Using the Startup Financial Model App for an Entrepreneurship Class

Q: I'm an entrepreneurship professor and every year I teach a class on business plan development with an average of about 10 - 15 teams and continuing to grow. I'm interested in having the students use your app for my class, but wondering how I can get access to review their plans. I would need to log in and do demos etc. I would also need to build a case study of sorts to share with the class. 

Thanks for contacting us and your interest in our app. We work closely with a number of universities around the world in a similar way and we would be thrilled to work with you and your student teams.

We normally would work this as follows: We create a distinctive 50% discount code for your school or class for the students to use when they subscribe to our app. Each student assigns you as an assigned user so that you can review all of their plans in your professor dashboard at no cost to you. (All of their results are in one dashboard to make it easy for you.) We also have some scenarios we’ve created and can create new ones for you if you provide the core curriculum or principles you would like them to test/learn while using our app. We can then give you a set of questions and scenarios for the students to test and provide you an answer key.

Your professor dashboard would look like this:

We have a number of scenarios, but they center around what principles you are teaching.

Once the students have entered their core assumptions, the learning value comes from them changing core assumptions and reviewing the output to see the impact and answering questions about the impact. Example questions if you are trying to teach the principles of expense management, cash flow, working capital, and the impact of recurring revenue and churn rates:

What happens to annual cash flow over the five-year plan if your direct expenses are 10% higher than expected? (you will have the answer key and you can test the assumptions yourself in the app)What happens to cash flow over the course of any year on a monthly basis if you bill customers quarterly and collect in advance compared to if you collect monthly in arrears? What happens to your breakeven timing in each scenario? How important are your billing and cash collection procedures in your startup?Would you rather add 100 new customers per month of “Xxxxxxx” service on a 12-month contract with a 25% churn rate or 75 new customers per month on a 6-month contract with a 10% churn rate? Why? What does the Year 5 revenue and EBITDA look like in each scenario? How much venture capital or debt would you have to raise if you didn’t want cash to drop below $100,000 in any given month?

We also have videos you can refer students to in order to supplement your curriculum. Here's an example video on Recurring Revenue which includes a business plan scenario and shows how different business plan assumptions of contract length, churn, and billing cycles leads to dramatically different revenue results.

If you can share some of the principles you are teaching, we would be happy to quickly create some scenarios for you.