ModelPilot

Indie Hackers family! Incredibly excited to be a part of the community.

Here's the story of my background, why I recently launched ModelPilot, and where we're headed.

I started out in the world of corporate finance. My first couple jobs out of school were in investment banking, private equity, and corporate development.

Those were tough roles - 80+ hour work weeks spent in Excel and PowerPoint. But because of those experiences, I became an absolute ninja when it comes to finance.

I wanted to take those finance skills and apply them to companies where they could really move the needle. I'd also always been drawn to the fast-moving world of startups. No brainer - I'd go join a startup as its head of finance. So that's what I did.

It didn't take long for me to realize how different startup finance was going to be vs. corporate finance. The startup had virtually no financial systems and processes in place, and were mostly just operating with a YOLO mentality (cash in the bank = cash available to spend kind of thing).

So I was really starting from ground zero. But day by day, we built the financial processes and systems for that startup.

We got proper bookkeeping set up, built the company's financial model, set up real-time reporting dashboards, layered in 13-week cash flow analyses and other cash flow management tools and processes, etc.

It didn't take long for those tools to start moving the needle in a huge way. Our leadership team had much better visibility into the business and where we were headed, and were able to make decisions accordingly.

"I don't know how we did it before we had these financial tools in place," they would often tell me.

That experience is ultimately what gave me the realization that led to ModelPilot: most startups have zero idea what they're doing from a finance perspective, but could benefit greatly from having the proper tools in place.

So I thought, what's the most important and powerful financial tool every startup should be using? It's the financial model.

Financial models are hugely important for a variety of reasons and use cases. Internal business planning and forecasting, cash flow planning & management, evaluation of the viability of strategic initiatives you may be evaluating.

And then there's the capital raising side of things. If you're raising capital, you absolutely need to have a thoughtful and professional financial model you can send to investors in order to be perceived as credible and taken seriously. Same holds true if you have plans to exit any time soon.

But many founders and operators don't have finance skill sets and wouldn't know where to begin with building a financial model. So how else would you do it?

You could hire a finance person in-house, but that's probably going to cost you at least $10k/month.

Or you could hire a finance freelancer or fractional CFO of some sort, but it's going to be tough to assess their quality, their availability will likely ebb and flow quite a bit, and you probably won't know what it's going to cost you (they'll bill hourly, but won't give you a good sense for how many hours it's going to take).

We wanted to offer a better solution.

Enter ModelPilot: the easiest, most hands-free way to get your company's financial model built and maintained. All for one fixed monthly price.

We built our approach to be as easy and simple as possible. You (or your bookkeeper) gets us your raw/unformatted financial data, and we handle everything else. You probably won't hear from us again until your model is 95%+ done.

We custom-build your entire financial model for you and keep it up-to-date with real-time data every single month.

And these models are the real deal (trust me as somebody who used to be a private equity investor). They have full 3-statement functionality + interlinking, are customized to meet your company's unique drivers and KPIs, and contain the right level of detail and granularity.

Professionally formatted and presented, sure to impress any prospective investors, lenders or other external stakeholders you'd ever send it to.

And kept up-to-date in real time. We'll roll it forward every single month as soon as your company's updated financial data becomes available.

So that's ModelPilot! We just recently launched the business, and so far so good - we've already onboarded our first few clients (mix of startups and private equity portfolio companies) with wonderful initial feedback so far.

And we're not slowing down! Our goal is to allow all companies - startups, SMBs, you name it - to access these powerful financial tools and unlock increased visibility, insights, and optionality. All made easy, and at an approachable price with no surprises, ever.

If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to check us out on our website! Feel free to hit us with a form submission (happy to talk to anyone, even if you're not ready to commit to signing up yet), book an introductory call, or even sign up for the service if you feel that it's a good fit for your business. We're very confident you won't be disappointed.

That's all for now! Pumped to be a part of this community and excited to see you all out there.