ramie

TY!

Awesome!

The idea behind a Launch HN post is to come out to community and show what you've been working on when it's ready for public consumption and look for feedback. It is supposed to be for pretty fresh launches. In our case for example, we started taking early adopters off the wait list a couple months ago so this is kind of our fresh launch after iterating on early adopter feedback.

We totally didint pay Michael to say that. Thank you so much for the kind words!

We'll check it out!

Being honest, I don't know enough about flightpath to give a good comparison.

Baremetrics however I know very well. They do a great job plugging into Stripe and helping you analyze your revenue, however their forecasting capabilities are extremely limited. They also only look at revenue, not expenses or hiring. With Finmark, you can just as easily connect your stripe account and get reporting on your historic revenues, however we also are much more robust in forecasting and allowing you to create a true financial model.

The spreadsheet template you linked is definitely one of the better templates out there. A couple months ago there was a great HN thread where Stéphane Nasser reviewed multiple different templates that exist. Our theory however is that spreadsheets, using a template or not, are too burdensome to maintain and easy to mess up. You could download all of your stripe data into a CSV, and create pivot tables to come up with all the same charts that baremetrics offers, but it's easier just to use software. Thats what we want to do for financial modeling In fact, we purposely priced our software lower than baremetrics despite having all the same core functionality plus so much more.

Thanks!

Yes, we would love to chat. I think my head of marketing already reached out online but feel free to email me directly. Rami at finmark.

Thanks!

Thanks for flagging that; we'll take a look

Thank you!

We really appreciate that feedback especially since we are updating our website this month. Just in case you missed it above, reposting some screenshots here:

https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/8057672/Scenario%20...

https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/8057672/Scenario%20...

https://finmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Scenario-Plan...

It is like you're looking at my pitch deck. We have zero interest in providing professional services but know that some of our customers will need CFO like help and so a natural partnership for us is outsourced accounting firms. Later this year we will open up reviews for bookkeepers so that our customers can interact to make those qualified recommendations to each other.

It is still early in the journey for us. You're absolutely right, only time will tell what customers best react to and we may end up having to adapt.

I think long term there could be some truth to that. If we capture enough marketshare then I can see a point in time where we have more flexibility to charge more. However, I have zero interest in making the bulk of our money off of early stage companies. We believe we will be very sticky and more and more valuable as a company scales, hopefully we can monetize more off of companies that make it big and stick with us.

You're reading our minds; that is exactly where we want to take Finmark. As far as the last 20%, we think we've built our app in a way that is modular enough to get about 95% of the customization that you would have in excel. Over time we hope to to eliminate that last 5% altogether.

We made the site ourselves and put it up in wordpress.

Yes, our plans are month to month. A customer can cancel anytime. We also don't retroactively charge you more for the past month if your revenues increased. We instead reach out to you and confirm a plan change for the upcoming month. If you tell us it was a blip and you don't expect it to continue at that scale, then we will just keep you on the current plan.

No offense taken at all. When I was running my last company, at $25M in revenue, we couldn't find any good options for a service like this. Anaplan and Adaptive Insights had 6 figure price tags and required a lot of professional services. At some point a company might choose to leave Finmark, but our hope is to cater to startups from pre-revenue to pre-IPO.

We are updating our website this month to give more detail about the solution and showcase more of the product.

In the meantime, happy to provide screenshots:

https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/8057672/Scenario%20...

https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/8057672/Scenario%20...

https://finmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Scenario-Plan...

I swear Im not trying to be a smart ass as I say this, but we actually make it really easy to forecast how much you will pay us as you build out your own model in Finmark.

With literally two clicks, you can drive any expense cost based on another variable in your business like new hires or revenue growth.

Really appreciate the kind words on the landing page. Our designer is having a terrific day it seems :)

As far as the pricing, our hope is that we go beyond what an excel sheet can offer. First, we timed an investment banker building a model in excel versus doing it in Finmark. Doing it in Finmark was more than 10x faster.

We also integrate into your other systems to pull actuals automatically every month which should save you time each month.

Later this year we plan on then aggregating benchmarks to help you get a better understanding of how your metrics and assumptions compare to similar companies.

I could go on and on on the differences between us and a spreadsheet. That said, it is still early and value the feedback. If enough people mention price as the key reason not to use Finmark then we will listen and adjust.

Really appreciate the feedback. We are working on updating our website this month to be more detailed regarding our solution, including a video walkthrough.

Regarding the free trial, complete miss on our part. We just went in and updated our site to make it clear that yes, we offer a 30 day free trial.

We definitely are not the only option out there and I would preach that any solution is better than none at all. We looked at the existing solutions before starting Finmark and we couldn't find any that were simple yet powerful enough to warrant using over excel. Liveplan, Quickbooks cashflow, and others, don't give you the granularity to accurately forecast a business. For example: you cannot build revenue drivers based on sales hires or marketing spend nor can you forecast itemized expenses. Its for that reason we wanted to reimagine what the software should look like. I draw a very similar parallel to Carta. Before Carta (or e-shares) there were a number of companies that tried to tackle cap table management. None of them really hit the mark and so everyone still used excel until Carta came along. Today, everyone still uses excel for their financial modeling and we're hoping to change that.

We hopefully also make it really easy to update your investors too. You can give investors read only access to just your key metrics so that you never have to worry about them chasing you down for updates. Also, when you're pitching new investors, you can create a custom scenario for your fundraising plan and share only that with potential new investors.

We were lucky. Our first hire was a designer to both design our marketing site and our app. This designer worked for us in our last startup too and I cannot say how valuable I think a good UI/UX designer is.

You nailed it. Our upper end of pricing is $5000 a month for companies doing up to $40M in revenue and caps out at $10,000 a month.

I totally understand and can appreciate that sentiment. Here was our rationale for the current pricing model.

1) We don't want to charge an arm and a leg for pre-revenue/early stage companies to have access to our software. We wanted to find a scalable way to discount our pricing so that when you're early and cash strapped, you can still use us without price being a big factor.

2) As your revenue grows, then your company is going to be bigger, and you will have more people that will be collaborating in Finmark and more data that we will have to process. In essence, we think that revenue is linearly correlated with data and user usage across our app. Therefore, we don't think we are giving the same thing. Instead, the company is using us more and therefore we are charging more.

Curious if that resonates?

You're not wrong about a ton of new tools coming to market in this space. Redpoint recently did a writeup of just some of the financial modeling companies https://medium.com/redpoint-ventures/the-finance-tech-stack-...

Next time you want to make a financial model, instead of spending weeks making it try out Finmark (YC S20). We want to make creating a model turbotax easy without forcing people to use a template. Instead, our modular approach allows every company to create their own unique model in under an hour.