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ramie's comments

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

The idea behind a Launch HN post is to come out to community and show what you've been working on when it's ready for public consumption and look for feedback. It is supposed to be for pretty fresh launches. In our case for example, we started taking early adopters off the wait list a couple months ago so this is kind of our fresh launch after iterating on early adopter feedback.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

Being honest, I don't know enough about flightpath to give a good comparison.

Baremetrics however I know very well. They do a great job plugging into Stripe and helping you analyze your revenue, however their forecasting capabilities are extremely limited. They also only look at revenue, not expenses or hiring. With Finmark, you can just as easily connect your stripe account and get reporting on your historic revenues, however we also are much more robust in forecasting and allowing you to create a true financial model.

The spreadsheet template you linked is definitely one of the better templates out there. A couple months ago there was a great HN thread where Stéphane Nasser reviewed multiple different templates that exist. Our theory however is that spreadsheets, using a template or not, are too burdensome to maintain and easy to mess up. You could download all of your stripe data into a CSV, and create pivot tables to come up with all the same charts that baremetrics offers, but it's easier just to use software. Thats what we want to do for financial modeling In fact, we purposely priced our software lower than baremetrics despite having all the same core functionality plus so much more.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

It is like you're looking at my pitch deck. We have zero interest in providing professional services but know that some of our customers will need CFO like help and so a natural partnership for us is outsourced accounting firms. Later this year we will open up reviews for bookkeepers so that our customers can interact to make those qualified recommendations to each other.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

I think long term there could be some truth to that. If we capture enough marketshare then I can see a point in time where we have more flexibility to charge more. However, I have zero interest in making the bulk of our money off of early stage companies. We believe we will be very sticky and more and more valuable as a company scales, hopefully we can monetize more off of companies that make it big and stick with us.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

You're reading our minds; that is exactly where we want to take Finmark. As far as the last 20%, we think we've built our app in a way that is modular enough to get about 95% of the customization that you would have in excel. Over time we hope to to eliminate that last 5% altogether.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

Yes, our plans are month to month. A customer can cancel anytime. We also don't retroactively charge you more for the past month if your revenues increased. We instead reach out to you and confirm a plan change for the upcoming month. If you tell us it was a blip and you don't expect it to continue at that scale, then we will just keep you on the current plan.

ramie | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Finmark (YC S20) – Financial planning software for startups

No offense taken at all. When I was running my last company, at $25M in revenue, we couldn't find any good options for a service like this. Anaplan and Adaptive Insights had 6 figure price tags and required a lot of professional services. At some point a company might choose to leave Finmark, but our hope is to cater to startups from pre-revenue to pre-IPO.
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