion rate would make sense for us.

You have a very impressive list of tools you integrate with.

Minor bug: the "Watch the Planning Intro" box doesn't grow when the text size does; it just cuts off the text.

Mind hosting the planning intro video with a source that lets you embed HTML5 video and only fall back to Flash?

Unfortunately, Vimeo's HTML5 embed doesn't give you an API that you can use to close the video from JS, which is why we're using their older Flash embed. I'd love to make the switch once they change that, though.

Have you tried YouTube's HTML5 embed?

No we haven't, and that's something for us to keep in mind if we think about switching, but for the time being all our stuff's in Vimeo and I don't think we have any plans to move it.

EDIT: Actually, on thinking on it for another minute, I suppose it'd be pretty easy to do detection to support people who don't have Flash installed. Thanks for the suggestion--I'll put that in our queue.

Thanks!

To clarify -- those are tools we'd like to integrate with, but we need your help in prioritizing which to start with.

yeah, that was confusing. Don't assume that people actually read every single word on your page ;-)

PS If anyone from Olark is lurking -- you guys have made talking with everyone a TON easier!

How about https instead of http?

Good point. Both are supported for this free app. Our analytics app is https only.

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