At Profitably, we've been building a new tool for building out the numbers behind your business idea/forecast. Our initial approach was on analytics for your business -- but it turns out people aren't ready to understand customer profitability until they know what they should be looking for.
It would be an honor if you checked out our planning tool (forever free) and gave some pointed feedback. What do you like/hate? Would you consider recommending this to someone?
I guess I don't see the point of this tool. You have to make wild guesses for every single metrics in there. Is it a MBA thing? Do people really find this useful?
EDIT: Maybe I got confused by the 'business plan' part. Is it intended for an established business? or for someone putting together a business plan for starting a business?
Definitely NOT an MBA thing. :-) This is for startups and small businesses alike. Most people are modeling their businesses with an Excel file, and they are making the wild guesses in there. The problem is that it's tough to see the impact of changing any of these wild guesses in Excel, and it's a static document that can't link to actuals for comparison.
We want to help people plan/model their business, measure how they're doing, and then execute. (And the site could use a lot more of that verbiage within the app!)
Ok. I can see myself using this for my business, since I have some solid data for most metrics. I could then get a better sense of the kind of impact improving one metric or another would have. Still not sure of the usefulness when you start from scratch and make assumptions for everything though.
A lot of startups and small businesses wind up with a crazy Excel model where they model their assumptions around things like revenue forecast. We built this to track the relationships without worrying about broken formulas, typos, etc.
Yikes. Each step in the planning tool is a different "page" thanks to the hash in the url...were you clicking back through a bunch of stages to get off the site?
No matter how many times I pushed back I could not come back to the HackerNews article. I just cannot go backwards from the dashboard. This page = http://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead#dashboard
It does some kind of load/resolve thingy very quickly each time I press back. But nothing happens, still on Dash.
Oh, yeah, I guess that's our Backbone redirect from the initial page to whatever the first "pane" would be. If we weren't using teh Ajax we'd do that, we'd use a 302 and then the browser history wouldn't get confused.
We'll figure out a fix for that. Thanks for the feedback.
This is a neat little app. Went through the whole setup wizard in about 10 minutes, I could see myself playing with the different channels and adding more data as I have it for my startup. Integration with analytics and quickbooks would be great. Keep it up and I'd pay $49/mo for that.
Thanks so much! We built an existing product that integrated with QuickBooks, but it turns out looking back isn't as useful if you can't use that info to look forward. We're marrying the two models right now so look for budget vs actuals real soon now.
One more thing: Scenarios are coming in the next week or so.
Some basic line charts would add a nice visual I think as well.
I could see myself using this while trying to raise money ("oh, you think our customer acquisition cost is going to be $50 for that channel? Let's just change that....bam!"). Of course, it's something you could do in excel, but some people (myself included) aren't excel wizards.
Actually you can pretty much do that -- define the cost of acquisition for ad spend and watch how it scales with customer growth, etc. Where do you have display ads right now?
Unfortunately, Vimeo's HTML5 embed doesn't give you an API that you can use to close the video from JS, which is why we're using their older Flash embed. I'd love to make the switch once they change that, though.
No we haven't, and that's something for us to keep in mind if we think about switching, but for the time being all our stuff's in Vimeo and I don't think we have any plans to move it.
EDIT: Actually, on thinking on it for another minute, I suppose it'd be pretty easy to do detection to support people who don't have Flash installed. Thanks for the suggestion--I'll put that in our queue.
At Profitably, we've been building a new tool for building out the numbers behind your business idea/forecast. Our initial approach was on analytics for your business -- but it turns out people aren't ready to understand customer profitability until they know what they should be looking for.
It would be an honor if you checked out our planning tool (forever free) and gave some pointed feedback. What do you like/hate? Would you consider recommending this to someone?
http://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead
Thanks in advance and I'm happy to answer questions here or via email -- graham.siener@profitably.com