
Show HN: business plan forecasting (our new app) - gsiener
http://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead
======
gsiener
Hey all,

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

~~~
harryf
Can you share some finished examples?

~~~
gsiener
Great question -- here's a shot of the revenue forecast: <http://cl.ly/9c99>

And here's customer growth: <http://cl.ly/9bLI>

We just built this so we're still working out how to show some polished
examples.

------
cedsav
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?

~~~
adamrneary
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!)

~~~
cedsav
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.

------
jgmmo
This site rendered my back button useless and trapped me on the site.

~~~
gsiener
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?

~~~
pbh
No, it just seems to have a redirect from plan_ahead to plan_ahead#dashboard
that breaks the back button (at least on Firefox 3.6.20, Linux).

(I'm not sure what the original commenter's platform is though.)

~~~
fhwang
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.

------
scottkrager
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.

~~~
gsiener
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.

~~~
scottkrager
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.

~~~
gsiener
That'd be pretty sweet, huh? Stay tuned!

------
rokhayakebe
You know what I want? Ad spending forecasting. If I spend a dollar more on
display ads what am I going to get from it.

~~~
gsiener
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?

~~~
rokhayakebe
Just through buysellads, but i spent a few hours trying to figure out what
combination of CPM, CTR, and Conversion rate would make sense for us.

------
JoshTriplett
You have a very impressive list of tools you integrate with.

Minor bug: the "Watch the Planning Intro" box doesn't grow when the text size
does; it just cuts off the text.

Mind hosting the planning intro video with a source that lets you embed HTML5
video and only fall back to Flash?

~~~
fhwang
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Have you tried YouTube's HTML5 embed?

~~~
fhwang
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Thanks!

------
gsiener
PS If anyone from Olark is lurking -- you guys have made talking with everyone
a TON easier!

------
mattvot
How about https instead of http?

~~~
gsiener
Good point. Both are supported for this free app. Our analytics app is https
only.

