Feedback on Idea: Automated Financial Valuation and Feasibility Study for Startups and SMEs
Since I have been working in the financial field now for almost ten years, I have seen and helped tons of startups and SMEs needing to value their Company or understand the feasibility of their project pre-launch.
This is usually required for various reasons, investors, fund raising / capital increase or undertaking a loan to name a few.
Most of the time, this usually entails the payment of an amount that is too expensive for the Company at that time (both startups and SMEs). Additionally, sometimes they need a nice report to submit to their stakeholders (shareholders, banks, etc..)
My idea is to create a platform which enables users to perform their own valuation or feasibility study report, by answering a few qualitative and quantitate questions themselves (of-course, I will be explaining the questions that might seem difficult to understand), the pricing of the report will be below the USD100 mark and the report will be around 12-15 pages long which will include all the company details and financial analysis that one would usually need to understand about any business. Also, I will give the users a 30 day access to change their report inputs and generate new reports anytime.
At the beginning, I will also focus strongly on customer support as I am expecting that users would need help in answering some of their questions plus it would be a great way to get early feedback.
What do you think, is that a problem you think might be worth solving?
Why not a dashboard where you can play with the variables and simulate diff outputs?
With the option to download/email a PDF on demand?
Although tbh most startup financial projection is highly speculative until they got paying users.
I'm a numbers/data guy so I'd be quite interested provided it was easy to use.
I agree with this idea.
@TDajani I envision a dashboard/funnel tool that lets you play with various variables and settings to get different results.
I'm doing something similar for my own product GrowthHunt.co, where I've built a simple tool that recommends strategies from my database based on some questions the user answered about their startup/product.
I believe this approach will help you decrease the amount of time spent on customer support and also bring in alot of free users from the start.
@GrowthHunt your product seems very interesting. nice job. I will have a dashboard, but a bit more advanced than just 5-6 variables affecting the outputs. It will be a large database of variables that affect the output and you will have an overview tab that will show you the result, as well as the option to download the report as pdf and change your inputs anytime within a 30 day period. Do you believe you can use a tool like that to understand the value of your company or the financial feasibility of your project and get charged for it (below the USD100 mark), or you think its not a problem that is important enough ?
For me personally, as GrowthHunt is really a very small business that can be easily run by a single person, I don't see me requiring this tool.
With that being said, it does not mean that I will not need it in the future. I'm seeing the feasibility of your idea for established startups with a team of more than 2 person.
@GrowthHunt I guess you are right there. Let's launch it then and test that theory. Appreciate your feedback
My idea is basically that, but a bit more advanced, because I am having various elements that could change the outputs, so the dashboard contains alot of questions, and there is an overview tab which basically shows you the end result, and then you can also download your report as pdf as many times as you want within the 30 day period. Most products out there provide a very quick valuation figure with no reports. Since your a numbers guy as well, Do you think if I do something more advanced than what is out there and charge for it, users will be interested?