Adam Hoeksema on building his startup and pivoting from SaaS after 8 years
Today i've got an interview i did with Adam Hoeksema on how he's building his company for my website FounderStacks.co where you can see what tools / services founders use 👇
How Adam Hoeksema is Helping Businesses Create Financial Projections
Company Name: ProjectionHub
Industry: Accounting and Finance
Year Founded: 2012
Company Website: https://www.projectionhub.com/
Tell us about your company. What does it do and what value does it provide to your customers?
ProjectionHub helps startups and small businesses create financial projections for potential investors and lenders. When a startup or small business is looking to raise capital, an investor or lender will often request financial projections. We provide over 100 industry specific financial projection spreadsheet templates. Whether you are starting a trucking business, a restaurant, a SaaS business or an eCom startup, we have a template for you.
In addition to our templates, we offer services to fill out or customize our financial projection templates.
What inspired you to start this business?
I spent over a decade as an SBA (Small Business Administration) lender. As a lender, we often asked our clients to provide financial projections. Our clients commonly struggled with this request which inspired me to find a better way to help small businesses and startups create financial projections.
Can you describe the journey from the idea stage to the actual launch of your business?
Initially, I set out to build a “TurboTax for financial projections.” I recruited my brother who is a Software Engineer to join me and help build this software tool. We built an ugly first version of the tool, launched it, and we started to get paying customers relatively quickly, but we certainly ran into some challenges.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced while building your company?
The primary challenge that we ran into is that our business model of charging a monthly fee for a SaaS product didn’t work well when it came to financial projections. Financial projections are a thing that you need at a specific point in time when you are trying to raise capital. Once you secure the investment or the loan, you no longer need financial projections. Because of this, the product just didn’t make sense as a recurring SaaS product.
Additionally, as we kept trying to add new features we realized that we were just rebuilding features that already exist in Excel. Excel is still quite powerful when it comes to financial modeling, so it really didn’t make sense to spend all of this time and money developing a tool that essentially replicated what was already possible in Excel.
So after 8+ years of trying to get the software business to work, we finally realized that we should just lean in to Excel spreadsheets. We started building custom spreadsheets for clients. We built a set of projections for a coffee shop client and then we took that spreadsheet and made it work for any coffee shop, turned it into a template, threw up a landing page and put it up for sale.
Within a couple of years our spreadsheet template sales exceeded our software product sales, and today our template sales are 15x more per month than our best month ever of software sales.
It isn’t a recurring SaaS product, but I learned that every product doesn’t need to be a recurring SaaS product in order to have a good business.
Can you talk about how you use some of the software tools/services to run your business? Which are the most vital?
Our business runs on Hubspot. We moved to Hubspot about 18 months ago and in the process we were able to remove roughly 5 different software tools that we used and consolidate all into Hubspot. Hubspot has been vital to the growth of our business over the last 18 months as it has allowed us to keep up with the increasing number of customers and keep our communication with customers organized and consistent.
We are also big fans of Loom. Loom allows us to record videos quickly and simply share a link with our customers. We use Loom to demonstrate how to do something in a spreadsheet and provide customer service quickly and efficiently. Our customers are thrilled with our service.
We have also started to use Loom to record video quotes for custom consulting work. If a client needs a customized financial model we can record a quick video to demonstrate our approach, introduce ourselves, build trust, and offer a quote. This has really improved our sales pitch conversion rate.
Were there any tools or services that didn’t work out for your business?
We used ClickFunnels for our template sales landing pages initially. It actually worked quite well, but as we scaled we wanted to have our template landing pages in Webflow where the rest of our website lived. We moved everything over to Webflow about two years ago which has been a good move. ClickFunnels was a great place to start though!
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who wish to start their own business?
I always say, just get started. Just start something in a small way and start generating revenue. I am an avid podcast listener, but I have certainly learned way more about business by trying and failing and trying again than I ever have in the thousands of hours of podcasts I have listened to. Just get started with a small, manageable risk and grow from there.
Social Links/Contact Information:
LinkedIn -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhoeksema/
Youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCciYOSvOZI89705ua5Ebm7g
