New updates and improvements to Foresight
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Today I released an update to the Ecommerce Forecasting Tool that adds an expanded approach to the Forecast sheet to forecast retention on a per-cohort basis and adds a new Historicals sheet to analyze past cohort performance. The Historicals sheet allows you to drop in historical retention data for your business and use it to automatically create an average retention curve for forecasting.
As always, you can download the updates through your original email receipt or by logging into Gumroad. The model is free; all donations, ratings and reviews are appreciated.
The Standard Financial Model is now even more standard. Kind of.
One thing that has been difficult for me to communicate is that the Standard Financial Model is prebuilt for a variety of different business models. For the last couple years, one way in which I communicated that was with different product titles - SaaS Financial Model, Standard Financial Model for Ecommerce, etc. - to show that the model was prebuilt for those types of business models. But the reality is that it's always been the same model, just with different starting assumptions, but that it was prebuilt to fit those businesses equally well. And while I noted that at every chance, it was still a bit confusing to some.
To make that more clear, I've simplified the product suite down to just the Standard Financial Model. Same product, same name, same focus, just clearer messaging and communication. There's no Standard Model for SaaS, etc. because there is no need for one. What I started writing are a series of guides on how to use it for different types of revenue models. Here are a few detailed examples:
If there's a guide that would be helpful for you, please let me know, happy to help.
Updated the Venture Capital Model, Rolling Funds to build the rolling fund structure into the base of the venture capital model. This is a significant update to the template, as it previously focused on the cash flows to the management company, but now is built into a full fund model to forecast all venture fund cash flows and metrics.
New Live Preview option added to many templates to allow users to view and navigate an entire financial model, providing more detail than previously available through screenshots. See an example at Standard Financial Model.
New filters and sorting options on many pages to make it easier to find relevant content and products. Expect more additions to data on products and documentation to better surface the differentiating features of products and the documentation supporting them.
If you're curious, more about how I build this site, and here's a post I wrote about how I built the recent downloads functionality.
A quick update on my personal site on how many people donate for the products they download.
Update to Cap Table and Exit Waterfall Tool:
Exit Waterfall, Simple sheet to provide an alternative way to calculating a waterfall using a simpler set of formulas by making a few intentional decisions on aspects of preferred investments it does not support. See sheet for more details.Cap Table, Anti Dilution sheet to allow for (a) issuing new shares instead of adjusting conversion ratio, (2) accounting for ownership % dilution as well as value dilution, and (3) making anti-dilution ratios different per row to account for different original purchase prices. The updates allow for significantly more flexibility in dealing with anti-dilution.The self-paced Cap Table and Exit Waterfall Course and the live session Cap Table and Exit Waterfall Masterclass are now live and ready for registrations. Questions, contact me anytime.
New recycling options rolled out in the Venture Capital Model, Annual Forecast in parallel with an edit to the investment deployment forecasting methodology.
Instead of a percentage of management fees recycling option, the model now offers a new set of assumptions on Get Started to more closely align with the options typical in fund LPAs (limited partnership agreements). The new recycling subroutine calculations on the Forecast sheet detail the potential recycling per period with each option, and help users understand how different recycling options impact cash flows.
In addition, the structure for forecasting invested capital was changed to match up the timing of recycled capital with investments, which will make the cash deployment and budgeting clearer and easier. A new output on Get Started reports the Budgeted Invested Capital separate from the proceeds that are recycled into investments, and the Called Capital and New Investments lines on the Forecast sheet were edited to reflect a different approach to budgeting for investments.
These edits will also help the model be a better fit for private equity funds and evergreen funds.