Ask IH: Would Something Like This Be Beneficial To Indie Hackers?
Long time lurker, first time poster. I admire what everyone here is doing and really aspire to be like you guys. I have in the past worked on helping startups with building their financial documentation to help them forecast their own growth and also when it came time to raising money.
What I would like to ask if, there was a product that could assist you with revenue forecasting, or tracking expenditure, would it be helpful for you in building up your plans? Something that would give you a better picture on how to take the next step forward in spending money on marketing, building product etc...
Would this be useful to you?
Thanks
I think you could start by just providing official CFO as a service consulting to startups. There is definitely a gap for that (and I know some people running similar businesses successfully), and if you have specific skills, templates and knowledge for the startup environment that will be a plus.
Then next step is to look for common problem points and systemize, I don't think you are there yet.
thanks for the feedback adamski, I think that may be a good direction to go towards. start by offering some service in this direction then work towards productising it, so that it will be easier for the customer.
Hey i think it might be useful but depends on the stage you are at. At the start there aren't as many expenses that you can't keep an overview of I think
thanks Kevin, i will definitely keep the stages aspect in mind. at different levels you have different needs.
It's a bit difficult to parse exactly what problem you're trying to solve between the consulting work you've done and the features you're describing in a product.
As a product, which of these problems are you helping a CEO solve?
I've cobbled together a number of spreadsheets for all of these problems, and I know others have as well. The battle that you fight for things solved by spreadsheet is whether a single model can work for everyone vs. the flexibility of building a bespoke model. But the flip side is these are major problems that aren't being solved by others and requires a lot of effort.
Eric Ries's Lean Startup Tools team created some of these types of things but I've never used them; that makes me think there could be a market for this sort of thing. Worth taking a look.
https://startuprunway.io/#/
https://hiringplan.io/
Thanks JDR, with regards to the problems, for now, it would be focused on points 2-4, then perhaps later on forecasting for investment. I've seen many entrepreneurs who need to get their foundation right before proceeding forward.
It definitely can't be a 1 model fits all, but there could be some foundational items that would help people put things in order.
Thanks for this feedback, it would help me to reevaluate this ide properly.